«I didn't hit him.»
«Why did you do it? Why did you do it? Why did you kill him?»
«I didn't kill him.»
«Why did you do it?»
How little in fact any human being understands about anything the practice of the arts soon teaches one. An inch away from the world one is accustomed to there are other worlds in which one is a complete stranger. Nature normally heals with oblivious forgetfulness those who are rudely hustled by circumstance from one into another. But if after reflection and with deliberation one attempts with words to create bridges and to open vistas one soon finds out how puny is one's power to describe or to connect. Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. Most artists are the minor poets of their little world, who have only one voice and can sing only one song.
The first days were a maelstrom of confusion, misunderstandings, incredulity. Not only could I not believe what had happened, I could not conceptualize it. However I am not going to tell anything more of this as a story. The story is over. And what it is the story of I shall attempt in a little while to say. As the time went on I tried various attitudes, said various things, changed my mind, told the truth, then lied, then broke down, was impassive, then devious, then abject. None of this helped at the trial. Rachel in black was a touching figure. Everyone deferred and was sympathetic. The judge had a special inclination of the shoulders and a special grave smile. I do not think anything was planned in cold blood. It occurred to me later that of course the police themselves had decided what had happened, they suggested it to Rachel, they told her what it was all about. She may even have tried to be, at the start, incoherently truthful. But the story was so impossible. The poker, wiped clean of her fingerprints and liberally covered with my own, was soon found. The whole thing was obvious. All Rachel had to do was scream. I for my part acted as guiltily as any man could. Perhaps at moments I almost believed that I had killed him, just as at moments perhaps she almost believed that she had not.
I was about to write down, «I do not blame her,» but this would be misleading. It is not exactly, on the other hand, that I blame her. What she did was terrible, both her actions were wicked, the murder and the lie. And I suppose I owe it to her as a kind of duty to see what she did, to look at it and to try to understand it. «Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.» In a way I might have been flattered. In a way there was something almost to admire, a great spirit, a great will. For of course I did not envisage her as moved by any mere petty pusillanimous desire to preserve herself. What did she feel during the trial and afterwards? Perhaps she thought that I would somehow get off. Perhaps she only settled very gradually with many self-preserving vaguenesses into her final dreadful role.
There was even a sort of perfection about it. She had taken such a perfect revenge upon the two men in her life. Some women never forgive. «I would not give him my hair for a bowstring at the end. I would not raise a finger to save him dying.» Christian had joined Arnold in France, as I learnt much later. But no doubt the will that powered that hammerblow had been forged much earlier. When I glimpsed it at the start of my narration it was already steely strong. There was, almost, no surprise here. What did surprise me was the strength of Rachel's feeling for myself. There must have been, to create such a great hate, a very considerable degree of love. I had simply not noticed that Rachel loved me. She must have cared deeply to be able, in order to destroy me, to lie so hugely and so consistently. I ought to have been moved to reverence. Later perhaps I was. No, I do not exactly «blame,» though neither do I «condone.» I am not sure what «forgiveness» means. I have cut attachments, I have «let her off,» I feel no thrilling connection of resentment between us. In some blank way I even wish her well. Forgiveness is often thought of as an emotion. It is not that. It is rather a certain kind of cessation of emotion. So perhaps I do indeed forgive. It matters little what words one uses here. In fact she was an instrument which did me a very great service.
I did at times accuse her, then withdrew my accusations. It is not altogether easy to save oneself at the expense of another, even justly. I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life. Put any man in the dock and he will feel guilty. I rolled in my guilt, in the very filth of it. Some newspapers said I seemed to enjoy my trial. I did not enjoy it, but I experienced it very intently and fully. My ability to do this was dependent upon the fact that capital punishment had by this time been abolished in England. I could not have faced the hangman with equanimity. The vague prospect of prison affected me, in my enhanced and vivid new consciousness, comparatively little. (It is in fact impossible to imagine beforehand what prolonged imprisonment is like.) I had been forcibly presented with a new mode of being and I was anxious to explore it. I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted. I had never felt more alert and alive in my life, and from the vantage point of my new consciousness I looked back upon what I had been: a timid incomplete resentful man.
Hartbourne and Francis, in their different ways, did what they could for me. Hartbourne's line, worked out after discussions with my lawyer, was that I was insane. («That cock won't fight, old man!» I shouted to him across the courtroom.) His evidence for this view was rather slender. It appeared that I frequently cancelled appointments. («Then are we all mad?» said the prosecuting counsel.) I had forgotten to attend a party which had been arranged in my honour. I was moody and eccentric and absent-minded. I imagined myself to be a writer. («But he is a writer!» said the prosecuting counsel. I applauded.) My apparently calm reaction to my sister's death which the insanity lobby also tried to use, was later taken over by the prosecution as a proof of my callousness. The climax and raison d'etre of the theory was that I had killed Arnold in a brain storm and then forgotten all about it! And if I had displayed uncertainty and clutched my head more often this idea might have been at least worth entertaining. As it was, I appeared as a liar but not as a lunatic. I calmly and lucidly denied that I was mad, and the judge and the jury agreed with me. Hartbourne believed me guilty of course.
