The Babylonian Codex Part 1

The Babylonian Codex.

by C.S. Graham.

FOREWORD.

When A Grief Observed A Grief Observed was first published under the pseudonym of N. W. Clerk it was given me by a friend, and I read it with great interest and considerable distance. I was in the middle of my own marriage, with three young children, and although I felt great sympathy for C. S. Lewis in his grief over the death of his wife, at that time it was so far from my own experience that I was not deeply moved. was first published under the pseudonym of N. W. Clerk it was given me by a friend, and I read it with great interest and considerable distance. I was in the middle of my own marriage, with three young children, and although I felt great sympathy for C. S. Lewis in his grief over the death of his wife, at that time it was so far from my own experience that I was not deeply moved.

Many years later, after the death of my husband, another friend sent me A Grief Observed A Grief Observed and I read it, expecting to be far more immediately involved than I had on the first reading. Parts of the book touched me deeply, but on the whole my experience of grief and Lewis's were very different. For one thing, when C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman, she was in the hospital. He knew that he was marrying a woman who was dying of cancer. And even though there was the unexpected remission, and some good years of reprieve, his experience of marriage was only a taste, compared to my own marriage of forty years. He had been invited to the great feast of marriage and the banquet was rudely s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him before he had done more than sample the hors d'oeuvres. and I read it, expecting to be far more immediately involved than I had on the first reading. Parts of the book touched me deeply, but on the whole my experience of grief and Lewis's were very different. For one thing, when C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman, she was in the hospital. He knew that he was marrying a woman who was dying of cancer. And even though there was the unexpected remission, and some good years of reprieve, his experience of marriage was only a taste, compared to my own marriage of forty years. He had been invited to the great feast of marriage and the banquet was rudely s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him before he had done more than sample the hors d'oeuvres.

And to Lewis that sudden deprivation brought about a brief loss of faith. "Where is G.o.d?...Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face."

The death of a spouse after a long and fulfilling marriage is quite a different thing. Perhaps I have never felt more closely the strength of G.o.d's presence than I did during the months of my husband's dying and after his death. It did not wipe away the grief. The death of a beloved is an amputation. But when two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other. When C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman, it was a pretty certain expectation that she would die first, unless there was an unexpected accident. He moved into marriage with an imminent expectation of death, in an extraordinary witness of love and courage and personal sacrifice. Whereas a death which occurs after a full marriage and a reasonable life span is part of the whole amazing business of being born and loving and living and dying.

Reading A Grief Observed A Grief Observed during my own grief made me understand that each experience of grief is unique. There are always certain basic similarities: Lewis mentions the strange feeling of fear, the needing to swallow, the forgetfulness. Perhaps all believing people feel, like Lewis, a horror of those who say of any tragedy, "Thy will be done," as though a G.o.d of love never wills anything but good for us creatures. He shows impatience with those who try to pretend that death is unimportant for the believer, an impatience which most of us feel, no matter how strong our faith. And C. S. Lewis and I share, too, the fear of the loss of memory. No photograph can truly recall the beloved's smile. Occasionally, a glimpse of someone walking down the street, someone alive, moving, in action, will hit with a pang of genuine recollection. But our memories, precious though they are, still are like sieves, and the memories inevitably leak through. during my own grief made me understand that each experience of grief is unique. There are always certain basic similarities: Lewis mentions the strange feeling of fear, the needing to swallow, the forgetfulness. Perhaps all believing people feel, like Lewis, a horror of those who say of any tragedy, "Thy will be done," as though a G.o.d of love never wills anything but good for us creatures. He shows impatience with those who try to pretend that death is unimportant for the believer, an impatience which most of us feel, no matter how strong our faith. And C. S. Lewis and I share, too, the fear of the loss of memory. No photograph can truly recall the beloved's smile. Occasionally, a glimpse of someone walking down the street, someone alive, moving, in action, will hit with a pang of genuine recollection. But our memories, precious though they are, still are like sieves, and the memories inevitably leak through.

