[To OWEN.] Can you give me the loan of half-a-crown? I'll repay you out of the subscriptions I'm collecting for the publication of my new book. [To YOLLAND.] It is entitled: 'The Pentaglot Preceptor4 or Elementary Institute of the English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Irish Languages; Particularly Calculated for the Instruction of Such Ladies and Gentlemen as may Wish to Learn without the Help of a Master'.
YOLLAND [Laughs.] That's a wonderful title!
HUGH Between ourselves�the best part of the enterprise. Nor do I, in fact, speak Hebrew. And that last phrase�'without the Help of a Master'�that was written before the new national school was thrust upon me�do you think I ought to drop it now? After all you don't dispose of the cow just because it has produced a magnificent calf, do you?
YOLLAND YOU certainly do not. HUGH The phrase goes. And I'm interrupting work of moment. [He goes to the door and stops there.]
To return briefly to that other matter, Lieutenant. I understand your sense of exclusion, of being cut off from a life here; and I trust you will find access to us with my son's help. But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen�to use an image you'll understand� it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . . . fact.
Gentlemen. [He leaves.] OWEN 'An expeditio with three purposes': the children laugh at him: he always
promises three points and he never gets beyond A and B. YOLLAND He's an astute man. OWEN He's bloody pompous. YOLLAND But so astute. OWEN And he drinks too much. Is it astute not to be able to adjust for sur
vival? Enduring around truths immemorially posited�hah! YOLLAND He knows what's happening. OWEN What is happening? YOLLAND I'm not sure. But I'm concerned about my part in it. It's an eviction
of sorts. OWEN We're making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that?
YOLLAND Not in . . .
OWEN And we're taking place-names that are riddled with confusion and . . .
4. I.e., the five-tongued head teacher.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
YOLLAND Who's confused? Are the people confused?
OWEN . . . and we're standardising those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can. YOLLAND Something is being eroded. OWEN Back to the romance again. Alright! Fine! Fine! Look where we've got
to. [He drops on his hands and knees and stahs a finger at the map.] We've come to this crossroads. Come here and look at it, man! Look at it! And we call that crossroads Tobair Vree. And why do we call it Tobair Vree? I'll tell you why. Tobair means a well. But what does Vree mean? It's a corruption of Brian�[Gaelic pronunciation.] Brian�an erosion of Tobair Bhriain. Because a hundred-and-fifty years ago there used to be a well there, not at the crossroads, mind you�that would be too simple�but in a field close to the crossroads. And an old man called Brian, whose face was disfigured by an enormous growth, got it into his head that the water in that well was blessed; and every day for seven months he went there and bathed his face in it. But the growth didn't go away; and one morning Brian was found drowned in that well. And ever since that crossroads is known as Tobair Vree�even though that well has long since dried up. I know the story because my grandfather told it to me. But ask Doalty�or Maire�or Bridget�even my father�even Manus�why it's called Tobair Vree; and do you think they'll know? I know they don't know. So the question I put to you, Lieutenant, is this: What do we do with a name like that? Do we scrap Tobair Vree altogether and call it�what?�The Cross? Crossroads? Or do we keep piety with a man long dead, long forgotten, his name 'eroded' beyond recognition, whose trivial little story nobody in the parish remembers?
YOLLAND Except you.
OWEN I've left here.
YOLLAND You remember it.
OWEN I'm asking you: what do we write in the Name-Book?
YOLLAND Tobair Vree.
OWEN Even though the well is a hundred yards from the actual crossroads� and there's no well anyway�and what the hell does Vree mean? YOLLAND Tobair Vree. OWEN That's what you want?
YOLLAND Yes. OWE N You're certain? YOLLAND Yes.
OWEN Fine. Fine. That's what you'll get.
YOLLAND That's what you want, too, Roland.
[Pause.]
OWEN [Explodes.] George! For God's sake! My name is not Roland!
YOLLAND What?
OWEN [Softly.] My name is Owen. [Pause.]
YOLLAND Not Roland? OWEN Owen. YOLLAND You mean to say�? OWEN Owen. YOLLAND But I've been� OWE N O-w-e-n.
.
FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
YOLLAND Where did Roland come from? OWEN I don't know. YOLLAND It was never Roland? OWEN Never. YOLLAND O my God!
[Pause. They stare at one another. Then the absurdity of the situation strikes them suddenly. They explode with laughter, OWEN pours drinks. As they roll about their lines overlap.]
YOLLAND Why didn't you tell me?
OWEN Do I look like a Roland? YOLLAND Spell Owen again.
OWEN I was getting fond of Roland.
YOLLAND O my God!
OWEN O-w-e-n.
YOLLAND What'll we write�
OWEN �in the Name-Book?!
YOLLAND R-o-w-e-n!
OWEN Or what about Ol-
YOLLAND Ol- what?
OWEN Oland!
[And again they explode. MANUS enters. He is very elated. ]
MANUS What's the celebration?
OWEN A christening!
YOLLAND A baptism!
OWEN A hundred christenings!
YOLLAND A thousand baptisms! Welcome to Eden!
OWEN Eden's right! We name a thing and�bang!�it leaps into existence!5
YOLLAND Each name a perfect equation with its roots.
OWEN A perfect congruence with its reality.
[To MANUS.] Take a drink. YOLLAND Poteen�beautiful. OWEN Lying Anna's poteen. YOLLAND Anna na mBreag's poteen. OWEN Excellent, George. YOLLAND I'll decode you yet. OWEN [Offers drink.] Manus? MANUS Not if that's what it does to you. OWEN You're right. Steady�steady�sober up�sober up. YOLLAND Sober as a judge, Owen.
[MANUS moves beside OWEN.]
MANUS I've got good news! Where's Father?
OWEN He's gone out. What's the good news?
MANUS I've been offered a job.
OWEN Where? [Now aware of YOLLAND.] Come on, man�speak in English.
MANUS For the benefit of the colonist?
OWEN He's a decent man.
MANUS Aren't they all at some level?
OWEN Please.
5. Cf. Adam's naming of every creature (Genesis 2.19�20).
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
[MANUS shrugs.]
He's been offered a job. YOLLAND Where? OWEN Well�tell us! MANUS I've just had a meeting with two men from Inis Meadhon.6 They want
me to go there and start a hedge-school. They're giving me a free house,
free turf, and free milk; a rood7 of standing corn; twelve drills8 of potatoes;
and� [He stops. ] OWEN An d what?
MANUS A salary of .4 2 a year!
OWEN Manus, that's wonderful!
MANUS You're talking to a ma n of substance.
OWEN I'm delighted. YOLLAND Where's Inis Meadhon?
OWEN An island south of here. And they came looking for you?
MANUS Well, I mean to say . . .
[OWEN punches MANUS.] OWEN Aaaaagh! This calls for a real celebration. YOLLAND Congratulations. MANUS Thank you. OWEN Where are you, Anna? YOLLAND Whe n do you start? MANUS Next Monday. OWEN We'll stay with you when we're there.
[To YOLLAND.] HO W long will it be before we reach Inis Meadhon? YOLLAND HO W far south is it? MANUS About fifty miles. YOLLAND Could we make it by December? OWEN We'll have Christmas together. [Sings.] 'Christmas Day on Inis
Meadhon
YOLLAND [Toast.] I hope you're very content there, Manus.
MANUS Thank you.
[YOLLAND holds out his hand, MANUS takes it. They shake warmly.] OWEN [Toast.] Manus. MANUS [Toast.] T o Inis Meadhon. [He drinks quickly and turns to leave.] OWEN Hold on�hold on�refills coming up. MANUS I've got to go. OWEN Com e on, man; this is an occasion. Wher e are you rushing to? MANUS I've got to tell Maire.
[MAIRE enters with her can of milk.] MAIRE You've got to tell Maire what? OWEN He's got a job! MAIRE Manus? OWEN He's been invited to start a hedge-school in Inis Meadhon. MAIRE Where? MANUS Inis Meadhon�the island! They're giving me .42 a year and . . . OWEN A house, fuel, milk, potatoes, corn, pupils, what-not!
6. Middle Island; one of the three Aran Islands, 7. A cubic measure, off the west coast of Ireland, south of Donegal. 8. Rows.
.
FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
MANUS I start on Monday. OWEN You'll take a drink. Isn't it great? MANUS I want to talk to you for . . . MAIRE There's your milk. I need the can back.
[MANUS takes the can and runs up the steps.] MANUS [AS he goes.] How will you like living on an island? OWEN You know George, don't you? MAIRE We wave to each other across the fields. YOLLAND Sorry-sorry? OWEN She says you wave to each other across the fields. YOLLAND Yes, we do; oh yes, indeed we do. MAIRE What's he saying? OWEN He says you wave to each other across the fields. MAIRE That's right. So we do. YOLLAND What's she saying? OWEN Nothing�nothing�nothing.
[To MAIRE.] What's the news?
[MAIRE moves away, touching the text hooks with her toe.] MAIRE Not a thing. You're busy, the two of you. OWEN We think we are. MAIRE I hear the Fiddler O'Shea's about. There's some talk of a dance tomor
row night. OWEN Where will it be? MAIRE Maybe over the road. Maybe at Tobair Vree. YOLLAND Tobair Vree! MAIRE Yes. YOLLAND Tobair Vree! Tobair Vree! MAIRE Does he know what I'm saying? OWEN Not a word. MAIRE Tell him then. OWEN Tell him what? MAIRE About the dance. OWEN Maire says there may be a dance tomorrow night. YOLLAND [TO OWEN.] Yes? May I come?
[To MAIRE.] Would anybody object if I came? MAIRE [To OWEN.] What's he saying? OWEN [To YOLLAND.] Who would object? MAIRE [TO OWEN.] Did you tell him? YOLLAND [To MAIRE.] Sorry-sorry? OWEN [To MAIRE.] He says may he come? MAIRE [TO YOLLAND.] That's up to you. YOLLAND [TO OWEN.] What does she say? OWEN [To YOLLAND.] She says� YOLLAND [To MAIRE.] What-what? MAIRE [To OWEN.] Well? YOLLAND [TO OWEN.] Sorry-sorry? OWEN [To YOLLAND.] Will you go? YOLLAND [TO MAIRE.] Yes, yes, if I may. MAIRE [TO OWEN.] What does he say? YOLLAND [To OWEN.] What is she saying?
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
OWEN O for God's sake! [To MANUS who is descending with the empty can.] You take on this job, Manus. MANUS I'll walk you up to the house. Is your mother at home? I want to talk
to her. MAIRE What's the rush? [To OWEN.] Didn't you offer me a drink? OWEN Will you risk Anna na mBreag?
MAIRE Wh y not. [YOLLAND is suddenly intoxicated. He leaps up on a stool, raises his glass and shouts. ]
YOLLAND Anna na mBreag! Baile Beag! Inis Meadhon! Bombay! Tobair Vree!
Eden! And poteen�correct, Owen? OWEN Perfect. YOLLAND And bloody marvellous stuff it is, too. I love it! Bloody, bloody,
bloody marvellous!
[Simidtaneously with his final 'bloody marvellous' bring up very loud the introductory music of the reel. Then immediately go to black. Retain the music throughout the very brief interval.]
SCENE TWO
The following night.
This scene may be played in the schoolroom, but it would be preferable to lose�by lighting�as much of the schoolroom as possible, and to play the scene down front in a vaguely 'outside' area.
The music rises to a crescendo. Then in the distance we hear MAIRE and YOLLAND approach�laughing and running. They run on, hand-in-hand. They have just left the dance.
Fade the music to distant background. Then after a time it is lost and replaced by guitar music. MAIRE and YOLLAND are now down front, still holding hands and excited by their sudden and impetuous escape from the dance.
MAIRE O my God, that leap across the ditch nearly killed me. YOLLAND I could scarcely keep up with you.
MAIRE Wait till I get my breath back. YOLLAND We must have looked as if we were being chased.
[They now realise they are alone and holding hands�the beginnings of embarrassment. The hands disengage. They begin to drift apart. Pause. ]
MAIRE Manus'll wonder where I've got to.
YOLLAND I wonder did anyone notice us leave.
[Pause. Slightly further apart.]
MAIRE The grass must be wet. My feet are soaking.
YOLLAND Your feet must be wet. The grass is soaking.
[Another pause. Another few paces apart. They are now a long distance from one another.] YOLLAND [Indicating himself] George.
[MAIRE nods: Yes�yes. Then.] MAIRE Lieutenant George. YOLLAND Don't call me that. I never think of myself as Lieutenant. MAIRE What-what? YOLLAND Sorry-sorry? [He points to himself again.] George.
.
FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
[MAIRE nods: Yes-yes. Then points to herself.] MAIRE Maire. YOLLAND Yes, I know you're Maire. Of course I know you're Maire. I mean
I've been watching you night and day for the past . . . MAIRE [Eagerly.] What-what? YOLLAND [Points.] Maire. [Points.] George. [Points both.] Maire and George.
[MAIRE nods: Yes-yes-yes.]
I�I�I�
MAIRE Say anything at all. I love the sound of your speech.
YOLLAND [Eagerly.] Sorry-sorry? [In acute frustration he looks around, hoping for some inspiration that will provide him with communicative means. Now he has a thought: he tries raising his voice and articulating in a staccato style and with equal and absurd emphasis on each word.]
Every-morning-I-see-you-feeding-brown-hens-and-giving-meal-to-black
calf�[The futility of it.]�O my God. [MAIRE smiles. She moves towards him. She will try to communicate in Latin. ]
MAIRE Tu es centurio in�in�in exercitu Britannico�9
YOLLAND Yes-yes? Go on�go on�say anything at all�I love the sound of your speech. MAIRE �et es in castris quae�quae�quae sunt in agro'�[The futility of it.]�O my God. [YOLLAND smiles. He moves towards her. Now for her English words.] George�water. YOLLAND 'Water'? Water! Ohyes�water�water�verygood�water�good�
good. MAIRE Fire. YOLLAND Fire�indeed�wonderful�fire, fire, fire�splendid�splendid!
MAIRE Ah . . . ah . . . YOLLAND Yes? Go on. MAIRE Earth. YOLLAND 'Earth'? MAIRE Earth. Earth.
[YOLLAND still does not understand. MAIRE stoops down and picks up a handful of clay. Holding it out.]
Earth. YOLLAND Earth! Of course�earth! Earth. Earth. Good Lord, Maire, your
English is perfect! MAIRE [Eagerly.] What-what? YOLLAND Perfect English. English perfect. MAIRE George� YOLLAND That's beautiful�oh that's really beautiful. MAIRE George� YOLLAND Say it again�say it again� MAIRE Shhh. [She holds her hand up for silence�she is trying to remember
her one line of English. Now she remembers it and she delivers the line as if
9. You are a centurion in the British Army [Latin; 1. And you are in the camp in the field [Latin; Friel's note]. "Centurion"; an officer in command Friel's note]. of a hundred soldiers.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
English were her language�easily, fluidly, conversationally.] George, in Norfolk we besport ourselves around the maypoll.
YOLLAND Good God, do you? That's where my mother comes from�Norfolk. Norwich actually. Not exactly Norwich town but a small village called Little Walsingham close beside it. But in our own village of Winfarthing we have a maypole too and every year on the first of May� [He stops abruptly, only now realising. He stares at her. She in turn misunderstands his excitement.]
MAIRE [To herself.] Mother of God, my Aunt Mary wouldn't have taught me something dirty, would she?
[Pause. YOLLAND extends his hand to MAIRE. She turns away from him and moves slowly across the stage.]
YOLLAND Maire.
[She still moves away.]
YOLLAND Maire Chatach.
[She still moves away.]
YOLLAND Bun na hAbhann?2 [He says the name softly, almost privately, very tentatively, as if he were searching for a sound she might respond to. He tries again.] Druim Dubh?3
[MAIRE stops. She is listening, YOLLAND is encouraged.]
Poll na gCaorach. Lis Maol.4
[MAIRE turns towards him.]
Lis na nGall.5 MAIRE Lis na nGradh.6
[They are now facing each other and begin moving�almost imperceptibly� towards one another. ]
MAIRE Carraig an Phoill.7 YOLLAND Carraig na Ri. Loch na nEan.8 MAIRE Loch an Iubhair. Machaire Buidhe.9 YOLLAND Machaire Mor. Cnoc na Mona.' MAIRE Cnoc na nGabhar.2 YOLLAND Mullach.3 MAIRE Port.4
YOLLAND Tor.5 MAIRE Lag.6 [She holds out her hands to YOLLAND. He takes them. Eack now speaks almost to himself/herself]
YOLLAND I wish to God you could understand me. MAIRE Soft hands; a gentleman's hands. YOLLAND Because if you could understand me I could tell you how I spend
my days either thinking of you or gazing up at your house in the hope that you'll appear even for a second. MAIRE Every evening you walk by yourself along the Tra Bhan and every morning you wash yourself in front of your tent. YOLLAND I would tell you how beautiful you are, curly-headed Maire. I would so like to tell you how beautiful you are.
2. Mouth of the River? 9. Lake of the Yew Tree. The Great Plain. 3. Black Ridge? 1. The Big Plain. Hill of the Nobles. 4. Pit of the Sheep. Bald Fairy Fort. 2. Hill of the Goat. 5. Fairy Fort of the Foreigner. 3. Summit. 6. Fairy Fort of Love. 4. Port (i.e., same meaning in Gaelic and English). 7. Rock of the Hole. 5. Bush or heavy. 8. Rock of the King. Lake of the Bird. 6. Weak.
.
FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
MAIRE Your arms are long and thin and the skin on your shoulders is very
white. YOLLAND I would tell you . . . MAIRE Don't stop�I know what you're saying. YOLLAND I would tell you how I want to be here�to live here�always�with
you�always, always. MAIRE 'Always'? What is that word�'always'? YOLLAND Yes-yes; always. MAIRE You're trembling. YOLLAND Yes, I'm trembling because of you. MAIRE I'm trembling, too. [She holds his face in her hand.] YOLLAND I've made up my mind . . . MAIRE Shhhh. YOLLAND I'm not going to leave here . . . MAIRE Shhh�listen to me. I want you, too, soldier. YOLLAND Don't stop�I know what you're saying. MAIRE I want to live with you�anywhere�anywhere at all�always�always. YOLLAND 'Always'? What is that word�'always'?
MAIRE Take me away with you, George. [Pause. Suddenly they kiss. SARAH enters. She sees them. She stands shocked, staring at them. Her mouth works. Then almost to herself] SARAH Manus . . . Manus! [SARAH runs off . Music to crescendo.]
