Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

The irony was designed to provoke me. The voice went on: “You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“All those years ago, if you had been told what was going to happen to you, would you have compounded for it?”

“Would you have done, about yourself?”

“I wasn’t as insatiable as you, you know. In most ways, yes.”

I didn’t have to explicate that answer. He hadn’t chosen to compete. His marriage, like mine to Margaret, had been a good one. He had two daughters, but no son. He envied me mine. But he was trying to be therapeutic, he didn’t want to talk about himself.

“You had a formidable power in you when you were young, we all knew that. We were all certain you’d make your name. You can’t say you haven’t, can you? But it must have been surprising when it happened. I know some of it’s been painful, I couldn’t have taken what you’ve had to take. Still, that was what you were made for, wasn’t it?”

I heard the friendly smile, half-sardonic, half-approving.

“You didn’t find your own nature,” he was saying, “altogether easy to cope with, did you?”

“You know I didn’t.”

“You started out subtle and tricky as well as rapacious. You had to make yourself a better man. And the trouble with that sort of effort is that one loses as well as gains. We’re both more decent than we were at twenty, Lewis, but I’m sure we’re nothing like so much fun.”

At that I laughed. That was the primordial Charles March. He might have become more decent, but his tongue hadn’t lost its sadistic edge.

“Still, I’ve told you before,” he went on, “it’s impossible to regret one’s own experience, don’t you agree?”

“I used to agree with you. Which you thought entirely proper, of course.” Just for an instant I had caught the debating tone of our young manhood. Then I said: “But in this I’m beginning to wonder whether you are right.”

He was glad to have revived me a bit, to have led me into an argument: but he was taken aback that I had spoken with feeling, and that my spirits had sunk down again. Quickly he switched from that subject, although he stayed a long while, casting round for other ways of interesting me, before he left.

Claustrophobia was getting hold of me. It had been a nuisance always. The scarlet tapestries pressed upon my eyes, the pillows were built up so that I couldn’t move my head more than a few degrees.

Blindness would be like this. Did one still have such hallucinations? Was it the absolute dark? Of all the private miseries, that was one I was not sure I could endure. None of us knew his limits. Once, when young Charles was conceived, I thought it might be beyond my limit if the genes had gone wrong, if he were born to a suffering one could do nothing about.

I shouldn’t be able to read with my left eye. That was practical. If this could happen to one eye, it could happen to the other. Peripheral vision (Mansel’s voice). Useful vision. A great deal of my life was lived through the eye. How could I get on without reading? Records, people reading to me. It would be gritty. How could I write? I should have to learn to dictate. It would be like learning a new language. Still.

The machine wearing out (Rubin’s voice). People talked about getting old. Did anyone believe it? Ageing men went in for rhetorical flourishes: but were they real? One didn’t live in terms of history, but in existential moments. One woke up as one had done thirty years before. Certainly that was true of me. Men were luckier than women. There was nothing brutal to remind one of time’s arrow. Perhaps men like Rubin, physicists, mathematicians, remembered they had had great concepts in their youth: never again, the power had gone. I had seen athletes in their thirties, finished, talking like old men and meaning it. But for me, day by day, existence hadn’t altered. Memory faltered a little: sometimes I forgot a name. The machine wearing out.

As I pushed one fact away, another swam in. Living in public. Attacks. That year’s attack, people saying that I had stolen other men’s writing. They could have accused me of many things, but, as I had told George Passant, not of that. That I couldn’t have done. You had to make yourself a better man (Charles March’s voice). Yes, but even when I was as he first knew me, when I was “tricky and rapacious”, that I could never have done. Not out of virtue, but out of temperament. It was one of my deficiencies — and sometimes a strength — that I had to stay indifferent to what I didn’t know at first-hand. Yet the accusation hurt. It seemed to hurt more than if it had been true.

In the red-dark: motionless: there came — for instants among the depression or the anger — a sense of freedom. This was as low as I had gone. There was a kind of exhilaration, which I had known just once before in my life, of being at the extreme.

Then the vacuum in my mind began to fill itself again.

Early in the fifth morning, Mansel’s greeting. The clever fingers: the reprieve of light. The lens, the large eye. He was taking longer than usual, examining from above, below, and the right.

Crisply he said: “I’m sorry, sir. We’ve failed. The retina hasn’t stuck.”

It was utterly unanticipated, I had prepared myself for a good deal, not for this. At the same time it sounded — as other announcements of ill-luck had sounded — like news I had known for a long time.

“Well,” I said, “this is remarkably tiresome.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” said Mansel. He spoke in bad temper, blaming himself and me, just as I heard scientists taking it out of their lab assistant after an experiment had gone wrong. He was recalculating. There was an element of chance in these operations. There was an element of human error. He couldn’t trace the fault.

“Anyway, inquests are useless,” he said snappily. He became a doctor, a good doctor, again.

“There’s no reason why you should be uncomfortable any longer,” he said, taking the cover off my good eye. We shall have to look after that one, he remarked, in reassurance. It would have to be inspected regularly, of course. He would ring up my wife, so that she could take me home. I should feel better there. It would do me good to have a drink as soon as I arrived.

“What will happen to this?” I pointed a finger towards the left eye.

“For the present, it will probably be rather like it was before we operated. Then, if we did nothing further — I shall have to talk to you about that, you understand, but not just now — if we did nothing further, it would gradually die on you. That might take some time.”

After he had gone, I sat up in bed and drank a cup of tea. Lying flat, I had been scarcely able to eat a sandwich, and I was hungry. Obviously Mansel wanted to try another operation. It was dark to face the thought of going through all that again. Just to get some minor vision. A little sight was better than no sight. The bad eye would die on me. That might be the right choice. He was a strong-willed man, he wouldn’t have me let it go without a conflict. In my way I was stubborn too. I had to make my own forecasts.

Yet, in the middle of indecision, I got an animal pleasure out of being in the light. My left eye Mansel had bound up again, but the other was free. It was good to see the roofs outside, and a nurse’s face. She had spoken to me each morning, and now I saw her. If I had met her in the street, I should have thought she looked sensible enough, with the map of Ireland written on her. But now her face stood out, embossed, as though I had not seen a face before.

It was she who told me that I had a visitor. I looked at my watch. Still not ten o’clock. I thought Margaret had been in a hurry. But the nurse held the door open, not for her, but for young Charles.