I am coming near the enf of the becobd with a feeling that there must be some real and definitive end, like the period at the end of a sentence, both to the record and the substance out of which it has come. Setting all this down has been at tomes an agony. At other times the narrative seems to have run along easily, telling itself like a newborn brook flowing from a spring. But out of it has come a kind of satisfaction, even perhaps, in the sense of eternity, a kind of purification and the realization of a purpose, without which my life would have remained incomplete and even confused and meaningless. I have begun to feel a sort of peace, the kind of peace which a great writer or sculptor or painter or architect or engineer must feel when a given objective of creation is realized and achieved. There is blended with it a feeling of self-respect such as I have never known before, of having had a purpose and carried it through. Whatever happens now I have at least done something.
I have purged myself, awkwardly, by a great effort, with all the discomfort and miseries of a difficult gestation, for, not being skilled and experienced as a writer and in the whole business of putting into words that are understandable the thought and emotions and intuitions of this thing called my body, I have been called upon to exercise vast powers of will and determination. Yet in the exercise of those powers, in the very discipline involved I have achieved satisfaction and even peace. Despite the frustrations, the birth pangs, the desperate effort to see things clearly and honestly, I shall be sorry when there is no more to write. I am even a little afraid of that moment. It is, I think, a terror of becoming lost all over again.
When it is finished what shall I do then with my time, with my interests, with my thoughts? I am beginning to understand that I shall never turn back, that I shall never see Oakdale again or Enid or the old life since it would be impossible for me ever again to be a part of all those dead things. I have tried earnestly to set down in honesty what I am and why I am what I am. Perhaps it is a task too complicated, too complex, too difficult for any man. Alone here in the jungle I have put upon paper things I have never told any man, things which it would be quite impossible to tell, no matter how earnestly I might wish to do so. At moments, alone in the jungle, I have felt myself blushing. And so I have done a "Self-portrait of the Artist."
There is little left to tell except the end and, of course, I shall not be here to set that down, to write the postscript of what may seem a trivial and tormented existence!
After the break-up with Mary I lived for a time in what might be described best perhaps as a state of suspended animation in which I had neither will nor purpose, in which nothing that happened had any interest or value. Twice I tried to break through to her. Once a letter was returned marked "address unknown." The other letter was never answered. Once I planned again in detail the perfect means of destroying Enid. All three impulses, I know, were dictated by a single force that of sensuality, of wanting passionately to experience again and indeed forever merely the sensual satisfaction which was forever linked to Mary. How often is that pure sensuality confused with love, yet it is nevertheless an integral and indispensable part of any complete and satisfactory love. In that sensuality my own body was regenerated and made younger. It became for a time something apart from me, a kind of instrument which I myself admired and even glorified, so that the sight of it, seen naked accidentally in a mirror, roused in me an emotion of gratitude and admiration. Perhaps that is the way all of us should feel toward our bodies if we were honest and truly decent. For a time, even though it may have been an illusion (and that I shall never know), I did experience what might be called by the French designation amour, complete and liberating and satisfactory. In that, even though it may have been an illusion, I was more fortunate than most men who rarely even approach such an experience.
In that period of suspended animation I seemed to have acquired a curious gentleness, and save for the two letters to Mary and the morbid planning of Enid's destruction, things went better in my relationship with Enid. At least I was not consciously cruel to her. I accepted her nonsense, her complacency, her power of pretending, her devastating emptiness and superficiality, or perhaps I ignored it because it no longer had the power to touch me. I think this was one of the happiest periods of her life because the pattern which she had set up for herself became for a little time to have some semblance of reality. I was docile because I did not really care about anything and so was no longer annoyed by her lack of honesty and her make-believe. I did not strike back. I no longer even felt any revulsion.
I found that I slept a great deal, partly because it provided the escape of a "little death" and partly because there was no reason for waking, having a shower, and starting a new day.
And then came the unexpected and unplanned opportunity provided by a war of which, until then, I had taken little notice. They needed "businessmen," They needed "administrators" and "executives," and so they took me, and almost at once they forgot the whole purpose of taking me by sending me out here to sit on this evil and lovely and uncomfortable island where Enid writes to me as if our life together had always been a satisfactory and even a happy one, as if nothing at all had ever happened. The erring husband had come home, exactly as the advisors to the lovelorn had predicted.