Act Three
The following evening. It is raining.
SARAH and OWEN alone in the schoolroom, SARAH, more waiflike than ever, is sitting very still on a stool, an open hook across her knee. She is pretending to read hut her eyes keep going up to the room upstairs, OWEN is working on the floor as before, surrounded Iry his reference books, map, Name-Book etc. But he has neither concentration nor interest; and like SARAH he glances up at the upstairs room.
After a few seconds MANUS emerges and descends, carrying a large paper hag which already contains his clothes. His movements are determined and urgent. He moves around the classroom, picking up books, examining each title carefully, and choosing about six of them which he puts into his bag. As he selects these books.
OWEN You know that old limekiln7 beyond Con Connie Tim's pub, the place we call The Murren?�do you know why it's called The Murren?
[MANUS does not answer.] I've only just discovered: it's a corruption of Saint Muranus. It seems Saint Muranus had a monastery somewhere about there at the beginning of the seventh century. And over the years the name became shortened to The Murren. Very unattractive name, isn't it? I think we should go back to the
7. Furnace for making lime out of shells or limestone.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
original�Saint Muranus. What do you think? The original's Saint Muranus. Don't you think we should go back to that?
[No response, OWEN begins writing the name into the Name-Book. MANUS is now rooting about among the forgotten implements for a piece of rope. He finds a piece. He begins to tie the mouth of the flims)', overloaded bag�and it bursts, the contents spilling out on the floor.]
MANUS Bloody, bloody, bloody hell!
[His voice breaks in exasperation: he is about to cry. OWEN leaps to his feet.] OWEN Hold on. I've a bag upstairs. [He runs upstairs, SARAH waits until OWEN is off. Then.]
SARAH Manus . . . Manus, I . . . [MANUS hears SARAH but makes no acknowledgement. He gathers up his belongings.
OWEN reappears with the bag he had on his arrival.] OWEN Take this one�I'm finished with it anyway. And it's supposed to keep out the rain.
[MANUS transfers his few belongings, OWEN drifts back to his task. The packing is now complete.]
MANUS You'll be here for a while? For a week or two anyhow? OWEN Yes. MANUS You're not leaving with the army? OWEN I haven't made up my mind. Why? MANUS Those Inis Meadhon men will be back to see why I haven't turned
up. Tell them�tell them I'll write to them as soon as I can. Tell them I still
want the job but that it might be three or four months before I'm free to go. OWEN You're being damned stupid, Manus. MANUS Will you do that for me? OWEN Clear out now and Lancey'll think you're involved somehow. MANUS Will you do that for me? OWEN Wait a couple of days even. You know George�he's a bloody roman
tic�maybe he's gone out to one of the islands and he'll suddenly reappear tomorrow morning. Or maybe the search party'11 find him this evening lying drunk somewhere in the sandhills. You've seen him drinking that poteen� doesn't know how to handle it. Had he drink on him last night at the dance? MANUS I had a stone in my hand when I went out looking for him�I was
going to fell him. Th e lame scholar turned violent. OWEN Did anybody see you? MANUS [Again close to tears.] But when I saw him standing there at the side
of the road�smiling�and her face buried in his shoulder�I couldn't even go close to them. I just shouted something stupid�something like, 'You're a bastard, Yolland.' If I'd even said it in English . . . 'cos he kept saying 'Sorry-sorry?' Th e wrong gesture in the wrong language.
OWEN And you didn't see him again? MANUS 'Sorry?' OWEN Before you leave tell Lancey that�just to clear yourself. MANUS Wha t have I to say to Lancey? You'll give that message to the island-
men? OWEN I'm warning you: run away now and you're bound to be . . . MANUS [To SARAH.] Will you give that message to the Inis Meadhon men? SARAH I will.
.
FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
[MANUS picks tip an old sack and throws it across his shoulders.]
OWEN Have you any idea where you're going?
MANUS Mayo, maybe. I remember Mother saying she had cousins somewhere away out in the Erris Peninsula.8 [He picks up his hag.] Tell father I took only the Virgil and the Caesar and the Aeschylus9 because they're mine anyway�I bought them with the money I get for that pet lamb I reared� do you remember that pet lamb? And tell him that Nora Dan never returned the dictionary and that she still owes him two-and-six1 for last quarter's reading�he always forgets those things.
OWEN Yes.
MANUS And his good shirt's ironed and hanging up in the press and his clean
socks are in the butter-box under the bed. OWEN Alright. MANUS And tell him I'll write. OWEN If Maire asks where you've gone . . . ? MANUS He'll need only half the amount of milk now, won't he? Even less
than half�he usually takes his tea black. [Pause.] And when he comes in at night�you'll hear him; he makes a lot of noise�I usually come down and give him a hand up. Those stairs are dangerous without a banister. Maybe before you leave you'd get Big Ned Frank to put up some sort of a handrail. [Pause.] And if you can bake, he's very fond of soda bread.
OWEN I can give you money. I'm wealthy. Do you know what they pay me? Two shillings a day for this�this�this�
[MANUS rejects the offer by holding out his hand.]
Goodbye, Manus.
[MANUS and OWEN shake hands.
Then MANUS picks up his bag briskly and goes towards the door. He stops a few paces beyond SARAH, turns, comes back to her. He addresses her as he did in Act One but now without warmth or concern for her.]
MANUS What is your name? [Pause.] Come on. What is your name? SARAH My name is Sarah. MANUS Just Sarah? Sarah what? [Pause.] Well? SARAH Sarah Johnny Sally. MANUS And where do you live? Come on. SARAH I live in Bun na hAbhann. [She is now crying quietly.] MANUS Very good, Sarah Johnny Sally. There's nothing to stop you now�
nothing in the wide world. [Pause. He looks down at her.] It's alright�it's alright�you did no harm�you did no harm at all. [He stoops over her and kisses the top of her head�as if in absolution. Then briskly to the door and
off-]
OWEN Good luck, Manus!
SARAH [Quietly.] I'm sorry . . . I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry, Manus . . . [OWEN tries to work but cannot concentrate. He begins folding up the map. As he does.]
OWEN Is there class this evening?
[SARAH nods: yes. ]
I suppose Father knows. Where is he anyhow?
8. Northwest comer of County Mayo, south of statesman Julius Caesar (100�4 4 B.C.E) are his Donegal. military commentaries. 9 . Ancient Greek playwright (525^15 6 B.C.E.). 1. Two shillings and sixpence�thirty pennies�in The surviving works of the Roman general and the old British currency.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
[SARAH points.]
Where?
[SARAH mimes rocking a baby.]
I don't understand�where?
[SARAH repeats the mime and wipes away tears, OWEN is still puzzled.]
It doesn't matter. He'll probably turn up.
[BRIDGET and DOALTY enter, sacks over their heads against the rain. They are self-consciously noisier, more ebullient, more garrulous than ever� brimming over with excitement and gossip and brio. ]
DOALTY You're missing the crack,2 boys! Cripes, you're missing the crack!
Fifty more soldiers arrived an hour ago! BRIDGET And they're spread out in a big line from Sean Neal's over to Lag and they're moving straight across the fields towards Cnoc na nGabhar! DOALTY Prodding every inch of the ground in front of them with their bayo
nets and scattering animals and hens in all directions! BRIDGET And tumbling everything before them�fences, ditches, hay-stacks, turf-stacks! DOALTY They came to Barney Petey's field of corn�straight through it be
God as if it was heather!1 BRIDGET Not a blade of it left standing! DOALTY And Barney Petey just out of his bed and running after them in his
drawers: 'You hoors4 you! Get out of my corn, you hoors you!' BRIDGET First time he ever ran in his life. DOALTY TOO lazy, the wee get,5 to cut it when the weather was good.
[SARAH begins putting out the seats.] BRIDGET Tell them about Big Hughie. DOALTY Cripes, if you'd seen your aul fella, Owen. BRIDGET They were all inside in Anna na mBreag's pub�all the crowd from
the wake� DOALTY And they hear the commotion and they all come out to the street� BRIDGET Your father in front; the Infant Prodigy footless6 behind him! DOALTY And your aul fella, he sees the army stretched across the
countryside�
BRIDGET O my God!
DOALTY And Cripes he starts roaring at them! BRIDGET 'Visigoths! Huns! Vandals!'7 DOALTY 'Ignari! Stulti! Rusticil'8
BRIDGET And wee Jimmy Jack jumping up and down and shouting, 'Thermopylae! Thermopylae!'9 DOALTY You never saw crack like it in your life, boys. Come away on out with
me, Sarah, and you'll see it all. BRIDGET Big Hughie's fit to take no class. Is Manus about? OWEN Manus is gone. BRIDGET Gone where? OWEN He's left�gone away.
2. Excitement. turies. 3. Plant with small leaves and flowers. 8. Ignoramuses! Fools! Peasants! [Latin; Friel's 4. Whores. note]. 5. Little bastard or little fool. 9. A narrow valley on the Aegean Sea, where in 6. Barefoot. 480 B.C.E. a small number of Greek soldiers 7. Nomadic tribes that militarily challenged the attempted to stave off a much larger Persian force. (Western) Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th cen
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FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
DOALTY Where to? OWEN He doesn't know. Mayo, maybe. DOALTY What's on in Mayo? OWEN [To BRIDGET.] Did you see George and Maire Chatach leave the dance
last night? BRIDGET We did. Didn't we, Doalty? OWEN Did you see Manus following them out? BRIDGET I didn't see him going out but I saw him coming in by himself later. OWEN Did George and Maire come back to the dance?
BRIDGET No . OWEN Did you see them again? BRIDGET He left her home. We passed them going up the back road�didn't
we, Doalty? OWEN And Manus stayed till the end of the dance? DOALTY We know nothing. WTiat are you asking us for? OWEN Because Lancey'll question me when he hears Manus's gone. [Back
to BRIDGET.] That's the way George went home? By the back road? That's where you saw him? BRIDGET Leave me alone, Owen. I know nothing about Yolland. If you want to know about Yolland, ask the Donnelly twins.
[Silence, DOALTY moves over to the window.] [To SARAH.] He's a powerful fiddler, O'Shea, isn't he? He told our Seamus he'll come back for a night at Hallowe'en.
[OWEN goes to DOALTY who looks resolutely out the window.] OWEN What's this about the Donnellys? [Pause.] Were they about last night? DOALTY Didn't see them if they were. [Begins whistling through his teeth.] OWEN George is a friend of mine. DOALTY So. OWEN I want to know what's happened to him. DOALTY Couldn't tell you. OWEN What have the Donnelly twins to do with it? [Pause.] Doalty! DOALTY I know nothing, Owen�nothing at all�I swear to God. All I know
is this: on my way to the dance I saw their boat beached at Port. It wasn't there on my way home, after I left Bridget. And that's all I know. As God's my judge.
The half-dozen times I met him I didn't know a word he said to me; but he seemed a right enough sort . . . [With sudden excessive interest in the scene outside.] Cripes, they're crawling all over the place! Cripes, there's millions of them! Cripes, they're levelling the whole land!
[OWEN moves away.
MAIRE enters. She is bareheaded and wet from the rain; her hair in disarray. She attempts to appear normal hut she is in acute distress, on the verge of being distraught. She is carrying the milk-can.]
MAIRE Honest to God, I must be going off my head. I'm half-way here and I
think to myself, 'Isn't this can very light?' and I look into it and isn't it empty. OWEN It doesn't matter. MAIRE How will you manage for tonight? OWEN We have enough. MAIRE Are you sure? OWEN Plenty, thanks. MAIRE It'll take me no time at all to go back up for some.
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OWE N Honestly, Maire. MAIRE Sure it's better you have it than that black calf that's . . . that . . . [She
looks around.] Have you heard anything? OWEN Nothing. MAIRE What does Lancey say? OWEN I haven't seen him since this morning. MAIRE What does he think? OWEN We really didn't talk. He was here for only a few seconds. MAIRE He left me home, Owen. And the last thing he said to me�he tried
to speak in Irish�he said, 'I'll see you yesterday'�he meant to say 'I'll see you tomorrow.' And I laughed that much he pretended to get cross and he said 'Maypoll! Maypoll!' because I said that word wrong. And off he went, laughing�laughing, Owen! Do you think he's alright? What do you think?
OWEN I'm sure he'll turn up, Maire.
MAIRE He comes from a tiny wee place called Winfarthing. [SJie suddenly drops on her hands and knees on the floor�where OWEN had his map a few minutes ago�and with her finger traces out an outline map.]
Come here till you see. Look. There's Winfarthing. And there's two other wee villages right beside it; one of them's called Barton Bendish�it's there; and the other's called Saxingham Nethergate�it's about there. And there's Little Walsingham�that's his mother's townland. Aren't they odd names? Sure they make no sense to me at all. And Winfarthing's near a big town called Norwich. And Norwich is in a county called Norfolk. And Norfolk is in the east of England. He drew a map for me on the wet strand and wrote the names on it. I have it all in my head now: Winfarthing�Barton Bendish� Saxingham Nethergate�Little Walsingham�Norwich�Norfolk. Strange sounds, aren't they? But nice sounds; like Jimmy Jack reciting his Homer.
[She gets to her feet and looks around; she is almost serene now. To SARAH.]
You were looking lovely last night, Sarah. Is that the dress you got from Boston? Green suits you.
[To OWEN.] Something very bad's happened to him, Owen. I know. He wouldn't go away without telling me. Where is he, Owen? You're his friend�where is he? [Again she looks around the room; then sits on a stool.]
I didn't get a chance to do my geography last night. The master'll be angry with me. [She rises again.] I think I'll go home now. The wee ones have to be washed and put to bed and that black calf has to be fed . . . My hands are that rough; they're still blistered from the hay. I'm ashamed of them. I hope to God there's no hay to be saved in Brooklyn. [She stops at the door.] Did you hear? Nellie Ruadh's baby died in the middle of the night. I must go up to the wake. It didn't last long, did it?
[MAIRE leaves. Silence. Then.]
OWEN I don't think there'll be any class. Maybe you should . . .
[OWEN begins picking up his texts, DOALTY goes to him.]
DOALTY Is he long gone?�Manus. OWEN Half an hour. DOALTY Stupid bloody fool. OWEN I told him that. DOALTY D O they know he's gone? OWEN Who?
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FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
DOALTY The army. OWEN Not yet.
DOALTY They'll be after him like bloody beagles. Bloody, bloody fool, limping along the coast. They'll overtake him before night for Christ's sake.
[DOALTY returns to the window, LANCEY enters�now the commanding officer.}
OWEN Any news? Any word?
[LANCEY moves into the centre of the room, looking around as he does.]
LANCEY I understood there was a class. Where are the others? OWEN There was to be a class but my father . . . LANCEY This will suffice. I will address them and it will be their responsibility
to pass on what I have to say to every family in this section.
[LANCEY indicates to OWEN to translate, OWEN hesitates, trying to assess the change in LANCEY'S manner and attiude.]
I'm in a hurry, O'Donnell. OWEN The captain has an announcement to make. LANCEY Lieutenant Yolland is missing. We are searching for him. If we
don't find him, or if we receive no information as to where he is to be found, I will pursue the following course of action. [He indicates to OWEN to translate.]
OWEN They are searching for George. If they don't find him� LANCEY Commencing twenty-four hours from now we will shoot all livestock in Ballybeg.
[OWEN stares at LANCEY.]
At once. OWEN Beginning this time tomorrow they'll kill every animal in Baile Beag� unless they're told where George is.
LANCEY If that doesn't bear results, commencing forty-eight hours from now we will embark on a series of evictions and levelling of every abode in the following selected areas�
OWEN You're not�! LANCEY D O your job. Translate. OWEN If they still haven't found him in two days' time they'll begin evicting
and levelling every house starting with these townlands.
[LANCEY reads from his list.] LANCEY Swinefort. OWEN Lis na Muc. LANCEY Burnfoot. OWEN Bun na hAbhann. LANCEY Dromduff. OWEN Druim Dubh. LANCEY Whiteplains. OWEN Machaire Ban. LANCEY Kings Head. OWEN Cnoc na Bi. LANCEY If by then the lieutenant hasn't been found, we will proceed until a
complete clearance is made of this entire section. OWEN If Yolland hasn't been got by then, they will ravish the whole parish. LANCEY I trust they know exactly what they've got to do.
[Pointing to BRIDGET.] I know you. I know where you live. [Pointing to SARAH.] Who are you? Name!
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[SARAH'S mouth opens and shuts, opens and shuts. Her face becomes contorted. ]
What's your name?
[Again SARAH tries frantically.]
OWEN Go on, Sarah. You can tell him.
[But SARAH cannot. And she knows she cannot. She closes her mouth. Her head goes down.]
OWEN Her name is Sarah Johnny Sally. LANCEY Where does she live? OWEN Bun na hAbhann. LANCEY Where? OWEN Burnfoot. LANCEY I want to talk to your brother�is he here? OWEN Not at the moment. LANCEY Where is he? OWEN He's at a wake. LANCEY What wake?
[DOALTY, who has been looking out the window all through LANCEY'S announcements, now speaks�calmly, almost casually.]
DOALTY Tell him his whole camp's on fire. LANCEY What's your name? [To OWEN.] Who's that lout? OWEN Doalty Dan Doalty. LANCEY Where does he live? OWEN Tulach Alainn. LANCEY What do we call it? OWEN Fair Hill. He says your whole camp is on fire.
[LANCEY rushes to the window and looks out. Then he wheels on DOALTY.] LANCEY I'll remember you, Mr Doalty. [To OWEN.] YOU carry a big responsi
bility in all this. [He goes off.] BRIDGET Mother of God, does he mean it, Owen? OWEN Yes, he does. BRIDGET We'll have to hide the beasts somewhere�our Seamus'll know
where. Maybe at the back of Lis na nGradh�or in the caves at the far end of the Tra Bhan. Come on, Doalty! Come on! Don't be standing about there!
[DOALTY does not move. BRIDGET runs to the door and stops suddenly. She sniffs the air. Panic. ]
The sweet smell! Smell it! It's the sweet smell! Jesus, it's the potato blight! DOALTY It's the army tents burning, Bridget. BRIDGET Is it? Are you sure? Is that what it is? God, I thought we were
destroyed altogether. Come on! Come on!
[She runs off OWEN goes to SARAH who is preparing to leave.]
