The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Read online

  The Journal

  Of

  Mary Hervey

  Russell

  By

  Storm Jameson

  For Do

  “Returning to darkness, the consoling mother,

  For the short winter sleep. . . .”

  Contents

  Preface

  First Book

  Second Book

  “La vie d’un homme est son image. A l’heure de mourir, nous nous refléterons dans le passé, et, penchés sur le miroir de nos actes, nos âmes reconnaîtront ce que nous sotnmes. Toute notre vie s’emploie à tracer de nous-mêmes un ineffaçable portrait. Le terrible, e’est qu’on ne le sait pas; on ne songe pas à se faire beau. On y songe en parlant de soi; on se flatte; mais notre terrible portrait, plus tard, ne nous flattera pas. On raconte sa vie et l'on se ment; mais notre vie ne mentira pas; elle racontera notre âme, qui se présentera devant Dieu dans sa posture habituelle.”

  GIDE, Journal 1889–1939

  Preface to the Second Edition

  The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell was written in 1943, and came out in 1945. I find it difficult now to say what, in this book which is not a novel, I was trying to do. I suppose, several things at once, inextricably entangled with each other, or awkwardly unrelated. I was not then, nor am I now, entirely clear what they were. The impulse to write about one’s own life is certainly ambiguous, never, even in a Goethe or a Rousseau, what it gives itself out to be. Vanity comes into it, but not, or often not, nearly so strongly as one would expect. There are many easier ways of feeding vanity. A more pressing motive must be to get rid of certain pestilent memories. All writing, however trivial or seemingly innocent, is evidence of a neurosis: the writing of autobiography signals the existence, possibly at a great depth, of more than one, and ineradicable.

  I have always known what, if I were given, as in the fairy tales, one strictly personal wish, I would ask for. I would ask to be able to send out a spectre of myself, in my place, to stand about at parties, or attend public meetings, or appear in any room where it will be expected of me to meet strangers or talk to several people. Think what such a ruse would save in effort, in humiliation, in demoralising regrets, in the disintegration of mind and spirit. Whenever I have spent any time in the company of a great many people, all of whom at least seem to be in lively possession of their wits, or with only one stranger not in need of help—which would save the situation by bringing reality into it—it takes me hours and hours, or a sleepless night, to cobble together the torn rags of my mind. The weakness of my character, or an experience commoner than I imagine? No matter. The truth remains that autobiography, or an autobiographical novel, is one way, not always satisfactory, of giving birth to a double who can take one’s place in the world, even though one cannot be wholly sure that other people see the same spectre as the one prudently sent out.

  I tried the experiment in three novels, Company Parade, Love in Winter, and None Turn Back. They were parts of what was to be a long series, but after the third book I lost interest and courage. The character who in all three played the role of spectre, a young woman called Mary Hervey Russell, had already been given a long novel to herself, That Was Yesterday — one of the few I have no real wish to erase. The same year I made an attempt to write straight autobiography, but less than half way through No Time Like The Present found myself driven to write: “The story of my life ends with the end of 1914. It is only worth telling in so far as it is general. (Engraving of the Port of Whitby. Family Group. Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1913.) The moment it becomes particular (as if I were to tell you how I married, had children, was happy, miserable, cursed, fortunate, scolded, praised) it ceases to be worth a pin to you. My beliefs and feelings on the other hand, will be worth nothing if they are not particular.” I spent the rest of a short book particularising them.

  After ten years of writing novels — using on them the whole of my intellect and a will which tries to ignore the mild contempt I feel for novel-writing as a profession—I tried again, this time with a little more confidence. Confidence, it is true, was by no means as strong as it pretended. But nothing, none of my slightly comic fears of being laughed at, no proper diffidence, were as persistently powerful as the impulse to write the book.