Francis alone did not believe me guilty. However he was able to render little assistance. He marred his evidence by crying all the way through, which made a bad impression on the jury. And as a «character witness» he was not exactly a felicitous performer. The prosecutor sneered at him openly. And he told so many simpleminded lies and half-lies in his anxiety to defend me that he be came in the end something of a figure of fun, even to my own side. The judge treated him with heavy irony. It was, to say the least, unfortunate for me that Francis had not been with me when Rachel telephoned. Francis, latching onto this, soon started saying that he had been: but was then quite unable to give any account of what had happened which could stand up to the simplest queries from the prosecution. The jury clearly believed that Francis was my «creature» and that I had somehow «put him up to it.» And the prosecution soon tied him in a knot. «Why then did you not accompany the accused to Baling?»
«I had to go out to buy tickets for Venice.»
«For Venice?»
«Yes, he and I were just going to go to Venice together.» (Laughter.) In fact, all that Francis managed (quite involuntarily) to contribute to the argument was another sinister theory about my motives, to the effect that I was a homosexual, madly in love with Arnold, and that I had killed him out of jealousy! Some of the lewder newspapers ran this idea for a while. However the judge, probably out of consideration for Rachel's feelings, did not highlight it in his final summing up.
Christian was one of the stars of the case. She always dressed with great care, wearing, as the papers soon noticed, a different ensemble every day. «A smart rich woman» was just what the journalists wanted, and she even achieved during the days of the trial a kind of fame which stood her in good stead later when she decided to set up in business in haute couture. In fact she probably developed the idea at this very time. She was very concerned about me. (She too quite evidently believed me guilty.) But she just could not help enjoying the trial. She was in all appearance a «good witness.» She spoke clearly and firmly and lucidly, and the judge, who patently found her attractive, complimented her on her evidence. The jury liked her too, there were several men who always exchanged glances when she appeared. However in the hands of a clever public prosecutor she was easily made to damage my case without even noticing. Questioned about our marriage, she was made to convey the impression that I was a thoroughly unstable person if not indeed a «nasty bit of work.» («You would describe your former husband as an intense man?»
«Oh awfully intense!») At one point her sheer idiotic self-satisfaction moved me so much that I shouted out, «Good old Chris!» The judge reacted as to a molester of virtuous womanhood. A Sunday paper offered her a large sum of money for her «story,» but she refused.
It never entered anyone's head that she could have had a motive for killing her husband. Marriage is a very private place. I had myself destroyed the only piece of solid evidence for such a view. (Arnold's letter about Christian.) The excellence of her marriage, assumed by all, was piously touched upon by some witnesses. It was unnecessary to stress it. Equally, it was never suggested that I had any designs upon my victim's wife. Delicacy, everywhere so manifest in this model trial, forbade any such notion, though it might have seemed obvious enough as a speculation. Even the newspapers, so far as I know, did not pursue it, possibly because the idea that it was Arnold whom I loved was more amusing. And delicacy, as it so often does, usurped the place of truth.
More felicitously, as a result of a spontaneous conspiracy of silence, Julian's name was simply not mentioned at all. No one had any reason to bring her in since, on the one hand, I was in bad enough trouble anyway, and, on the other, that story could only do me harm. So Julian vanished. It was as if the whole fantastic scene in the Old Bailey courtroom, the robed and wigged celebrants, the sober yet histrionic witnesses, the quiet gleeful public, were all part of a machinery of magic designed to dematerialize her and make her as if she had never been. Yet at moments her paramount reality in that scene was such that I wanted to shout out her name again and again. However I did not. This silence at least which was enjoined was also achieved. Those who know will understand how in a curious way I was almost relieved to think how she had now been made perfect by being removed into the sphere of the impossible. This idea indeed provided a focus of contemplation which alleviated the awful sufferings of that time.
In a purely technical sense I was condemned for having murdered Arnold. (The jury were out of the room for less than half an hour. Counsel did not even bother to leave their seats.) In a more extended sense, and this too provided fruit for meditation, I was condemned for being a certain awful kind of person. I aroused horror and aversion in the bosom of the judge and in the bosoms of the honest citizens of the jury and the sturdy watchdogs of the press. I was heartily hated. In sentencing me to life imprisonment the judge gave general satisfaction. It was a mean crime of an unusual pure kind: to kill one's friend out of envy of his talents. And poor Priscilla, risen from the grave, seemed to point her finger at me too. I had failed as a friend and I had failed as a brother. My insensibility to my sister's plight and then to her death was attested by several. The defence, as I said, did their best to use this as proof of mental unbalance. But the general view was simply that it proved me a monster.
I gave myself up to the course of events with a certain resignation and without screams of protest, for another and deeper reason too, which had to do with Julian. Or perhaps there were two reasons here, one lying above the other. Or perhaps three. What did I believe that Julian thought about what had happened? In a strange way I was almost entirely agnostic about what Julian thought. I did not imagine that she saw me as a murderer. But neither did I expect her to defend me by accusing her mother. My love for Julian had somehow brought about this death. (This piece of causality I was quite clear about.) And my responsibility for it I was prepared to lodge forever in the mystery of my love for Julian and her love for me. That was part of it. But I also felt something like this, that the emergence of my life out of quietness into public drama and horror was a necessary and in some deep sense natural outcome of the visitation with which I had been honoured. Sometimes I thought of it as a punishment for the failure of my vow of silence. Sometimes, shifting the same idea only very slightly, it seemed more like a reward. Because I loved Julian something huge had happened to me. I had been given the privilege of an ordeal. That I suffered through her and for her was, in addition, a delightful, almost frivolous comfort.