OWEN How are you? Are you alright? [SARAH nods: Yes.] OWEN Don't worry. It will come back to you again.
[SARAH shakes her head.]
OWEN It will. You're upset now. He frightened you. That's all's wrong. [Agaiw SARAH shakes her head, slowly, emphatically, and smiles at OWEN. Then she leaves.
OWEN busies himself gathering his belongings, DOALTY leaves the window and goes to him.]
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FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
DOALTY He'll do it, too. OWEN Unless Yolland's found.
DOALTY Hah!
OWEN Then he'll certainly do it.
DOALTY When my grandfather was a boy they did the same thing. [Simply, altogether without irony. ] And after all the trouble you went to, mapping the place and thinking up new names for it.
[OWEN busies himself. Pause. DOALTY almost dreamily.]
I've damned little to defend but he'll not put me out without a fight. And
there'll be others who think the same as me. OWEN That's a matter for you. DOALTY If we'd all stick together. If we knew how to defend ourselves. OWEN Against a trained army. DOALTY The Donnelly twins know how. HUGH If they could be found. DOALTY If they could be found. [He goes to the door.] Give me a shout after
you've finished with Lancey. I might know something then. [He leaves.] [OWEN picks up the Name-Book. He looks at it momentarily, then puts it on top of the pile he is carrying. It falls to the floor. He stoops to pick it up�hesitates�leaves it. He goes upstairs.
As OWEN ascends, HUGH and JIMMY JACK enter. Both wet and drunk. JIMMY is very unsteady. He is trotting hehind HUGH, trying to break in on HUGH'S declamation.
HUGH is equally drunk but more experienced in drunkenness: there is a portion of his mind which retains its clarity.]
HUGH There I was, appropriately dispositioned to proffer my condolences to
the bereaved mother . . . JIMMY Hugh� HUGH . . . and about to enter the domus lugubris1�Maire Chatach? JIMMY The wake house. HUGH Indeed�when I experience a plucking at my elbow: Mister George
Alexander, Justice of the Peace. 'My tidings are infelicitous,' said he�
Bridget? Too slow. Doalty? JIMMY Infelix�unhappy. HUGH Unhappy indeed. 'Master Bartley Timlin has been appointed to the
new national school.' 'Timlin? Who is Timlin?' 'A schoolmaster from Cork.2 And he will be a major asset to the com
munity: he is also a very skilled bacon-curer'! JIMMY Hugh� HUGH Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! The Cork bacon-curer! Barbarus hie ego sum quia
non intelligor ulli�James? JIMMY Ovid. HUGH Procede.
JIMMY 'I am a barbarian in this place because I am not understood by anyone.'3
1. House of mourning [Latin; Friel's note]. poet was exiled to live by the Black Sea in what is 2. Influential city on Ireland's south coast. Romania today. 3. From Ovid's Tristia, written after the Roman
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HUGH Indeed�[Shouts.] Manus! Tea! I will compose a satire on Master Bartley Timlin, schoolmaster and bacon- curer. But it will be too easy, won't it? [SJiotits.] Strong tea! Black!
[The only way JIMMY can get HUGH S attention is by standing in front of him and holding his arms.]
JIMMY Will you listen to me, Hugh! HUGH James.
[SfooMts.] And a slice of soda bread. JIMMY I'm going to get married. HUGH Well! JIMMY At Christmas. HUGH Splendid. JIMMY To Athene. HUGH Who? JIMMY Pallas Athene. HUGH Glaukopis Athene? JIMMY Flashing-eyed, Hugh, flashing-eyed! [He attempts the gesture he has
made before: standing to attention, the momentary spasm, the salute, the face raised in pained ecstasy�hut the body does not respond efficiently this time. The gesture is grotesque.]
HUGH The lady has assented? JIMMY She asked me�I assented. HUGH Ah. When was this? JIMMY Last night. HUGH What does her mother say? JIMMY Metis from Hellespont?4 Decent people�good stock. HUGH And her father? JIMMY I'm meeting Zeus tomorrow. Hugh, will you be my best man? HUGH Honoured, James; profoundly honoured. JIMMY YOU know what I'm looking for, Hugh, don't you? I mean to say�you
know�I�I�I joke like the rest of them�you know?�[Again he attempts the pathetic routine but abandons it instantly.] You know yourself, Hugh� don't you?�You know all that. But what I'm really looking for, Hugh�what I really want�companionship, Hugh�at my time of life, companionship, company, someone to talk to. Away up in Beann na Gaoithe�you've no idea how lonely it is. Companionship�correct, Hugh? Correct?
HUGH Correct. JIMMY And I always liked her, Hugh. Correct? HUGH Correct, James. JIMMY Someone to talk to. HUGH Indeed. JIMMY That's all, Hugh. The whole story. You know it all now, Hugh. You
know it all. [As JIMMY says those last lines he is crying, shaking his head, trying to keep his balance, and holding a finger up to his lips in absurd gestures of secrecy and intimacy. Now he staggers away, tries to sit on a stool,
4. Renowned for her wisdom, Metis was impregnated by and then swallowed by Zeus, whose head began to ache until Athena sprang from his head.
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FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11
misses it, slides to the floor, his feet in front of him, his hack against the broken cart. Almost at once he is asleep.
HUGH watches all of this. Then he produces his flask and is about to pour a drink when he sees the Name-Book on the floor. He picks it up and leafs through it, pronouncing the strange names as he does. Just as he begins, OWEN emerges and descends with two bowls of tea.]
HUGH Ballybeg. Burnfoot. Kings Head. Whiteplains. Fair Hill. Dunboy. Green Bank.
[OWEN snatches the book from HUGH.] OWEN I'll take that. [In apology.] It's only a catalogue of names. HUGH I know what it is. OWEN A mistake�my mistake�nothing to do with us. I hope that's strong
enough. [Tea.] [He throws the book on the table and crosses over to JIMMY.]
Jimmy. Wake up, Jimmy. Wake up, man. JIMMY What�what-what? OWEN Here. Drink this. Then go on away home. There may be trouble. Do
you hear me, Jimmy? There may be trouble. HUGH [Indicating Name-Book.] W e must learn those new names. OWEN [Searching around.] Did you see a sack lying about? HUGH We must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own.
We must make them our new home.
[OWEN finds a sack and throws it across his shoidders.] OWEN I know where I live. HUGH James thinks he knows, too. I look at James and three thoughts occur
to me: A�that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. James has ceased to make that discrimination.
OWEN Don't lecture me, Father. HUGH B�w e must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilise. Is there no soda bread? OWEN And C, Father�one single, unalterable 'fact': if Yolland is not found,
we are all going to be evicted. Lancey has issued the order. HUGH Ah. Edictum imperatoris.5 OWEN You should change out of those wet clothes. I've got to go. I've got to
see Doalty Da n Doalty. HUGH Wha t about? OWEN I'll be back soon.
[As OWEN exits.] HUGH Take care, Owen. To remember everything is a form of madness. [He
looks around the room, carefully, as if he were about to leave it forever. Then he looks at JIMMY, asleep again.]
The road to Sligo.6 A spring morning. 1798." Going into battle. Do you remember, James? Tw o young gallants with pikes across their shoulders and the Aeneid8 in their pockets. Everything seemed to find definition that
5. The decree of the commander [Latin; Friel's note]. 6. Port town south of County Donegal. 7. That year a force of Catholics and Protestants known as the United Irishmen launched a rebellion throughout Ireland. After the British quashed the uprising, the Irish Parliament was abolished, and two years later the Act of Union incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom.
8. Virgil's epic, about the Trojan hero Aeneas, who escapes the destruction of Troy and founds Rome.
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spring�a congruence, a miraculous matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh, green land. The rhythms of perception heightened. The whole enterprise of consciousness accelerated. We were gods that morning, James; and I had recently married my goddess, Caitlin Dubh Nic Reactainn, may she rest in peace. And to leave her and my infant son in his cradle�that was heroic, too. By God, sir, we were magnificent. We marched as far as�where was it?�Glenties!9 All of twenty-three miles in one day. And it was there, in Phelan's pub, that we got homesick for Athens, just like Ulysses. The desiderium nostrorum�the need for our own. Our pietas,1 James, was for older, quieter things. And that was the longest twenty-three miles back I ever made. [Toasts JIMMY.] My friend, confusion is not an ignoble condition.
[MAIRE enters.]
MAIRE I'm back again. I set out for somewhere but I couldn't remember where. So I came back here.
HUGH Yes, I will teach you English, Maire Chatach. MAIRE Will you, Master? I must learn it. I need to learn it.
HUGH Indeed you may well be my only pupil. [He goes towards the steps and begins to ascend.] MAIRE When can we start?
HUGH Not today. Tomorrow, perhaps. After the funeral. We'll begin tomorrow. [Ascending.] But don't expect too much. I will provide you with the available words and the available grammar. But will that help you to interpret between privacies? I have no idea. But it's all we have. I have no idea at all. [He is now at the top.] MAIRE Master, what does the English word 'always' mean? HUGH Semper�per omnia saecula.1 The Greeks called it 'aei'. It's not a word I'd start with. It's a silly word, girl. [He sits.] [JIMMY is awake. He gets to his feet. MAIRE sees the Name-Book, picks it up, and sits with it on her knee.] MAIRE When he comes back, this is where he'll come to. He told me this is where he was happiest. [JIMMY sits beside MAIRE.]
JIMMY Do you know the Greek word endogameinl It means to marry within the tribe. And the word exogamein means to marry outside the tribe. And you don't cross those borders casually�both sides get very angry. Now, the problem is this: Is Athene sufficiently mortal or am I sufficiently godlike for the marriage to be acceptable to her people and to my people? You think about that. HUGH Urbs antiqua fuit�there was an ancient city which,'tis said, Juno3 loved above all the lands. And it was the goddess's aim and cherished hope that here should be the capital of all nations�should the fates perchance allow that. Yet in truth she discovered that a race was springing from Trojan
9. A region of intersecting glens on the coast of rative of Virgil's Aeneid. Here Juno angrily foresees central Donegal. the destruction of Carthage by Aeneas's Roman 1. Piety [Friel's note]. The Latin term for the trait descendants ("a race was springing from Trojan associated especially with Virgil's dutiful hero blood") and the extension of Roman rule over this Aeneas. The story of Ulysses', or Odysseus', ten-North African colony (Rome and Carthage fought year wandering on the way home is told in Homer's the Punic Wars in the 3rd and 2nd centuries Odysse)'. B.C.E.). While vaunting Rome's imperial mission to 2. Always�for all time. Aei, always [Friel's note]. civilize the world, Virgil's epic also includes a tragic 3. In Roman mythology queen of the gods, who love story: Aeneas and the Carthaginian queen loved ancient Carthage (now in Tunisia) above all. Dido fall in love, but she commits suicide after he Hugh's recitation is from the beginning of the nar-abandons her for his imperial duty.
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BRATHWAITE: [NATION LANGUAGE] / 252 3
blood to overthrow some day these Tyrian4 towers�a people late regem belloque superbum�kings of broad realms and proud in war who would come forth for Lybia's5 downfall�such was�such was the course�such was the course ordained�ordained by fate . . . What the hell's wrong with me? Sure I know it backways. I'll begin again. Urbs antiquafuit�there was an ancient city which,'tis said, Juno loved above all the lands.
[Begin to bring down the lights.]
And it was the goddess's aim and cherished hope that here should be the capital of all nations�should the fates perchance allow that. Yet in truth she discovered that a race was springing from Trojan blood to overthrow some day these Tyrian towers�a people kings of broad realms and proud in war who would come forth for Lybia's downfall . . .
[Black.]
4. I.e., Carthaginian. Carthage had been founded anon), by Phoenicians from the city of Tyre (now in Leb- 5. Carthage's. KAMAU BRATHWAITE
b. 1930 As a poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite has been the most prominent West Indian spokesman for "the literature of reconnection": he has sought to recover and revalue the African inheritance in the Caribbean�a religious, linguistic, and cultural inheritance seen as embarrassing or taboo through most of the twentieth century. In History of the Voice, a lecture first delivered in 1979, Brathwaite argues that Afro-Caribbeans, their ancestors uprooted by slavery, were further cut off from their specific history and their local environment by Standard English models of language and literature. He proposes "nation language," a creolized English saturated with African words, rhythms, even grammar, as a crucial tool for writers to recuperate Afro-Caribbean history and experience. His own poetry draws on West Indian syncopations, orality, and musical traditions, but also adapts imported models, such as the modernist dislocations of persona, rhythm, and tone in T. S. Eliot's verse.
He was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the eastern edge of the West Indies. His undergraduate studies in history were at Cambridge University; his graduate studies, at the University of Sussex. He worked as an education officer for the Ministry of Education in Ghana (1955�62) and taught history at the University of the West Indies, before taking a position in comparative literature at New York University in 1991. His many books of poetry include a work of epic scope and scale, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), which gathers Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969).
[Nation Language]1
What I am going to talk about this morning is language from the Caribbean, the process of using English in a different way from the "norm". English in a new sense as I prefer to call it. English in an ancient sense. English
1. First printed separately in 1984, Brathwaite's lecture History of the Voice was slightly modified and incorporated in his essay collection Roots (1986, 1 993), from which this selection is excerpted.
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in a very traditional sense. An d sometimes not English at all, but language.
start my thoughts, taking up from the discussion that developed after Dennis Brutus's2 very excellent presentation. Without logic, and through instinct, the people who spoke with Dennis from the floor yesterday brought up the question of language.* * * In his case, it was English, and English as spoken by Africans, and the native languages as spoken by Africans.
We in the Caribbean have a similar kind of plurality: we have English, which is the imposed language on muc h of the archipelago. English is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch, and Spanish. W e have what we call Creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. W e have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors. Finally, we have the remnants of ancestral languages still persisting in the Caribbean. There is Amerindian, which is active in certain parts of Central America but not in the Caribbean because the Amerindians are a destroyed people, and their languages were practically destroyed. We have Hindi, spoken by some of the more traditional East Indians who live in the Caribbean, and there are also varieties of Chinese. And, miraculously, there are survivals of African languages still persisting in the Caribbean. So we have that spectrum�that prism�of languages similar to the kind of structure that Dennis described for South Africa. Now, I have to give you some kind of background to the development of these languages, the historical development of this plurality, because I can't take it for granted that you know and understand the history of the Caribbean.
Th e Caribbean is a set of islands stretching out from Florida in a mighty curve. You must know of the Caribbean at least from television, at least now with hurricane David (�) coming right into it. Th e islands stretch out on an arc of some two thousand miles from Florida through the Atlantic to the South American coast, and they were originally inhabited by Amerindian people, Taino, Siboney, Carib, Arawak. In 1492, Columbus "discovered" (as it is said) the Caribbean, and with that discovery came the intrusion of European culture and peoples and a fragmentation of the original Amerindian culture. We had Europe "nationalizing" itself into Spanish, French, English and Dutch so that people had to start speaking (and thinking) in four metropolitan languages rather than possibly a single native language. Then, with the destruction of the Amerindians, which took place within 30 years of Columbus' discovery (one million dead a year), it was necessary for the Europeans to import new labour bodies into the Caribbean. An d the most convenient form of labour was the labour on the very edge of the trade winds�the labour on the edge of the slave trade winds, the labour on the edge of the hurricane, the labour on the edge of West Africa�. And so the peoples of Ashanti,3 Congo, Nigeria, from all that mighty coast of western Africa were imported into the Caribbean. An d we had the arrival in that area of a new language structure. It consisted of many languages, but basically they had a common semantic and stylistic form. Wha t these languages had to do, however, was to submerge themselves, because officially the conquering peoples�the Spaniards, the English, the French, and the Dutch�di d not wish to hear people speaking Ashanti or any
2. South African poet (b. 1924). 3. Region in present-day central Ghana.
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BRATHWAITE: [NATION LANGUAGE] / 252 5
of the Congolese languages. So there was a submergence of this imported language. Its status became one of inferiority. Similarly, its speakers were slaves. They were conceived of as inferiors�nonhuman, in fact�. But this very submergence served an interesting intercultural purpose, because although people continued to speak English as it was spoken in Elizabethan times and on through the Romantic and Victorian ages, that English was, nonetheless, still being influenced by the underground language, the submerged language that the slaves had brought. And that underground language was itself constantly transforming itself into new forms. It was moving from a purely African form to a form that was African, but which was adapting to the new environment and to the cultural imperatives of the European languages. And it was influencing the way in which the French, Dutch, and Spanish spoke their own languages. So there was a very complex process taking place which is now beginning to surface in our literature.
In the Caribbean, as in South Africa (and in any area of cultural imperialism for that matter), the educational system did not recognize the presence of these various languages. What our educational system did was to recognize and maintain the language of the conquistador�the language of the planter, the language of the official, the language of the Anglican preacher�. It insisted that not only would English be spoken in the anglophone Caribbean, but that the educational system would carry the contours of an English heritage. Hence, as Dennis said, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Jane Austen�British literature and literary forms, the models that were intimate to Great Britain, that had very little to do, really, with the environment and the reality of the Carib- bean�were dominant in the Caribbean educational system. People were forced to learn things that had no relevance to themselves. Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other "cultural disaster" areas), the people educated in this system came to know more, even today, about English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes, our own slave rebels�the people who helped to build and to destroy our society�. We are more excited by English literary models, by the concept of, say, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood, than we are by Nanny of the Maroons,4 a name some of us didn't even know until a few years ago. And in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious (in terms of sensibility) of the falling of snow for instance�the models are all there for the falling of the snow�than of the force of the hurricanes that take place every year. In other words, we haven't got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience; whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall. It is that kind of situation that we are in.
Now the Creole adaptation to all this is the child who, instead of writing in an essay "The snow was falling on the fields of Shropshire"5 (which is what our children literally were writing until a few years ago, below drawings they made of white snow fields and the corn-haired people who inhabited such a landscape), wrote "The snow was falling on the cane fields." The child had not yet reached the obvious statement that it wasn't snow at all, but rain that
4. The Maroons were Africans and escaped slaves Ashanti (?) Queen Mother, is regarded as one of who, after running away or participating in suc-the greatest of the Jamaican freedom fighters cessful rebellions, set up autonomous societies [Brathwaite's note]. throughout plantation America in marginal and 5. Region of western England on the Welsh borcertainly inaccessible areas outside European der, written about by the English poet A. E. Housinfluence. . . . Nanny of the Maroons, an ex-man (1859-1936). '
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
was probably falling on the cane fields. She was trying to have both cultures at the same time. But that is creolization.