Like Lewis, I, too, kept a journal, continuing a habit started when I was eight. It is all right to wallow in one's journal; it is a way of getting rid of self-pity and self-indulgence and self-centeredness. What we work out in our journals we don't take out on family and friends. I am grateful to Lewis for the honesty of his journal of grief, because it makes quite clear that the human being is allowed to grieve, that it is normal, it is right to grieve, and the Christian is not denied this natural response to loss. And Lewis asks questions that we all ask: where do those we love go when they die?

Lewis writes that "I have always been able to pray for the dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H. [as he calls Joy Davidman in this journal], I halt." And this feeling I well understand. The beloved is so much a part of ourselves that we do not have the perspective of distance. How do we pray for what is part of own heart?

We don't have any pat answers. The church is still pre-Copernican in its att.i.tude toward death. The medieval picture of heaven and h.e.l.l hasn't been replaced with anything more realistic, or more loving. Perhaps for those who are convinced that only Christians of their own way of thinking are saved and will go to heaven, the old ideas are still adequate. But for most of us, who see a G.o.d of a much wider and greater love than that of the tribal G.o.d who only cares for his own little group, more is needed. And that more is a leap of faith, an a.s.surance that that which has been created with love is not going to be abandoned. Love does not create and then annihilate. But where Joy Davidman is now, or where my husband is, no priest, no minister, no theologian can put into the limited terms of provable fact. "Don't talk to me about the consolations of religion," Lewis writes, "or I shall suspect that you do not understand."

For the true consolations of religion are not rosy and cozy, but comforting in the true meaning of that word: com-fort: with strength. Strength to go on living, and to trust that whatever Joy needs, or anyone we love who has died needs, is being taken care of by that Love which began it all. Lewis rightly rejects those who piously tell him that Joy is happy now, that she is at peace. We do not know what happens after death, but I suspect that all of us still have a great deal to learn, and that learning is not necessarily easy. Jung said that there is no coming to life without pain, and that may well be true of what happens to us after death. The important thing is that we do not know. It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love.

I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at G.o.d with angry violence. This is a part of healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C. S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul's growth.

So Lewis shares his own growth and his own insights. "Bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases-like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase, too." Yes, that is the calling of either husband or wife after the other has died.

I have pictures of my husband in my study, in my bedroom, now, after his death, as I had them around while he was alive, but they are icons, not idols; tiny flashes of reminders, not things in themselves, and, as Lewis says, sometimes a block rather than a help to the memory. "All reality is iconoclastic," he writes. "The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness.... And this, not an image ormemory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead."

And that is more important than visitations from the dead, though Lewis discusses that possibility of these. In the end, what s.h.i.+nes through the last pages of his journal of grief is an affirmation of love, his love for Joy and hers for him, and that love is in the context of G.o.d's love.

No easy or sentimental comforts are offered, but the ultimate purpose of G.o.d's love for all of us human creatures is love. Reading A Grief Observed A Grief Observed is to share not only in C. S. Lewis's grief but in his understanding of love, and that is richness indeed. is to share not only in C. S. Lewis's grief but in his understanding of love, and that is richness indeed.

Madeleine L'EngleCrosswicks, August 1988

INTRODUCTION.

A Grief Observed is not an ordinary book. In a sense it is not a book at all; it is, rather, the pa.s.sionate result of a brave man turning to face his agony and examine it in order that he might further understand what is required of us in living this life in which we have to expect the pain and sorrow of the loss of those whom we love. It is true to say that very few men could have written this book, and even truer to say that even fewer men would have written this book even if they could, fewer still would have published it even if they had written it. is not an ordinary book. In a sense it is not a book at all; it is, rather, the pa.s.sionate result of a brave man turning to face his agony and examine it in order that he might further understand what is required of us in living this life in which we have to expect the pain and sorrow of the loss of those whom we love. It is true to say that very few men could have written this book, and even truer to say that even fewer men would have written this book even if they could, fewer still would have published it even if they had written it.

My stepfather, C. S. Lewis, had written before on the topic of pain (The Problem of Pain, 1940), and pain was not an experience with which he was unfamiliar. He had met grief as a child: he lost his mother when he was nine years old. He had grieved for friends lost to him over the years, some lost in battle during the First World War, others to sickness. 1940), and pain was not an experience with which he was unfamiliar. He had met grief as a child: he lost his mother when he was nine years old. He had grieved for friends lost to him over the years, some lost in battle during the First World War, others to sickness.

