PARTISAN REVIEW
understood by the great English novelists. On one occasion, we went
to visit some friends of my uncle's at Tonbridge Wells. At this party
there happened to be two young people newly married whose feeling
for e;;tch other was so right, so touching, so vibrant, that it was a
presence like music in the room. In the presence of their happiness,
I felt the assurance that my own adolescent problems would one day
melt away, liquefy in the fusion of a love like theirs where the most
sensitive considerateness was inclosed within an underlying passion.
The presence of these two young people filled my aunt with a fury
which she could not conceal.
As
soon as she left the hotel she burst
out: "How disgusting, how selfish, how horrible. Fancy insulting
Alfred by introducing him to those people. Of course, I'm used to
every kind of horror after what I went through at the hospital in
the war, but Alfred ought to be spared," and so on. To my mind to
learn the innocence of those young people was to return to the Garden
of Eden: and here she was a horrible perverted British angel with
a ferocious bark, making it her business that now that humanity had
been shut out no pairs of lovers should slip back by a hidden gate
into the Garden.
My aunt often used to take me into another garden-her own–
and there, under the pretext of gardening she would spend a solid
morning lecturing me on the wickedness of writers with the exception
of Robert Louis Stevenson who was supposed to have been one of
of her admirers. Stevenson, she would explain with a sigh, w.as
ill he had to go aw:ay to a South Sea island, so he could be excused.
"Don't choose the
easy
way of
Art
and Bohemianism. Choose the
difficult
way, as your uncle has done. Of course, if he'd liked he
could have been a great cellist, a great poet, or a great painter, and
won the empty admiration of the mob, as you .are tempted to do,
and married some feather-brained actress, as you will do if we aren't
all very careful." I must say my aunt's unbridled hatred of the young,
the beautiful and the happy, spiced heavily with her rather unac–
countable passion for The East, and dark references to her G.S.
(meaning Great Sorrow), were enjoyable. She was great at Garden
Scenes and early morning Bedroom Scenes, when she would summon
me to her room and after explaining to me that she was in bed be–
cause the snares which surrounded me had kept her awake all night
she would tell me her Night Thoughts on the swamps I w.as likely
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