He began to talk, turning his eyes away from me and out toward the water and the marsh, and I had to strain and stand very still to hear what he said. The sun had risen higher and was driving back the shadows of the trees across the grass where we stood, and the water was likewise advancing, and so we were held between them, in one of those processes of almost imperceptible change that occur in the landscape here, whereby you feel you are participating in an act of becoming. The stillness mounts and mounts, and the air becomes more and more charged with intensity, and finally the sea begins to give back its light like a shield. I cannot reproduce L’s words for you, Jeffers: I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to retain an accurate record of that deep kind of talk in any case, and I am determined not to falsify anything, even for the sake of a narrative. He talked about his weariness with society and his continual need to escape it, and the problem this posed in determining any kind of home for himself. As a younger man his mild homelessness hadn’t troubled him, he said, and in later life he had watched the people of his acquaintance create homes that were like plaster casts of their own wealth, with humans inside. Those structures sometimes exploded and sometimes merely suffocated their occupants – but personally, he could never be anywhere without sooner or later wanting to go somewhere else. The one place that was real to him was his studio in New York, the same one he had had all the way through. He had built a second studio at his country house but he couldn’t work there: it was like being in a museum of himself. He had recently been forced to sell that house, he told me, along with his house in the city, which left him back where he had been at the beginning, with just the original studio. Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings. He knew plenty of gluttons for living who gained and lost and gained again and lost again in such quick succession that they probably never even noticed that none of it lasted; and he knew, too, enough examples of the rot that could be concealed within an outward-seeming lastingness. What interested him was his suspicion not that he might have missed out on something, but that he had failed entirely to see something else, something that had ultimately to do with reality and with a definition of reality as a place where he himself did not exist.
He had been forced to go back and think again about his childhood in light of this, he said, though he had long since realised that the particular details of his life were so much clutter, from which the essence merely needed to be extracted and the specifics thrown away. Yet there was something there, he felt certain, that he had overlooked – something to do with death, which had been a prominent feature of his early life. Right from the start, he had taken from death the impulse to live: even the deaths of the animals in the slaughterhouse, which might have horrified another child, gave him time and again a sensation that was like a note being struck, a confirmation of his own being. He supposed his lack of horror and emotion could be attributed to the deadening that results from repeated exposure to something, but in that case he had been dead almost from the beginning. No, in the striking of that note there was something else, a feeling of equality with all things that was also an ability to survive them. He himself could not be fatally touched, or so he had always believed: he could not be destroyed, even as he was witness to the destruction. He had taken his survival as freedom, and run away with it.
I told him that Tony had also had early experience of death, and had responded the opposite way, by staying exactly where he was forever after. I had sometimes chafed at this rootedness, which I took at first for caution or conservatism, but it had shown me its resilience enough times for me to treat it with respect. I had great trouble respecting anything, I said, and instinctively rebelled against what was presented to me as immovable or fixed. In the period of difficulty before I met Tony, I told him, I was sent to see a psychoanalyst who drew a map of my character on a piece of paper. He thought he could sum it up, on a crumpled piece of A4! It was his gimmick, and I could tell he was proud of it. The psychoanalyst’s map showed a central pillar of what appeared to be objective reality, around which numerous arrows shot off into space and then met and crossed over to form an endlessly conflicting circle. Half these arrows were obeying the impulse to rebel, the other half the impulse to comply, the suggestion being that as soon as I was brought into compliance with something I rebelled against it, and having rebelled, felt a great urge to comply again – round and round in a pointless dance all of my own! He thought his explanation was sheer genius, but at that time I was possessed only by the desire to harm myself: it had me by the throat like a dog. And so I stopped seeing the psychoanalyst, because I could see he wasn’t going to get that dog off me. It grieved me to prove him right about rebellion, though, or so I supposed he had the satisfaction of thinking.
Months later I met the psychoanalyst in the street, I