He had written also about the great poets and their songs of love, but somehow neither his learning nor his experiences had ever prepared him for the combination of both the great love and the great loss which is its counterpoint; the soaring joy which is the finding and winning of the mate whom G.o.d has prepared for us; and the crus.h.i.+ng blow, the loss, which is Satan's corruption of that great gift of loving and being loved.

In referring to this book in conversation, one often tends to leave out, either inadvertently or from laziness, the indefinite article at the beginning of the t.i.tle. This we must not do, for the t.i.tle completely and thoroughly describes what this book is, and thus expresses very accurately its real value. Anything ent.i.tled "Grief Observed" would have to be so general and nonspecific as to be academic in its approach and thus of little use to anyone approaching or experiencing bereavement.

This book, on the other hand, is a stark recounting of one man's studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.

What makes A Grief Observed A Grief Observed even more remarkable is that the author was an exceptional man, and the woman whom he mourns, an exceptional woman. Both of them were writers, both of them were academically talented, both were committed Christians, but here the similarities end. It fascinates me how G.o.d sometimes brings people together who are so far apart, in so many ways, and merges them into that spiritual h.o.m.ogeneity which is marriage. even more remarkable is that the author was an exceptional man, and the woman whom he mourns, an exceptional woman. Both of them were writers, both of them were academically talented, both were committed Christians, but here the similarities end. It fascinates me how G.o.d sometimes brings people together who are so far apart, in so many ways, and merges them into that spiritual h.o.m.ogeneity which is marriage.

Jack (C. S. Lewis) was a man whose extraordinary scholars.h.i.+p and intellectual ability isolated him from much of mankind. There were few people among his peers who could match him in debate or discussion, and those who could almost inevitably found themselves drawn to one another in a small, tight-knit group which became known as "The Inklings," and which has left us with a legacy of literature. J.R.R. Tolkien, John Wain, Roger Lancelyn-Green, and Neville Coghill were among those who frequented these informal gatherings.

Helen Joy Gresham (nee Davidman), the "H." referred to in this book, was perhaps the only woman whom Jack ever met who was his intellectual equal and also as well-read and widely educated as he was himself. They shared another common factor: they were both possessed of total recall. Jack never forgot anything he had read, and neither did she.

Jack's upbringing was a mixture of middle-cla.s.s Irish (he came from Belfast, where his father was a police-court solicitor) and English, set in the very beginnings of the twentieth century-a time when the concepts of personal honour, total commitment to one's given word, and the general principles of chivalry and good manners were still drummed into the young British male with rather more intensity than was any other form of religious observance. The writing of E. Nesbit, Sir Walter Scott, and perhaps Rudyard Kipling were the exemplars of the standards with which Jack was indoctrinated as a young man.

My mother, on the other hand, could not have come from a background more divergent from his. The daughter of two lower-middle-cla.s.s Jewish second-generation immigrants, her father of Ukrainian, her mother of Polish origins, she was born and brought up in the Bronx in New York City. The only striking similarities to be found in the comparison of their early developments were that they were both possessed of truly amazing intelligence combined with academic talent and eidetic memory. They both came to Christ via the long and difficult road which leads from Atheism, to Agnosticism, and thence by way of Theism finally to Christianity, and they both enjoyed remarkable success in their university student careers. Jack's was interrupted by his duty to his country in the First World War, and Mother's by political activism and marriage.

Much has been written, both fictional and factual (sometimes one masquerading as the other) concerning their lives and their meeting and marriage, but the most important part of the story pertaining to this book is simply a recognition of the great love that grew between them until it was an almost visible incandescence. They seemed to walk together within a glow of their own making.

To understand even a little of the agony which this book contains, and the courage it demonstrates, we must first acknowledge that love between them. As a child, I watched these two remarkable people come together, first as friends, then, in an unusual progression, as husband and wife, and finally as lovers. I was part of the friends.h.i.+p; I was an adjunct to the marriage, but I stood aside from the love. By that I do not mean that I was in any way deliberately excluded, but rather that their love was something of which I could not, and should not, be a part.

