The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, “No, I’m not going to do that.
Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed.
Try as I could – which wasn’t very hard – I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don’t think this is complacency; it’s more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.
The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God’s detritus.
There had been addition – and subtraction – in my life, but how much multiplication?
Jake, who is both fitter and more hedonistic than me, once told me what they say about martinis: “One’s perfect. Two’s too many. And three’s not enough.
So, you see, we’re a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It’s always like that in war. That’s why it’s up to your generation now.’ But I don’t feel part.
We didn’t do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath.
History is not just the lies of the victors; it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.
I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.
Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.
And he was not angry. But, before the pain set in, he had the time to be rueful. He had laid everything out, the best of himself, and it had not been enough. He had considered himself a bohemian, but she had proved too bohemian for him. And he had failed to understand her explanation of herself.
Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.
Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we’ve got – or haven’t got – is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step.
Cheer up! Death is round the corner.
Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.
To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.
Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable.
One of my sons writes books I can read, but cannot understand, and the other writes books I can understand, but cannot read.