Pp/1h/01/12
ON BEING ME
In the last few days, in between teaching and those things that life seems to but does not consist of; in odd moments, such as the ten minutes or so in Dalton periods when I wasn’t marking something or answering questions about how to begin an essay, I have been reading an autobiography. Autobiographies especially interest me, if they are honest and sincere, and auto biographies of poets have for me an irrestible fascination because poets are people who live and watch in prose at the same time. This one I happen to have found more absorbing than all others, partly because it is written by a man to whom some of the more flattering of my friends have compared me (for reasons which I now discover were possible not as flattering as I used to think), and partly because Stephen Spender, who wrote this book, once wrote me a letter which, arriving in a period of gloom, spurred me on to go through into the light beyond it; and perhaps most of all because he wrote a poem which I read and realised before I knew who wrote it, forx it was published anonymously, that it xxxxxxxx did what one always hopes poems will do – put into words which are a relief what one thinks and feels in that heart of one’s being that few people know the existence of.
An autobiography is a record of development and change, in circumstances, outlook, and ideas. We do not seem to be the same people at the age of 25 xxxxxxas we were at the age of 15. There are times when we can look back on something we have done and said, xand say to ourselves: ‘How silly, or how horrid, or how noble I must have been just then, I’m different ‘now.” And yet in one way we haven’t changed; we are still recognisably the same person as we were then, when we seem to have behaved in such a surprising manner. What reading this autobiography has reinforced in my mind is how a person may change completely in his outward manner of life, in his ideas and professed religion – and yet remain recognisably the same person. A good deal of this is of course physical and apparently trivial; people are what they are and who they are because of the way they wrinkle their nose or toss their head; they endear themselves to us, or annoy us, by their way of sitting orof entering and leaving a room. But these things are not as trivial as they seem; they are bound up with something deeper, something that makes us what we are, the fundamental self.
Stephen Spender was born and brought up a memxber of the moneyed English middle class, those whose private incomes make what for many of us is earning our living into a method of spending one’s time in an interesting manner, But, moved by the sufferingx he saw around him in the world, he became a Communist. Moved by what he saw during the Spanish Civil War, and what he discovered Communists did and believed, he ceased to be a Communist. During the war he seemed patriotic and xjoined the NFS; now, having in the 1330s seemed revolutionary and red, xxxxxxxxxxxxxx a younger poet and rather a wild man, he seems to have became pensive and gentle. He has been so many things; but what is significant is that whatever he may have seemed to be, he was always xxx Stephen Spender recognisably the same.
Some time before I came to Wennington I was almosxt a Communist; when I came here I was about two inches from the Catholic Church; I have been a large number of other things as well – but I have remained, so I am told, always recognisably and possibly annoyingly, me. These ideas that I held forth about, these things which I apparently believed and preached, were expeditions in expression, attempts to find some system, some philosophy, which expressed what I have xxxx always felt and really believed. I am myself, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I am trying to get somehere in life and have a fair idea where I want to get; these outlooks that I have seemed tochange as I change my clothes, were various roads that I tried, and abandoned when I found they were not leading where I wanted. What mattered wasx what I really was and felt; what matters about a man is not that he is a Communist or a Conservative or what you will, but what kind of a man he is, and what fundamental self he is trying to express in these baffling and contradictory forms.
This explains something that used to bother me. James Maxton, an ILP lead r whom I admired, and GBS who attacked the English middle clas outlook, were very friendly with Lady Astor, a conservative and very rich. Aneurin Bevan, whom by now you know something about, was for a time a welcome and friendly visitor to the house of Lord Beaverbrook, whose political opinions are those of the Daily Express. Stephen Spender, when a Communist poet, was a friend of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, aristocrats who live in a castle. One would think they would hate each other, but they don’t. They differ in outward ideas – but something joins them together, something more deep than labels and intellectual ideas, some sympathy and understanding, some quality of mind and heart that is more important than arguments, politics, and religious discussions. They like one another for what they are.
Now you are in one sense growing in a way that I am not. All the difference really is that being younger you change more quickly and more often than I do, and what you like or approve one day you may dislike the next. You change the clothes of your minds more often than I do; you can be, as I observe, a Communist one week and a mild liberal the next; you may go all out for art or science on week, and change the next. This doesn’t matter. It isn’t what you officially think that matters; it is what kind of person you are becoming, your fundamental self which is already expressing itself or trying to express itself in this apparently contradictory behaviour. That is why I am talking like this; because I think it is important to sit down at times and wonder what kind of person you are becoming, really deep down, compared with which the ideas you have at the moment don’t matter.