  One of the motives behind it, the most readily accessible — and the most decent: nothing, as we say in my part of the country, to be sorry for — had to do with time. The time when the book was written, and the generation to which I belong. Anyone born before 1914 carries the weight, enormous, of a completely vanished past, one when hope and belief in a future were natural. That world is gone. Nineveh is not more remote, more casually buried. The way its inhabitants spoke, thought, felt, their reasons for laughing and crying, for trusting one myth and rejecting another, are blurred in the memories even of stubborn survivors. The longing to discharge some part of the burden in words is very sharp.

  In 1943 the pressure was becoming intolerably heavy. Not only the lost pre-1914 past cried out to be rediscovered, but the present, steadily losing strength and its wits. If it is impious to neglect the past, it is still more impious and unkind to neglect a dying present. Which of us who lived through them keeps on his tongue the actual taste of those years of expecting war, of watching, helpless and angry, the darkness spreading across Europe from concentration camps and rooms set aside for torture, of the trickle, like water oozing through a wall, of refugees, of the shame and shamefaced relief when Czechoslovakia was abandoned? Even the smell of defeat reaching us from France, and the sour smell of bombed houses, is gone. And perhaps a good thing. At the time, in 1943, it only seemed imperative not to forget.

  Turning the pages now after fifteen years, I recognise other motives, more personal, but still perfectly avowable. Another sort of piety. To those who have no other voice except the one we lend them. The death in an air-raid of my young sister stirred the sediment of guilt we all, except a few, remarkably few, free spirits, carry about with us. I wanted to lengthen her short life, torn from her before she had come anywhere near the end of her passionate energy and quick sharp gaiety … None of these respectable motives is the final, the compelling one.

  I suppose that the real reason for writing an autobiography is to excavate oneself. But even this impulse is confused and double — not only the idea of self-discovery but, nagging, obsessive, the craving to understand what happened, the nature of the flaw that quickly became the immense yawning gap between what life seemed, to the child and the girl, to promise, and what it gave. When did the flaw begin, what caused it, whose fault?

  And, even in a simple life, there is no charted road to self- discovery. An uncounted number of by-paths offer easier, more attractive discoveries. In 1943 we had been shut up in our island for four years. A restless nostalgia for other countries filled me when I began writing, and I let myself be drawn back to Bordeaux, Paris at the time of the 1937 Exhibition, Royan, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, not caring much whether my memories of these places were likely to interest anyone, since I was seeking in them the person I know least well, myself… I know no more exquisite pleasure, no more nearly complete happiness, than that of being, for the first time, in a foreign city. No other experience, neither listening to music, nor the sudden recognition in a book, perhaps springing only in a single phrase, of some relevant secret—relevant to what?—gives me this pure pleasure. In some extraordinary way it has become correct, among certain young and youngish writers, to insist that foreign countries are a bore. This is as if a man without legs were to insist on the superiority of bath-chairs.

  Some things in this book which appear more personal than the memories of a tourist — though they are not — wer
e ignored or mistaken. Why insert in an account of the Paris I knew just before the war, a fragment of a play about Ulysses, supposed to have been written by a Frenchman? At the time I was writing, it seemed the simplest and most truthful way of saying all I felt about what is often now called the Baldwin Age (as though the name of one well-meaning and easily-tired man were an adequate label for choices and events which hurried on the death of an empire). Ulysses in my fable is Baldwin: Antinous, Penelope, are … But how conceited, how futile, to begin explaining what, if I had succeeded, would have explained itself. In the same way it mortifies me to explain now that the dialogue placed near the end of the book—the speakers two dead soldiers of the first Great War and two others from the second—was an attempt to make articulate an idea which at the time seemed of great importance. There were other threads woven with it — among them a not at all dispassionate account of the poets of the Thirties — but the important sense, the idea I tried desperately to squeeze into words, had to do with the terrifying and breathtaking strength of memories, and their power over us. Objects sunk in the past, and places — places especially — about which we think with too insistent a longing take possession of us in the way the sun takes possession of an icicle, changing, vaporising it, drawing it into itself. Death, perhaps, is memory in its pure state.