Wha t is even more important, as we develop this business of emergent language in the Caribbean, is the actual rhythm and the syllables, the very body work, in a way, of the language. Wha t English has given us as a model for poetry, and to a lesser extent, prose (but poetry is the basic tool here), is the pentameter: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day."6 There have, of course, been attempts to break it. An d there were other dominant forms like, for exam
7
ple, Beowulf (c. 750), The Seafarer, and what Langland (1322?-1400) had produced:
For trewthe telleth that love, is triacle of hevene; May no synne he on him sene. that useth that spise, And alle his werkes he wrougte. with love as him liste.
Or, from Piers the Plowman (which does not make it into Palgrave's Golden Treasury,8 but which we all had to "do" at school) the haunting prologue:
In a somer seson. whan soft was the sonne
I shope me into shroudes. as I a shepe were
Which has recently inspired our own Derek Walcott to his first major nation language effort:
In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of hrown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.9
But by the time we reach Chaucer (1345�1400), the pentameter prevails.
Over in the New World, the Americans�Walt Whitman�tried to bridge or
to break the pentameter through a cosmic movement, a large movement of
sound. Cumming s tried to fragment it. An d Marianne Moore attacked it with
syllabics.1 But basically the pentameter remained, and it carries with it a cer
tain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane. The hur
ricane does not roar in pentameter. And that's the problem: how do you get a
rhythm that approximates the natural experience, the environmental experi
ence. We have been trying to break out of the entire pentametric model in
the Caribbean and to move into a system that more closely and intimately
approaches our own experience. So that is what we are talking about now.
It is nation language in the Caribbean that, in fact, largely ignores the pen
tameter. Nation language is the language that is influenced very strongly by the
African model, the African aspect of our Ne w World/Caribbean heritage.
English it may be in terms of its lexicon, but it is not English in terms of its syn
tax. An d English it certainly is not in terms of its rhythm and timbre, its own
sound explosion. In its contours, it is not English, even though the words, as
you hear them, would be English to a greater or lesser degree. An d this brings
us back to the question that some of you raised yesterday: can English be a rev
6. The opening line of "Elegy Written in a Country Langland (ca. 1330-1387). Churchyard," by the English poet Thomas Gray 9. Beginning of "The Schooner Flight," by the (1716-1771). Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott (b. 1930). 7. Poem in Old English. 1. Verses based on the number of syllables, not 8. Collection of songs and lyric poems published accents, in a line. E. E. Cummings (1894�1962), in London. Piers the Plowman: Middle English American poet. Marianne Moore (1887-1972), poem believed to have been written by William American poet.
.
BRATHWAITE: CALYPSO / 252 7
olutionary language? And the lovely answer that came back was: it is not English that is the agent. It is not language, but people, who make revolutions.
I think, however, that language does really have a role to play here, certainly in the Caribbean. But it is an English that is not the standard, imported, educated English, but that of the submerged, surrealist experience and sensibility, which has always been there and which is now increasingly coming to the surface and influencing the perception of contemporary Caribbean people. It is what I call, as I say, nation language. I use the term in contrast to dialect. The word dialect has been bandied about for a long time, and it carries very pejorative overtones. Dialect is thought of as "bad" English. Dialect is "inferior" English. Dialect is the language when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect. Dialect has a long history coming from the plantation where people's dignity was distorted through their languages and the descriptions that the dialect gave to them. Nation language, on the other hand, is the submerged area of that dialect that is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be in English, but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind, or a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is English and African at the same time.* * *
* $ *
The mainstream poets who were moving from standard English to nation language were influenced basically, I think (again the models are important), by T. S. Eliot. What T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone.2 That is what really attracted us to Eliot. And you can see how the Caribbean poets introduced here have been influenced by him, although they eventually went on to create their own environmental expression.
* * *
1979-81 1984,1986
Calypso1
1
The stone had skidded arc'd and bloomed into islands: Cuba and San Domingo Jamaica and Puerto Rico Grenada Guadeloupe Bonaire2
5 curved stone hissed into reef wave teeth fanged into clay
2. For those of us who really made the break-Bird: American jazz musician Charlie "Bird" Parker through, it was Eliot's actual voice�or rather his (1920�1955). Dizzy: American jazz trumpeter recorded voice, property of the British Council Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993). KJook: American jazz (Barbados)�reading "Preludes", "The Love Song drummer Kenny Clarke (1914-1985). of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, and later 1. Type of folk song originating in Trinidad, often the Four Quartets�not the texts�which turned involving commentary on current events and us on. In that dry deadpan delivery, the "riddims" improvised wordplay with syncopated rhythms. of St. Louis (though we did not know the source This poem is from Rights of Passage, the first of then) were stark and clear for those of us who at three books collected as The Arrivants. the same time were listening to the dislocations of 2. Caribbean Islands. The first two stanzas suggest Bird, Dizzy, and Klook. And it is interesting that, a creation myth in which the islands are formed in on the whole, the establishment could not stand a rock-skipping game called ducks and drakes. Eliot's voice�and far less jazz [Brathwaite's note].
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
white splash flashed into spray
Bathsheba Montego Bay3
bloom of the arcing summers . . .
2
10 Th e islands roared into green plantations ruled by silver sugar cane sweat and profit cutlass profit islands ruled by sugar cane
is An d of course it was a wonderful time a profitable hospitable well-worth-your-time whe n captains carried receipts for rices letters spices wigs opera glasses swaggering asses
20 debtors vices pigs
O it was a wonderful time an elegant benevolent redolent time� and young Mrs. P.'s quick irrelevant crime at four o'clock in the morning . . .
3
25 But what of black Sam with the big splayed toes and the shoe black shiny skin?
He carries bucketfulls of water 'cause his Ma's just had another daughter.
30 And what of John with the European name who went to school and dreamt of fame his boss one day called him a fool and the boss hadn't even been to school . . .
4
Steel drum steel drum
35 hit the hot calypso dancing hot rum hot rum who goin' stop this bacchanalling?4
For we glance the banjo dance the limbo 40
grow our crops by maljo5
3. Jamaican city and tourist resort. "Bathsheba": and revelry. seaside resort in Barbados. 5. Evil eye (Trinidadian dialect; from the French 4. From Bacchanalia: festival of Bacchus, the mal yeiix). Roman god of wine, celebrated with song, dancing,
.
SOYINKA: TELEPHONE CONVERSATION / 2529
have loose morals
gather corals
father our neighbour's quarrels
perhaps when they come 45 with their cameras and straw hats: sacred pink tourists from the frozen Nawth
we should get down to those
white beaches
where if we don't wear breeches
50 it becomes an island dance
Some people doin' well
while others are catchin' hell
o the boss gave our Johnny the sack though we beg him please 55 please to take 'im back
so the boy now nigratin' overseas . . .
1967
WOLE SOYINKA
b. 1934 Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, near Ibadan, in western Nigeria, and educated at Government College and University College, in Ibadan. In 1954 he began his studies at the University of Leeds. After six years in England he returned to Nigeria, where he founded a national theater in 1960 and, at the cost of repeated imprisonment, intervened in tumultuous political struggles. He has taught at universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, as well as at North American universities. In 1986 he became the first black African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for plays, such as Death and the King's Horseman (1975), that inventively hybridize Yoruba oral traditions with European literary paradigms, fuse African rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. He has also written poems, including "Telephone Conversation," a mini verse drama of sorts in which two characters, a racist English landlady and an African trying to rent an apartment, are wittily pitted against one another.
Telephone Conversation
The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. 'Madam', I warned,
5 'I hate a wasted journey�I am African.'
.
2530 25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
Silence. Silenced transmission of Pressurised good-breeding. Voice, whe n it came, Lip-stick coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was, foully.
10 'HOW DARK?' ... I had not misheard . . . 'ARE YOU LIGHT 'OR VERY DARK?' Button B. Button A.1 Stench Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak. Red booth. Red pilIar-box.c Red double-tiered mailbox Omnibus0 squelching tar. It was real! Shamed double-decker bus
15 By ill-mannered silence, surrender Pushed dumbfoundment to beg simplification. Considerate she was, varying the emphasis�
'ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?' Revelation came. 'You mean�like plain or milk chocolate?'
20 Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted, I chose. 'West African sepia'��and as afterthought, reddish brown 'Down in my passport.' Silence for spectroscopic2 Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
25 Hard on the mouthpiece. 'WHAT'S THAT?' conceding 'DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.' 'Like brunette.'
'THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?' 'Not altogether. 'Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see 'The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
30 'Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, caused � 'Foolishly madam�b y sitting down, has turned 'My bottom raven black�One moment madam'�sensing Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap About my ears�'Madam', I pleaded, 'Wouldn't you rather
35 'See for yourself ?'
1960, 1962
1. Buttons on old British telephones. 2. Related to study of the spectrum. TONY HARRISON
b. 1937 Tony Harrison was born in Leeds, where his father was a baker, and where he learned a regional Yorkshire dialect from his mother. At the age of eleven, a scholarship to the prestigious Leeds Grammar School dislocated him from his working-class background: he was told he would have to learn to speak "properly" and forbidden, because of his accent, to read his poetry aloud in the classroom. He later studied classics at Leeds University. While a lecturer in English at Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria, he translated (with fellow poet James Simmons) Aristophanes' Lysistrata into the pidgin English of the Hausa people; at the same time he wrote poems in the voices of working-class British expatriates. He has been resident dramatist at the
.
HARRISON: NATIONAL TRUST / 2531
National Theatre in London, has undertaken commissions for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and has published verse translations of classical Greek and French plays.
As a poet Harrison has been faithful to his modest origins. His poems give speech to the speechless, to the exploited and oppressed�the two uncles of "Heredity," for example, or a bereaved father unable to articulate his grief, or a terrified convict� exposing their predicaments with passion and indignation. Attributing to working- class speech of the north of England a "richer engagement, a more sensual engagement, with language," he brings that sensual vigor, wit, and immediacy of working-class Yorkshire speech into an exciting amalgam with literary English. Like Caribbean poets, Irish poets, Scottish poets, and others, he combines Standard English with nonstandard oral sounds, with the diction, syntax, and grammar of regional speech, in an unstable, sometimes explosive compound. His sixteen-line near-sonnets from the long work called The School of Eloquence, like his important long poem v., richly interweave the literary and the oral, learned allusion and raw directness, Standard English and working-class Yorkshire speech.
Heredity
How you became a -poet's a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, foe and Harry� one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
National Trust1
Bottomless pits. There's one in Castleton,2
and stout upholders of our law and order
one day thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
5 and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.
Not even a good flogging made him holler!
O gentlemen, a better way to plumb
the depths of Britain's dangling a scholar,
say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,3
10 now National Trust, a place where they got tin,
those gentlemen who silenced the men's oath
and killed the language that they swore it in.
The dumb go down in history and disappear
and not one gentleman's been brought to book:
I. A British association to preserve places of nat-2. In the Derby coalfields. ural beauty or buildings of architectural or histor-3. A tin mine in Cornwall. ical importance.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
15 Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr
(Cornish)� "the tongueless man gets his land took."
1978
Book Ends
I
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don't try.
5 You're like hook ends, the pair of you, she'd say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare . . .
The "scholar" me, you, worn out on poor pay, only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas, io too regular each bud, each yellow spike.1
A night you need my company to pass and she not here to tell us we're alike!
Your life's all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks, is for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between's not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
1978
II
The stone's too full. The wording must be terse. There's scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it�
Come on, it's not as if we're wanting verse. It's not as if we're wanting a whole sonnet!
5 After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker (I think that both of us were on our third)
you said you'd always been a clumsy talker and couldn't find another, shorter word for "beloved" or for "wife" in the inscription,
io but not too clumsy that you can't still cut:
1. Flames from the gas fire common in lower-class English homes.
.
HARRISON : LON G DISTANC E / 253 3 You're supposed toand you can't tell be the bright boy at description them what the fuck to put! I've got to find the right words on my own. isI've got the envelope that he'd been scrawling, mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling but I can't squeeze more love into their stone. 1981
Long Distance
I
Your bed's got two wrong sides. Your life's all grouse." grumble I let your phone-call take its dismal course:
Ah can't stand it no more, this empty house!
Carrots choke us wi'out your mam's white sauce!
5 Them sweets you brought me, you can have 'em back. Ah'm diabetic now. Got all the facts.
(The diabetes comes hard on the track of two coronaries and cataracts.)
Ah've alius liked things sweet! But now ah push
10 food down mi throat! Ah'd sooner do wi'out. And t'only reason now for beer's to flush (so t'dietician said) mi kidneys out.
When I come round, they'll be laid out, the sweets, Lifesavers, my father's New World treats, 15 still in the big brown bag, and only bought rushing through JFK1 as a last thought.
II
Though my mother was already two years dead Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas, put hot water bottles her side of the bed and still went to renew her transport pass.
5 You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone. He'd put you off an hour to give him time to clear away her things and look alone as though his still raw love were such a crime.
He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief 10 though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
!. A New York airport.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief. He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.
I believe life ends with death, and that is all. You haven't both gone shopping; just the same, 15 in my new black leather phone book there's your name and the disconnected number I still call.
1981
Turns
I thought it made me look more "working class" (as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!) I did a turn in it before the glass. My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
5 (She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!)
All the pension queue1 came out to stare. Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR),2 his cap turned inside up beside his head,
io smudged H A H in purple Indian ink and Brylcreem slicks3 displayed so folk might think he wanted charity for dropping dead.
He never begged. For nowt!4 Death's reticence crowns his life's, and me, I'm opening my trap is to busk5 the class that broke him for the pence that splash like brackish tears into our cap.
1981
Marked with D.1
When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven not unlike those he fuelled all his life, I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,
s light streaming from his mouth to shape her name, "not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie." I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame but only literally, which makes me sorry,
1. Line of retired people waiting for their pension (social security) payments. 2. Sidewalk mailbox dating from the reign of Queen Victoria and carrying the initials of her name and Latin title: Victoria Regina. 3. Play on Brylcreem Sticks, a hairstyling wax. 4. Nothing (northern dialect). 5. Take around the hat; i.e., solicit money for street entertainment (from members of the middle class, in this case). 1. Cf. the anonymous nursery rhyme "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man / Bake me a cake as fast as you can / Pat it and prick it, and mark it with B, / Put it in the oven for baby and me."
.
NGUGT: DECOLONISING THE MIND / 2535
sorry for his sake there's no Heave n to reach.
10 I get it all from Earth my daily bread
but he hungered for release from mortal speech
that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead.
Th e baker's ma n that no-one will see rise
and England made to feel like some dull oaf
is is smoke, enough to sting one person's eyes
and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.
1981
NGUGI WA THIONG'O
b. 1938 NgugT wa Thiong'o was born in Limuru, Kenya, where his father was a peasant farmer. He was educated at the Alliance High School in Kikuyu, Kenya; Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; and Leeds University in England. In the late 1960s, while teaching at University College, Nairobi, Kenya, he was one of the prime movers behind the abolition of the college's English department, arguing for its replacement by a Department of African Literature and Languages (two departments were formed, one of literature, the other of language). His novels include Weep Not, Child (1964), about the 1950s Ma u Ma u rebellion against British rule in Kenya, A Gram of Wheat (1967), about the war's aftermath, and Petals of Blood (1977), about the failure of the East African state, and he has written plays and novels in his native Gikuyu, also sharply critical of post-independence Kenya, such as the novel Matigarima Njiruungi (1986). In 1982, after his imprisonment in Kenya and the banning of his books there, NgugT
left to teach abroad, most recently at New York University.
At the beginning of Decolonising the Mind (1986), NgugT declares the book "my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings. From now on it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way." Although NgugT has subsequently modified this position, he lays out starkly the case against English language and literature as tools of colonialism, which continue to have insidious effects long after formal decolonization. As the student of a British colonial education, NgugT came to feel that, because of the close relation between language and cultural memory, the imposition of English language and literature severs colonized peoples from their cultural experience�an experience best recovered and explored in indigenous languages.
From Decolonising the Mind From The Language of African Literature
HI
I was born into a large peasant family: father, four wives and about twenty-
eight children. I also belonged, as we all did in those days, to a wider extended
family and to the community as a whole.
We spoke Gikuyu 1 as we worked in the fields. We spoke Gikuyu in and
1. Bantu language spoken in western Kenya by approximately five million people.
.
25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
outside the home. I can vividly recall those evenings of story-telling around the fireside. It was mostly the grown-ups telling the children but everybody was interested and involved. We children would re-tell the stories the following day to other children who worked in the fields picking the pyrethrum flowers,2 tea-leaves or coffee beans of our European and African landlords.
The stories, with mostly animals as the main characters, were all told in Glkuyu. Hare, being small, weak but full of innovative wit and cunning, was our hero. We identified with him as he struggled against the brutes of prey like lion, leopard, hyena. His victories were our victories and we learnt that the apparently weak can outwit the strong. We followed the animals in their struggle against hostile nature�drought, rain, sun, wind�a confrontation often forcing them to search for forms of co-operation. But we were also interested in their struggles amongst themselves, and particularly between the beasts and the victims of prey. These twin struggles, against nature and other animals, reflected real-life struggles in the human world.
Not that we neglected stories with human beings as the main characters. There were two types of characters in such human-centred narratives: the species of truly human beings with qualities of courage, kindness, mercy, hatred of evil, concern for others; and a man-eat-man two-mouthed species with qualities of greed, selfishness, individualism and hatred of what was good for the larger co-operative community. Co-operation as the ultimate good in a community was a constant theme. It could unite human beings with animals against ogres and beasts of prey, as in the story of how dove, after being fed with castor-oil seeds, was sent to fetch a smith working far away from home and whose pregnant wife was being threatened by these man-eating two- mouthed ogres.
There were good and bad story-tellers. A good one could tell the same story over and over again, and it would always be fresh to us, the listeners. He or she could tell a story told by someone else and make it more alive and dramatic. The differences really were in the use of words and images and the inflexion of voices to effect different tones.
We therefore learnt to value words for their meaning and nuances. Language was not a mere string of words. It had a suggestive power well beyond the immediate and lexical meaning. Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs, transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but musically arranged words. So we learnt the music of our language on top of the content. The language, through images and symbols, gave us a view of the world, but it had a beauty of its own. The home and the field were then our pre-primary school but what is important, for this discussion, is that the language of our evening teach-ins, and the language of our immediate and wider community, and the language of our work in the fields were one.
