THE INTELLIGENTSIA
275
whose roots have sprouted in one's own unconscious self. To quarrel
with society means to quarrel with its projections in one's self, and
produces the classical neurotic split patterns. Oedipus situation and
inferiority complex, timidity and arrogance, over-compensation and
introversion are merely descriptive metaphors for deformations which
spring from basically the same root. An intelligentsia deprived of the
prop of an alliance with an ascending class must turn against itself and
develop that hot-house atmosphere, that climate of intellectual mas–
turbation and incest, which characterized it during the last decade.
And it must further develop that morbid attraction for the
pseudo-intellectual hangers-on whose primary motive is not the 'aspir–
ation to independent thought' but neurosis pure and simple, and who
crowd around the hot-house because the world outside is too cold for
them. They infiltrate, and gradually outnumber the legitimate inhab–
itants, adding to their disrepute, until, in periods of decadence, the
camp-followers gradually swallow up the army.
It
is a sad trans–
formation when social protest dissolves into a-social morbidity.
But even for the 'real' intelligentsia, neurosis is an almost inev–
itable correlate. Take sex for example. On the one hand we know all
about the anachronistic nature of our sex-regulating institutions, their
thwarting influence and the constant barrage of unhappiness they
shower on society. On the other hand, individual experiments of
'free companionship', marriages with mutual freedom, etc. etc., all
end in pitiful failure; the very term of 'free love' has already an
embarrassingly Edwardian taint. Reasonable arrangements in an un–
reasonable society cannot succeed. Tlie pressureo f the environment
(both from outside and from inside our conditioned selves) is enorm–
ous; under its distorting influence the natural becomes cramped, even
in
writing. You feel it even in such accomplished craftsmen as D. H.
Lawrence and Hemingway. You hear, when the critical situation
approaches, the author saying to himself: 'Damn it, it is an act of
nature and I am going to put it as easily and naturally as if the two
of them were having a meal.' And then you watch him, the author,
putting his sleeves up and setting himself to the task; sweat pours
down his brow, his eyes pop out of his head, the nib of
his
pen breaks
under the pressure of hi<> desperate efforts to be 'easy and natural
about it'. The trouble is, of course, that while he writes,
his
environ–
ment (i.e. the potential readers) have closed in around him; he feels
their stare and breathless expectancy, and feels paralysed by it. Hence
the cramped dialect of Lady Chatterley's lover and that preposterous
rabbit in the bag for which no bell would ever toll, in an otherwise
masterly novel.
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