  No one, I think, heard what I tried to say.

  Like any other autobiography not justified by having great deeds or spiritual achievements to relate, Hervey Russell’s journal was an effort, fumbling, to undo emotional knots, the knots twisted by every kind of failure, (including the failure to keep other people from dying), and by intuitions which suddenly cut us to the bone, like the moment when I understood that if our age is remembered at all it will be as one when exile was not simply an event, something that happened to a great many men and women, some of whom survived it, but when it became the whole meaning of life. Suddenly I knew that there is nothing else, no closer meaning. Exile. Behind it, what? A void — filled with stones we have touched, streets we looked at in another life, reeds that in another life slashed the finger drawn across them, rotting timbers, images, a young half-effaced smile, the shadow on wet sand of a wave, voices.

  More often than not, the voice which speaks in us when we are off guard, or trying loyally to be honest, is that of an ancestor. All my ancestors have contributed something to the violence and jeering laughter I have spent a lifetime struggling to control, and to the self-hatred it is impossible — since we see ourselves from the inside — not to feel. The image we have of ourselves is as ludicrously one-sided as that visible, from the outside, to an enemy — or a friend. Other people see what we do. We know — sometimes—why we did it. Both images are incomplete, and grotesquely distorted. When I try to catch up with the self flying from me—try, as we say, to be honest—ami doing anything more than offering to pay something for failures due to fear, vanity, coldness, egotism, self-ignorance.

  In the end, is anything in a life better worth recording than one or two fragments, those the current will carry with it to the last—the sound, heard at night, of the Whitby bell-buoy, or the curve of a rocky coast-line turning north? I don’t know.

  S.J.

  January 1961.

  First Book

  Bordeaux, June 14.

  Four o’clock in the afternoon, on the Quai de Richelieu, waiting to cross the Pont de Pierre — the heat is scarcely endurable, a transparent mask pressed on eyes and head; the traffic strangles itself in noise, heat, fumes of oil and petrol. Suddenly, with all this, slipping through some tear in the web, a strong scent of lime blossom. Yes, there is a tree in full bloom. This country cannot help pressing a joy into your hand even at an unlikely moment.

  *

  I look everywhere, feeling certain that my mother must have sat in this garden in the Place Gambetta. It is exactly the place she looked for in a foreign town, and enjoyed with every sense. Folding her sunshade, she would sit on one of these iron chairs made to imitate cane — chestnut-trees grow thickly at this side, offering the shade needed by her fine northern skin — and look at this magnolia-tree in bloom, at the grass, freshly green round the flower-beds, and the minuscule stream and lake. At the same time, crown and deep reason of her joy, she had within sight and hearing the restless life of Bordeaux, noisy trams, the café at the corner of the Cours de Tourny, shops with their motionless sun-blinds.

  Silent, eagerness itself behind her reserve, she looked in every port for some new thing. That double window of hats and blouses: she certainly stared into it a dozen times before going inside to point, with a mute desperate arrogance, at handkerchiefs. Perhaps in the end she bought other things: in those days she was still a dandy, loving delicate fashionable clothes — and forced to contrive in order to have them. Yes, yes, she must have come here. Then why am I not sure which was her chosen place? She chose one and returned to it day after day, as long as her husband’s ship stayed in port — this side of a public garden rather than that, this café and this table in it, this street of shops. Why cannot I be sure of her in the Place Gambetta?

  Since she was here, I suppose about 1890, the names of some of the streets have been changed. Not that that will disconcert her. She rarely troubled to learn the name of a street, expecting the cab-men to know by instinct that she wished to be set down in the best shopping street. Or if she were going back to the ship, that they would understand the words spoken in her strongest voice — “Go to the Prince Line dock.” I suppose they knew the habits of English captains’ wives.

