Charles Snow - Last Things

I didn’t take more of the blame than I had to. It wouldn’t have been true, it would have been over dramatic and, curiously enough, over-vain, to imagine that I could have altered all or many of my actions. I had struggled too hard, and with too much self-concentration: but it would have been impossible not to struggle hard. Nevertheless, in a sense, in a sense which was real although one could explicate it half away, I had been a bad son, a bad friend, a bad husband. To my mother I could, without being a different person, have given more. Yes, I had been very young: but I was already old enough to distrust one’s own withdrawals, and to know that one’s own needs – including self-protection and the assertion of one’s loneliness – could be cruel. And, what took more recognition, could be disciplined.

I had been a bad friend to George Passant – not in later years, when there was nothing to be done except be there, when all he wanted was to spend a night or two in what he thought of as a normal world – not then, but almost as soon as I ceased to be an intimate and left the town for London. It was then that I had blinkered myself. I ought to have known how the great dreams were being acted out, how all the hopes of the son of the morning were driving him where such hopes had driven other leaders before him. I ought to have used my own realism to break up the group or his inner paradise. Perhaps no one could have done that, for George was a powerful character and had, of course, the additional power of his own desires. But I was tougher-minded than he was, and there was a chance, perhaps one chance in ten, that I could have shifted him.

As for being a bad husband to Sheila, it was simply that I shouldn’t have been her husband at all. There I had committed the opposite wrong to what I had done (or rather not done) to George Passant. Instead of absenting myself as from him – or earlier from my mother, I had summoned up every particle of intensity, energy and will. She, lost and splintered as she was, had to take me in the end. After that, I couldn’t find a way, there was no way, to make up for it. Now I had seen in my son Charles the same capacity for intense focusing of the whole self, regardless of anyone and anything, regardless in his case of his normal sense or detached kindness. Regardless in mine of the tenderness that I felt for Sheila, independent of love, and lasting longer.

That I couldn’t forget. When Austin Davidson played with speculations about the after-life, I had a reason, stronger than all others, for wishing that I could, even in the most ghostly fashion, believe in it: a reason so mawkish and sentimental that I couldn’t admit it, and yet so demanding that once, when Davidson and young Charles were bantering away, I couldn’t listen. Instead, I wanted to hear – it was as mawkish as that – a voice from the shades saying (clipped and gnomic as so much that Sheila had said in life): ‘Never mind. It’s all right. You should know, it’s all right.’

If I had been given the option, I should have chosen to eliminate the first half of my life, and try again. No one could judge that but myself. Francis Getliffe, who had known me continuously for longer than anyone else, would have been – in the priest’s terms – too merciful. He had seen me do bad things, but he hadn’t seen those hidden things: and, even if he had, he would still have been too merciful.

For the second half of my life, Margaret had known me as no one else had. At times she had seen me at my worst. But there I should – compared with the remoter past – have given myself the benefit of the doubt. And I thought that she would too. She would have said – so I believed – that I had made an effort to reshape a life. It wasn’t easy or specially successful, she might have added to herself: for Margaret was not often taken in, either about herself or me, nor so willing to be satisfied as Francis. But she would have given me the benefit of the doubt, even if she had known me from the beginning. She had a higher sense of what life ought to be than I had: but also she could accept more when it went wrong.

Yet, as I lay in bed, it wasn’t the remorse – the tainted patches, the days, the years – that became mixed with this present moment. Instead, other moments, dredged up from the past, flickered into this one. Moments which might originally have been miserable or joyous – they were all content-giving by now. Lying awake as a child, hearing my father and some choral friends singing down below; walking with Sheila on a freezing winter night; sitting tired and ill by the sea, wondering how I could cope with the next term at the Bar; triumph after an examination result, drinking, chucking glasses into the fireplace.

I was vulnerable to memories, I wanted to be, some I was forcing back to mind. They were what remained, not the judgments or the regrets. Again I thought of Charles March in that same conversation two years before, saying, as I listened with eyes blacked out: ‘You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?’

An interesting life. Did anyone think – to himself – of his own life like that? That was the kind of summing-up that a biographer or historian might make: but it didn’t have any meaning to oneself, to one’s own life as lived. Zest, action growing out of flatness, boredom growing out of zest, achievement growing out of boredom, reverie – joy – anxiety – action. Could anyone sum that up for himself or make an integral as an onlooker might? True, I had once heard an old clergyman, in his rooms in college, tell me that he had had ‘a disappointing life’. He had said it angrily, in a whisky-thickened voice. It had been impressive, though not precisely moving, when he said it: on the spot, he was sincere, he meant what he said. But he had a reason for bursting out: he was explaining to himself (and incidentally to me) why he proposed not to do a good turn to another man. I did not believe that even he thought continuously of his life in terms like that. He enjoyed his bits of power in the college: he enjoyed moving from his sessions with the whisky bottle to his prophecies of catastrophe. Certainly a biographer – in the unlikely event of his ever having one – could have summarised his existence in his own phrase. It was objectively true. I doubted if it seemed so to himself for hours together. Even as he was speaking to me, his vitality was still active and hostile, he still was capable of dreaming that, by a miracle, his deserts might even now be given him.

Like most of us, he occasionally thought of his life as a progress or a history. Then he could dispose of it by his ferocious summing-up. That was on the cosmogonists’ model which had occurred to me before: from T = o, the big bang, the birth of Despard-Smith, to T = 79, the end of things, the death of Despard-Smith. A history. A disappointing history. But that wasn’t the way in which he, or the rest of us, thought most frequently to himself about his life. There was another cosmogonists’ model which, it seemed to me, was much closer to one’s own life as lived. Continuous creation. A slice disappeared, was replaced again. Something was lost, something new came in. All the time it looked to oneself as though there was not much change, nor deterioration, nor journey towards an end. Didn’t each of our lives, to ourselves as we lived them, seem, much more often than not, like a process of continuous creation?

So, when Austin Davidson in his last illness dismissed the themes which had preoccupied him for a lifetime (except for his game of gambling: ‘If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,’ he once said, ‘I should still want to hear the latest Stock Exchange quotations’), he found others which filled their place: and the days of solitariness, though they might be, and often were, bitter, had their own kind of creation. Even studying his ankles, watching in detail the changes in his physical state, was a fresh awakening of interest, petty if you like, but in its fashion a revival. That was as true for him as it was for my mother, also talking of her ankles in her last illness. Yes, that was a singular outburst of the process of continuous creation. Themes of a lifetime wore themselves out: but we weren’t left empty, the resolution wasn’t as tidy as that, somehow the psychic heart went on pumping, giving one a new or transformed lease of existence – perhaps restricted, but more concentrated because of that.