The court saw me, as I have said, as a fantastical man. Little did they know how fantastical I was, though not in their crude sense. It is the literal truth that the image of Julian was not absent from my mind for a single second during the waking hours of those terrible days. I apprehended at the same time her absolute presence and her absolute absence. There were moments when I felt as if I were being literally torn to pieces by love. (What must it be like to be eaten by a large animal? I felt I knew.) This pain, from which I almost fainted, once or twice came upon me when I was addressing the court, and abruptly stopped my utterance, thereby giving comfort to the insanity lobby. Perhaps the only thing which made me survive this period of thinking about Julian was the complete absence of hope. A grain of hope present at that time would have killed me.
The psyche, desperate for its survival, discovers deep things. How little most so-called psychologists seem to know about its shifts and its burrowings. At some point in a black vision I apprehended the future. I saw this book, which I have written, I saw my dearest friend P. L., I saw myself a new man, altered out of recognition. I saw beyond and beyond. The book had to come into being because of Julian, and because of the book Julian had to be. It was not, though indeed time matters little to the unconscious mind, that the book was the frame which she came to fill, nor was she the frame which the book filled. She somehow was and is the book, the story of herself. This is her deification and incidentally her immortality. It is my gift to her and my final possession of her. From this embrace she can never now escape. But, and this is not to belittle my darling, I saw much more than this in the black glass of the future. And this is, if I can express it, the deepest reason why I accepted the unjust judgment of the court.
I felt that every single thing that was happening to me was not just predestined but somehow actively at the moment of its occurrence thought by a divine power which held me in its talons. At times I felt almost as if I were holding my breath in case some tiny movement of my own should interfere with the course of this divine possession. Though in the same thought I also knew that I could not now, by the most frenzied struggling, ever escape my fate. The courtroom and the judge and the condemnation for life were mere shadows of a much huger and more real drama of which I was the hero and the victim. Human love is the gateway to all knowledge, as Plato understood. And through the door that Julian opened my being passed into another world.
About these things, my dear fellow, we in our seclusion have often spoken, in our times of quietness together, with words whose meaning glowed out of an ineffable understanding, like flames upon dark water. So friends, so spirits, ultimately converse. It was for this that Plato, in his wisdom, forbade the artists. Socrates wrote nothing, neither did Christ. Almost all speech which is not so illumined is a deformation of the truth. And yet: I am writing these words and others whom I do not know will read them. With and by this paradox I have lived, dear friend, in our sequestered peace. Perhaps it will always be for some an unavoidable paradox, but one which is only truly lived when it is also a martyrdom.
I do not know whether I shall see the «outside world» again. (A curious phrase. The world is, in reality, all outside, all inside.) The question is of no interest to me. A truthful vision finds the fullness of reality everywhere and the whole extended universe in a little room. That old brick wall which we have so often contemplated together, my dear friend and teacher: how could I find words to express its glowing beauty, lovelier and more sublime than the beauty of hills and waterfalls and unfolding flowers? These are indeed vulgarisms, commonplaces. What we have seen together is a beauty and a glory beyond words, the world transfigured, found. It was this, which in the bliss of quietness I now enjoy, which I glimpsed prefigured in madness in the water-colour blue eyes of Julian Baffin. She images it for me still in my dreams, as the icons of childhood still haunt the visions of the ageing sage. May it be always so, for nothing is lost, and even at the end we are ever at the beginning.
And I found you, my friend, the crown of my quest. Could you not have existed, could you not have been waiting for me in this monastery which we have inhabited together? That is impossible, my dear. Were you there by accident? No, no, I should have had to invent you, and by the power which you yourself bestow I should have been able to. Now indeed I can see my life as a quest and an ascesis, but lost until the end in ignorance and dark. I was seeking you, I was seeking him, and the knowledge beyond all persons which has no name at all. So I sought you long and in sorrow, and in the end you consoled me for my lifelong deprivation of you by suffering with me. And the suffering became joy.
So we live on together here in our quiet monastery, as we are pleased to call it. And so I come to the end of this book. I do not know if I shall write another. You have taught me to live in the present and to forswear the fruitless anxious pain which binds to past and to future our miserable local arc of the great wheel of desire. Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusion, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points. You who are a musician have shown me this, in the wordless ultimate regions of your art, where form and substance hover upon the brink of silence, and where articulate forms negate themselves and vanish into ecstasy. Whether words can travel that path, through truth, absurdity, simplicity, to silence I do not know, nor what that path can be like. I may write again. Or may at last abjure what you have made me see to be but a rough magic.
This book has been in some way the story of my life. But it has also been, I hope, an honest tale, a simple love story. And I would not wish it to seem at the end that I have, in my own sequestered happiness, somehow forgotten the real being of those who have figured as my characters. I will mention two. Priscilla. May I never in my thought knit up the precise and random detail of her wretchedness so as to forget that her death was not a necessity. And Julian. I do not, my darling girl, however passionately and intensely my thought has worked upon your being, really imagine that I invented you. Eternally you escape my embrace. Art cannot assimilate you nor thought digest you. I do not now know, or want to know, anything about your life. For me, you have gone into the dark. Yet elsewhere I realize, and I meditate upon this knowledge, that you laugh, you cry, you read books and cook meals and yawn and lie perhaps in someone's arms. This knowledge too may I never deny, and may I never forget how in the humble hard time-ridden reality of my life I loved you. That love remains, Julian, not diminished though changing, a love with a very clear and a very faithful memory. It causes me on the whole remarkably little pain. Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.
