46
PARTISAN REVIEW
though his new "girlfriends," as he was pleased to call us, found that
image entertaining if only partly credible, we truly admired him for
quite a different sort of valor.
What we admired was the courage and sporadic humor with
which (even amid the egocentric self-pity) he fought his way through
these alarming roller-coaster changes of mood, the pi unging into
loneliness and illness, the zooming up into deliciously irresistible sagas
of outrageous nonsense; the bullying contentiousness swivelling sud–
denly to the disarming repartee, and all as if it were happening to him
entirely outside of his control. Though he could also become an
intolerable crosspatch, we admired the courage (sometimes very dra–
matized courage) with which he undertook those gruesome drying-out
cures, and the effort he often generously made to break out of his
hopelessness in order to entertain us. Impossible as he could some–
times be, we all became fond of him.
As far as we could see, he made no attempt to work in the first two
years after Cissy's death. But the fantasy which in health and seclusion
had gone into novels in this period of illness and disorientation in a
strange country (for his homecoming to England had been unexpec–
tedly fraught with culture-shock) was either acted out in extravaganzas
of social behavior or found its way into letters, of which he must have
written hundreds. His fantasy was such that it was often quite difficult
to tell whether some story of exploits had not first been improvized and
then congealed into permanent credence by frequent repetition. These
stories would even sometimes be about one of us. We heard them with
indulgent amazement at the kaleidoscopic change a perfectly ordinary
event had undergone, emerging as dramatic or amusing with some–
times only a slender thread connecting it with the truth.
If
one knew
him well, one could winnow fact from fantasy in his letters but since
they read as plausibly as his novels it is impossible to imagine how a
stranger would ever be able to do so. Although some parts were lucid,
benevolent and even brilliantly reasoned, friends told me that they
more or less ignored other parts of them as alcoholic distortion, or, as I
did, "let it ride," interpreting their exaggerated accounts of people,
whether approving or scurrilous, as symptoms of his disorientation
and misery. Like Roger Wade, he seemed to be able to type equally
well, whether sober or drunk.
His legacy from childhood of Victorian values was only modified
by changes in his environment. They contributed to his deep distrust
and disbelief in the generosity of human nature; people are always out
to get something out of you and "toughness" is the only weapon