  *

  In the late dusk when I went back to my hotel I looked at things for her, in the hope that, seeing them through my eyes, she would recollect herself and come forward. Turning out of the Cours du Jardin Publique — now Cours de Verdun, but she would prefer the more modest name — into a narrow street, I saw with startled joy the Monument des Girondins profiled white against the sky. Later, from the window of my bedroom on a corner of the Place des Quinconces, I watched the lights blazing outside the theatre — they should be gas-lamps — and along the quays, those on the farther side of the Garonne reflected in the past, in her present. A dialogue between a piano and a violin began in the large café at a corner — endlessly continued, using up what little air, what little darkness, there was.

  I was sleepless — not only because of the breathless heat, but I feared to overlook the one thing that was keeping her and meaning to give her up in its own time. And Bordeaux scarcely slept. The café was awake until long after midnight, and at three o’clock men were sweeping the streets, and talking, between it and the river. Very early, almost before dawn, the lamps still burning along the quays, but as if abolished already by the still absent light, a single star, immense, appeared over the harbour. I watched a little colour come into the sky — as stealthy as that which unbelievably came back after she died, only to her cheeks, not her far too suave mouth — above the shadow formed of trees and houses crowding the other bank of the river. In a few minutes there was a full chorus of birds in the Place des Quinconces, the star dwindled to a dot, the street-lamps went out on the quays, flicked off by a thumb. Stretching itself, the light pushed the sky away on all sides, and just after four the sun sprang from the Garonne directly into my room. I ought now to have closed the shutters, but I was too eager. Abroad, I am very much the captain’s wife in my curiosity: which is at its most alert in towns: it seizes its chance to sleep when I take it to the country.

  Bordeaux was making signs and I could not read them. The conversation went on outside, growing more lively and complicated — a plume of factory smoke in the clear sky; cranes leaning over the unruffled brightness of the river; oddly cut down by the sun, the two lighthouse-columns; the breeze, only audible where it crossed the branches of a tree; the traffic thickening with every minute; a girl and a young man laughing together on their way to work; men in washed-out blouses: above them all, an incessant darting and crossing of noisy shuttles, the swifts.

  By seven o’cloc
k the heat was frightful, the Garonne had lost its colour — a breath of mist clouded the glass. I closed both shutters, but the heat had settled itself firmly in the room; it clung to the heavy gilt overmantel and the stains on rose-flowered carpet and wall-paper. I felt ill, and rang for coffee to pull me together.

  When the chambermaid came in, she looked at me and said, “Il fait chaud a Bordeaux.” At once, as though the words, opening a door in one of the deeper caves of my mind, had released a memory living now with all the energy of an intuition, one I could not refuse, since it helped itself to every sense as well as every fibre of intellect, I was sure that my mother had stayed here. Sometimes, if the ship were lying a long way down the river from a town she liked, she would leave it and stay in an hotel. This was exactly the type of modest middle-class hotel she would choose. Had she, too, been unable to sleep for the heat and told me about it in one of the rare moments when she spoke of her voyages? Repeating words she had understood, but was not willing to reply to except by one of her brief smiles and an involuntarily haughty glance — all too English, the chambermaid must have thought.

  Very well, if she stayed here, she went out after breakfast — defying the heat — and straight to the Allées de Tourny. Not only is it just round the corner but it is the widest and most opulent of Bordeaux’s streets.

  I went there, and looked in every shop for just that object, a flower or a hat, which in any foreign street sums up its foreignness. There was a moment when I thought I had her. She stepped forward, reflected in the glass of the window. . . . No one. Myself. . . . I am an idiot — when she meant seriously to buy anything, she looked for it in this side-street of more modest shops. In front of the dark narrow glove-shop I felt for the first time certain that the young woman I never knew had come here: it was a very old shop. I went in and began looking at gloves; I chose a pair in white doe-skin for my youngest sister: she, they say, who is most like my mother as a girl.