Christian Hartbourne
FRANCIS
It is my pleasure and privilege to add a critical epilogue to this unusual «autobiography.» I do so gladly as homage to my old friend, still languishing in «durance vile,» and I do so dutifully as a service to the cause of science. This remarkable piece of self-analysis from a talented pen deserves a thoroughly detailed commentary, for which, the publisher tells me, there is unfortunately no space in this volume. I intend however to publish in due course a lengthy book, upon which I have now been at work for some time, about the case of Bradley Pearson, and in this work the «autobiography,» a prime piece of evidence in this cause celebre, will of course be fully treated. What follows here is merely a digest of a few concise points.
It is also of course clear from the most casual scrutiny that our subject is homosexual. He has the typical narcissism of the breed. (Consider his description of himself at the beginning of the tale.) His masochism (of which more below), his eager professions of virility, his confessed lack of identity, his attitude (already mentioned) to women, the evidence of his parental relationship patterns, all these point in the same direction. And indeed his rather surprising «unconvincingness» at the trial may be laid at the same door. He did not believe in himself and so could hardly expect the judge and jury to lend him credence. Bradley Pearson connected this absence of any sense of self with his mode of existence as an artist. But here, as so many of the uninstructed, he mistook cause and symptom. Most artists are homosexual. This tender appreciative tribe, bereft of sturdy self-assertion as either man or woman, is best enabled thus to body forth the world and give it houseroom in their souls.
That «Bradley Pearson's Story» is the tale of a man in love with a woman need cause little embarrassment to our theory. Bradley himself gives us all the clues that we are in need of. When he first (in the story) catches sight of his young lady he mistakes her for a boy. He falls in love with her when he imagines her as a man. He achieves sexual intercourse with her when she has dressed up as a prince. (And who incidentally is Bradley Pearson's favourite author? The greatest homosexual of them all. What sends Bradley Pearson's fantasy soaring as high as the Post Office Tower? The idea of boys pretending to be girls pretending to be boys!) Further: who in reality is this girl? (Father-fixated of course and taking Bradley as a father-substitute, no mystery there.) The daughter of Bradley's protege, rival, idol, gadfly, friend, enemy, alter ego, Arnold Baffin. Science proclaims that this cannot be the work of accident. And science is right.
When I say that Bradley Pearson was in love with Arnold Baffin I would not be understood to be making any crude statement. We are dealing with the psychology of a complicated and refined son. Bradley's more simple, more human, affection bore perhaps upon another object. But Arnold symbolized the focus of passion and the goal of love to this unfortunate self-darkened victim. It was Arnold whom he loved and Arnold whom he hated, Arnold his own distorted image in the stream over which Narcissus leans eternally anxious, eternally enraptured. He admits, significant word, that there is something «demonic» in Arnold and also in himself. The «character» of Arnold is in a literary sense markedly «weak,» as any critic would point out. Why indeed is the whole story oddly «unconvincing» as if it were somehow hollow? Why do we feel that something is missing from it? Because Bradley does not «come clean.» He often says that he is attached to Arnold or that he is envious of Arnold or that he is obsessed by Arnold, but he does not, he dare not, body these feelings forth in the narrative. And because of this omission the tale, which should feel very hot, feels in fact very cold.
This classical misplacement is not however the chief item of interest. The case is interesting mainly because Bradley Pearson is an artist and because, before our very eyes, he is ingeniously (and often disingenuously) reflecting about his art. As he says, the psyche desperate for its survival invents deep things. That he often does not realize the significance of his reflections can make his work, with suitable expert exposition, yet more fascinating and instructive to us. That Bradley is a masochist is here a banality of criticism. (That all artists are is a further truism.) How readily recognizable to the expert eye is obsession in literature! Even the greatest cannot cover their tracks, conceal their little vices, altogether moderate the note of glee! For this the artist labours, to get this scene in, to savour this secret symbol of his secret love. But let him be never so cunning, he cannot evade the eye of science. (This is one reason why artists always fear and denigrate scientists.) Bradley is cunning, particularly in his misleading celebration of a simple heterosexual subject, but how can we not notice that what he really enjoys is being discomfited by Arnold Baffin?
Of greater interest, as psychology if not as literature, is Bradley's more poetic and more conscious embroidery upon his own theme. The mysterious title of the book, ambiguous in I cannot readily say how many senses, is, though somewhat obscurely, «explained» for us by its author. Bradley speaks of «the black Eros.» He also mentions some yet more arcane source of inspiration. What he means, taken at its face value, may be highly significant or may be pretentious rubbish. There can be no doubt however of the psychological «weight» of such a conception. It is surely more natural for a man to picture the force of love as a woman, and for a woman to picture it as a man. (It is true that both Eros and Aphrodite are the inventions of men, but it is important that the former is the child of the latter.) Yet Bradley shamelessly delights in the conception of the huge black bully (like an enormous blackamoor) who has, as he conceives it, come to discipline his life, as artist and as man. Moreover (and what do we need more to complete our theory?) should we wish to enquire further concerning the identity of this monster we have only to consider the two initial letters of his name. (Black Prince. Bradley Pearson.) As for the alleged Mr. Loxias, he too is soon seen to be our friend in a thin disguise. There is even a marked similarity of literary style. The narcissism of the deviant eats up all other characters and will tolerate only one: himself. Bradley invents Mr. Loxias so as to present himself to the world with a flourish of alleged objectivity. He says of P. Loxias, «I could have invented him.» In fact he did!