Even then in my early teen years I stood aside and watched the love grow between these two, and was able to be happy for them. It was a happiness tinged with both sadness and fear, for I knew, as did both Mother and Jack, that this, the best of times, was to be brief and was to end in sorrow.

I had yet to learn that all human relations.h.i.+ps end in pain-it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love. I had the resilience of youth upon which to fall when Mother died; for me there would be other loves to find and no doubt in time to lose or be lost by. But for Jack this was the end of so much which life had for so long denied him and then briefly held out to him like a barren promise. For Jack there were none of the hopes (however dimly I might see them) of bright sunlit meadows and life-light and laughter. I had Jack to lean upon, poor Jack only had me.

I have always wanted the opportunity to explain one small thing that is in this book and which displays a misunderstanding. Jack refers to the fact that if he mentioned Mother, I would always seem to be embarra.s.sed as if he had said something obscene. He did not understand, which was very unusual for him. I was fourteen when Mother died and the product of almost seven years of British Preparatory School indoctrination. The lesson I was most strongly taught throughout that time was that the most shameful thing that could happen to me would be to be reduced to tears in public. British boys don't cry. But I knew that if Jack talked to me about Mother, I would weep uncontrollably and, worse still, so would he. This was the source of my embarra.s.sment. It took me almost thirty years to learn how to cry without feeling ashamed.

This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.

When Jack was racked with the emotional pain of his bereavement, he also suffered the mental anguish resulting from three years of living in constant fear, the physical agony of osteoporosis and other ailments, and the sheer exhaustion of spending those last few weeks in constant caring for his dying wife. His mind stretched to some unimaginable tension far beyond anything a lesser man could bear; he turned to writing down his thoughts and his reactions to them, in order to try to make some sense of the whirling chaos that was a.s.saulting his mind. At the time that he was writing them, he did not intend that these effusions were to be published, but on reading through them some time later, he felt that they might well be of some help to others who were similarly afflicted with the turmoil of thought and feeling which grief forces upon us. This book was first published under the pseudonym of N. W. Clerk. In its stark honesty and unadorned simplicity the book has a power which is rare: it is the power of unabashed truth.

To fully appreciate the depths of his grief I think it is important to understand a little more of the circ.u.mstances of Jack and Mother's initial meeting and relations.h.i.+p. My mother and father (novelist W. L. Gresham) were both highly intelligent and talented people and in their marriage there were many conflicts and difficulties. Mother was brought up an atheist, and became a communist. Her native intelligence did not allow her to be deceived for long by that hollow philosophy, and (by this time, married to my father) she found herself searching for something less posturing and more real.

Encountering amid her reading of a wide variety of authors the work of the British writer C. S. Lewis, she became aware that beneath the fragile and very human veneer of the organized churches of the world, there lies a truth so real and so pristine that all of man's concocted philosophical posings tumble into ruin beside it. She became aware also that here was a mind of hitherto unparalleled clarity. As all new believers do, she had questions, and so she wrote to him. Jack noticed her letters at once, for they too signalled a remarkable mind, and a penfriends.h.i.+p soon developed.

In 1952 Mother was working on a book about the Ten Commandments (Smoke on the Mountain: Westminster Press, 1953), and while convalescing from a serious illness journeyed to England determined to discuss the book with C. S. Lewis. His friends.h.i.+p and advice were unstinting as were those of his bother, W. H. Lewis, an historian and himself a writer of no mean ability. Westminster Press, 1953), and while convalescing from a serious illness journeyed to England determined to discuss the book with C. S. Lewis. His friends.h.i.+p and advice were unstinting as were those of his bother, W. H. Lewis, an historian and himself a writer of no mean ability.

On her return to America, Mother (now a complete Anglophile), discovered that her marriage to my father was over, and following the divorce she fled to England with myself and my brother. We lived for a while in London, and although letters were exchanged, Jack was not a visitor to our home, he rarely came to London, which was a city he was not fond of, and Mother and he were merely intellectual friends at this time, though in common with many other people we were the recipients of considerable financial a.s.sistance from his special charity fund.

