Therefore Choose (6 page)

“The thing is,” he said, “I don't really like sick people. Illness puts me off, rather.”

“Illness?”

“I'm afraid of it, I think.”

“Of what?”

“I'm not sure. That I'll catch their disease, or become like them.”

“Physical illness or mental?”

“Both.”

“That's why you will become a doctor? To cure people, to make them likable?”

“Probably something to do with the way I was brought up. To be sick in our family was a bad thing.”

“A moral failing?”

“Something disapproved of, something to be punished, not soothed.”

“It's rather touching.”

“What?”

“I like that in you. That you can be honest with yourself. The English are not so good at that.”

“I don't know.”

“Many people would feel the disdain, become doctors, and never know why they were dissatisfied. Make a choice to spend their lives with people they didn't like.”

“I'm hoping it's just lack of experience, and that I'll get over it.”

“It's good that you can tell me,” she said.

Anna got up from her armchair, came to sit next to George on the sofa, close to him, and gave his arm a hug.

“In some way that I can't understand,” George said, “I think the only really worthwhile thing to do in life is to write a novel.”

“Learn to write well, or not to write at all.”

“What?”

“A quotation I like. For an editor, good to have in your pocket. It's from your English poet, Dryden.”

“I don't know …”

“Why not do what you desire? Then you could be properly inside it.”

“I don't know whether I'd be good enough. My stories don't get very far.”

“You think there are people who say, ‘I want to write,' then just do it?”

“Well.”

“You suffer from the genius theory. You think certain special people are chosen, and they take dictation from the gods. This theory is childish. What is necessary is doing it, writing, for hours every day. You think you could be a carpenter without learning your trade, learning how to make each kind of joint?”

He felt sheepish, but she was smiling, leaning forward in her enthusiasm.

“I want to write a novel about a race of people who are far better able to understand each other than we are,” he said.

“A utopia?”

“Not really. I think perhaps the people are hermaphrodites. With sexual characteristics of both male and female.”

“This sounds naughty.”

“No, that's not it. Or only a bit. More it's that sometimes they take on the character of the male and sometimes of the female, so that when they have a sexual relationship there would be difference, but across this difference they would understand each other better.”

“Androgynes. They know what it was like to be that other one.”

“With the experience of being both like and unlike the other one, they could be closer, less antagonistic.”

“Are you antagonistic to me?”

“Perhaps you have some of this ability already in you.”

“You call me romantic!” she said.

“Trouble is, I can't see how it would work as a novel. I haven't the first idea what the plot would be.”

“But you think about it?”

“Do you think that means something? That the idea keeps coming back to me? Because that's why I'd be better off being a doctor: do something useful instead of dreaming. D'you know what?”

“What?”

“The dream. That's the centre. It's Coleridge's idea really. That's what a story is, or a poem. A kind of dream. But rather than taking you further from reality into anxieties and peculiar things, which dreams do when you are asleep, it brings you closer to it.”

Anna leant towards him, excited. “Is this Coleridge's idea, or yours?”

“A bit of each perhaps. It was Shakespeare's idea too. The centre of it is, well the centre for me, is that the writer isn't trying to make people think some particular thing, like the Church does, or like propaganda. It's the opposite. The writer gives you some circumstances, and enables you to think what you would think in that situation.”

“August Wilhelm Schlegel in the last century. He wrote about the idea of literature as a dream, but not in such an interesting way.”

“What did he say?”

“I think he said that literature is a waking dream, and that you submit yourself to it.”

“That's too passive,” said George. “The dream is a meeting point; it's a partnership between the author and the reader.”

“That's a very important idea. I've not heard it put like that.”

Anna got up and started pacing.

“It's important,” she said. “Perhaps you should join our magazine.”

George had one of his notebooks with him, one without its front section taken up with lecture notes. He went to fetch it, and gave it to her. She opened it, turned the pages, and read for ten minutes.

“I tell you my talent: to get inside a novel or a short story or an article. Understand it from the point of view of the writer. I get inside people's thoughts, become part of them.”

“Become part of them?”

“See what they're doing, in a deep way. That is how I am a good editor. I can't do it for everyone. I can do it for you.”

“You think they are interesting? Are they any good?”

“That's not what I'm saying. More important. I understand them. You know what I want to be? I want to be a reader.”

“But everyone reads.”

“Many hundreds of people want to be writers. Most never make it. Those who are good live in terrible anguish and disappointment. Worse than trying to be an actor.”

What Anna was saying was too close. George found it difficult to listen to her. She hadn't said whether she liked what she had read in his notebook. He tried to concentrate on what she was saying. He felt something uncomfortable growing in him, an urge to say something.

“I have something better,” she said. “In any case, better for me. I look out for those who have something distinctive. I help them as an editor, or I tell others, like a teacher or reviewer.”

“A literature professor.”

“A woman? Maybe in America. Not as things are here. Don't you see what's going on around you? At present I continue as an editor. I'm lucky to be able to do that.”

George's urge became too strong. “What I've written,” he said. “Do you think it's any good?”