I hope that my old friend, when his sapient eye alights upon these pages, will look indulgently (I can imagine him smiling with that familiar self-conscious irony) upon the observations of a mere scientist. They are prompted, let me assure him, not just by a chill love for truth, but by a lively affection for a very lovable human being, to whom the author of this note feels recognition and gratitude. I have hinted earlier that Bradley was blessed with another more mundane and more «real» attachment, another much simpler and less tormenting focus of emotion. I would not, and indeed need not, use his ill-concealed love for me as evidence of his perverted tendencies. (The transparent attempt to belittle the love-object is again typical.) I cannot however close this very miniature monograph without saying this to him: I knew of his feelings and, I trust he will believe me, I valued them highly.
Francis Marloe
PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSULTANT
A subscription list for my forthcoming work, Bradley Pearson, the Paranoiac from the Paper Shop, is now open c/o the publisher. Letters to my consulting rooms will be forwarded from the same address.
JLhc lave been asked by a «Mr. Loxias» for my comments on a piece of fantastic writing by the murderer of my husband. I was inclined at first simply to ignore the request. I also considered resorting to legal action to prevent publication. However there has already been, and I am sure not accidentally, a good deal of publicity about the matter, and to stifle this «outpouring» might give it the interest of a secret document without in the end concealing what it said. Frankness is better and compassion is better. For we must, I think, feel or attempt to feel pity and compassion for the author of this fantasy. It is sad that when provided with the «seclusion» which he professes always to have wanted, what Pearson produces is a sort of mad adolescent dream, and not the serious work of art of which he imagined himself capable and of which he so incessantly told us.
I have certainly no wish to be unkind. The revived publicity about this hideous tragedy has caused me great suffering. That my own life has been «ruined» is a fact with which I have to live. I hope and believe that unhappiness has not made me bitter. I do not want to hurt anybody. And I do not believe that my frankness now can possibly hurt Bradley Pearson, who seems to be invincibly wrapped up in his own fantastic conceptions of what happened and of what he himself is like.
About his account of events there is little to be said. It is in it's main outline clearly a «dream» such as might interest a psychologist. And let me say here that I do not and cannot judge Bradley Pearson's motives in writing it. (Of Mr. Loxias's motives I will speak below.) Perhaps the kindest thing to say is that he wanted to write a novel but found himself incapable of producing anything except his own immediate fantasies. I expect many novelists rewrite their own recent histories «nearer to the heart's desire,» but they have at least the decency to change the names. BP (as I shall shorten his name henceforth) alleges that in prison he has found God (or Truth or Religion or something). Perhaps all men in prison think they have found God, and have to in order to survive. I feel no vendetta-like resentment against him now, or any particular desire that he should suffer. His suffering cannot repair my loss. His new «creed» may be sincerely believed in or may be, as the whole story may be, a smoke-screen to conceal his unrepentant malice. If his tale is indeed prompted by malice we have to do with a person so wicked that ordinary judgment of him is baffled. If, as is much more likely, BP has come to believe or half believe both in his «salvation» and in his story, then we have to do with one whose mind has given way under continued strain. (He was certainly not insane at the time of the murder.) And then he must be, as I said earlier, an object of pity. This is how I prefer to view him, though really I cannot know, and indeed do not want to know, what is in fact the case. When BP went through the gates of the prison I felt as if he had died and I wanted to concern myself with him no more. To think about him, for instance with anger and rage, would have caused too much misery, besides being fruitless and immoral.
I spoke advisedly of an «adolescent» fantasy. BP is what might be called a «Peter Pan» type. He does not in his story describe his extensive past life, except for hinting that there were romances with women. He is the sort of man who likes both to hint at a past and to behave as if he were eternally twenty-five. (He speaks of himself as an ageing Don Juan, as if there were only a trivial difference between real and imagined conquests! I doubt if there were really many women in his life.) A psychiatrist would probably find him «retarded.» His tastes in literature were juvenile. He speaks grandly of Shakespeare and of Homer, but I doubt if he had read the former since schooldays or the latter ever. His constant reading, which of course he nowhere admits, was mediocre adventure stories by authors such as Forester and Stevenson and Mulford. He really liked boys' stories, tales of crude adventure with no love interest, where he could identify himself with some princely hero, a man with a sword or such. My husband often commented to me about this, and once tackled BP directly. BP was upset and I can recall him actually blushing very much at the charge.
BP was of course a person painfully conscious of inferiority. He was an unhappy disappointed man, ashamed of his social origin and his illiteracy, and stupidly ashamed of his job which he imagined made him a figure of fun. In fact he was, though not for that reason, a figure of fun to all of us. No one, before the tragedy, could mention him without smiling a little. He must have realized this. I suppose it is possible, and it is a shocking thought, that a man might commit a serious crime just in order to stop people from laughing at him. That BP was a man who hated being laughed at –is pretty clear throughout the story. The rather pompous self-mocking style is a defence and a sort of meeting people half-way if they decide to laugh.
Of course he turns everything topsy-turvy in his account of his relations with our family. He says rather coyly that we needed him. The truth was that he needed us and was a sort of parasite, an awful nuisance sometimes. He was very lonely and we all felt sorry for him. And I can remember occasions too when we made absurd excuses when he wanted to see us or hid when he rang the doorbell. His relations with my husband were crucial of course. His claim to have «discovered» my husband is ridiculous. My husband was already quite famous when BP after much begging, persuaded an editor to let him review one of my husband's books, and after that he made himself known to us and became, as I think my daughter once put it, «the family pussycat.»