And then I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture. I first went to Kamaandura, missionary run, and then to another called Maanguuu run by nationalists grouped around the Glkuyu Independent and Karinga Schools Association. Our language of education was still Glkuyu. The very first time I was ever given an ovation for my writing was over a composition in Glkuyu. So for my first four years there was still harmony between the language of my formal education and that of the Limuru peasant community.
2. Flower used to produce a natural insecticide.
.
NGUGT: DECOLONISING THE MIND / 253 7
It was after the declaration of a state of emergency over Kenya in 19523 that all the schools run by patriotic nationalists were taken over by the colonial regime and were placed under District Education Boards chaired by Englishmen. English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference.
Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment-� three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks�or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I A M A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thu s children were turned into witch-hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one's immediate community.
The attitude to English was the exact opposite: any achievement in spoken or written English was highly rewarded; prizes, prestige, applause; the ticket to higher realms. English became the measure of intelligence and ability in the arts, the sciences, and all the other branches of learning. English became the main determinant of a child's progress up the ladder of formal education.
As you may know, the colonial system of education in addition to its apartheid racial demarcation had the structure of a pyramid: a broad primary base, a narrowing secondary middle, and an even narrower university apex. Selections from primary into secondary were through an examination, in my time called Kenya African Preliminary Examination, in which one had to pass six subjects ranging from Maths to Nature Study and Kiswahili.4 All the papers were written in English. Nobody could pass the exam who failed the English language paper no matter how brilliantly he had done in the other subjects. remember one boy in my class of 1954 who had distinctions in all subjects except English, which he had failed. He was made to fail the entire exam. He went on to become a turn boy5 in a bus company. I who had only passes but a credit in English got a place at the Alliance High School, one of the most elitist institutions for Africans in colonial Kenya. Th e requirements for a place at the University, Makerere University College,6 were broadly the same: nobody could go on to wear the undergraduate red gown, no matter how brilliantly they had performed in all the other subjects unless they had a credit� not even a simple pass!�in English. Thu s the most coveted place in the pyramid and in the system was only available to the holder of an English language credit card. English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom.
Literary education was now determined by the dominant language while also reinforcing that dominance. Orature (oral literature) in Kenyan languages stopped. In primary school I now read simplified Dickens and Stevenson alongside Bider Haggard. Jim Hawkins, Oliver Twist, To m Brown�not Hare,
3. The Mau Mau, militant African nationalists, widely understood language in Africa. led a revolt in 1952 that resulted in four years of 5. I.e., the person who operates a turnstile. British military operations and the deaths of more 6. University in Kampala, Uganda, that was con- than eleven thousand insurgents. nected with the University of London in the 1950s 4. Swahili, a Bantu language that is the most and 1960s.
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25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
Leopard and Lion�were now my daily companions in the world of imagination. 7 In secondary school, Scott and G. B. Shaw vied with more Rider Haggard, John Buchan, Alan Paton, Captain W. E. Johns.8 At Makerere I read English: from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot with a touch of Graham Greene.9
Thus language and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds.
$ s
rv
* # A * * * Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.
v
So what was the colonialist imposition of a foreign language doing to us children?
The real aim of colonialism was to control the people's wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.
For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people's culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people's language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.
* & $ 7. The English novelist Charles Dickens (1812� 1870) wrote Oliver Twist. Jim Hawkins is the hero of Treasure Island, by the Scottish fiction writer and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850�1894). The English novelist Rider Haggard (1856-1925) wrote African adventure stories. Tom Brown's Schooldays is by the English novelist Thomas Hughes (1822-1896). 8. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Scottish novelist. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo- Irish dramatist. John Buchan (1875-1940), Scottish author of adventure stories. Alan Paton (1903-1988), South African novelist. William Earl Johns (1893-1968), English author of children's fiction.
9. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400), English poet. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Anglo-American poet. Graham Greene (1904-1991), English novelist. "Read": here "majored in."
.
SALMAN RUSHDIE / 253 9
IX
I started writing in Gikuy u language in 197 7 after seventeen years of involvement in Afro-European literature, in my case Afro-English literature.'1' * * Wherever I have gone, particularly in Europe, I have been confronted with the question: why are you now writing in Gikuyu? Wh y do you now write in an African language? In some academic quarters I have been confronted with the rebuke, 'Why have you abandoned us?' It was almost as if, in choosing to write in Gikuyu, I was doing something abnormal. But Gikuyu is my mother tongue! Th e very fact that what commo n sense dictates in the literary practice of other cultures is being questioned in an African writer is a measure of how far imperialism has distorted the view of African realities. It has turned reality upside down: the abnormal is viewed as normal and the normal is viewed as abnormal. Africa actually enriches Europe: but Africa is made to believe that it needs Europe to rescue it from poverty. Africa's natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America: but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the conti
nent. Africa even produces intellectuals who now rationalise this upside-down way of looking at Africa.
I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples. In schools and universities our Kenyan languages�that is the languages of the many nationalities which make up Kenya�were associated with negative qualities of backwardness, underdevelopment, humiliation and punishment. We who went through that school system were meant to graduate with a hatred of the people and the culture and the values of the language of our daily humiliation and punishment. I do not want to see Kenyan children growing up in that imperialist-imposed tradition of contempt for the tools of communication developed by their communities and their history. I want them to transcend colonial alienation.
$ *c $
We African writers are bound by our calling to do for our languages what Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy1 did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them, which process later opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the other areas of huma n creative endeavours.
1986
1. Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), Russian poet, and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian novelist. SALMAN RUSHDIE
In these excerpts from his essay " 'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist,' " fiction writer Salman Rushdie (b. 1947; see the headnote to him and see his story "The Prophet's Hair," later in this volume) counters the nativist view of English as an imperial yoke that must be thrown off. Recounting the spread of English as a world
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25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
language and describing its indigenization by the non-English, Rushdie claims it as a vital and expressive South Asian literary language, with its own history and tradition.
[English Is an Indian Literary Language]
I'll begin from an obvious starting place. English is by now the world language. It achieved this status partly as a result of the physical colonization of a quarter of the globe by the British, and it remains ambiguous but central to the affairs of just about all the countries to who m it was given, along with mission schools, trunk roads1 and the rules of cricket, as a gift of the British colonizers.
But its present-day pre-eminence is not solely�perhaps not even primarily� the result of the British legacy. It is also the effect of the primacy of the United States of America in the affairs of the world. This second impetus towards English could be termed a kind of linguistic neo-colonialism, or just plain pragmatism on the part of man y of the world's governments and educationists, according to your point of view.
As for myself, I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anticolonial� or is it post-colonial?�cudgels against English. Wha t seems to me to be happening is that those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it�assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.
To take the case of India, only because it's the one with which I'm most familiar. Th e debate about the appropriateness of English in post-British India has been raging ever since 1947;2 but today, I find, it is a debate which has meaning only for the older generation. Th e children of independent India seem not to think of English as being irredeemably tainted by its colonial provenance. They use it as an Indian language, as one of the tools they have to hand.
(I am simplifying, of course, but the point is broadly true.)
There is also an interesting North�South divide in Indian attitudes to
English. In the North, in the so-called 'Hindi belt', where the capital, Delhi,
is located, it is possible to think of Hindi as a future national language; but in
South India, which is at present suffering from the attempts of central gov
ernment to impose this national language on it, the resentment of Hindi is far
greater than of English. After spending quite some time in South India, I've
become convinced that English is an essential language in India, not only
because of its technical vocabularies and the international communication
which it makes possible, but also simply to permit two Indians to talk to each
other in a tongue which neither party hates.
Incidentally, in West Bengal, where there is a State-led move against
English, the following graffito, a sharp dig at the State's Marxist chief minister,
Jyoti Basu, appeared on a wall, in English: it said, 'My son won't learn English;
your son won't learn English; but Jyoti Basu will send his son abroad to learn
English.'
1. Main roads, such as the Grand Trunk Road, the constructed during the British Raj. immense highway between Calcutta and Amritsar 2. When the British relinquished control of India.
.
RUSHDIE: [ENGLISH IS AN INDIAN LITERARY LANGUAGE] / 254 1
One of the points I want to make is that what I've said indicates, I hope, that Indian society and Indian literature have a complex and developing relationship with the English language. * * *
English literature has its Indian branch. By this I mean the literature of the English language. This literature is also Indian literature. There is no incompatibility here. If history creates complexities, let us not try to simplify them.
So: English is an Indian literary language, and by now, thanks to writers like Tagore, Desani, Chaudhuri, Mulk Baj Anand, Baja Rao, Anita Desai3 and others, it has quite a pedigree. * * *
$ a
In my own case, I have constantly been asked whether I am British, or Indian. The formulation 'Indian-born British writer' has been invented to explain me. But, as I said last night, my new book deals with Pakistan. So what now? 'British-resident Indo-Pakistani writer'? You see the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports.
One of the most absurd aspects of this quest for national authenticity is that�as far as India is concerned, anyway�it is completely fallacious to suppose that there is such a thing as a pure, unalloyed tradition from which to draw. The only people who seriously believe this are religious extremists. The rest of us understand that the very essence of Indian culture is that we possess a mixed tradition, a melange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal4 and contemporary Coca-Cola American. To say nothing of Muslim, Buddhist, Jain,5 Christian, Jewish, British, French, Portuguese, Marxist, Maoist, Trotskyism Vietnamese, capitalist, and of course Hindu elements. Eclecticism, the ability to take from the world what seems fitting and to leave the rest, has always been a hallmark of the Indian tradition, and today it is at the centre of the best work being done both in the visual arts and in literature. * * *
* *
* 4 * As far as Eng. Lit. itself is concerned, I think that if all English literatures could be studied together, a shape would emerge which would truly reflect the new shape of the language in the world, and we could see that Eng. Lit. has never been in better shape, because the world language now also possesses a world literature, which is proliferating in every conceivable direction. The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago. * * *
3. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengali Indian fiction and nonfiction writers. poet; G. V. Desani (1909-2000), Nirad C. Chau-4. Dvnasty of Muslim emperors who reigned in dhuri (1897-1999), Mulk Raj Anand (1905-India, 1526-1858. 2004), Raja Rao (b. 1909), Anita Desai (b. 1937): 5. Jainism is one of India's oldest religions.
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2542
JOHN AGARD
b. 1949 John Agard was born and raised in British Guiana (now Guyana) and attended a Roman Catholic high school there, before immigrating to England in 1977. Along with his own collections of poetry, steeped in Caribbean wordplay, rhythms, and idioms that are vivified especially in oral performance, he has also published verse collections, plays, and stories for children. In "Listen Mr Oxford don" he represents his use of West Indian Creole as political and poetic rebellion, while playfully acknowledging, for all his defiance, the complexity of his relation to the Queen's English.
Listen Mr Oxford don
Me not no Oxford don� tutor me a simple immigrant from Clapham Common 1 I didn't graduate
5 I immigrate
But listen Mr Oxford don I'm a man on de run and a man on de run is a dangerous one
io I ent� have no gun don't I ent have no knife but mugging de Queen's English2 is the story of my life
I dont need no axe
15 to split/ up yu syntax I dont need no hammer to mash/ up yu grammar
I warning you Mr Oxford don I'm a wanted man 20 and a wanted man is a dangerous one
De m accuse me of assault on de Oxford dictionary/ imagine a concise peaceful man like me/
25 de m want me serve time for inciting rhyme to riot but I tekking it quiet down here in Clapham Common
1. In Brixton, a part of London settled by Afro-2. English regarded as under the queen's guardi- Caribbean immigrants. anship; hence correct.
.
DORI S LESSIN G / 254 3 30I'm not a violent man Mr Oxford don I only armed wit mih human breath but human breath is a dangerous weapon 35So mek dem send one big word after me I ent� serving no jail sentence I slashing suffix in self-defence I bashing future wit present tense and if necessary am not I making de Queen's English accessory/to my offence 1985
DORIS LESSING
b. 1919 Born in Persia (now Iran) to British parents, Doris Lessing (nee Tayler) lived in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1924 to 1949, before settling in England. Her five-novel sequence with the general title Children of Violence (beginning with Martha Quest, 1952) combines psychological autobiography with powerful explorations of the relationship between blacks and whites in southern Africa. Her combination of psychological introspection, political analysis, social documentary, and feminism gives a characteristic tone to her novels and short stories. These elements are effectively combined in her novel The Golden Notebook (1962), which explores with unexhibitionist frankness the sexual problems of an independent woman while at the same time probing the political conscience of an ex-communist and the needs and dilemmas of a creative writer. In the early 1970s, influenced by the writings of the renegade psychologist R. D. Laing and by the principles of Sufism (the mystical, ecstatic aspects of Islam), Lessing's realistic investigations of social issues took a different turn. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), she explores myth and fantasy, restrained within a broadly realist context. In a series of novels with the general title Canopus in Argos: Archives (written between 1979 and 1983), she draws on her reading of the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, and the Koran and borrows conventions from science fiction to describe the efforts of a superhuman, extraterrestrial race to guide human history. The novels convey the scope of huma n suffering in the twentieth century with a rare imaginative power. On completion of this novel sequence, Lessing took the unusual step of publishing two pseudonymous novels (now known jointly as The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1983-84), in which she reverted to the realist mode with which she is most widely associated. The Good Terrorist (1985) is also written in the style of documentary realism, but The Fifth Child (1988) combines elements of realism and fantasy, exploring the effect on a happy family of the birth of a genetically abnormal, nonhuman child. Her work since the early 1990s has included two candid volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), the four short novels that comprise The Grandmothers (2004), several other novels, and a series of short stories. Some of these stories�which deal with racial and social dilemmas as well as with loneliness, the claims of politics, the problems of aging (especially for
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254 4 / DORIS LESSING
women), the conflict between the generations, and a whole spectrum of problems of alienation and isolation�have a special pungency and force. Lessing is very much a writer of her time, deeply involved with the changing patterns of thought, feeling, and culture during the last fifty years. She has consistently explored and tested the boundaries of realist technique, without resort to formal experimentalism. Published just on the cusp of second-wave feminism, the story reprinted here, "To Room Nineteen," is a psychologically penetrating study of a woman who finds ultimate fulfillment in neither her marriage nor her children and, feeling trapped by traditional gender roles, seeks solitude in�to echo the title of Virginia Woolf's feminist classic about gender, space, and identity�a room of her own.
To Room Nineteen
This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings' marriage was grounded in intelligence.
They were older when they married than most of their married friends: in their well-seasoned late twenties. Both had had a number of affairs, sweet rather than bitter; and when they fell in love�for they did fall in love�had known each other for some time. They joked that they had saved each other "for the real thing." That they had waited so long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible discrimination. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt) probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid, self- doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.
Not only they, but others, felt they were well matched: their friends' delight was an additional proof of their happiness. They had played the same roles, male and female, in this group or set, if such a wide, loosely connected, constantly changing constellation of people could be called a set. They had both become, by virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience people to whom others came for advice. They could be, and were, relied on. It was one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably because of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course! How right! How was it we never thought of it before!
And so they married amid general rejoicing, and because of their foresight
and their sense for what was probable, nothing was a surprise to them.
Both had well-paid jobs. Matthew was a subeditor on a large London news
paper, and Susan worked in an advertising firm. He was not the stuff of which
editors or publicised journalists are made, but he was much more than "a
subeditor," being one of the essential background people who in fact steady,
inspire and make possible the people in the limelight. He was content with
this position. Susan had a talent for commercial drawing. She was humorous
about the advertisements she was responsible for, but she did not feel strongly
about them one way or the other.
Both, before they married, had had pleasant flats, but they felt it unwise to
base a marriage on either flat, because it might seem like a submission of
personality on the part of the one whose flat it was not. They moved into a
new flat in South Kensington on the clear understanding that when their
marriage had settled down (a process they knew would not take long, and was
in fact more a humorous concession to popular wisdom than what was due to
themselves) they would buy a house and start a family.
.
To ROOM NINETEEN / 2545
And this is what happened. They lived in their charming flat for two years, giving parties and going to them, being a popular young married couple, and then Susan became pregnant, she gave up her job, and they bought a house in Richmond. It was typical of this couple that they had a son first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter. Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose. But people did feel these two had chosen; this balanced and sensible family was no more than what was due to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right.
And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in Richmond and were happy. They had everything they had wanted and had planned for.
And yet . . .
Well, even this was expected, that there must be a certain flatness. . . .
Yes, yes, of course, it was natural they sometimes felt like this. Like what?
Their life seemed to be like a snake biting its tail. Matthew's job for the sake of Susan, children, house, and garden�which caravanserai1 needed a well- paid job to maintain it. And Susan's practical intelligence for the sake of Matthew, the children, the house and the garden�which unit would have collapsed in a week without her.
But there was no point about which either could say: "For the sake of this is all the rest." Children? But children can't be a centre of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a wellspring to live from. Or they shouldn't be. Susan and Matthew knew that well enough.
Matthew's job? Ridiculous. It was an interesting job, but scarcely a reason for living. Matthew took pride in doing it well; but he could hardly be expected to be proud of the newspaper: the newspaper he read, his newspaper, was not the one he worked for.
Their love for each other? Well, that was nearest it. If this wasn't a centre, what was? Yes, it was around this point, their love, that the whole extraordinary structure revolved. For extraordinary it certainly was. Both Susan and Matthew had moments of thinking so, of looking in secret disbelief at this thing they had created: marriage, four children, big house, garden, charwomen,2 friends, cars . . . and this thing, this entity, all of it had come into existence, been blown into being out of nowhere, because Susan loved Matthew and Matthew loved Susan. Extraordinary. So that was the central point, the wellspring.
And if one felt that it simply was not strong enough, important enough, to support it all, well whose fault was that? Certainly neither Susan's nor Matthew's. It was in the nature of things. And they sensibly blamed neither themselves nor each other.
On the contrary, they used their intelligence to preserve what they had created from a painful and explosive world: they looked around them, and took lessons. All around them, marriages collapsing, or breaking, or rubbing along (even worse, they felt). They must not make the same mistakes, they must not.
