“It’s absurd,” I said, “to make it a question of looks—”
“But it makes me furious!” she said in that suddenly strong clear voice. “These despisers. These grubby clever men with their grubby genius. The heroes of the weekly reviews. Their impotent little obscenities. I’ve tried to find, in knowing them and reading them, a great, real contempt, something as fierce and clean as fire, a nightmare of contempt, so that from the pillars of burning smoke we can build beings of better shape than ourselves. I’ve read, watched, listened, wanting to know. …”
I said things, too. But who am I? For instance, I said: “You don’t allow to all men one common failing, which shows particularly when the men are satirical writers: they must always write about women rather in the spirit of uncleanminded undergraduates. You should be more tolerant, Mrs. Storm. …”
We talked of vulgarity. She had once read a book of mine, and I complained bitterly of my vulgarity, saying, you know, that one didn’t begin by being vulgar, “but one began,” I suggested, “by being just bumptious. The meeker you are, the more bumptious you probably are inside, but that does not harm. Not that I was ever really meek. And at the beginning there’s a tremendous humility in you to yourself. You can’t have any achievement without that humility, and yet you lose it later on because you find out all the wrong things about yourself. People are only too ready to show you the wrong things about yourself. They like doing it. They seem to think there is something wrong with conceit. It irritates fools, because they think it is unwarranted. How do they know if it is unwarranted, and what does it matter if it is or not? Or it irritates them because they too once had in themselves a humility to themselves, and then allowed it to be, according to that Bottomley-Kipling-John-Bull gospel, ‘knocked out of them.’ And so if a young man is not very strong he lets the mischievous fools take his conceit away from him, he turns his back on his real conceit, which is himself—he has it ‘knocked out of him,’ just as any taste for music was knocked out of him by his public-school—and goes out for one of the spurious conceits which are called ‘being as others are.’ Then he has put his feet on the endless and never-ending road of vulgarity, and there are very few turnings. …”
She sat in the deep wicker armchair, which had come with me from Chelsea six years before but would travel nevermore. It creaked madly as she sat down, and she glanced at it in surprise. “Of course,” she said, “it’s contagious. …”
“You are quite wrong,” I said. “The real sticky part seems to come from inside one. And there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of defeat—a writer, I mean, who must earn his living by writing, and so must always write. For it is more difficult for a second-rate writer not to be vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. It uncoils from somewhere inside you, like a nasty, sticky snake. So slick it is, too. So helpful, often. And when you see it for the first time you stare at it transfixed, and you say, ‘But I am not vulgar!’ But you get used to it later on. Very few people notice it. Most people like it. And, of course, it pays.”
“The golden snake,” she said. “It’s quite a good snake. It is silly to despise money.”
“Writers,” I said, and, I think, said rightly, “love money, they adore money! Successful writers, I mean. The ones who have become venerable, the ones who have made great names by writing about the irony of life and the incapabilities of wealth, the writers of the people for the people. They worship money, they hoard money. One and all despise rich people, and are perfectly beastly about the upper-classes. You should ask any publisher about the business capacity of any great author who writes about the Irony of Life. To really intelligent men of the middle-classes, living in sin does not seem nearly so wicked as living in luxurious sin. I only know one successful author who has the decency to get drunk with his easily-earned money. One should keep a sense of proportion about money, and you can only do that by throwing it away. The Jews, for instance—”
“Jews,” she said, “are charming. The rich ones, I mean, and preferably the fat shiny ones. They understand luxury and elegance, and elegance is an enchantment that the skin loves. But nowadays only Jews have an idea of enchantment, only Jews and Americans. Furs, jewels, spacious rooms, trellised terraces, all lovely baubles, silks of China, myrrh, frankincense, and motorcars. The Jews are disenchanted, but at least they’re brave enough to insist on having all the enchantments of disenchantment. Luxury, ease, splendour, spaciousness. You’ll say they’re florid. Well, they may be, they are, but they’re also the last towers of chivalry. Mr. Chesterton goes running after them shouting about beer and the Pope, but if you’re going to leave chivalry to beer-drinkers and the Pope, God help enchantment. You’ll say that the Americans’ indulgent admiration for their wives almost borders on the gaga, but they fight for it very really, they don’t just talk and indulge. They fight