Conrad Aiken - Blue Voyage

“Don’t do either! but have a cocktail!”

“That’s not a bad idea, either! a dry Martini would go nicely.”

“Steward! Can we have two dry Martinis, please?”

“Two dry Martinis, yes, sir.”

“Yes, it’s very sad and complicated. If you look at the problem from a purely humanitarian point of view, and try to solve it solely in the interests of mankind — even then, it’s not too simple. In the first place, there is always the possibility that the whole Freudian idea, as thus applied to art, is wrong. It may be that art will be a permanent necessity for man, a penalty that he pays for having become a social and civilized animal. How can we be sure? If I go on writing plays and novels, may I not at any rate give aid and comfort to a few verbalistic lunatics like myself, and help them to keep their spiritual balance in this melancholy world? And isn’t that a good deed?… But no, I’m not sure. The intellectual side of me declines to believe in that — or balks at it. I have what my friend Tompkins, the psychoanalyst, calls a Samson complex.”

“This gets deeper and darker. Have a drink. Here’s to the Samson complex!”

“Your bloody good health!”

“Not bad at all.”

“Shall we repeat?”

“We might!”

“Two more please, steward?”

“Two dry Martinis? Yes, sir.”

“Well, now, Socrates, tell me about the Samson complex. I hope you don’t mind if I just seem to listen, like a sponge.”

“I don’t mind, if you don’t. But I don’t want to bore you.”

“Bore me! Great Godfry. I’ve been dying for something highbrow like this. But don’t be surprised if I fall asleep.”

“Well, the name for it was partly a joke, and refers to a dream I had two weeks ago, when I was visiting Tompkins. Tompkins has always been keen to have me drop all this literary folderol and become a psychologist, or at any rate a psychological critic of literature. When I was staying with Tompkins, two weeks ago, he renewed his attack on me and once more brought this schism painfully to the surface. Lately, I had been backsliding a little. After a year and a half of potboiling, which took the form of book reviewing, I suddenly developed a tremendous resistance to criticism — my destructive speculations, you see, were coming too close to a destruction of myself, not only by taking up all my time, but also by undermining my amour propre … How much, please?”

“Two shillings — or fifty cents. Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

“Here’s to your ectoplasm.”

“And yours. May it never grow less. Don’t forget the dream in your excitement.”

“I was just getting to it. It reflects, you see, this conflict in me between the critic and the artist … The times, I should think, were those of Euripides: though I’m not positive the place was Greece. I was a runner, a messenger, and I had been running since daybreak, bearing some portentous message. What was this great message, this revelation? I don’t know — it was never clearly formulated in the dream. But at dusk I came to a great stone-built temple, and entered it. I was exhausted: I could hardly stand. The temple chamber, within, was immense, high-roofed, and ceilinged with blue and gold; and at the far end of it, before a grim stone altar, a hieratic procession of tall priests was forming. It seemed, however, that they were expecting me, and that whatever it was that they were about to perform must wait till they had heard what it was that I had to say. I approached them, spoke, and then, my message delivered, realized that I was going to die, that the long run had killed me. Stumbling, therefore, to a table-shaped tomb of stone, I stretched myself upon it like the effigy of a crusader, my throbbing eyes turned upward toward the ceiling … How high it was, how gorgeously azured and gilded, and how massive the masonry of its arch! If it should fall — if it were only to fall — would it not destroy — not only myself, already dying — but also these hateful priests and their mysteries? the temple? And suddenly, then, with a last spastic effort of body and soul, I cried out in terrific command to the ceiling ‘FALL! FALL!..’ And it fell.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

“Good gracious Peter … I see, yes, where the Samson idea comes in … I never dreamt anything like that in my life. All my dreams are in pieces — I’m walking in one place, and then I’m in another. I look into a room and see a lovely girl undressing, kiss her — oh boy! notice that she has put too much rouge on her mouth, and looks consumptive — and the next thing I know I’m watching a crazy play, with that girl, or another one something like her, acting the heroine in Why Girls Leave Home . No good at all. Do you always dream dreams like that?”

“Usually.”

“No wonder you’ve got things to write about … Tell me — when you write a novel, for instance, how do you go about it? Do you make up a plot out of whole cloth — so to speak — or do you see something in life, simply, and put it down?”

“I don’t think it’s either method, but a sort of combination. Personally, I find it hard to draw from life. I couldn’t, for example, transfer you to a novel, or Hay-Lawrence, and make you real: you would only become real, for my purpose, if I had invented you” …

“Gosh! Now, suppose we were all of us just—”

“Characters in a novel? Yes! Every now and then one experiences that sense of a complete dissociation of personality, when one seems to evaporate under the glare of one’s own eye. Exactly the way that when you’ve been lying in bed in one position too long you lose all sense of your body … You know, it’s something like this, some analagous feeling of unreality and absurdity, a destructive sense of the profound relativity of my existence, that makes me a failure. It seems to me — I don’t know whether this is idiotic, but thanks to the cocktails I don’t hesitate to say it — it seems to me that I can foresee everything, exactly the feeling that one has in a hashish or mescal trance. Have you ever tried hashish?”

“No. Something like opium, isn’t it?”

“Something … You lose the power to distinguish in time and place. For instance, you remember, as you sit there absorbed in sensory meditation, that you have forgotten to let in the dog. In the course of thinking this, you so sharply visualize the action of descending the stairs, passing the bust of Clytie in the wall niche, slipping back the cold brass bolt, feeling the injured screw under the doorknob, hearing the whimper of the hinge and the threefold scrape of the dog’s nails on the worn door panel, and then (the door opened) seeing the mad swarm of stars above the Baptist church — you experience all this so profoundly, and the return upstairs, that you become convinced that you have actually done it … Am I losing my thread, or are these cocktails making me drunk?”

“I suspect you’re drunk!”

“Yes, I have at all times, drunk or sober, a crippling sense of having foreseen every possible action or feeling or thought, not only of my own, but also of everyone else. All the alternatives, too. The whole blooming buzzing cosmic telephone exchange — every connection. This is so appallingly vivid that in its wake any real action performed by me, or any thought formulated, or any feeling observed in its progress from belly to thorax, and from thorax to — possibly — horripilation—”

“Pause there! That word again, please, if you don’t mind, professor.”

“Horripilation — when your hair walks backward on cold feet. Any such reality seems to me in consequence a rather stupid and meaningless repetition, not worth troubling about. Why write a book, which one can conceive so much more sublimely than anyone could possibly write? Why bother even to conceive a new unity in a chosen gamut of heterogeneity, when one also foresees disastrously the hour when that unity will have become merely one item in a larger heterogeneity, each new system absorbed by a larger system? Why bother to foresee that fatality of decay and change, of clicking and mechanical and inevitable death, when one remembers that even oneself, the foreseer, was foreseen in the act of foreseeing, and that even one’s newness is old?… This is a poisonous sophistry from which I find it hard to escape. I only escape it when the attention of my senses has been sharply drawn. And even then the willingness to act or feel is only intermittent. As in love, for instance.”