They had avoided the pitfall so many of their friends had fallen into�of buying a house in the country for the sake of the children; so that the husband became a weekend husband, a weekend father, and the wife always careful not to ask what went on in the town flat which they called (in joke) a bachelor flat. No, Matthew was a full-time husband, a full-time father, and at nights,
1. Inn with large courtyard, in West Asia. 2. Household workers.
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254 6 / DORIS LESSING
in the big married bed in the big married bedroom (which had an attractive view of the river) they lay beside each other talking and he told her about his day, and what he had done, and whom he had met; and she told him about her day (not as interesting, but that was not her fault) for both knew of the hidden resentments and deprivations of the woman who has lived her own life�and above all, has earned her own living�and is now dependent on a husband for outside interests and money.
Nor did Susan make the mistake of taking a job for the sake of her independence, which she might very well have done, since her old firm, missing her qualities of humour, balance, and sense, invited her often to go back. Children needed their mother to a certain age, that both parents knew and agreed on; and when these four healthy wisely brought-up children were of the right age, Susan would work again, because she knew, and so did he, what happened to women of fifty at the height of their energy and ability, with grown-up children who no longer needed their full devotion.
So here was this couple, testing their marriage, looking after it, treating it like a small boat full of helpless people in a very stormy sea. Well, of course, so it was. . . . The storms of the world were bad, but not too close�which is not to say they were selfishly felt: Susan and Matthew were both well-informed and responsible people. And the inner storms and quicksands were understood and charted. So everything was all right. Everything was in order. Yes, things were under control.
So what did it matter if they felt dry, flat? People like themselves, fed on a hundred books (psychological, anthropological, sociological) could scarcely be unprepared for the dry, controlled wistfulness which is the distinguishing mark of the intelligent marriage. Two people, endowed with education, with discrimination, with judgement, linked together voluntarily from their will to be happy together and to be of use to others�one sees them everywhere, one knows them, one even is that thing oneself: sadness because so much is after all so little. These two, unsurprised, turned towards each other with even more courtesy and gentle love: this was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other. In fact, even to say so, to think in such a way, was banal, they were ashamed to do it.
It was banal, too, when one night Matthew came home late and confessed he had been to a party, taken a girl home and slept with her. Susan forgave him, of course. Except that forgiveness is hardly the word. Understanding, yes. But if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand. Nor had he confessed�what sort of word is that?
The whole thing was not important. After all, years ago they had joked: Of course I'm not going to be faithful to you, no one can be faithful to one other person for a whole lifetime. (And there was the wordfaithful�stupid, all these words, stupid, belonging to a savage old world.) But the incident left both of them irritable. Strange, but they were both bad-tempered, annoyed. There was something unassimilable about it.
Making love splendidly after he had come home that night, both had felt
that the idea that Myra Jenkins, a pretty girl met at a party, could be even
relevant was ridiculous. They had loved each other for over a decade, would
love each other for years more. Who, then, was Myra Jenkins?
Except, thought Susan, unaccountably bad-tempered, she was (is?) the first.
In ten years. So either the ten years' fidelity was not important, or she isn't.
.
To ROOM NINETEEN / 2547
(No, no, there is something wrong with this way of thinking, there must be.) But if she isn't important, presumably it wasn't important either when Matthew and I first went to bed with each other that afternoon whose delight even now (like a very long shadow at sundown) lays a long, wand-like finger over us. (Why did I say sundown?) Well, if what we felt that afternoon was not important, nothing is important, because if it hadn't been for what we felt, we wouldn't be Mr and Mrs Rawlings with four children, etc., etc. The whole thing is absurd�for him to have come home and told me was absurd. For him not to have told me was absurd. For me to care, or for that matter not to care, is absurd . . . and who is Myra Jenkins? Why, no one at all.
There was only one thing to do, and of course these sensible people did it: they put the thing behind them, and consciously, knowing what they were doing, moved forward into a different phase of their marriage, giving thanks for past good fortune as they did so.
For it was inevitable that the handsome, blond, attractive, manly man, Matthew Rawlings, should be at times tempted (oh, what a word!) by the attractive girls at parties she could not attend because of the four children; and that sometimes he would succumb (a word even more repulsive, if possible) and that she, a good-looking woman in the big well-tended garden at Richmond, would sometimes be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness. Except that bitterness was not in order, it was out of court. Did the casual girls touch the marriage? They did not. Rather it was they who knew defeat because of the handsome Matthew Rawlings' marriage body and soul to Susan Rawlings.
In that case why did Susan feel (though luckily not for longer than a few seconds at a time) as if life had become a desert, and that nothing mattered, and that her children were not her own?
Meanwhile her intelligence continued to assert that all was well. What if her Matthew did have an occasional sweet afternoon, the odd affair? For she knew quite well, except in her moments of aridity, that they were very happy, that the affairs were not important.
Perhaps that was the trouble? It was in the nature of things that the adventures and delights could no longer be hers, because of the four children and the big house that needed so much attention. But perhaps she was secretly wishing, and even knowing that she did, that the wildness and the beauty could be his. But he was married to her. She was married to him. They were married inextricably. And therefore the gods could not strike him with the real magic, not really. Well, was it Susan's fault that after he came home from an adventure he looked harassed rather than fulfilled? (In fact, that was how she knew he had been unfaithful, because of his sullen air, and his glances at her, similar to hers at him: What is it that I share with this person that shields all delight from me?) But none of it by anybody's fault. (But what did they feel ought to be somebody's fault?) Nobody's fault, nothing to be at fault, no one to blame, no one to offer or to take it . . . and nothing wrong, either, except that Matthew never was really struck, as he wanted to be, by joy; and that Susan was more and more often threatened by emptiness. (It was usually in the garden that she was invaded by this feeling: she was coming to avoid the garden, unless the children or Matthew were with her.) There was no need to use the dramatic words, unfaithful, forgive, and the rest: intelligence forbade them. Intelligence barred, too, quarrelling, sulking, anger, silences of withdrawal, accusations and tears. Above all, intelligence forbids tears.
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254 8 / DORIS LESSING
A high price has to be paid for the happy marriage with the four healthy children in the large white gardened house.
And they were paying it, willingly, knowing what they were doing. When they lay side by side or breast to breast in the big civilised bedroom overlooking the wild sullied river, they laughed, often, for no particular reason; but they knew it was really because of these two small people, Susan and Matthew, supporting such an edifice on their intelligent love. The laugh comforted them; it saved them both, though from what, they did not know.
They were now both fortyish. The older children, boy and girl were ten and eight, at school. The twins, six, were still at home. Susan did not have nurses or girls to help her: childhood is short; and she did not regret the hard work. Often enough she was bored, since small children can be boring; she was often very tired; but she regretted nothing. In another decade, she would turn herself back into being a woman with a life of her own.
Soon the twins would go to school, and they would be away from home from nine until four. These hours, so Susan saw it, would be the preparation for her own slow emancipation away from the role of hub-of-the-family into woman-with-her-own-life. She was already planning for the hours of freedom when all the children would be "off her hands." That was the phrase used by Matthew and by Susan and by their friends, for the moment when the youngest child went off to school. "They'll be off your hands, darling Susan, and you'll have time to yourself." So said Matthew, the intelligent husband, who had often enough commended and consoled Susan, standing by her in spirit during the years when her soul was not her own, as she said, but her children's.
What it amounted to was that Susan saw herself as she had been at twenty- eight, unmarried; and then again somewhere about fifty, blossoming from the root of what she had been twenty years before. As if the essential Susan were in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage. Matthew said something like this to Susan one night: and she agreed that it was true�she did feel something like that. What, then, was this essential Susan? She did not know. Put like that it sounded ridiculous, and she did not really feel it. Anyway, they had a long discussion about the whole thing before going off to sleep in each other's arms.
So the twins went off to their school, two bright affectionate children who had no problems about it, since their older brother and sister had trodden this path so successfully before them. And now Susan was going to be alone in the big house, every day of the school term, except for the daily woman who came in to clean.
It was now, for the first time in this marriage, that something happened which neither of them had foreseen.
This is what happened. She returned, at nine-thirty, from taking the twins to the school by car, looking forward to seven blissful hours of freedom. On the first morning she was simply restless, worrying about the twins "naturally enough" since this was their first day away at school. She was hardly able to contain herself until they came back. Which they did happily, excited by the world of school, looking forward to the next day. And the next day Susan took them, dropped them, came back, and found herself reluctant to enter her big and beautiful home because it was as if something was waiting for her there that she did not wish to confront. Sensibly, however, she parked the car in the garage, entered the house, spoke to Mrs Parkes the daily woman about her duties, and went up to her bedroom. She was possessed by a fever which
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To ROOM NINETEEN / 2549
drove her out again, downstairs, into the kitchen, where Mrs Parkes was making cake and did not need her, and into the garden. There she sat on a bench and tried to calm herself, looking at trees, at a brown glimpse of the river. But she was filled with tension, like a panic: as if an enemy was in the garden with her. She spoke to herself severely, thus: All this is quite natural. First, I spent twelve years of my adult life working, living my own life. Then I married, and from the moment I became pregnant for the first time I signed myself over, so to speak, to other people. To the children. Not for one moment in twelve years have I been alone, had time to myself. So now I have to learn to be myself again. That's all.
And she went indoors to help Mrs Parkes cook and clean, and found some sewing to do for the children. She kept herself occupied every day. At the end of the first term she understood she felt two contrary emotions. First: secret astonishment and dismay that during those weeks when the house was empty of children she had in fact been more occupied (had been careful to keep herself occupied) than ever she had been when the children were around her needing her continual attention. Second: that now she knew the house would be full of them, and for five weeks, she resented the fact she would never be alone. She was already looking back at those hours of sewing, cooking (but by herself), as at a lost freedom which would not be hers for five long weeks. And the two months of term which would succeed the five weeks stretched alluringly open to her�freedom. But what freedom�when in fact she had been so careful not to be free of small duties during the last weeks? She looked at herself, Susan Rawlings, sitting in a big chair by the window in the bedroom, sewing shirts or dresses, which she might just as well have bought. She saw herself making cakes for hours at a time in the big family kitchen: yet usually she bought cakes. What she saw was a woman alone, that was true, but she had not felt alone. For instance, Mrs Parkes was always somewhere in the house. And she did not like being in the garden at all, because of the closeness there of the enemy�irritation, restlessness, emptiness, whatever it was, which keeping her hands occupied made less dangerous for some reason.
Susan did not tell Matthew of these thoughts. They were not sensible. She did not recognize herself in them. What should she say to her dear friend and husband Matthew? "When I go into the garden, that is, if the children are not there, I feel as if there is an enemy there waiting to invade me." "What enemy, Susan darling?" "Well I don't know, really. . . ." "Perhaps you should see a doctor?"
No, clearly this conversation should not take place. The holidays began and Susan welcomed them. Four children, lively, energetic, intelligent, demanding: she was never, not for a moment of her day, alone. If she was in a room, they would be in the next room, or waiting for her to do something for them; or it would soon be time for lunch or tea, or to take one of them to the dentist. Something to do: five weeks of it, thank goodness.
On the fourth day of these so welcome holidays, she found she was storming with anger at the twins, two shrinking beautiful children who (and this is what checked her) stood hand in hand looking at her with sheer dismayed disbelief. This was their calm mother, shouting at them. And for what? They had come to her with some game, some bit of nonsense. They looked at each other, moved closer for support, and went off hand in hand, leaving Susan holding on to the windowsill of the living room, breathing deep, feeling sick. She went to lie down, telling the older children she had a headache. She heard the boy
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255 0 / DORIS LESSING
Harry telling the little ones: "It's all right, Mother's got a headache." She heard that It's all right with pain. That night she said to her husband: "Today I shouted at the twins, quite unfairly." She sounded miserable, and he said gently: "Well, what of it?"
"It's more of an adjustment than I thought, their going to school."
"But Susie, Susie darling. . . ." For she was crouched weeping on the bed. He comforted her: "Susan, what is all this about? You shouted at them? What of it? If you shouted at them fifty times a day it wouldn't be more than the little devils deserve." But she wouldn't laugh. She wept. Soon he comforted her with his body. She became calm. Calm, she wondered what was wrong with her, and why she should mind so much that she might, just once, have behaved unjustly with the children. What did it matter? They had forgotten it all long ago: Mother had a headache and everything was all right.
It was a long time later that Susan understood that that night, when she had wept and Matthew had driven the misery out of her with his big solid body, was the last time, ever in their married life, that they had been�to use their mutual language�with each other. And even that was a lie, because she had not told him of her real fears at all.
The five weeks passed, and Susan was in control of herself, and good and kind, and she looked forward to the end of the holidays with a mixture of fear and longing. She did not know what to expect. She took the twins off to school (the elder children took themselves to school) and she returned to the house determined to face the enemy wherever he was, in the house, or the garden or�where?
She was again restless, she was possessed by restlessness. She cooked and sewed and worked as before, day after day, while Mrs Parkes remonstrated: "Mrs Rawlings, what's the need for it? I can do that, it's what you pay me for."
And it was so irrational that she checked herself. She would put the car into the garage, go up to her bedroom, and sit, hands in her lap, forcing herself to be quiet. She listened to Mrs Parkes moving around the house. She looked out into the garden and saw the branches shake the trees. She sat defeating the enemy, restlessness. Emptiness. She ought to be thinking about her life, about herself. But she did not. Or perhaps she could not. As soon as she forced her mind to think about Susan (for what else did she want to be alone for?) it skipped off to thoughts of butter or school clothes. Or it thought of Mrs Parkes. She realised that she sat listening for the movements of the cleaning woman, following her every turn, bend, thought. She followed her in her mind from kitchen to bathroom, from table to oven, and it was as if the duster, the cleaning cloth, the saucepan, were in her own hand. She would hear herself saying: No, not like that, don't put that there. . . . Yet she did not give a damn what Mrs Parkes did, or if she did it at all. Yet she could not prevent herself from being conscious of her, every minute. Yes, this was what was wrong with her: she needed, when she was alone, to be really alone, with no one near. She could not endure the knowledge that in ten minutes or in half an hour Mrs Parkes would call up the stairs: "Mrs Rawlings, there's no silver polish. Madam, we're out of flour."
So she left the house and went to sit in the garden where she was screened from the house by trees. She waited for the demon to appear and claim her, but he did not.
She was keeping him off, because she had not, after all, come to an end of arranging herself.
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To ROOM NINETEEN / 2551
She was planning how to be somewhere where Mrs Parkes would not come after her with a cup of tea, or a demand to be allowed to telephone (always irritating since Susan did not care who she telephoned or how often), or just a nice talk about something. Yes, she needed a place, or a state of affairs, where it would not be necessary to keep reminding herself: In ten minutes I must telephone Matthew about . . . and at half past three I must leave early for the children because the car needs cleaning. And at ten o'clock tomorrow I must remember. . . . She was possessed with resentment that the seven hours of freedom in every day (during weekdays in the school term) were not free, that never, not for one second, ever, was she free from the pressure of time, from having to remember this or that. She could never forget herself; never really let herself go into forgetfulness.
Resentment. It was poisoning her. (She looked at this emotion and thought it was absurd. Yet she felt it.) She was a prisoner. (She looked at this thought too, and it was no good telling herself it was a ridiculous one.) She must tell Matthew�but what? She was filled with emotions that were utterly ridiculous, that she despised, yet that nevertheless she was feeling so strongly she could not shake them off.
The school holidays came round, and this time they were for nearly two months, and she behaved with a conscious controlled decency that nearly drove her crazy. She would lock herself in the bathroom, and sit on the edge of the bath, breathing deep, trying to let go into some kind of calm. Or she went up into the spare room, usually empty, where no one would expect her to be. She heard the children calling "Mother, Mother," and kept silent, feeling guilty. Or she went to the very end of the garden, by herself, and looked at the slow-moving brown river; she looked at the river and closed her eyes and breathed slow and deep, taking it into her being, into her veins.
Then she returned to the family, wife and mother, smiling and responsible, feeling as if the pressure of these people�four lively children and her husband�were a painful pressure on the surface of her skin, a hand pressing on her brain. She did not once break down into irritation during these holidays, but it was like living out a prison sentence, and when the children went back to school, she sat on a white stone seat near the flowing river, and she thought: It is not even a year since the twins went to school, since they were off my hands (What on earth did I think I meant when I used that stupid phrase?) and yet I'm a different person. I'm simply not myself. I don't understand it.
Yet she had to understand it. For she knew that this structure�big white house, on which the mortgage still cost four hundred a year, a husband, so good and kind and insightful, four children, all doing so nicely, and the garden where she sat, and Mrs Parkes the cleaning woman�all this depended on her, and yet she could not understand why, or even what it was she contributed to it.
She said to Matthew in their bedroom: "I think there must be something wrong with me." And he said: "Surely not, Susan? You look marvelous�you're as lovely as ever."
She looked at the handsome blond man, with his clear, intelligent, blue- eyed face, and thought: Why is it I can't tell him? Why not? And she said: "I need to be alone more than I am."
At which he swung his slow blue gaze at her, and she saw what she had
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2552 / DORIS LESSING
been dreading: Incredulity. Disbelief. And fear. An incredulous blue stare from
a stranger who was her husband, as close to her as her own breath.
He said: "But the children are at school and off your hands."
She said to herself: I've got to force myself to say: Yes, but do you realise that I never feel free? There's never a moment I can say to myself: There's nothing I have to remind myself about, nothing I have to do in half an hour, or an hour, or two hours. . . .
But she said: "I don't feel well."
He said: "Perhaps you need a holiday."
She said, appalled: "But not without you, surely?" For she could not imagine herself going off without him. Yet that was what he meant. Seeing her face, he laughed, and opened his arms, and she went into them, thinking: Yes, yes, but why can't I say it? And what is it I have to say?
She tried to tell him, about never being free. And he listened and said: "But Susan, what sort of freedom can you possibly want�short of being dead! Am 1 ever free? I go to the office, and I have to be there at ten�all right, half past ten, sometimes. And I have to do this or that, don't I? Then I've got to come home at a certain time�I don't mean it, you know I don't�but if I'm not going to be back home at six I telephone you. When can I ever say to myself: I have nothing to be responsible for in the next six hours?"
Susan, hearing this, was remorseful. Because it was true. The good marriage, the house, the children, depended just as much on his voluntary bondage as it did on hers. But why did he not feel bound? Why didn't he chafe and become restless? No, there was something really wrong with her and this proved it.
And that word bondage�why had she used it? She had never felt marriage, or the children, as bondage. Neither had he, or surely they wouldn't be together lying in each other's arms content after twelve years of marriage.