Even the final, savage, heroic quarrel which occurred the day before I left, in which I said cruel and vicious things I never said before and, whatever- happens, will never say again because they hurt me far more than they hurt Enid, has made no difference. She "forgave" me at once even though I had told her that she was a humbug and worse than a liar because she lived a lie and was utterly detestable to any decent man. Afterward I went outside into the darkness and was sick in the rose garden. But it was all for nothing. She did not even know what I was talking about. What happens to her or to me is of little importance. The tragedy is that there are so many like her. That I am nowhere near her, that she goes through day after day, week after week, without ever seeing me, is of no importance. In the eyes of the world and in so far as she is concerned I have been recaptured and everything is all right again. The letters she writes me, like the one about cutting down the hedge and her difficulties with Ronnie, my boy, are dull and small-minded but illuminated by a sense of triumph. I do not think it would matter at all to her if I died or were killed. For a time it would bring her a sense of importance in the community. Materially she is well-off. She would be a "war widow" whose husband had died, one way or another, for his country. She can, barring utter economic collapse of a whole great nation, keep her automobile, her refrigerator, her neo-Georgian house, her plumbing. She can send the children off to college, possibly to waste four years of their lives, to return as empty and as uneducated as Enid and I returned a generation earlier. She might conceivably marry again an older man less eccentric and peculiar and more comfortable than I have ever been, a man who fitted the pattern of her world and culture, a man who had never dared to look at himself, his wife, or the world in which he lives.
There is a double and complicated irony in the sense of triumph I find in Enid's letters. She has never understood that in the very moment I came back to her she had really lost me forever. It did not matter whether I was living in the same house or separated by half the earth, as we actually are. She had lost me. I was simply not there at all whether my body was in Oakdale or in the South Pacific. I suppose I am not alone in such an escape. There must be others. Only I have written it all down.
Last night the Sergeant came in again for some gin rummy. He seemed a little more calm than he had been in the past. It may be that he is becoming worn down by monotony and despair. I had to tell him that there was still no news regarding the possibility of leave and he took it not too badly.
I think I shall miss him, or rather perhaps the complete extrovert stability which he represents. He has a kind of animal warmth and vitality which somehow rubs off on you when he has been around for a little time. Most of all, I think, it is because we are friends. I think of him as a friend, even when I attempt to analyze why this is so... more a friend perhaps than any man I have ever known. Why? Perhaps because we do not question each other or our motives or thoughts, because each gives the other what it is he wants and needs.
A friend is a very difficult thing to analyze. "Friend" is a word which is used carelessly and often enough without meaning. When I sit down and try to list my friends, the number emerges surprisingly small. Mere community of interests is not enough. There is a certain give-and-take, a certain mutual compensation which is not easy to define, since more often than not it arises from impulse and intuition beyond the realm of the conscious. I suppose you get what you give, and my own life has been perhaps crippled and limited because I did not give enough and so got back little. Sometimes I think that in this hurried mechanical world in which we live there is too little time not only to live decently and richly but even to maintain and cultivate the thing known as a friend.
I think the Sergeant and I would each go to any length to do a service for the other. Sometimes I think that perhaps we could have a very satisfactory existence for the rest of our lives, merely beachcombing together until at last one of us dies. We have never discussed any of this. I could not bring myself to do it and in any case such a discussion would scare him to death. At the root of everything perhaps lies on my side the realization that in him I have met an honest man.
He won all evening at rummy and went away in high spirits, I heard him whistling as he crossed the sand in the moonlight to his own hut, and it occurred to me that not only was he an honest man but a free man and that he would never do a nasty thing. That is the reason he cannot understand a specimen like Homer, the wool-hat. That is the reason why r out of sheer moral indignation and frustration, he gives Homer a "going-over." In him and his kind perhaps lies the salvation of the world, not in science or "liberalism" or do-gooding or sentimentality or respectability or politics or womb-to-tomb philosophies, but in primitive virtues like simplicity and honesty and decency.
The sound of his whistling has died away in the moonlight, and back at my battered typewriter I find that, for me, with all my limitations and all my inhibition. I have nothing more to write. I am sitting here fumbling with the keys, obsessed by a strange feeling of emptiness. Perhaps it is because there is no more to tell. I am purged and clean but empty.
The quick red fox jumps over the... Somebody is shooting again. Probably that noble "underprivileged" specimen Homer...
I shall have to go and see what the rumpus is about. I go empty and finished but clean...
None: That is the way the manuscript ended and it is perhaps as good as any other ending. It just may be that there is a kind of symbolism in the fact that middle-class "Mr. Smith," with all his limitations, his weaknesses, his aspirations, was destroyed by Homer, the wool-hat Homer, one of the swarming ever-increasing "underprivileged".
