56
PARTISAN REVIEW
stories with a great deal of feeling. But there were also more suicide
attempts, after which he would seem shamefaced and almost contented,
and a very strange hallucinatory incident which frightened "Auntie"
into calling us for help, when he appeared to be re-enacting his
original La Jolla suicide attempt.
It
is curious that in
The Long
Goodbye
his attitude to suicide is far tougher than that which we all
felt towards these suicidal crises. There Philip Marlowe (his good self)
says to Roger Wade (his bad self): "nobody can stop you from killing
yourself if you really want to. I realize that. So do you."
By now his cries for help had become intensified, as I was the last
surviving shuttle-service friend upon whom he totally depended,
though he made lengthy nocturnal telephone calls to Jocelyn in Paris,
who always raised his spirits. My own anxious concern that his
survival seemed so problematical, and my distress about his evident
loneliness became the target for his endeavor to project his illusory
views about the form he thought my life should take. His great need for
nursing companionship would lead him blindly
to
ignore my devotion
to my family and to music, and he would sometimes demand more time
than I could spare from work and family, and test out my staying
power as a friend by expressing views reflecting a divorce from reality
which was beyond the powers of compassion to resolve. These weeks
became the peak of his battle towards grasping the reality of Cissy 's
death and the unreality of his "play-acting" attempts (as he later
described them) to substitute a fantasized "romantic whirl of enjoy–
ment of London life" for the natural process of allowing his complex
grief
to
work itself out without either projection or denial. He later
expressed his own sense of the truth of this explanation of his Carlton
Hill crisis to Stephen, when giving him a far too generous account of
my role at that time and an equally generous expression of reciprocal
solicitude for my health. "I am willing to stake anything to get
Natasha well. After all she alone gave me the impetus and motive for
curing myself" (not true-we
all
did something towards it). "I
shouldn't have cared to do it for myself. She alone had the infinite
patience to see me go through crisis after crisis without once coming
even near to giving me up as a bad job. The doctors could cure me
temporarily, but they could not give me back a soul. Only Natasha
could be steadfast enough to do thatl" Actually I have since wondered
sometimes whether patience
was
the most salutary help to offer, for
sometimes 1 felt forced to leave the room, if for instance he expressed
hostility to children (there argument was not possible, for his feeling of
that deprivation in his past life was the saddest part of his illness). I had