No, her state (whatever it was) was irrelevant, nothing to do with her real good life with her family. She had to accept the fact that after all, she was an irrational person and to live with it. Some people had to live with crippled arms, or stammers, or being deaf. She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own.
Nevertheless, as a result of this conversation with her husband, there was a new regime next holidays.
The spare room at the top of the house now had a cardboard sign saying: PRIVATE! DO NOT DISTURB! on it. (This sign had been drawn in coloured chalks by the children, after a discussion between the parents in which it was decided this was psychologically the right thing.) The family and Mrs Parkes knew this was "Mother's Room" and that she was entitled to her privacy. Many serious conversations took place between Matthew and the children about not taking Mother for granted. Susan overheard the first, between father and Harry, the older boy, and was surprised at her irritation over it. Surely she could have a room somewhere in that big house and retire into it without such a fuss being made? Without it being so solemnly discussed? Why couldn't she simply have announced: "I'm going to fit out the little top room for myself, and when I'm in it I'm not to be disturbed for anything short of fire"? Just that, and finished; instead of long earnest discussions. When she heard Harry and Matthew explaining it to the twins with Mrs Parkes coming in�"Yes, well, a family sometimes gets on top of a woman"�she had to go right away to the bottom of the garden until the devils of exasperation had finished their dance in her blood.
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To ROOM NINETEEN / 2553
But now there was a room, and she could go there when she liked, she used it seldom: she felt even more caged there than in her bedroom. One day she had gone up there after a lunch for ten children she had cooked and served because Mrs Parkes was not there, and had sat alone for a while looking into the garden. She saw the children stream out from the kitchen and stand looking up at the window where she sat behind the curtains. They were all�her children and their friends�discussing Mother's Room. A few minutes later, the chase of children in some game came pounding up the stairs, but ended as abruptly as if they had fallen over a ravine, so sudden was the silence. They had remembered she was there, and had gone silent in a great gale of "Hush! Shhhhhh! Quiet, you'll disturb her. . . ." And they went tiptoeing downstairs like criminal conspirators. When she came down to make tea for them, they all apologised. The twins put their arms around her, from front and back, making a human cage of loving limbs, and promised it would never occur again. "We forgot, Mummy, we forgot all about it!"
What it amounted to was that Mother's Room, and her need for privacy, had become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights. Quite soon Susan was going up to the room only because it was a lesson it was a pity to drop. Then she took sewing up there, and the children and Mrs Parkes came in and out: it had become another family room.
She sighed, and smiled, and resigned herself�she made jokes at her own expense with Matthew over the room. That is, she did from the self she liked, she respected. But at the same time, something inside her howled with impatience, with rage. . . . And she was frightened. One day she found herself kneeling by her bed and praying: "Dear God, keep it away from me, keep him away from me." She meant the devil, for she now thought of it, not caring if she were irrational, as some sort of demon. She imagined him, or it, as a youngish man, or perhaps a middle-aged man pretending to be young. Or a man young-looking from immaturity? At any rate, she saw the young-looking face which, when she drew closer, had dry lines about mouth and eyes. He was thinnish, meagre in build. And he had a reddish complexion, and ginger hair. That was he�a gingery, energetic man, and he wore a reddish hairy jacket, unpleasant to the touch.
Well, one day she saw him. She was standing at the bottom of the garden, watching the river ebb past, when she raised her eyes and saw this person, or being, sitting on the white stone bench. He was looking at her, and grinning. In his hand was a long crooked stick, which he had picked off the ground, or broken off the tree above him. He was absent-mindedly, out of an absentminded or freakish impulse of spite, using the stick to stir around in the coils of a blindworm or a grass snake (or some kind of snakelike creature: it was whitish and unhealthy to look at, unpleasant). The snake was twisting about, flinging its coils from side to side in a kind of dance of protest against the teasing prodding stick.
Susan looked at him thinking: Who is the stranger? What is he doing in our garden? Then she recognised the man around whom her terrors had crystallised. As she did so, he vanished. She made herself walk over to the bench. A shadow from a branch lay across thin emerald grass, moving jerkily over its roughness, and she could see why she had taken it for a snake, lashing and twisting. She went back to the house thinking: Right, then, so I've seen him with my own eyes, so I'm not crazy after all�there is a danger because I've seen him. He is lurking in the garden and sometimes even in the house, and he wants to get into me and to take me over.
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255 4 / DORIS LESSING
She dreamed of having a room or a place, anywhere, where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was.
Once, near Victoria, she found herself outside a news agent that had Rooms to Let advertised. She decided to rent a room, telling no one. Sometimes she could take the train in to Richmond and sit alone in it for an hour or two. Yet how could she? A room would cost three or four pounds a week, and she earned no money, and how could she explain to Matthew that she needed such a sum? What for? It did not occur to her that she was taking it for granted she wasn't going to tell him about the room.
Well, it was out of the question, having a room; yet she knew she must.
One day, when a school term was well established, and none of the children had measles or other ailments, and everything seemed in order, she did the shopping early, explained to Mrs Parkes she was meeting an old school friend, took the train to Victoria, searched until she found a small quiet hotel, and asked for a room for the day. They did hot let rooms by the day, the manageress said, looking doubtful, since Susan so obviously was not the kind of woman who needed a room for unrespectable reasons. Susan made a long explanation about not being well, being unable to shop without frequent rests for lying down. At last she was allowed to rent the room provided she paid a full night's price for it. She was taken up by the manageress and a maid, both concerned over the state of her health . . . which must be pretty bad if, living at Richmond (she had signed her name and address in the register), she needed a shelter at Victoria.
The room was ordinary and anonymous, and was just what Susan needed. She put a shilling in the gas fire, and sat, eyes shut, in a dingy armchair with her back to a dingy window. She was alone. She was alone. She was alone. She could feel pressures lifting off her. First the sounds of traffic came very loud; then they seemed to vanish; she might even have slept a little. A knock on the door: it was Miss Townsend the manageress, bringing her a cup of tea with her own hands, so concerned was she over Susan's long silence and possible illness.
Miss Townsend was a lonely woman of fifty, running this hotel with all the rectitude expected of her, and she sensed in Susan the possibility of understanding companionship. She stayed to talk. Susan found herself in the middle of a fantastic story about her illness, which got more and more improbable as she tried to make it tally with the large house at Richmond, well-off husband, and four children. Suppose she said instead: Miss Townsend, I'm here in your hotel because I need to be alone for a few hours, above all alone and with no one knowing where I am. She said it mentally, and saw, mentally, the look that would inevitably come on Miss Townsend's elderly maiden's face. "Miss Town- send, my four children and my husband are driving me insane, do you understand that? Yes, I can see from the gleam of hysteria in your eyes that comes from loneliness controlled but only just contained that I've got everything in the world you've ever longed for. Well, Miss Townsend, I don't want any of it. You can have it, Miss Townsend. I wish I was absolutely alone in the world, like you. Miss Townsend, I'm besieged by seven devils, Miss Townsend, Miss Townsend, let me stay here in your hotel where the devils can't get me. . . ." Instead of saying all this, she described her anaemia, agreed to try Miss Townsend's remedy for it, which was raw liver, minced, between whole-meal bread, and said yes, perhaps it would be better if she stayed at home and let a friend do shopping for her. She paid her bill and left the hotel, defeated.
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To ROOM NINETEEN / 2555
At home Mrs Parkes said she didn't really like it, no, not really, when Mrs Rawlings was away from nine in the morning until five. The teacher had telephoned from school to say Joan's teeth were paining her, and she hadn't known what to say; and what was she to make for the children's tea, Mrs Rawlings hadn't said.
All this was nonsense, of course. Mrs Parkes's complaint was that Susan had withdrawn herself spiritually, leaving the burden of the big house on her.
Susan looked back at her day of "freedom" which had resulted in her becoming a friend to the lonely Miss Townsend, and in Mrs Parkes's remonstrances. Yet she remembered the short blissful hour of being alone, really alone. She was determined to arrange her life, no matter what it cost, so that she could have that solitude more often. An absolute solitude, where no one knew her or cared about her.
But how? She thought of saying to her old employer: I want you to back me up in a story with Matthew that I am doing part-time work for you. The truth is that . . . but she would have to tell him a lie too, and which lie? She could not say: I want to sit by myself three or four times a week in a rented room. And besides, he knew Matthew, and she could not really ask him to tell lies on her behalf, apart from his being bound to think it meant a lover.
Suppose she really took a part-time job, which she could get through fast and efficiently, leaving time for herself. What job? Addressing envelopes? Canvassing?
And there was Mrs Parkes, working widow, who knew exactly what she was prepared to give to the house, who knew by instinct when her mistress withdrew in spirit from her responsibilities. Mrs Parkes was one of the servers of this world, but she needed someone to serve. She had to have Mrs Rawlings, her madam, at the top of the house or in the garden, so that she could come and get support from her: "Yes, the bread's not what it was when I was a girl. . . . Yes, Harry's got a wonderful appetite, I wonder where he puts it all. . . . Yes, it's lucky the twins are so much of a size, they can wear each other's shoes, that's a saving in these hard times. . . . Yes, the cherry jam from Switzerland is not a patch on the jam from Poland, and three times the price. . . ." And so on. That sort of talk Mrs Parkes must have, every day, or she would leave, not knowing herself why she left.
Susan Rawlings, thinking these thoughts, found that she was prowling through the great thicketed garden like a wild cat: she was walking up the stairs, down the stairs, through the rooms, into the garden, along the brown running river, back, up through the house, down again. .. . It was a wonder Mrs Parkes did not think it strange. But on the contrary, Mrs Rawlings could do what she liked, she could stand on her head if she wanted, provided she was there. Susan Rawlings prowled and muttered through her house, hating Mrs Parkes, hating poor Miss Townsend, dreaming of her hour of solitude in the dingy respectability of Miss Townsend's hotel bedroom, and she knew quite well she was mad. Yes, she was mad.
She said to Matthew that she must have a holiday. Matthew agreed with her. This was not as things had been once�how they had talked in each other's arms in the marriage bed. He had, she knew, diagnosed her finally as unreasonable. She had become someone outside himself that he had to manage. They were living side by side in this house like two tolerably friendly strangers.
Having told Mrs Parkes, or rather, asked for her permission, she went off
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2556 / DORIS LESSING
on a walking holiday in Wales. She chose the remotest place she knew of. Every morning the children telephoned her before they went off to school, to encourage and support her, just as they had over Mother's Room. Every evening she telephoned them, spoke to each child in turn, and then to Matthew. Mrs Parkes, given permission to telephone for instructions or advice, did so every day at lunchtime. When, as happened three times, Mrs Rawlings was out on the mountainside, Mrs Parkes asked that she should ring back at such and such a time, for she would not be happy in what she was doing without Mrs Rawlings' blessing.
Susan prowled over wild country with the telephone wire holding her to her duty like a leash. The next time she must telephone, or wait to be telephoned, nailed her to her cross. The mountains themselves seemed trammelled by her unfreedom. Everywhere on the mountains, where she met no one at all, from breakfast time to dusk, excepting sheep, or a shepherd, she came face to face with her own craziness which might attack her in the broadest valleys, so that they seemed too small; or on a mountaintop from which she could see a hundred other mountains and valleys, so that they seemed too low, too small, with the sky pressing down too close. She would stand gazing at a hillside brilliant with ferns and bracken, jewelled with running water, and see nothing but her devil, who lifted inhuman eyes at her from where he leaned negligently on a rock, switching at his ugly yellow boots with a leafy twig.
She returned to her home and family, with the Welsh emptiness at the back of her mind like a promise of freedom.
She told her husband she wanted to have an an pair girl.3
They were in their bedroom, it was late at night, the children slept. He sat, shirted and slippered, in a chair by the window, looking out. She sat brushing her hair and watching him in the mirror. A time-hallowed scene in the connubial bedroom. He said nothing, while she heard the arguments coming into his mind, only to be rejected because every one was reasonable.
"It seems strange to get one now, after all, the children are in school most of the day. Surely the time for you to have help was when you were stuck with them day and night. Why don't you ask Mrs Parkes to cook for you? She's even offered to�I can understand if you are tired of cooking for six people. But you know that an au pair girl means all kinds of problems, it's not like having an ordinary char4 in during the day. . . ."
Finally he said carefully: "Are you thinking of going back to work?"
"No," she said, "no, not really," She made herself sound vague, rather stupid.
She went on brushing her black hair and peering at herself so as to be oblivious
of the short uneasy glances her Matthew kept giving her. "Do you think we
can't afford it?" she went on vaguely, not at all the old efficient Susan who
knew exactly what they could afford.
"It's not that," he said, looking out of the window at dark trees, so as not to
look at her. Meanwhile she examined a round, candid, pleasant face with clear
dark brows and clear grey eyes. A sensible face. She brushed thick healthy
black hair and thought: Yet that's the reflection of a madwoman. How very
strange! Much more to the point if what looked back at me was the gingery
green-eyed demon with his dry meagre smile. . . . Why wasn't Matthew agree
ing? After all, what else could he do? She was breaking her part of the bargain
3. Live-in foreigner who serves a family in 4. Charwoman. exchange for learning its language.
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To ROOM NINETEEN / 2557
and there was no way of forcing her to keep it: that her spirit, her soul, should live in this house, so that the people in it could grow like plants in water, and Mrs Parkes remain content in their service. In return for this, he would be a good loving husband, and responsible towards the children. Well, nothing like this had been true of either of them for a long time. He did his duty, perfunctorily; she did not even pretend to do hers. And he had become like other husbands, with his real life in his work and the people he met there, and very likely a serious affair. All this was her fault.
At last he drew heavy curtains, blotting out the trees, and turned to force her attention: "Susan, are you really sure we need a girl?" But she would not meet his appeal at all: She was running the brush over her hair again and again, lifting fine black clouds in a small hiss of electricity. She was peering in and smiling as if she were amused at the clinging hissing hair that followed the brush.
"Yes, I think it would be a good idea on the whole," she said, with the cunning of a madwoman evading the real point.
In the mirror she could see her Matthew lying on his back, his hands behind his head, staring upwards, his face sad and hard. She felt her heart (the old heart of Susan Rawlings) soften and call out to him. But she set it to be indifferent.
He said: "Susan, the children?" It was an appeal that almost reached her. He opened his arms, lifting them from where they had lain by his sides, palms up, empty. She had only to run across and fling herself into them, onto his hard, warm chest, and melt into herself, into Susan. But she could not. She would not see his lifted arms. She said vaguely: "Well, surely it'll be even better for them? We'll get a French or a German girl and they'll learn the language."
In the dark she lay beside him, feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away. She disliked very much this woman who lay here, cold and indifferent beside a suffering man, but she could not change her.
Next morning she set about getting a girl, and very soon came Sophie Traub from Hamburg, a girl of twenty, laughing, healthy, blue-eyed, intending to learn English. Indeed, she already spoke a good deal. In return for a room� "Mother's Room"�and her food, she undertook to do some light cooking, and to be with the children when Mrs Rawlings asked. She was an intelligent girl and understood perfectly what was needed. Susan said: "I go off sometimes, for the morning or for the day�well, sometimes the children run home from school, or they ring up, or a teacher rings up. I should be here, really. And there's the daily woman. . . ." And Sophie laughed her deep fruity Fraulein's laugh, showed her fine white teeth and her dimples, and said: "You want some person to play mistress of the house sometimes, not so?"
"Yes, that is just so," said Susan, a bit dry, despite herself, thinking in secret fear how easy it was, how much nearer to the end she was than she thought. Healthy Fraulein Traub's instant understanding of their position proved this to be true.
The au pair girl, because of her own common sense, or (as Susan said to herself with her new inward shudder) because she had been chosen so well by Susan, was a success with everyone, the children liking her, Mrs Parkes forgetting almost at once that she was German, and Matthew finding her "nice to have around the house." For he was now taking things as they came, from the surface of life, withdrawn both as a husband and a father from the household.
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255 8 / DORIS LESSING
One day Susan saw how Sophie and Mrs Parkes were talking and laughing in the kitchen, and she announced that she would be away until teatime. She knew exactly where to go and what she must look for. She took the District Line to South Kensington, changed to the Circle, got off at Paddington, and walked around looking at the smaller hotels until she was satisfied with one which had FRED'S HOTEL painted on windowpanes that needed cleaning. The fagade was a faded shiny yellow, like unhealthy skin. A door at the end of a passage said she must knock; she did, and Fred appeared. He was not at all attractive, not in any way, being fattish, and run-down, and wearing a tasteless striped suit. He had small sharp eyes in a white creased face, and was quite prepared to let Mrs Jones (she chose the farcical name deliberately, staring him out) have a room three days a week from ten until six. Provided of course that she paid in advance each time she came? Susan produced fifteen shillings (no price had been set by him) and held it out, still fixing him with a bold unblinking challenge she had not known until then she could use at will. Looking at her still, he took up a ten-shilling note from her palm between thumb and forefinger, fingered it; then shuffled up two half crowns, held out his own palm with these bits of money displayed thereon, and let his gaze lower broodingly at them. They were standing in the passage, a red-shaded light above, bare boards beneath, and a strong smell of floor polish rising about them. He shot his gaze up at her over the still-extended palm, and smiled as if to say: What do you take me for? "I shan't," said Susan, "be using this room for the purposes of making money." He still waited. She added another five shillings, at which he nodded and said: "You pay, and I ask no questions." "Good," said Susan. He now went past her to the stairs, and there waited a moment: the light from the street door being in her eyes, she lost sight of him momentarily. Then she saw a sober-suited, white-faced, white-balding little man trotting up the stairs like a waiter, and she went after him. They proceeded in utter silence up the stairs of this house where no questions were asked� Fred's Hotel, which could afford the freedom for its visitors that poor Miss Townsend's hotel could not. The room was hideous. It had a single window, with thin green brocade curtains, a three-quarter bed that had a cheap green satin bedspread on it, a fireplace with a gas fire and a shilling meter by it, a chest of drawers, and a green wicker armchair.
"Thank you," said Susan, knowing that Fred (if this was Fred, and not George, or Herbert or Charlie) was looking at her not so much with curiosity, an emotion he would not own to, for professional reasons, but with a philosophical sense of what was appropriate. Having taken her money and shown her up and agreed to everything, he was clearly disapproving of her for coming here. She did not belong here at all, so his look said. (But she knew, already, how very much she did belong: the room had been waiting for her to join it.) "Would you have me called at five o'clock, please?" and he nodded and went downstairs.
