The Limits of Love by Frederic Raphael

Author:Frederic Raphael [Raphael, Frederic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-09-30T05:00:00+00:00

2

There were nine months before he went up to Cambridge and by that time he was determined to have written something that would be accepted. Day after day, when he got home from the paper, he sat in his room and tried to write. He stared down from his bedroom window at the TRADESMEN ONLY sign at the back entrance of the flats and waited for something to come. He waited emptily for something to come. When it did, it was always someone else’s. His imitation was of a high order (had not the Cambridge scholarship examiners been especially delighted with his prose?) but nothing issued from himself. His ignorance of life seemed irremediable. He sat in the centrally heated flat and stared down at the concrete rind of road which bounded Monmouth Court. He tried to write but had no language natural to him. His life was nothing to write about, for it was but an empty stare into the January day, a desolate passivity; nothing grew out of him, nothing grew in him, he himself did not grow. He was like a stake to which pretty flowers were tied; when people admired the full and confident blooms they failed to perceive the arid stick at the heart of the arrangement. Paul was girded with prizes awarded him for his cultivated exterior, but when he looked into the heart of the matter, there was a dead centre. He could not express himself, for he had no access to a language in which he could give himself expression. His language then was an obscure sullenness, the only blemish, Nat and Alma thought, on their charming son; his only real language was one of moods, of sulks, of hollow incommunicable despair which could issue only in trivial tantrums. When he thought of life, of earning an income, he was filled with nausea. He thought of going through life with the perpetual dirty secret, the inexpressible dark sweat of himself always having to be hidden, washed out like those tell-tale stains that ever reappeared. He had no substantial unity: his body was the suitcase in which he carried the pretty props through which his living would be achieved. He tossed off the physical in favour of a pure and acceptable mentality. When the mind functioned, the self vanished. All intellect functioned in a purely spiritual world. He looked forward to Cambridge as a place where only intelligence would count. When he thought now of being a writer, he thought inevitably of fame, of publication, of acceptance. He no longer thought of writing as a response to the problem of Jewishness, for he believed that his academic life would be all his life and that if he developed his mentality sufficiently, the question of Jewishness would never again present itself. He wanted to be a writer now because of the joys which might arise from seeing his name as having done something rather than as being something. It was for no very different reason that Nat so prided himself on the Dr before his name.

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