BP cannot even in his dream-story conceal that he was envious of my husband's success. I think this envy was an absolute obsession with him, he was eaten up by it. He knew also that my husband, though friendly and kind to him, despised him a little and laughed at him. The idea of this caused him torment. Sometimes I felt that he thought about nothing else. He naively himself admits that he had to be friends with Arnold, and so somehow identify with him and «take credit» for his writing, so as not to be driven mad with envy and hate. If an accuser is needed BP is his own. He admits too in a moment of candour that his picture of Arnold is prejudiced. This is putting it mildly. (He admits further to a general hatred of the human race!) Of course he never «helped» Arnold, but Arnold often helped him. His relation to myself and my husband was virtually that of a child to its parents. This too might interest a psychiatrist. But I do not want to enlarge any more upon matters which are obvious and which came into the open at the trial. His allegations about my daughter are of course absurd, both as to his feelings and as to hers. My daughter always regarded him as a sort of «funny uncle» and there is no doubt that she was very sorry for him, and pity can be mistaken for fondness and can even be a sort of fondness, and in this sort of way perhaps she was fond of him. His great «passion» for her is a typical dream-up. (I will explain what I think about its origin and motives in a moment.) I believe that unfulfilled frustrated people probably spend a lot of their lives in pure fantasy-dreaming. This can I am sure be a great source of consolation though not always harmless. And a «good» fantasy– dream might be to pick on some person whom you know slightly and imagine they are in love with you and picture a great love-relationship and its drama. BP, being probably some sort of sadomasochist, of course imagines an unhappy ending, an eternal separation, terrible sufferings for love, and so on. His one published novel (he implies he published more than one, but he only published one in fact) is a story of disappointed romantic love quite remarkably like this one. There is, I feel I must now frankly admit, yet a further aspect to the matter, and one which for various reasons, many of them obvious, was glossed over at the trial. Bradley Pearson was of course in love with me. This fact had been known to me and to my husband for a number of years and was also a subject for amusement. BP's fantasies of making love to me make sad reading. This unhappy love of his also explains his fiction of a passion for my daughter. This fiction is of course a smoke-screen. It is also partly a «substitute-idea» and partly, I am afraid, a pure revenge. (It may also be relevant that the strong attachment between father and daughter, not admitted in the story, may well have preyed upon BP and made him feel again, as so often, miserably excluded.) How far BP's love for me led him to perform that terrible deed is not for me to say. I am afraid that envy and jealousy were inextricably mixed up inside the bosom of that wicked and unhappy man. Of these matters, of which I would not have spoken if not forced to by confrontation with this farrago of lies, I say no more. It may be imagined how profoundly this document distresses me. I do not in fact blame BP for its proposed disgraceful publication. It is at least understandable that he should have written out this dreamy-fantasy-nonsense to console himself in a place of grimness and to distract himself from serious remorse or the effort of repentance. For the crime of publication I blame the self-styled Mr. Lox– ias (or «Luxius,» as I believe he sometimes calls himself). As several newspapers have hinted, this is a nom de guerre of a fellow-prisoner upon whom the unfortunate BP seems to have become distressingly fixated. The name conceals the identity of a notorious rapist and murderer, a well-known musical virtuoso, whose murder, by a peculiarly horrible method, of a successful fellow-musician made the headlines some considerable time ago. Possibly the similarity of their crime drew these two unhappy men together. Artists are notoriously an envious race. I would like to say this at the end, and I am sure I speak also for my daughter, with whom I am temporarily out of touch, now of course herself a well-known writer and living abroad. I bear him no malice and, in so far as he must be regarded as seriously unbalanced if not actually mad, I feel sincere pity for his undoubted sufferings. K 357 POSTSCRIPT BY JULIAN have read the story. I have also seen the other postscripts, which I believe the other postscript writers have not. Mr. Loxias allowed me this privilege. (For several reasons which I can guess.) However I have little to say. It is a sad story full of real pain. It was a dreadful time for me and I have forgotten much of it. I loved my father very dearly. This is perhaps the chief fact which I have to offer. I loved him. His violent death drove me nearly mad. I was nearly mad during Pearson's trial. I cannot recall that period of my life except as patches in a haze, as scenes. There is a mercy in oblivion. Human beings forget much more than is usually recognized, especially when there is a shock. Not so many years have passed since these events. Yet in the life of a young person these are long years. Centuries separate me from these events. I see them diminished and myself there as a child. It is the story of an old man and a child. I say this, treating it as literature. Yet I acknowledge that it concerns myself. Are we what we were as children? What stuff is that which persists? I was a child: I acknowledge myself: yet also I cannot recognize myself. A letter, for instance, is quoted. Did I write this letter? (Did he keep it?) It seems inconceivable. And the things that I said. (Supposedly.) Surely they are the invention of another mind. Sometimes the reactions of the child are too childish. I think I am «clever» now. Could clever me have been that child? Sometimes too there are thoughts which I could not possibly have thought. Thoughts which have leaked in from the author's mind. (I am not a very convincing «character.») Was I not muddled and frightened and without precedents? It seems like literature, yes. My father was quite right not to encourage me to write. And Pearson was wrong to encourage me. I see that now. It is profitless to write early, one understands nothing. One has no craft and one is the slave of emotion. Time of young days is better spent in learning. Pearson implies that my father thought little of my abilities. The contrary is the case. My father was a man who often said the opposite of what he thought. Out of modesty or fear of destiny. This is not uncommon. Dr. Marloe describes the book as «cold,» and one understands him. There is a lot of theory in this book. Yet also it is a very «hot» book (too hot), full of unstudied personal emotions. And of immediate judgments, sometimes not good ones. Perhaps it needs, like a poem, to be again and again reflected? Perhaps any novel needs further reflection and a truly great writer would write only one novel. (Flaubert?) My mother refers to me rightly as a writer but wrongly as well-known. (I am a poet.) So I am careful and sparing with words. There is a ring in what Pearson says about silence. That part I liked. He may be right that an experience is richest not talked of. As between two people talk to an outsider destroys. Art is secret secret secret. But it has some speech or it would not be. Art is public public public. (But only when it is good.) Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) It is not science or love or power or service. But it is the only true voice of these. It is their truth. It delves and chatters not. Pearson always hated music. I can remember that. I can remember his brusquely switching off my father's record player. (A violent act.) I was a small child then. I see the scene. He hated it. Mr. Lox– ias must be a good teacher. (Indeed I know he is: if «teacher» is the word.) But is there not an irony? Pearson worked hard at writing all his life. I saw his notebooks. They looked liked work. There were a great many words there. Now there is music and no more words perhaps. Now there is music and beyond it silence. Why? I confess that I never read the books that Pearson wrote. I think there is more than one. My mother is wrong here. I did not think he was a very good critic either. I think he understood only the vulgar side of Shakespeare. But I admired what I thought of as his life. He seemed an example: a lifetime at trying and failing. It seemed remarkable to go on trying. (Sometimes it seemed stupid however.) Naturally I admired, my father too. There was no conflict. Perhaps some prescient instinct made me love the idea of a small publication. (A poet who is a novelist's child must deplore the parent's verbosity.) The idea of the secret worker making little things. But it was only an idea. Pearson published as much as he could. If my father was the carpenter, Pearson was certainly the walrus. This is not a personal statement. Words are for concealment, art is concealment. Truth emerges from secrecy and laconic discipline. I want to argue about a general matter. Pearson seems to me merely sentimental when he concludes that music is the highest art. Does he believe it? He is parroting. No doubt Mr. Loxias has influenced him. Music is an art and also a symbol of all art. Its most universal symbol. But the highest art is poetry because words are spirit at its most refined: its ultimate matrix. Excuse me, Mr. Loxias. Most important of all. Pearson was wrong to identify his Eros with the source of art. Even though he says one is a «mere» shadow of the other. Indeed it is the hotness of the book that I feel, not its coldness. True art is very very cold. Especially when it portrays passion. For only so can passion be portrayed. Pearson has muddied the waters. Erotic love never inspires art. Or only bad art. To be more precise. Soul-energy may be called sex down to the bottom. (Or up to the top.) That concerns me not. The deep springs of human love are not the springs of art. The demon of love is not the demon of art. Love is concerned with possession and vindication of self. Art with neither. To mix up art with Eros, however black, is the most subtle and corrupting mistake an artist can commit. Art cannot muddle with love any more than it can muddle with politics. Art is concerned neither with comfort nor with the possible. It is concerned with truth in its least pleasant and useful and therefore most truthful form. (Is it not so, you who listen?) Pearson was not cool enough. Neither was my father. Even this does not explain. Pearson said that every artist is a masochist to his muse. Though by now perhaps he has seen the falseness of this. (It is possibly the key to his own failure.) Nothing could be falser. The worshipping attitude concentrates on self. The worshipper kneels as Narcissus kneels to gaze into the water. Dr. Marloe says artists give houseroom to the universe. Yes. But then they cannot be narcissists. And of course not all artists are homosexuals. (What nonsense!) Art is not religion or worship or the acting out of obsessions. Good art is not. The artist has no master. No, none. Julian Belling Mr. Loxias who has read the above tells me 1 have not said whether I endorse Pearson or my mother. I have not seen or communicated with either for several years. Naturally I endorse (roughly) what my mother says. However what Pearson has to say is true in its way. As for Mr Loxias, about whom there has been speculation: I think know who he is. He will understand when I say that I have mixed feelings about him. What does truth mean to him, I wondc I feel I should in fairness add something else. I think the child I was loved the man Pearson was. But this was a love which words cannot describe. Certainly his words do not. A 1 failure.