“It has a spark,” she said. “That's good. Almost essential. What you've written are notes. They're for you, not for someone else. I need to see something more finished, more connected.”

George was disappointed that she didn't say it was good, but he felt he should not pursue it. He thought about the stories he had written. He didn't have anything finished with him. Even if he did, he didn't know whether he would be able to show it to her.

“Why don't you want to write for yourself?” George asked.

“I want to take part in what writers have thought. In each book, they spend much time, some spend many years. I don't have that dedication to get right down and concentrate on some particular thing. I want to take part in that thinking, the process and results of all that work. The benefit of that exploration, but get to it more quickly. I'm impatient.”

“Is that enough?”

“I went to Moscow for a year. I told you. To study the psychology of Lev Vygotsky. He believed that the mind is made up of the words and thoughts of people you've known, people you've read. As you read, as you choose who to read, you create your mind. You choose thoughts, ideas, ways of thinking that become yourself. You don't just put pieces of knowledge in a container, like paper clips in a jar.”

George remembered a blue glass bowl of paper clips on Anna's desk at her office.

“I can believe the mind is made of thoughts,” he said.

“More radical. A person's mind can be thoughts that others have elaborated. People you know, people you read. They pass thoughts to you.”

George watched Anna, intense, eyes looking at him, eager, passing on thoughts. She hadn't liked what he had written.

“You take thoughts on,” she said. “You add something. You pass them to someone else. We aren't as individual as we think.”

“But it is you who takes up the thoughts?”

“Let's say only a few have the ability and determination to work on a piece of writing long enough — something new — for it to be distinctive. Let's say minds are for becoming part of. Isn't that what we want to do? Isn't becoming part of another person what you want to do with your androgynes?”

What George thought was that, with her aristocratic background, Anna knew secretly that she would not be able to bear her writing to be less than distinguished. She would find it too humiliating to be unrecognized. If she found what she wrote was not so remarkable, it would undermine her. She must already have tried writing, he thought, and found that it was not so good. She couldn't bear mediocrity, but neither could she ever admit to not being able to bear it. Had she built a wall round this issue, part of her centre of holding back? At least I've not given up, he thought. Maybe my jottings aren't much good. Part of the trouble with the Germans: they're blunt. They won't say something's good if it's not. Maybe that's a virtue.

Then she surprised him. “To say the truth,” she said, “I used to want to be a writer. When I was fifteen or sixteen. I wanted to be very good indeed. I thought, What if I'm not? I made a choice. I'm an editor. Not just a good editor, an editor who is very good indeed.”

Almost exactly what he had imagined. Had he seen into her mind?

“My real talent,” she said. “Do you want to know my real talent?”

“Absolutely.”

“I've just discovered it. My real talent is being happy. Being here with you.”

How could anyone say anything so lovely? George wanted to reply. He felt guilty at having felt petty when she hadn't praised his writing. He wanted to reply properly. He knew that anything he said would be feeble. He looked at her.

“That's sweet of you to say that.”

“Don't be silly.”

Next day George opened his notebook. A page had been slipped in, written by Anna. “I know you were disappointed when I did not say that what I read was good,” she wrote. “I had not read the draft of your short story that starts at the back, for which you have to turn the notebook round, of a medical student who nearly knocks over an old man, which contrasts this man and a body in the dissection room. It's not finished, of course, but it has more than a spark. It has a flame. If you would like, I have some suggestions.” George bit the side of his hand, deeply touched that she knew what he'd been feeling, moved that he was in her mind.

Sometimes George and Anna would walk by the River Spree and talk about Germany and Europe.

“I don't know what the country is doing,” said Anna. “Last year we must fear the Spanish. Now in the newspaper it says we must fear the Russians.”

“I don't understand why people think the only alternative to Hitler is Communism,” said George. “What about the Reichstag? What about voting?”

“We have voting,” said Anna. “Everyone votes for Hitler. He says it is an advanced form of democracy.”

“What we are told, in England, is that after the war, Germany had to be discouraged from nationalism because Germans become too easily nationalist, and that's a danger.”

“Is that what you're told?”

“And that was the reason why the size of the army had to be limited after the war. Now the army's occupied the Rhineland, and it's huge, and everyone in Germany approves of that, while at the same time they say they only want peace. Why would one want a huge army for peace?”

“As an Englisher, what you see is exactly what you feared? German nationalism, German militarism.”

“I'm sorry. Am I being offensive?”

“Sweden and Denmark criticize us,” she said. “Now you and France. Who will be next?”

George had upset her.

“We're terrified for Judit,” she said. “You can tell from her name, she's Jewish. We have talked about moving the magazine to Amsterdam.”

“You decided that wouldn't work?”

“We talk about not having enough money, and we don't. But that's not the real concern. We have to be very careful what we print. Each of us reads everything to try to make sure. We don't quote Heine; he's one of the writers we don't mention.”

“Your magazine's not political at all.”

“In these days everything is political, just putting out a magazine at all. I hate Hitler's assault on literature. Sometimes I think he's just a common little man. At other times I think they wanted to establish their government, so that everyone would know where they stand. Things are more moderate now.”