The public person, the one that is on view, is as you know full well, often not the real person; it isn’t the person you are when you think in the night or walk alone in the wood. When you come to have real friends, and possibly when you come to fall in love, it is that real person you will want someone else to know, it is the fundamental self you will want to find in those you love. Many broken marriages result from the fact that the marriage was between public persons, who didn’t take the trouble to find out what private persons lived and were real behind these masks. Even today, you will find appalling letters in magazines from girls who hate their boy friends to see them without their make-up on, and from men who don’t want to see their girl-friends without make-up on. Live in a world of make-believe like that and you will end in didaster.
It is thoughts like thee that have caused me to have a passionate lack of interest in some discussions about pxolitics and religion; and which have made me realise very strongly that there are certain things I believe and feel which go beyond and behind quarrels about ideas. Xxxx It is popular in Wennington and elsewhere to be agnostic, and not to have firm faith. At times I seem to encourage this. But I don’t encourage it really. I insist on facing facts as they are, not how some system thinks that they are, and on real knowledge, leading to a refusal to live by a system that produces false attitudes and makes people act in public and pose, rather than really live. But I have come to realise that I do believe firmly and irrevocably in certain things, which are bound up with my being me, so that if I don’T live by them, I feel that I have let myself down, and been something other than myself. I believe in living by affection, trust and understanding rather than by mistrust and self-seeking. This, of course, sounds sos terribly obvious as not to be worth saying. But it isn’t so obvious. I have a great faith in psychology, and think that what we learn from it is of great value in understanding one another. But when it is used as an argument for people developing their personalities and never thwarting themselves in the interests of others, I draw the line. The idea that life was meant to be a sort of game in which, in DHL’s phrase, people come up against one another and bounce, bounce like a ball, doesn’t appeal to me. It also seems to me to lead to disaster for the weak who are often more valuable than the strong; and it leads to living by mistrust and self-seeking. And that is how most people in the world now do live, guarding themselves against their neigbours lest they should be let down. If you regard someone with mistrust and lack of faith in their goodness, you will develop in them the very things that you fear. Trust in others may lead you to being let down, and make you sxuffer; but lack of trust leads to disaster in all relationships, public and private. The present haggling of the foreign minister’s deputies is about the best proof of this at the moment. No problem or situation is ever insoluble if approached xxxxxxxxx and considered by people in affection and trust with a real desire to find the truth and live by it. Communists and Catholics, Western democrats and natives of the barbarous bush can live together in peace and understanding if they would only realise it, and stop play-acting silly sentences in their several textbooks. That is what my belief means applied to public life – and you see that it is precisely what both sides are now denying; it isn’t obvious, but I think it’s true. It’s also true in private life.
Lastly I believe that the truth is great and will prevail. If one lives by the light of one’s real feelings and ideas, the pattern of life will prove and justify one right. The living isn’t easy, and one will be accused of denying the very truths one believes most, but ultimately one’s actions will seen and understood in the right light. Not heaven itself upon the past has power, and what we have done we have done, and the goodness of it will triumph. That is the meaning of the passage from the Wisdom of Solomon that I read earlier. It isn’t a question of ???????????????????? I don’t say that living like this is easy; it leads to suffering; but suffering if borne with this in mind isennobling; it is only when xxxxx we suffer without believing that the truth will prevail that suffering is destructive.
I have spoken like this because there seems to me to be some things amid the shifts and changes of life that are eternal, and time will have no effect on them It may be that God is the sum total of those things in men, the total of the real worth of everyone’s fundamental self – which is why for me the discovery of one’s own fundamental sllf and those of others is a sufficient justification for life. I don’t think God made a world and put us in it, xxxxxxxxxxxx and judgex us accordingly; I don’t believe in God in that way. But I do believe that the God who is the sum total of the goodness of all people’s fundamental selves is creating the world, now; the creation is still going on.
Those who love and are real, who live sincerely, are in a very real sense on God’s side. Those who hate and destroy are, in a very real sense, of the devil. God is the force of real creation, the energy behind affection and love, and behind all art; the devil is the force of hate and mistrust, the energy behind all destruction.
I think that God will win if a few people realise this and continue to believe it and live by it. But even if he loses I’m not going to cease to be me.