It was twelve in the morning. She was free. She sat in the armchair, she simply sat, she closed her eyes and sat and let herself be alone. She was alone and no one knew where she was. When a knock came on the door she was annoyed, and prepared to show it: but it was Fred himself, it was five o'clock and he was calling her as ordered. He flicked his sharp little eyes over the room�bed, first. It was undisturbed. She might never have been in the room at all. She thanked him, said she would be returning the day after tomorrow, and left. She was back home in time to cook supper, to put the children to
.
To ROOM NINETEEN / 2559
bed, to cook a second supper for her husband and herself later. And to welcome Sophie back from the pictures where she had gone with a friend. All these things she did cheerfully, willingly. But she was thinking all the time of the hotel room, she was longing for it with her whole being.
Three times a week. She arrived promptly at ten, looked Fred in the eyes, gave him twenty shillings, followed him up the stairs, went into the room, and shut the door on him with gentle firmness. For Fred, disapproving of her being here at all, was quite ready to let friendship, or at least acquaintanceship, follow his disapproval, if only she would let him. But he was content to go off on her dismissing nod, with the twenty shillings in his hand.
She sat in the armchair and shut her eyes.
What did she do in the room? Why, nothing at all. From the chair, when it had rested her, she went to the window, stretching her arms, smiling, treasuring her anonymity, to look out. She was no longer Susan Rawlings, mother of four, wife of Matthew, employer of Mrs Parkes and of Sophie Traub, with these and those relations with friends, schoolteachers, tradesmen. She no longer was mistress of the big white house and garden, owning clothes suitable for this and that activity or occasion. She was Mrs Jones, and she was alone, and she had no past and no future. Here I am, she thought, after all these years of being married and having children and playing those roles of responsibility� and I'm just the same. Yet there have been times I thought that nothing existed of me except the roles that went with being Mrs Matthew Rawlings. Yes, here I am, and if I never saw any of my family again, here I would still be . . . how very strange that is! And she leaned on the sill, and looked into the street, loving the men and women who passed, because she did not know them. She looked at the downtrodden buildings over the street, and at the sky, wet and dingy, or sometimes blue, and she felt she had never seen buildings or sky before. And then she went back to the chair, empty, her mind a blank. Sometimes she talked aloud, saying nothing�an exclamation, meaningless, followed by a comment about the floral pattern on the thin rug, or a stain on the green satin coverlet. For the most part, she wool-gathered�what word is there for it?�brooded, wandered, simply went dark, feeling emptiness run deliciously through her veins like the movement of her blood.
This room had become more her own than the house she lived in. One morning she found Fred taking her a flight higher than usual. She stopped, refusing to go up, and demanded her usual room, Number 19. "Well, you'll have to wait half an hour then," he said. Willingly she descended to the dark disinfectant-smelling hall, and sat waiting until the two, man and woman, came down the stairs, giving her swift indifferent glances before they hurried out into the street, separating at the door. She went up to the room, her room, which they had just vacated. It was no less hers, though the windows were set wide open, and a maid was straightening the bed as she came in.
After these days of solitude, it was both easy to play her part as mother and wife, and difficult�because it was so easy: she felt an impostor. She felt as if her shell moved here, with her family, answering to Mummy, Mother, Susan, Mrs Rawlings. She was surprised no one saw through her, that she wasn't turned out of doors, as a fake. On the contrary, it seemed the children loved her more; Matthew and she "got on" pleasantly, and Mrs Parkes was happy in her work under (for the most part, it must be confessed) Sophie Traub. At night she lay beside her husband, and they made love again, apparently just as they used to, when they were really married. But she, Susan, or the being
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256 0 / DORIS LESSING
who answered so readily and improbably to the name of Susan, was not there: she was in Fred's Hotel, in Paddington, waiting for the easing hours of solitude to begin.
Soon she made a new arrangement with Fred and with Sophie. It was for five days a week. As for the money, five pounds, she simply asked Matthew for it. She saw that she was not even frightened he might ask what for: he would give it to her, she knew that, and yet it was terrifying it could be so, for this close couple, these partners, had once known the destination of every shilling they must spend. He agreed to give her five pounds a week. She asked for just so much, not a penny more. He sounded indifferent about it. It was as if he were paying her, she thought: paying her off�yes, that was it. Terror came back for a moment, when she understood this, but she stilled it: things had gone too far for that. Now, every week, on Sunday nights, he gave her five pounds, turning away from her before their eyes could meet on the transaction. As for Sophie Traub, she was to be somewhere in or near the house until six at night, after which she was free. She was not to cook, or to clean, she was simply to be there. So she gardened or sewed, and asked friends in, being a person who was bound to have a lot of friends. If the children were sick, she nursed them. If teachers telephoned, she answered them sensibly. For the five daytimes in the school week, she was altogether the mistress of the house.
One night in the bedroom, Matthew asked: "Susan, I don't want to interfere� don't think that, please�but are you sure you are well?" She was brushing her hair at the mirror. She made two more strokes on either side of her head, before she replied: "Yes, dear, I am sure I am well."
He was again lying on his back, his big blond head on his hands, his elbows angled up and part-concealing his face. He said: "Then Susan, I have to ask you this question, though you must understand, I'm not putting any sort of pressure on you." (Susan heard the word pressure with dismay, because this was inevitable, of course she could not go on like this.) "Are things going to go on like this?"
"Well," she said, going vague and bright and idiotic again, so as to escape: "Well, I don't see why not."
He was jerking his elbows up and down, in annoyance or in pain, and, looking at him, she saw he had got thin, even gaunt; and restless angry movements were not what she remembered of him. He said: "Do you want a divorce, is that it?"
At this, Susan only with the greatest difficulty stopped herself from laughing: she could hear the bright bubbling laughter she would have emitted, had she let herself. He could only mean one thing: she had a lover, and that was why she spent her days in London, as lost to him as if she had vanished to another continent.
Then the small panic set in again: she understood that he hoped she did have a lover, he was begging her to say so, because otherwise it would be too terrifying.
She thought this out, as she brushed her hair, watching the fine black stuff fly up to make its little clouds of electricity, hiss, hiss, hiss. Behind her head, across the room, was a blue wall. She realised she was absorbed in watching the black hair making shapes against the blue. She should be answering him. "Do you want a divorce, Matthew?"
He said: "That surely isn't the point, is it?" "You brought it up, I didn't," she said, brightly, suppressing meaningless tinkling laughter.
.
To ROOM NINETEEN / 2561
Next day she asked Fred: "Have enquiries been made for me?"
He hesitated, and she said: "I've been coming here a year now. I've made no trouble, and you've been paid every day. I have a right to be told." "As a matter of fact, Mrs Jones, a man did come asking." "A man from a detective agency?" "Well, he could have been, couldn't he?" "I was asking you . . . well, what did you tell him?" "I told him a Mrs Jones came every weekday from ten until five or six and
stayed in Number Nineteen by herself."
"Describing me?"
"Well Mrs Jones, I had no alternative. Put yourself in my place."
"By rights I should deduct what that man gave you for the information."
He raised shocked eyes: she was not the sort of person to make jokes like this! Then he chose to laugh: a pinkish wet slit appeared across his white crinkled face: his eyes positively begged her to laugh, otherwise he might lose some money. She remained grave, looking at him.
He stopped laughing and said: "You want to go up now?"�returning to the familiarity, the comradeship, of the country where no questions are asked, on which (and he knew it) she depended completely.
She went up to sit in her wicker chair. But it was not the same. Her husband had searched her out. (The world had searched her out.) The pressures were on her. She was here with his connivance. He might walk in at any moment, here, into Room 19. She imagined the report from the detective agency: "A woman calling herself Mrs Jones, fitting the description of your wife (etc., etc., etc.), stays alone all day in room No. 19. She insists on this room, waits for it if it is engaged. As far as the proprietor knows she receives no visitors there, male or female." A report something on these lines, Matthew must have received.
Well of course he was right: things couldn't go on like this. He had put an end to it all simply by sending the detective after her.
She tried to shrink herself back into the shelter of the room, a snail pecked out of its shell and trying to squirm back. But the peace of the room had gone. She was trying consciously to revive it, trying to let go into the dark creative trance (or whatever it was) that she had found there. It was no use, yet she craved for it, she was as ill as a suddenly deprived addict.
Several times she returned to the room, to look for herself there, but instead she found the unnamed spirit of restlessness, a prickling fevered hunger for movement, an irritable self-consciousness that made her brain feel as if it had coloured lights going on and off inside it. Instead of the soft dark that had been the room's air, were now waiting for her demons that made her dash blindly about, muttering words of hate; she was impelling herself from point to point like a moth dashing itself against a windowpane, sliding to the bottom, fluttering off on broken wings, then crashing into the invisible barrier again. And again and again. Soon she was exhausted, and she told Fred that for a while she would not be needing the room, she was going on holiday. Home she went, to the big white house by the river. The middle of a weekday, and she felt guilty at returning to her own home when not expected. She stood unseen, looking in at the kitchen window. Mrs Parkes, wearing a discarded floral overall of Susan's, was stooping to slide something into the oven. Sophie, arms folded, was leaning her back against a cupboard and laughing at some joke made by a girl not seen before by Susan�a dark foreign girl, Sophie's visitor. In an armchair Molly, one of the twins, lay curled, sucking her thumb
.
256 2 / DORIS LESSING
and watching the grownups. She must have some sickness, to be kept from school. The child's listless face, the dark circles under her eyes, hurt Susan: Molly was looking at the three grownups working and talking in exactly the same way Susan looked at the four through the kitchen window: she was remote, shut off from them.
But then, just as Susan imagined herself going in, picking up the little girl, and sitting in an armchair with her, stroking her probably heated forehead, Sophie did just that: she had been standing on one leg, the other knee flexed, its foot set against the wall. Now she let her foot in its ribbon-tied red shoe slide down the wall, and stood solid on two feet, clapping her hands before and behind her, and sang a couple of lines in German, so that the child lifted her heavy eyes at her and began to smile. Then she walked, or rather skipped, over to the child, swung her up, and let her fall into her lap at the same moment she sat herself. She said "Hopla! Hopla! Molly . . ." and began stroking the dark untidy young head that Molly laid on her shoulder for comfort.
Well. . . . Susan blinked the tears of farewell out of her eyes, and went quietly up the house to her bedroom. There she sat looking at the river through the trees. She felt at peace, but in a way that was new to her. She had no desire to move, to talk, to do anything at all. The devils that had haunted the house, the garden, were not there; but she knew it was because her soul was in Room 19 in Fred's Hotel; she was not really here at all. It was a sensation that should have been frightening: to sit at her own bedroom window, listening to Sophie's rich young voice sing German nursery songs to her child, listening to Mrs Parkes clatter and move below, and to know that all this had nothing to do with her: she was already out of it.
Later, she made herself go down and say she was home: it was unfair to be here unannounced. She took lunch with Mrs Parkes, Sophie, Sophie's Italian friend Maria, and her daughter Molly, and felt like a visitor.
A few days later, at bedtime, Matthew said: "Here's your five pounds," and pushed them over at her. Yet he must have known she had not been leaving the house at all.
She shook her head, gave it back to him, and said, in explanation, not in accusation: "As soon as you knew where I was, there was no point." He nodded, not looking at her. He was turned away from her: thinking, she knew, how best to handle this wife who terrified him.
He said: "I wasn't trying to . . . it's just that I was worried."
"Yes, I know."
"I must confess that I was beginning to wonder . . ."
"You thought that I had a lover?"
"Yes, I am afraid I did."
She knew that he wished she had. She sat wondering how to say: "For a year now I've been spending all my days in a very sordid hotel room. It's the place where I'm happy. In fact, without it I don't exist." She heard herself saying this, and understood how terrified he was that she might. So instead she said: "Well, perhaps you're not far wrong."
Probably Matthew would think the hotel proprietor lied: he would want to think so. "Well," he said, and she could hear his voice spring up, so to speak, with relief: "in that case I must confess I've got a bit of an affair on myself." She said, detached and interested: "Really? Who is she?" and saw Matthew's startled look because of this reaction.
.
To ROOM NINETEEN / 2563
"It's Phil. Phil Hunt."
She had known Phil Hunt well in the old unmarried days. She was thinking: No, she won't do, she's too neurotic and difficult. She's never been happy yet. Sophie's much better: Well Matthew will see that himself, as sensible as he is.
This line of thought went on in silence, while she said aloud: "It's no point in telling you about mine, because you don't know him." Quick, quick, invent, she thought. Remember how you invented all that nonsense for Miss Townsend.
She began slowly, careful not to contradict herself: "His name is Michael"� (.Michael What?)�"Michael Plant." (What a silly name!) "He's rather like you�in looks, I mean." And indeed, she could imagine herself being touched by no one but Matthew himself. "He's a publisher." (Really? Why?) "He's got a wife already and two children."
She brought out this fantasy, proud of herself.
Matthew said: "Are you two thinking of marrying?"
She said, before she could stop herself: "Good God, no.'"
She realised, if Matthew wanted to marry Phil Hunt, that this was too emphatic, but apparently it was all right, for his voice sounded relieved as he said: "It is a bit impossible to imagine oneself married to anyone else, isn't it?" With which he pulled her to him, so that her head lay on his shoulder. She turned her face into the dark of his flesh, and listened to the blood pounding through her ears saying: I am alone, I am alone, I am alone.
In the morning Susan lay in bed while he dressed. He had been thinking things out in the night, because now he said: "Susan, why don't we make a foursome?"
Of course, she said to herself, of course he would be bound to say that. If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let's make a foursome!
"Why not?" she said.
"We could all meet for lunch. I mean, it's ridiculous, you sneaking off to filthy hotels, and me staying late at the office, and all the lies everyone has to tell."
What on earth did I say his name was?�she panicked, then said: "I think it's a good idea, but Michael is away at the moment. When he comes back though�and I'm sure you two would like each other."
"He's away, is he? So that's why you've been . . ." Her husband put his hand to the knot of his tie in a gesture of male coquetry she would not before have associated with him; and he bent to kiss her cheek with the expression that goes with the words: Oh you naughty little puss! And she felt its answering look, naughty and coy, come onto her face.
Inside she was dissolving in horror at them both, at how far they had both sunk from honesty of emotion.
So now she was saddled with a lover, and he had a mistress! How ordinary, how reassuring, how jolly! And now they would make a foursome of it, and go about to theatres and restaurants. After all, the Rawlings could well afford that sort of thing, and presumably the publisher Michael Plant could afford to do himself and his mistress quite well. No, there was nothing to stop the four of them developing the most intricate relationship of civilised tolerance, all enveloped in a charming afterglow of autumnal passion. Perhaps they would all go off on holidays together? She had known people who did. Or
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256 4 / DORIS LESSING
perhaps Matthew would draw the line there? Why should he, though, if he was capable of talking about "foursomes" at all?
She lay in the empty bedroom, listening to the car drive off with Matthew in it, off to work. Then she heard the children clattering off to school to the accompaniment of Sophie's cheerfully ringing voice. She slid down into the hollow of the bed, for shelter against her own irrelevance. And she stretched out her hand to the hollow where her husband's body had lain, but found no comfort there: he was not her husband. She curled herself up in a small tight ball under the clothes: she could stay here all day, all week, indeed, all her life.
But in a few days she must produce Michael Plant, and�but how? She must presumably find some agreeable man prepared to impersonate a publisher called Michael Plant. And in return for which she would�what? Well, for one thing they would make love. The idea made her want to cry with sheer exhaustion. Oh no, she had finished with all that�the proof of it was that the words "make love," or even imagining it, trying hard to revive no more than the pleasures of sensuality, let alone affection, or love, made her want to run away and hide from the sheer effort of the thing. . . . Good Lord, why make love at all? Why make love with anyone? Or if you are going to make love, what does it matter who with? Why shouldn't she simply walk into the street, pick up a man and have a roaring sexual affair with him? Why not? Or even with Fred? What difference did it make?
But she had let herself in for it�an interminable stretch of time with a
lover, called Michael, as part of a gallant civilised foursome. Well, she could
not, and she would not.
She got up, dressed, went down to find Mrs Parkes, and asked her for the loan of a pound, since Matthew, she said, had forgotten to leave her money. She exchanged with Mrs Parkes variations on the theme that husbands are all the same, they don't think, and without saying a word to Sophie, whose voice could be heard upstairs from the telephone, walked to the underground, travelled to South Kensington, changed to the Inner Circle, got out at Paddington, and walked to Fred's Hotel. There she told Fred that she wasn't going on holiday after all, she needed the room. She would have to wait an hour, Fred said. She went to a busy tearoom-cum-restaurant around the corner, and sat watching the people flow in and out the door that kept swinging open and shut, watched them mingle and merge and separate, felt her being flow into them, into their movement. When the hour was up she left a half crown for her pot of tea, and left the place without looking back at it, just as she had left her house, the big, beautiful white house, without another look, but silently dedicating it to Sophie. She returned to Fred, received the key of No.
19, now free, and ascended the grimy stairs slowly, letting floor after floor fall away below her, keeping her eyes lifted, so that floor after floor descended jerkily to her level of vision, and fell away out of sight.
No. 19 was the same. She saw everything with an acute, narrow, checking glance: the cheap shine of the satin spread, which had been replaced carelessly after the two bodies had finished their convulsions under it; a trace of powder on the glass that topped the chest of drawers; an intense green shade in a fold of the curtain. She stood at the window, looking down, watching people pass and pass and pass until her mind went dark from the constant movement. Then she sat in the wicker chair, letting herself go slack. But she had to be
.
PHILIP LARKIN / 256 5
careful, because she did not want, today, to be surprised by Fred's knock at five o'clock.
The demons were not here. They had gone forever, because she was buying her freedom from them. She was slipping already into the dark fructifying dream that seemed to caress her inwardly, like the movement of her blood . . . but she had to think about Matthew first. Should she write a letter for the coroner? But what should she say? She would like to leave him with the look on his face she had seen this morning�banal, admittedly, but at least confidently healthy. Well, that was impossible, one did not look like that with a wife dead from suicide. But how to leave him believing she was dying because of a man� because of the fascinating publisher Michael Plant? Oh, how ridiculous! How absurd! How humiliating! But she decided not to trouble about it, simply not to think about the living. If he wanted to believe she had a lover, he would believe it. And he did want to believe it. Even when he had found out that there was no publisher in London called Michael Plant, he would think: Oh poor Susan, she was afraid to give me his real name.
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