insanity lobby. Perhaps the only thing which made me survive this period of thinking about Julian was the complete absence of hope. A grain of hope present at that time would have killed me.
The psyche, desperate for its survival, discovers deep things. How little most so-called psychologists seem to know about its shifts and its burrowings. At some point in a black vision I apprehended the future. I saw this book, which I have written, I saw my dearest friend P. L., I saw myself a new man, altered out of recognition. I saw beyond and beyond. The book had to come into being because of Julian, and because of the book Julian had to be. It was not, though indeed time matters little to the unconscious mind, that the book was the frame which she came to fill, nor was she the frame which the book filled. She somehow was and is the book, the story of herself. This is her deification and incidentally her immortality. It is my gift to her and my final possession of her. From this embrace she can never now escape. But, and this is not to belittle my darling, I saw much more than this in the black glass of the future. And this is, if I can express it, the deepest reason why I accepted the unjust judgment of the court.
I felt that every single thing that was happening to me was not just predestined but somehow actively at the moment of its occurrence thought by a divine power which held me in its talons. At times I felt almost as if I were holding my breath in case some tiny movement of my own should interfere with the course of this divine possession. Though in the same thought I also knew that I could not now, by the most frenzied struggling, ever escape my fate. The courtroom and the judge and the condemnation for life were mere shadows of a much huger and more real drama of which I was the hero and the victim. Human love is the gateway to all knowledge, as Plato understood. And through the door that Julian opened my being passed into another world.
About these things, my dear fellow, we in our seclusion have often spoken, in our times of quietness together, with words whose meaning glowed out of an ineffable understanding, like flames upon dark water. So friends, so spirits, ultimately converse. It was for this that Plato, in his wisdom, forbade the artists. Socrates wrote nothing, neither did Christ. Almost all speech which is not so illumined is a deformation of the truth. And yet: I am writing these words and others whom I do not know will read them. With and by this paradox I have lived, dear friend, in our sequestered peace. Perhaps it will always be for some an unavoidable paradox, but one which is only truly lived when it is also a martyrdom.
I do not know whether I shall see the «outside world» again. (A curious phrase. The world is, in reality, all outside, all inside.) The question is of no interest to me. A truthful vision finds the fullness of reality everywhere and the whole extended universe in a little room. That old brick wall which we have so often contemplated together, my dear friend and teacher: how could I find words to express its glowing beauty, lovelier and more sublime than the beauty of hills and waterfalls and unfolding flowers? These are indeed vulgarisms, commonplaces. What we have seen together is a beauty and a glory beyond words, the world transfigured, found. It was this, which in the bliss of quietness I now enjoy, which I glimpsed prefigured in madness in the water-colour blue eyes of Julian Baffin. She images it for me still in my dreams, as the icons of childhood still haunt the visions of the ageing sage. May it be always so, for nothing is lost, and even at the end we are ever at the beginning.
And I found you, my friend, the crown of my quest. Could you not have existed, could you not have been waiting for me in this monastery which we have inhabited together? That is impossible, my dear. Were you there by accident? No, no, I should have had to invent you, and by the power which you yourself bestow I should have been able to. Now indeed I can see my life as a quest and an ascesis, but lost until the end in ignorance and dark. I was seeking you, I was seeking him, and the knowledge beyond all persons which has no name at all. So I sought you long and in sorrow, and in the end you consoled me for my lifelong deprivation of you by suffering with me. And the suffering became joy.
So we live on together here in our quiet monastery, as we are pleased to call it. And so I come to the end of this book. I do not know if I shall write another. You have taught me to live in the present and to forswear the fruitless anxious pain which binds to past and to future our miserable local arc of the great wheel of desire. Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusion, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points. You who are a musician have shown me this, in the wordless ultimate regions of your art, where form and substance hover upon the brink of silence, and where articulate forms negate themselves and vanish into ecstasy. Whether words can travel that path, through truth, absurdity, simplicity, to silence I do not know, nor what that path can be like. I may write again. Or may at last abjure what you have made me see to be but a rough magic.
This book has been in some way the story of my life. But it has also been, I hope, an honest tale, a simple love story. And I would not wish it to seem at the end that I have, in my own sequestered happiness, somehow forgotten the real being of those who have figured as my characters. I will mention two. Priscilla. May I never in my thought knit up the precise and random detail of her wretchedness so as to forget that her death was not a necessity. And Julian. I do not, my darling girl, however passionately and intensely my thought has worked upon your being, really imagine that I invented you. Eternally you escape my embrace. Art cannot assimilate you nor thought digest you. I do not now know, or want to know, anything about your life. For me, you have gone into the dark. Yet elsewhere I realize, and I meditate upon this knowledge, that you laugh, you cry, you read books and cook meals and yawn and lie perhaps in someone's arms. This knowledge too may I never deny, and may I never forget how in the humble hard time-ridden reality of my life I loved you. That love remains, Julian, not diminished though changing, a love with a very clear and a very faithful memory. It causes me on the whole remarkably little pain. Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.
Postscripts By Dramatis Personae
Christian Hartbourne
FRANCIS
It is my pleasure and privilege to add a critical epilogue to this unusual «autobiography.» I do so gladly as homage to my old friend, still languishing in «durance vile,» and I do so dutifully as a service to the cause of science. This remarkable piece of self-analysis from a talented pen deserves a thoroughly detailed commentary, for which, the publisher tells me, there is unfortunately no space in this volume. I intend however to publish in due course a lengthy book, upon which I have now been at work for some time, about the case of Bradley Pearson, and in this work the «autobiography,» a prime piece of evidence in this cause celebre, will of course be fully treated. What follows here is merely a digest of a few concise points.
It is also of course clear from the most casual scrutiny that our subject is homosexual. He has the typical narcissism of the breed. (Consider his description of himself at the beginning of the tale.) His masochism (of which more below), his eager professions of virility, his confessed lack of identity, his attitude (already mentioned) to women, the evidence of his parental relationship patterns, all these point in the same direction. And indeed his rather surprising «unconvincingness» at the trial may be laid at the same door. He did not believe in himself and so could hardly expect the judge and jury to lend him credence. Bradley Pearson connected this absence of any sense of self with his mode of existence as an artist. But here, as so many of the uninstructed, he mistook cause and symptom. Most artists are homosexual. This tender appreciative tribe, bereft of sturdy self-assertion as either man or woman, is best enabled thus to body forth the world and give it houseroom in their souls.
That «Bradley Pearson's Story» is the tale of a man in love with a woman need cause little embarrassment to our theory. Bradley himself gives us all the clues that we are in need of. When he first (in the story) catches sight of his young lady he mistakes her for a boy. He falls in love with her when he imagines her as a man. He achieves sexual intercourse with her when she has dressed up as a prince. (And who incidentally is Bradley Pearson's favourite author? The greatest homosexual of them all. What sends Bradley Pearson's fantasy soaring as high as the Post Office Tower? The idea of boys pretending to be girls pretending to be boys!) Further: who in reality is this girl? (Father-fixated of course and taking Bradley as a father-substitute, no mystery there.) The daughter of Bradley's protege, rival, idol, gadfly, friend, enemy, alter ego, Arnold Baffin. Science proclaims that this cannot be the work of accident. And science is right.
When I say that Bradley Pearson was in love with Arnold Baffin I would not be understood to be making any crude statement. We are dealing with the psychology of a complicated and refined son. Bradley's more simple, more human, affection bore perhaps upon another object. But Arnold symbolized the focus of passion and the goal of love