Mother found London a depressing place to live and wanted to be near her circle of friends in Oxford, which included Jack, his brother "Warnie," and such people as Kay and Austin Farrer. I think it is too simple and too supposit.i.tious to say that her only motive for moving was to be near Jack, but it was certainly a contributory factor.

Our short time in Headington, just outside Oxford, seemed to be the beginning of so much that could have been wonderful. Our home was visited frequently by good friends and was the scene of many lively intellectual debates. It was also during this time that the relations.h.i.+p between Jack and Mother began to redefine itself.

I think that Jack resisted the deep emotional attachment to my mother which he began to be aware of, largely because it was something which he mistakenly thought was alien to his nature. Their friends.h.i.+p on a platonic level was convenient and caused no ripples on the placid surface of his existence. However, he was forced not merely to inward awareness of his love for her, but also to public acknowledgement of it by the sudden realisation that he was about to lose her.

It almost seems cruel that her death was delayed long enough for him to grow to love her so completely that she filled his world as the greatest gift that G.o.d had ever given him, and then she died and left him alone in a place that her presence in his life had created for him.

What many of us discover in this outpouring of anguish is that we know exactly what he is talking about. Those of us who have walked this same path, or are walking it as we read this book, find that we are not, after all, as alone as we thought.

C. S. Lewis, the writer of so much that is so clear and so right, the thinker whose acuity of mind and clarity of expression enabled us to understand so much, this strong and determined Christian, he too fell headlong into the vortex of whirling thoughts and feelings and dizzily groped for support and guidance deep in the dark chasm of grief. How I wish that he had been blessed with just such a book as this. If we find no comfort in the world around us, and no solace when we cry to G.o.d, if it does nothing else for us, at least this book will help us to face our grief, and to "misunderstand a little less completely."

For further reading, I recommend Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times by George Sayer (Harper & Row, 1988; Crossway Books) as the best available biography of C. S. Lewis; Lyle Dorsett's biography of my mother, by George Sayer (Harper & Row, 1988; Crossway Books) as the best available biography of C. S. Lewis; Lyle Dorsett's biography of my mother, And G.o.d Came In And G.o.d Came In (Macmillan, 1983); and also, somewhat immodestly perhaps, for an inside viewpoint of our family life, my own book, (Macmillan, 1983); and also, somewhat immodestly perhaps, for an inside viewpoint of our family life, my own book, Lenten Lands Lenten Lands (Macmillan, 1988; HarperSanFrancisco, 1994). (Macmillan, 1988; HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

Douglas H. Gresham

CHAPTER ONE.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to a.s.sure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called 'resources.' People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

On the rebound one pa.s.ses into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it-that disgusts me. And even while I'm doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have subst.i.tuted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank G.o.d the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it.

For H. wasn't like that at all. Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. Pa.s.sion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she p.r.i.c.ked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure-and there's another red-hot jab-of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as H.'s lover.

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job-where the machine seems to run on much as usual-I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions-something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he'd rather lie there s.h.i.+vering than get up and find one. It's easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.

Meanwhile, where is G.o.d? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with grat.i.tude and praise, you will be-or so it feels-welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: 'Why hast thou forsaken me?' I know. Does that make it easier to understand?

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in G.o.d. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no G.o.d after all,' but 'So this is what G.o.d's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'

Our elders submitted and said, 'Thy will be done.' How often had bitter resentment been stifled through sheer terror and an act of love-yes, in every sense, an act-put on to hide the operation?

Of course it's easy enough to say that G.o.d seems absent at our greatest need because He is is absent-non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it quite frankly, we don't ask for Him? absent-non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it quite frankly, we don't ask for Him?

One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a subst.i.tute for s.e.x. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it-solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If G.o.d were a subst.i.tute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who'd bother about subst.i.tutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn't what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another-quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat-or breathe.

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same a.s.surance about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. 'Them as asks don't get.' I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that a.s.surance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.

At any rate I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I would. She knew something of those circles.

Keeping promises to the dead, or to anyone else, is very well. But I begin to see that 'respect for the wishes of the dead' is a trap. Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle 'H. wouldn't have liked that.' This is unfair to the others. I should soon be using 'what H. would have liked' as an instrument of domestic tyranny, with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own.

