THE HYPNOTIZED PEOPLE
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in relationship to India, which means I have lived incestuously
with myself, and am able to take Britain without false emotion and
incorrect reasoning.
To mention the materialistic aspects first. Welfare State
amenities are useless for my kind of writer. I thrive on adversity.
If
I felt completely safe I would perhaps stagnate as a writer,
because writing to me is fundamentally a rebellion against a sense
of ancient security, a security that ultimately destroys the need to
create, that lulls one into self-deception. I discovered, too, that I
have a deep-rooted prejudice against doctors and curative drugs
of any kind. I prefer to heal myself by my own devious ways and
even simulate sickness when I feel too healthy. I have even cul–
tivated my own nervous breakdown and gone away and quietly
had it and come through it by myself, with my sense of the comic
in this game with myself remaining intact.
If
nationalistic India is grim, nationalism is even more
deadly and smug in England. It produces pompous statesmen like
Mr. Harold Macmillan who leave Mr. Nehru far behind. Retain–
ing the H-bomb, in effect as a deterrent against the United States,
wanting to form a non-nuclear club so that France (and the
Europeans) may be blackmailed into not wanting the bomb-for
hyprocrisy of such a high order Britain still remains unequalled.
Sexual freedom: the kind that exists in London is only sexual
hysteria. It bores me stiff. And, again, I was startled to discover
the range of perversities here, including an obsession with necro–
phily shown by young writers, and one case of a man who
listened to a tape recording of the sighs made by a woman during
an organism. At the same time sexual prudery, with all its at–
tendant class inhibitions, on sale every week in at least three lots
at fivepence a time--I mean the women's magazines. I cannot,
therefore, like an Indian friend of mine, claim that the first time
I held an English woman I felt "the whole of the British Empire
crumbling in my arms." There seems to be no awareness of sex
at all in England, no awareness that sex, like all the essentially
simple things of life, is not sporadic, boisterous, haphazard, but
is a slow, repetitive, educative process to be savored anew.
Nor do cultural interests hold me in thrall. I find I read more
American or continental writers than British ones, for to be