Since the foregoing documents were collected my dear friend Bradley Pearson has died. He died in prison of a quick-growing cancer, which developed soon after he finished his book. I was his only mourner. There is after all little for me to say. I had thought, as editor, to have written a long essay, criticizing and drawing morals. I had looked forward with some pleasure to having the last word. But Bradley's death has made a lengthy commentary seem otiose. Death cannot silence art, but it can suggest spaces and pauses. So I have little to say. The reader will recognize the voice of truth when he hears it. If he does not, so much the worse for him. I cannot forbear to make a few remarks, most of them obvious, about the postscripts. Mrs. Belling says, in part rightly, that words are for concealment. How little the postscript-writers have been able to avail themselves of this decency. These people are indeed on display. Each lady, for instance, asserts (or implies) that Bradley was in love with her. Even the gentleman asserts it. Touching. However this is a small matter and to be expected. Equally to be expected are the lies. Mrs. Baffin lies to protect herself, Mrs. Belling to protect Mrs. Baffin. How conveniently hazy Mrs. Selling's memory has now become! This is an understandable piety, although mother and daughter have long broken off all relations. «Dr.» Marloe, who told the truth at the trial, pusillanimously fails to repeat it now. I am told he has been threatened by Mrs. Baffin's solicitors. «Dr.» Marloe is no hero. For this we must forgive him. Bradley, who never saw these sad «postscripts» to his work, would have done so. My intention in publishing these papers was originally twofold. First, to give to the public a work of literature. I am by nature an impresario, and this is not the first time I have been thus instrumental. Secondly, I wished to vindicate the honour of my dear friend, to clear him, briefly, of the charge of murder. That I have not been assisted in this task by either Mrs. Belling or «Dr.» Marloe is, as I say, not surprising, though it is saddening. I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them. In pursuance of my second objective, I had intended to write a long analysis of my own, rather like a detective's final summing up, pointing out discrepancies, making inferences, drawing conclusions. This I have decided to omit. Partly because Bradley is dead. And death always seems to commit truth to some wider and larger court. And partly because, rereading Bradley Pearson's story, I feel that it speaks for itself. Two things remain. One to give some brief account of Bradley Pearson's last days. The other to take issue (on a theoretical point only: I leave the facts to her conscience) with Mrs. Belling. The latter I will do first, also briefly. Art, my dear Mrs. Belling, is a very much tougher and coarser plant than you seem to be imagining in your very literary piece. Your eloquence, which verges, I fear, on the romantic, even the sentimental, is that of a young person. When you are older in art you will understand better. (You may even then be privileged to understand Shakespeare's vulgarity.) About the soul we speak always in metaphors: metaphors which are best used briefly and then thrown away. About the soul perhaps we can only converse directly with our intimates. This makes moral philosophy vain. And there is no science of these things. There is no depth to which you, Mrs. Belling, or any other human being, can see where you can make final distinctions about what does and what does not essentially nourish art. Why are you so anxious to divide that great blackamoor in two, what are you afraid of? (The answer to this question could tell you much.) To say that great art can be as vulgar and as pornographic as it pleases is to say but little. Art is to do with joy and play and the absurd. Mrs. Baffin says that Bradley was a figure of fun. All human beings are figures of fun. Art celebrates this. Art is adventure stories. (Why do you deride adventure stories, Mrs. Baffin?) Of course it is to do with truth, it makes truth. But to that anything can open its eyes. Erotic love can. Bradley's synthesis may seem nai've; perhaps it is. Behind his unity there may be distinctions, but behind the distinctions there is unity and how far into that vista can a human being see and how far does an artist need to see? Art has its own austerity to it reserved. At an austere philosophy it can only mock. As for music, which Mrs. Belling acutely says is the image of all the arts but not their king: I am not disposed to disagree. In fact I am well placed to appreciate her argument. Known as a musician, I am in fact interested in all the arts. Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human communications. But the arts form not a pyramid but a circle. They are the defensive outer barriers of language, whose elaboration is a condition of all simpler modes of communication. Without these defences men sink to beasts. That music points to silence is again an image, which Bradley used. All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. The creator of form must suffer formlessness. Even risk dying of it. What would Bradley Pearson have done if he had lived? Would he have written another book, a great one? Perhaps. The human soul is full of surprises. Bradley died well, tenderly, gently, as a man should. I so clearly recall the look upon his face of simple vulnerable surprise when (I was present) the doctor told him the worst. He looked as he had looked once when he dropped a capacious teapot and saw it break. He said, «Oh!» and turned to me. The rest was fast. He soon took to his bed. The hand of death modelled him speedily, soon made his head a skull. He did not try to write. He talked with me, asked me to explain things, holding my hand. We listened to music together. On the morning of the last day he said to me, «My dear fellow, I'm sorry-to be still here-so boring.» Then he said, «Don't make a fuss, will you?» «What about?» «That opera-« «Which?» «Rosenkavalier.» After that he was silent for a while. Then, «How did it end? That young fellow-what was his name-?» «Octavian.» «Did he stay with the Marschallin or did he leave her and find a young girl of his own age?» «He found a young girl of his own age and left the Marschallin.» «Well, that was right, wasn't it.» Then after a while he turned, still holding my hand, and snuggled down as if to sleep. And slept. I am glad to think how much I comforted his last days. I felt as if he had suffered the lack of me throughout his life; and at the end I suffered with him and suffered, at last, his mortality. I needed him too. He added a dimension to my being. As for my own identity: I can scarcely, «Dr.» Marloe, be an invention of Bradley's, since I have survived him. Falstaff, it is true, sur– vivid Shakespeare, but did not edit his plays. Nor am I, let me assure Mrs. Hartbourne, in the publishing trade, though more than one publisher has reason to be grateful to me. I hear it has even been suggested that Bradley Pearson and myself are both simply fictions, the invention of a minor novelist. Fear will inspire any hypothesis. No, no. I exist. Perhaps Mrs. Baffin, though her ideas are quite implausibly crude, is nearer to the truth. And Bradley existed. Here upon the desk as I write these words stands the little bronze of the buffalo lady. (The buffalo's leg has been repaired.) Also a gilt snuffbox inscribed A Friend's Gift. And Bradley Pearson's story, which I made him tell, remains too, a kind of thing more durable than these. Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
P.L.