I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarra.s.sment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood.

Or are the boys right? What would H. herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn't a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all?-no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That's how I'd defend it to H. But ten to one she'd see a hole in the defence.

It isn't only the boys either. An odd byproduct of my loss is that I'm aware of being an embarra.s.sment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don't. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.

To some I'm worse than an embarra.s.sment. I am a death's head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking, 'One or other of us must some day be as he is now.'

At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy-our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once-like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he's had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house. But don't let me deceive myself. This body would become important to me again, and pretty quickly, if I thought there was anything wrong with it.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue.

Yet H. herself, dying of it, and well knowing the fact, said that she had lost a great deal of her old horror at it. When the reality came, the name and the idea were in some degree disarmed. And up to a point I very nearly understood. This is important. One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call 'the thing itself.' But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone. How long, how tranquilly, how nouris.h.i.+ngly, we talked together that last night!

And yet, not quite together. There's a limit to the 'one flesh.' You can't really share someone else's weakness, or fear or pain. What you feel may be bad. It might conceivably be as bad as what the other felt, though I should distrust anyone who claimed that it was. But it would still be quite different. When I speak of fear, I mean the merely animal fear, the recoil of the organism from its destruction; the smothery feeling; the sense of being a rat in a trap. It can't be transferred. The mind can sympathize; the body, less. In one way the bodies of lovers can do it least. All their love pa.s.sages have trained them to have, not identical, but complementary, correlative, even opposite, feelings about one another.

We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic-regulation ('You, Madam, to the right-you, Sir, to the left') is just the beginning of the separation which is death itself.

And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of H. and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But presumably all lovers are. She once said to me, 'Even if we both died at exactly the same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just as much a separation as the one you're so afraid of.' Of course she didn't know, know, any more than I do. But she was near death; near enough to make a good shot. She used to quote 'Alone into the Alone.' She said it felt like that. And how immensely improbable that it should be otherwise! Time and s.p.a.ce and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn't the conversation stop? any more than I do. But she was near death; near enough to make a good shot. She used to quote 'Alone into the Alone.' She said it felt like that. And how immensely improbable that it should be otherwise! Time and s.p.a.ce and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn't the conversation stop?

Unless you a.s.sume that some other means of communication-utterly different, yet doing the same work-would be immediately subst.i.tuted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones? Is G.o.d a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup? Even nature isn't such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice.

It is hard to have patience with people who say, 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and s.p.a.ces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

I have no photograph of her that's any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions-waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking-that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice-that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child.

CHAPTER TWO.

For the first time I have looked back and read these notes. They appall me. From the way I've been talking anyone would think that H.'s death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself. Her point of view seems to have dropped out of sight. Have I forgotten the moment of bitterness when she cried out, 'And there was so much to live for'? Happiness had not come to her early in life. A thousand years of it would not have made her blasee. blasee. Her palate for all the joys of sense and intellect and spirit was fresh and unspoiled. Nothing would have been wasted on her. She liked more things and liked them more than anyone I have known. A n.o.ble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food, and almost instantly the food was s.n.a.t.c.hed away. Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf. By our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile. Her palate for all the joys of sense and intellect and spirit was fresh and unspoiled. Nothing would have been wasted on her. She liked more things and liked them more than anyone I have known. A n.o.ble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food, and almost instantly the food was s.n.a.t.c.hed away. Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf. By our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile.

I must think more about H. and less about myself.

Yes, that sounds very well. But there's a snag. I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts-real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fict.i.tious (or I hope I shan't). But won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant-in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh G.o.d, G.o.d, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its sh.e.l.l if it is now doomed to crawl back-to be sucked back-into it?

Today I had to meet a man I haven't seen for ten years. And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well-how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the contrary. I kept on thinking, 'Yes, of course, of course. I'd forgotten that he thought that-or disliked this, or knew so-and-so-or jerked his head back that way.' I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonis.h.i.+ngly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That it is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes-like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night-little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes-ten seconds-of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.

What pitiable cant to say, 'She will live forever in my memory!' Live? Live? That is exactly what she won't do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What's left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word That is exactly what she won't do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What's left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. dead. It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest. It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest.