Guilt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Henry and June (1986)

  I lied and lied more carefully, more calculatingly than June, with all the strength of my mind. I wish I could tell you how and why. . . . Anyway, I did it all without endangering our love: it was a battle of wits in which I have taken the utmost delight. And do you know what? Allendy has beaten us, Allendy has found the truth, he has analyzed all of it right, has detected the lies, has sailed (I won’t say blithely) through all my tortuousness, and finally proved today again the truth of those damned ‘fundamental patterns’ which explain the behavior of all human beings. I tell you this: I would never let June go to him, for June would simply cease to exist, since June is all ramifications of neuroses. It would be a crime to explain her away. . . . And tomorrow I go to Allendy and we start another drama, or I start another drama, with a lie or a phrase, a drama of another kind, the struggle to explain, which is in itself deeply dramatic (are not our talks about June sometimes as dramatic as the event we are discussing?). I find that I do not know what to believe, that I have not decided yet whether analysis simplifies and undramatizes our existence or whether it is the most subtle, the most insidious, the most magnificent way of making dramas more terrible, more maddening. . . . All I know is that drama is by no means dead in the so-called laboratory. This is as passionate a game as it has been for you to live with June. And then when you see the analyst himself caught in the currents, then you are ready to believe there is drama everywhere. . . . ” My letter to Henry reveals my lies to him, necessary lies, mostly lies meant to heighten my confidence. October I spend a night with my beloved. I ask only that he does not return to America with June, which reveals to him how much I care. And he makes me swear that whatever happens when June comes I must believe in him and in his love. It is a difficult thing for me to do, but Allendy has taught me to believe, so I promise. Then Henry asks, “If I had the means today and I asked you to come away with me for good, would you do it?” “Because of Hugo and June I would not, could not But if there were no June and no Hugo, I would go away with you, even if we had no means.” He is surprised. “Sometimes I wondered if it was a game for you.” But he sees my face and is moved to silence. A night of clear, calm talk, when sensuality is almost superfluous.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I am remembering this while Hugo is gardening. And to be with him now seems as if I were living in the state of being I was in at twenty. Is it his fault, this youthfulness of our life together? My God, can I ask about Hugo what Henry asks about June? He has filled her. Have I filled Hugo? People have said there is nothing in him but me. His great capacity for losing himself, for love. That touches me. Even last night he talked about his inability to mix with other people, saying that I was the only one he was close to, happy with. This morning in the garden he was in bliss. He wanted me there, near him. He has given me love. And what else? I love the past in him. But all the rest has seeped away. After what I revealed to Henry about my life, I was in despair. It was as if I were a criminal, had been in jail, and were at last free and willing to work honestly and hard. But as soon as people discover your past they will not give you work and expect you to act like a criminal again. I am finished with myself, with my sacrifices and my pity, with what chains me. I am going to make a new beginning. I want passion and pleasure and noise and drunkenness and all evil. But my past reveals itself inexorably, like a tattoo mark. I must build a new shell, wear new costumes. While I wait for Hugo in the car I write on a cigarette box (on the back of the Sultanes there is a good bit of rosy space). Hugo has found out that: I have not seen the gardener about the garden, the mason about the cracked pool, have not done my accounts, have missed my fitting for an evening dress, have broken all routine. One evening Natasha calls up. I am supposed to have spent the nights in her studio. And she asks me, “What have you been doing these last ten days?” I cannot answer her or Hugo will hear me. “Why does Natasha call you up?” he asks. Later, in bed. Hugo is reading. As I write, almost under his eyes, he cannot suppose that what I am writing is so treacherous. I am thinking the worst about him I have ever thought.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I needed but to cross the threshold of our flat to find again its ambivalent atmosphere so full of bitterness, of slight but constant hostility, of claims on my feelings, all justified up to a point; at once, I became grouchy, deprived of my gratitude, discouraged. On Friday nights, when dinner had been varied and plentiful, family life was like a cloudless sky. No sooner had the first star appeared than my parents entered upon their day of rest; they would then be in good spirits, ready for a pleasant chat of which I was often the subject: “Remember what you wrote us from the summer camp: ‘You must carry me up! You must!’“ The whole family would laugh and I would try to smile although the story had already been repeated a thousand times. I found it more painful to be reminded now of the nonsense I had written than of my childhood panic. I could spot in their insistence on this little story a reproach that was also a revenge, half-resentful and half-affectionate. In effect, they were saying: “Remember, once you were weak and helpless. You think you are strong now and can do without us. When you needed us, we protected you.” I could see their increasing bitterness and disapproval of the turn my life was taking. It was neither pride nor resentment that separated me from my parents, but a far more penetrating emotion, that of guilt. I had been tutoring other kids ever since my fourth year in high school, so I was almost completely independent — financially, at least. I never dreamed of reproaching my parents with failing to give me what they had not given me: they had never had anything to give. But they made me feel guilty for what I didn’t give to them. When we moved from our alley, we left our proper social and economic level. Even if people were poor in our new street, they dressed better and patronized more expensive stores. We now had to live above our means and to sacrifice necessities to appearances. As she had in the past, my mother continued to buy remnants and pieces of defective cloth in the covered bazaars; but now, in making our clothes, she had to sew the pieces together into something “stylish.” She also started taking cheap permanent waves which reddened her lovely black hair and, for some months, made her head resemble a hideous brown sheep’s head. I retained, consequently, a fixed horror of permanents. For the first time in his life, my father now bought a suit of overalls. We had gas and electricity; for her long-term Sabbath cooking, however, my mother reverted to charcoal which was cheaper. Our gas and electricity bills were indeed occasions for collective remorse: “Put out that light! Is it so hard to press a button?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The raiders carried off all men indiscriminately, the old and the young, the healthy and the sick. A few young girls disappeared. The families of the hostages begged and prayed and wept. Something had to be done about those who were already in the camps. When they saw that no help would come from anywhere and that ostrich tactics led only to disaster, the leaders of the community got in touch with the Germans. Later, they were violently criticized for this; at the time, however, we heaved a sigh of relief. I have enough other reasons to feel strongly against our middle class and can dare to say this. The ghetto was there, easy to cut off and surround with a handful of men, and open to any attack. The Germans could kill, rape, and loot as they pleased. Those who protest today are the ones who found refuge in homes in the European quarters, but could one hope to hide the whole ghetto? The little hucksters, saddlers, tailors, bakers, and cobblers had no connections. Something had to be done. The Germans agreed to stop the raids and to allow us to organize a medical service that would exempt the sick and the aged from labor camps. In exchange, the leaders had to supply a given contingent of workers. At last we thought we would be able to leave our anguished seclusion. I must admit that, at the time, we found this arrangement preferable to the day-to-day terror of random police raids. What really convinced me was probably the fact that the medical commission declared me unsuitable for work. When I received my summons I went again to see my doctor. He certified that he had given me medical treatment for a lung infection. What with his certificate, the limited staff, the superficial character of mass examinations, and probably some implicit directives, I was hardly examined at all by a young doctor who was in a hurry and not very sure of himself. I was put into one of the already overstaffed offices of the new community organization. For once, I blessed my physical disability, which indeed I no longer felt. The graver dangers I was now exposed to even made my temperature subside. But I could not be satisfied with merely saving myself. As soon as I had done it, I was ashamed. Reports from the camps were very bad. As they had never had any experience of war, or of natural or historical disasters, my brethren — all city-dwellers, artisans, office-workers, salesmen, and petty traders, with a skin that was too white and flabby stomach muscles — lost all appearance of being human after only a few days of camp life. They neither washed nor shaved any more, were covered with lice, and just gave up, in spite of the efforts of the braver young men who tried to help them.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Whenever the students grumbled and my colleagues wisecracked about our food, I once more measured the distance that still separated me from them; what they despised gave me pleasure. My new bed also gave me as much joy as our diet, and I slept at home only when it was unavoidable, and chiefly because of the bedbugs. On the rare occasions when I did use my divan-bed, the starved bugs ravenously attacked me. I would wake up, after the first heavy sleep, with my neck itching like mad and my hands covered with heavy red swellings. No matter how heavy my eyes, I could not fall asleep again. My shoulders, armpits, ankles, and hands itched unbearably and I scratched myself desperately and had to bathe the irritated skin with vinegar. My battle against these dreadful insects would continue all night, while the room reeked with their sickly odor. Often a single massacre was not enough, and I would be attacked again and again. Sometimes, in the dark, I thought I could feel their horrible little legs crawling over my body. At once I would turn on the light and suddenly throw off the blankets and strip myself naked, only to find it had been a false alarm. But I would go ahead and make a new inspection of all my bedding and my clothing. In the middle of the night, with silence all around me and the electric light making my tired eyes smart, I worked furiously and methodically in an attempt to exterminate my enemy. At long last, I had to give it up and decided to spend all my nights in the high school dormitory, even when I had a twenty-four hour pass. My colleagues were surprised at this, for in their eyes a night away from the dormitory was a great relief. Actually, there was another reason that made it unpleasant for me to stay at home. The children there didn’t have enough to eat and were growing up all bones, with big heads and long knotty legs. My little cousins, however, unlike my brothers and sisters, were all soft and flabby, rather too fat, with the unhealthy fat one gets from eating too many starches. They seemed to suffer from a dyspeptic appetite and they constantly asked for food. Nothing was more unbearable for me than the exasperated voice of my widowed aunt grumbling all day long after her children: “May the Red Death carry you off! You’re eating too much! I’ve nothing left to give you!” All this made me feel ashamed of the luxurious diet I enjoyed at school, and I tried to ignore the guilt-feelings I felt. Most of my joys were indeed spoiled for me in this manner, though I had learned to drive out of my mind all disquieting thoughts. At least, I had a room where I could live protected from all this, so I moved all my belongings and my books there.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Oh, but she knew, and only too well, what it would mean should they be there together; the lies, the despicable subter- fuges, as though they were little less than criminals. It would be: ‘ Mary, don’t hang about my bedroom — be careful . . . of course while we’re here at Morton . . . it’s my mother, she can’t understand these things; to her they would seem an out- rage, an insult. . . . And then the guard set upon eyes and lips; the feeling of guilt at so much as a hand-touch; the pretence of a careless, quite usual friendship —‘ Mary, don’t look at me as though you cared! you did this evening — remember my mother.’ Intolerable quagmire of lies and deceit! The degrading of all 384 THE WELL OF LONELINESS that to them was sacred — a very gross degrading of love, and through love a gross degrading of Mary. Mary . . . so loyal and as yet so gallant, but so pitifully untried in the war of ex- istence. Warned only by words, the words of a lover, and what were mere words when it came to actions? And the ageing woman with the far-away eyes, eyes that could yet be so cruel, so accusing — they might turn and rest with repugnance on Mary, even as once they had rested on Stephen: ‘I would rather see you dead at my feet. . . .’ A fearful saying, and yet she had meant it, that ageing woman with the far-away eyes — she had uttered it knowing herself to be a mother. But that at least should be hidden from Mary.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She expressed her impatience with me and her displeasure in a veritable avalanche of scolding: my uncle had been dead since the evening before and my father was furious that I hadn’t come along sooner. She herself couldn’t understand my negligence; so much trouble simply because I persisted in spending all my time at school for so-called study, as if I didn’t have a home to work in, and so on, and so on... Then, without any transition, her scolding gave way to coy persuasion. “Let’s go. Come with me,” she concluded. She lowered her voice as if revealing a secret in the midst of a large crowd. “I know it bores you. I waited for you because I was afraid you wouldn’t come. But it’s your father’s brother, his oldest brother — in fact his father! You know how your father hates to complain, but he’s very angry that you didn’t come back at once.” It was a long time now since my mother’s simple histrionics had ceased to amuse or irritate me. I followed her without a word. The sun was now directly overhead, completely flooding the streets, and I abandoned all hope of making use of the fringes of shade. Crushed, I accepted this walk through hell. Perspiration, as it evaporated, made my shirt cling unpleasantly to my skin like the coarse linen bandages that my mother used to put on my childhood boils. My mother, on the contrary, had kept her race’s capacity to withstand the sun and now walked without any apparent effort, chattering cheerfully and skipping from topic to topic with the lively grace of the once pretty and lightheaded girl. My temples throbbed; preoccupied with my worries about the examination, I was distracted from her babbling and hardly replied. I admired the way she remained lively and enthusiastic even under the crushing weight of a family of ten. It frightened me to think how far apart we had grown, how foreign she was to all that I was becoming. With a simplicity that tried to be cunning, she attempted to give me some advice. Really, she’d never seen my father in such a state; true, Uncle Joseph had given him his education and been a father to him and such a father had the right to all honors. So it would be better if I acted as if the deceased were my own father (God forbid!); then I would show my father how I would act when his time came too. As I said nothing, she finally came around to mentioning what was obviously the most difficult thing: naturally, as a sign of mourning, I wouldn’t shave for a month. This time I emerged from my torpor and angrily refused. No, they couldn’t count on that. I couldn’t go to school unshaven. She heaved a deep sigh, half-sincere, half-feigned. My God! What a son she had!

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was put into one of the already overstaffed offices of the new community organization. For once, I blessed my physical disability, which indeed I no longer felt. The graver dangers I was now exposed to even made my temperature subside. But I could not be satisfied with merely saving myself. As soon as I had done it, I was ashamed. Reports from the camps were very bad. As they had never had any experience of war, or of natural or historical disasters, my brethren — all city-dwellers, artisans, office-workers, salesmen, and petty traders, with a skin that was too white and flabby stomach muscles — lost all appearance of being human after only a few days of camp life. They neither washed nor shaved any more, were covered with lice, and just gave up, in spite of the efforts of the braver young men who tried to help them. The best of them, those who in a moment of revolt tried to escape, had to cross hostile country and were quickly caught and shot or deported to Germany. Those who came home, wounded, sick, or on leave, were so thin, dazed, or aggressive in their filthy rags all caked with mud, that we were ashamed to look at them. The Germans, following a plan which we could not guess, grew more and more demanding and vicious. They shot the stragglers and the sick. They multiplied their demands and became increasingly difficult to satisfy. After they had taken all the men younger than thirty-five years of age, they demanded those aged forty, and then those aged forty-five. We began to realize that if the German occupation were to last much longer we would be completely lost, for the Germans had time on their side and would eventually exhaust us. It was no longer possible to answer their summonses, and the community could no longer furnish the required monthly quota of men, so the raids began again. Our anxiety of the first days gripped us again, but this time we were angry and disturbed, like hunted down beasts. We could not sleep any more. The German air force was busy elsewhere, so we spent our nights, which were nothing but one long alarm, standing half-asleep in trenches, with our backs against the damp earth. In the daytime we skirted the walls as we hurried to find some bread or to get news of our loved ones, safe at most for an hour or so.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “No, you’re not the king, because you’re wearing my sweater, and it’s my mother who gave it to you only the day before yesterday.” Chouchane was staring at us, and the game was again in its moment of tense silence, so that my remark sounded loud as the proclamation of a herald. Fraji’s terrified batlike eyes became even wider as he stared at me before casting a single glance, as fleeting as the signal of a lighthouse, on Chouchane and all the others. Finally, Fraji climbed painfully down from his crumbling pedestal and went off without uttering a single word in reply, without looking at any of us, as though he were alone in a deserted street. My pride and my justifiable anger suddenly fell flat and I felt a lump in my throat. By that time the other boys had decided to play another game and offered me a small part in it. In all the excitement and shouting I forgot the incident and became lighthearted again. When the violet-colored twilight began to fill our street, it seemed to me that the afternoon had been very short. Soon my mother appeared at the end of our alley, heavily veiled, as is proper for a woman returning from the bath house. Although she rarely wore a veil, I recognized her at once by her hurried gait and rushed to greet her. A minute later, Kalla and Joulie were there too, and my sister began to tell me about her interesting afternoon at the Turkish bath. That night I slept very quietly.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Allendy is watching over my life. He has hypnotized me into a trusting somnolescence. He wants me to be lulled by my happiness, to rest on his love. We decide, for Hugo’s sake (Hugo has become jealous of him), that I should not come to see him for ten or twelve days. It is also like a test of my confidence. Suddenly I relax my fevered desire for him and accept his nobility, his seriousness, his self-sacrifice, his concern for my happiness, and I feel humble. What makes me humble is that he believes I love him, and I feel that I am lying. It moves me to think I can lie to this great, sincere man. I wonder whether he knows better than I whom I love or whether I am deceiving him, as I have deceived them all. In 1921, when I was still corresponding with Eduardo, I was already in love with Hugo. If Hugo knew that in Havana, while we were exchanging love letters, I was stirred by Ramiro Collazo. If Henry knew that I love Allendy’s kisses, and if Allendy knew how deeply I want to live with Henry . . . Allendy believes my life with Henry, my low life, is not true or real or lasting, whereas I know I belong to it. He says, “You have traversed shady experiences, but I feel that you have remained pure. They are temporary curiosities, a hunger for experience.” Whatever experience I enter I come out unscathed. Everyone believes in my sincerity and purity, even Henry. Allendy wants me to see my love for Henry as a literary or dramatic excursion and my love for him as an expression of my true self, whereas I believe it is exactly the opposite. Henry has me, mind and womb; Allendy is my “experience.” There is continuous music from our new radio. Hugo listens while he beatifically contemplates the benefits of Allendy’s help. The announcer talks in a strange language from Budapest. I think about my lies to Allendy and wonder why I lie. For example, I have worried inordinately about Henry’s troubles with his eyes. If he should become as blind as Joyce, what would become of him? I say to myself, “I ought to give up everything and go and live with him and take care of him.” When I tell Allendy about my fear, I exaggerate the danger Henry is in. Lies are a sign of weakness. It seems to me that I do not have the courage to tell Allendy openly I do not love him, and so, instead, I want him to see what I am ready to do for Henry. An afternoon with Henry. He begins by telling me that our conversation the other night was the deepest and closest we have had, that it has changed him, given him strength. “To run away from June, I feel now, is no solution. I have always run away from women.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Years later, he was to betray his secret violence when, with unexpected audacity in such a silent man, soft and almost an invalid, he became a leader in Franco-Nazi collaboration. But his classes were carefully prepared and intelligent, so that they did me more harm than any stupid or aggressive jokes. I respected all that seemed scientifically accurate, and because I found no immediate reply to his arguments, they troubled me and made me feel guilty. To combat this, I threw myself into studies of Judaism and became intellectually aware of our own Hebrew spiritual tradition. For a few years I enthusiastically attended any lecture or meeting which could help me in these investigations; then firmly entrenched within my new knowledge, I tried to undermine as best I could the teachings of this doctrinaire racial theorist in the minds of my school-fellows. But they all laughed at my discoveries, much as they also derided what our teacher said. So I resorted to my usual vengeance. As he had at least the tact to allow us to express contrary views, whether he liked it or not, I was his best pupil, and I remember well writing angry sixteen-page compositions for him. But this was impossible with Murat, whom we nicknamed the sprinkler because he constantly spat as he spoke. He was an old crank who was a good example of the kind of anti-Semitism that is bred of stupidity. His mere physical appearance repelled me, with his rotting and uneven yellow teeth, the deposit of thick foaming saliva in the corners of his mouth, his colorless and lifeless hair, and the eternal moist cigarette stub which made him blink with its smoke. He allowed no discussion and, being mean and grumpy, took petty revenge on any obstinate contradictors, that is on the few pupils who thought at all. The others laughed at him and teased him with excessive humility, and this seemed to flatter him. When he was exasperated he would relieve himself by insulting them grossly. On the whole, however, they got on well together. On days when his temper was good he would leave his desk and, putting his left foot up on a bench, would rest his chin on his hand and his elbow on his knee; it was time for a more intimate exchange of views. As he spat over the more unfortunate pupils who sat in the front row, he would ask seemingly innocent questions which were intended to make us reveal our most secret faults. Why was it that, in this country, the Jews always mentioned the profession of the deceased in death notices? He pretended not to know the reason, but he smiled knowingly: simply because Jews make the most — even of death — to advertise! But his stupidity went hand in hand with his greed, and my comrades learned to play the dirty trick of giving him presents.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  This particular day, it was the bread that was lacking when I sat down for breakfast, so she asked me to go and fetch it at the baker’s oven, which was in the Street of the Sparrows, a blind alley fairly far from our home. As I was not very hungry, this unexpected chore annoyed me and I grumbled, pretended it was already too late, and made up my mind to go off without breakfasting. With the vast selfishness of a child, I guessed quite rightly that this would upset my mother and punish her for her forgetfulness. Finally, she lost her temper and, running short of other arguments, called upon heaven as a witness to curse me. But I was stubborn, slung my school satchel over my shoulder, and left the house. When I reached the end of the street, I heard her calling me, so I turned back with some ill will, dragging my feet, to receive from her my two pennies and an unexpected piece of bread crust. She had certainly borrowed it from Joulie, and this gesture made my vague remorse weigh all the more heavily on my conscience. The day had been spoiled for me, by my empty stomach and my confused conscience. I reached the old iron gate of the school, of course, too early. Birdie’s head, with his humble expression, his heavy eyelids that were always lowered, scarcely rose above a compact group of school children, while the other hucksters managed to attract only a few customers. One of them, a new trader, was giving us the old blarney to build up his trade. I noticed Saul as he detached himself from Birdie’s group: he was my rival and had thus come to be my first comrade. Our teacher in the first grade used to make us sit in the classroom by order of merit, so that Saul and I occupied the first row almost all year round. Comrades in the front row, we soon became friends by force of habit, though there was some irony to this as Saul was the son of a rich merchant in the covered bazaar, a fact that was each day more noticeable to me. Beneath his black apron that always seemed new, he wore fine cloth pants with mother-of-pearl buttons on the side, which had long aroused my curiosity: what could possibly be the use of buttons without any buttonholes? I had often made fun of them and Saul never knew what to answer. One day, as I repeated my taunts, he took on a superior manner: his mother had explained to him certain facts that he could not reveal to me. In spite of my exasperation and insistence, he absolutely refused to speak. In addition, he always smelled good, every day of the week, which impressed me very much.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In effect, they were saying: “Remember, once you were weak and helpless. You think you are strong now and can do without us. When you needed us, we protected you.” I could see their increasing bitterness and disapproval of the turn my life was taking. It was neither pride nor resentment that separated me from my parents, but a far more penetrating emotion, that of guilt. I had been tutoring other kids ever since my fourth year in high school, so I was almost completely independent — financially, at least. I never dreamed of reproaching my parents with failing to give me what they had not given me: they had never had anything to give. But they made me feel guilty for what I didn’t give to them. When we moved from our alley, we left our proper social and economic level. Even if people were poor in our new street, they dressed better and patronized more expensive stores. We now had to live above our means and to sacrifice necessities to appearances. As she had in the past, my mother continued to buy remnants and pieces of defective cloth in the covered bazaars; but now, in making our clothes, she had to sew the pieces together into something “stylish.” She also started taking cheap permanent waves which reddened her lovely black hair and, for some months, made her head resemble a hideous brown sheep’s head. I retained, consequently, a fixed horror of permanents. For the first time in his life, my father now bought a suit of overalls. We had gas and electricity; for her long-term Sabbath cooking, however, my mother reverted to charcoal which was cheaper. Our gas and electricity bills were indeed occasions for collective remorse: “Put out that light! Is it so hard to press a button? It cost us two hundred francs last month!” I heard those words thousands of times. My father groaned continuously and made plans to reduce our budget. But he didn’t have the severity needed to carry out these plans; besides, we could hardly live on less than we did. In order to pay our higher rent, to buy more conventional clothes and to meet the other indispensable expenses of our new status, we could no longer eat our fill. Besides, our family was always increasing. My father and his friends discussed their common problems at the café, and each passed his own unworkable suggestions on to the next. One evening, my father came home with this scheme: “There are so many of us that each meal is very expensive. If we cut out only one meal a week we could make a real monthly saving. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we go to bed on an empty stomach.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  How often, as I returned home at five o’clock, with the night already seeping into the narrow streets and the sky a deep blue-black, did I plan to make my peace with my parents and to be a considerate and useful son! I thought I knew the necessary gestures: salted almonds or pistachio nuts for my mother on Friday nights, sympathy for my father over his asthma and a show of interest for his business worries, to offer to run errands, fix the electric iron and the light switches. All these flickers of filial devotion generally sparked up in me after family rows and were the ultimate product of the remorse that I never admitted. I would be touched by the exemplary behavior of famous men who had remained faithful sons throughout their lives. The more the parents lacked understanding for the career, the work, and the ambitions of their sons, the more the latter must have enjoyed the feeling of having done their duty with a model filial piety. I needed but to cross the threshold of our flat to find again its ambivalent atmosphere so full of bitterness, of slight but constant hostility, of claims on my feelings, all justified up to a point; at once, I became grouchy, deprived of my gratitude, discouraged. On Friday nights, when dinner had been varied and plentiful, family life was like a cloudless sky. No sooner had the first star appeared than my parents entered upon their day of rest; they would then be in good spirits, ready for a pleasant chat of which I was often the subject: “Remember what you wrote us from the summer camp: ‘You must carry me up! You must!’“ The whole family would laugh and I would try to smile although the story had already been repeated a thousand times. I found it more painful to be reminded now of the nonsense I had written than of my childhood panic. I could spot in their insistence on this little story a reproach that was also a revenge, half-resentful and half-affectionate. In effect, they were saying: “Remember, once you were weak and helpless. You think you are strong now and can do without us. When you needed us, we protected you.” I could see their increasing bitterness and disapproval of the turn my life was taking. It was neither pride nor resentment that separated me from my parents, but a far more penetrating emotion, that of guilt. I had been tutoring other kids ever since my fourth year in high school, so I was almost completely independent — financially, at least. I never dreamed of reproaching my parents with failing to give me what they had not given me: they had never had anything to give. But they made me feel guilty for what I didn’t give to them.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I have a sense of all that I leave out—the lacunae, especially the dreams, the hallucinations. Also, the lies are left out, a desperate necessity to embellish. So I do not write them down. The journal is therefore a lie. What is left out of the journal is also left out of my mind. At the moment of writing I rush for the beauty. I disperse the rest, out of the journal, out of my body. I would like to come back, like a detective, and collect what I have washed off. For example, the terrible, divine credulity of Hugo. I think of what he could have noticed. The time I came back from Henry’s room and washed myself, he could have seen the few drops of water that fell to the floor; stains on my underclothes; rouge rubbed off on my handkerchiefs. He could have questioned my saying to him, “Why don’t you try and come twice?” (as Henry does), my excessive fatigue, the rings under my eyes. I keep my diary very secret, but how often I have written in it while sitting at his feet by the fire, and he has not tried to read over my shoulder. When Eduardo made Hugo lie down, close his eyes, and respond to words—“love,” “cat,” “snow,” “jealousy”—his reactions were amazingly slow and vague. Jealousy alone brought an immediate response. He seems to refuse to register, to realize. That is good. It is his self-protection. It is the basis of the odd liberty I have in spite of his powerful jealousy. He does not want to see. This arouses such a pity in me that at times it maddens me. I would like him to punish me, beat me, imprison me. It would relieve me. I go to meet Dr. Allendy to talk about Eduardo. I see a handsome, healthy man, with clear, intelligent, seer’s eyes. My mind is alert, expecting him to say something dogmatic, formulistic. I want him to say it, because if he does, this will be another man I cannot lean on, and I will have to go on conquering myself alone. We talked first about Eduardo, how he had gained in strength. Allendy was glad I had noticed a keen difference. But now we came to a difficult point. “Did you know,” asked Allendy, “that you have been the most important woman in his life? Eduardo has been obsessed with you. You are his image. He has seen you as mother, sister, and unattainable woman. To conquer you means conquering himself, his neuroses.” “Yes, I know. I want him to be cured. I do not want to deprive him of his newborn confidence by telling him that I don’t love him sensually.” “How do you love him?” “I have always been attached to him ideally. I am now, but not sensually. There is another man, a more animal man, who really holds me strongly.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My father swore that none of my brothers or sisters would stay in school a day longer than was necessary for the school certificate. In the name of justice, they must help him. Besides, modern education didn’t lead anywhere; a good artisan is worth more than a scribbler, and business is more certain than a diploma. Without his having to ask them overtly, the children started quitting school, one after the other, very early. Worn away by my father’s daily reminders of their expense, frightened by his asthma attacks, they felt guilty and spontaneously began to want to find a job. When I managed insidiously to persuade them to stay till the sixth year, all they gained thereby was a final examination at the end of the year. Convinced of their failure in spite of the heavy sacrifices already made, they were sure that the struggle was futile, and didn’t even dare turn up for the test. But I myself had now gone too far and was too conscious of my own ambition to turn back. On the contrary, the constant aggression, the mournful speeches which ceaselessly strengthened my feelings of guilt, all this gave a considerable importance to my studies. I brought to them a kind of passion, an avidity that my schoolmates could not understand, pleasant amateurs that they were. Like Loriot’s chocolates, so expensive for me, I swallowed as much of it all as I could. For whole years, I raced against time, making each day, each hour of my life count and conform literally to a strict schedule. I wanted to come up in the world, to succeed, but succeed at what? I wasn’t sure, but still had to keep going. I set myself provisional goals, stations on the long road I traveled: to win this prize and get ahead of that student. Since, at that age, knowledge and experience are so easily confused, my teachers believed me very mature and told me so. My major teacher in the third year noted “an energetic intellect” on my report card at the end of the year. I had the highest average in the second year and was probably Marrou’s best student in the first. The kids at school told me, and they would certainly not have made it up to please me, that Poinsot, our philosophy teacher, had said: “He’s the most intelligent student I’ve ever had, and I’ve been teaching for sixteen years.” One day I read that intellectual and sexual precociousness went together, and that many famous men had also been sexually very gifted.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Instead of peace, there was only more unpleasantness. When my father put on his cap and picked up his prayerbook to officiate, he seemed to become cramped as if a stranger were staring at him in mockery; and if I too put on a cap and stood up whenever required, I felt that I was watched by him and the rest of the family, as if they unmasked me in spite of my play-acting. It was an intolerable situation. As luck would have it, the younger children began having difficulties similar to mine. Frightened at their own audacity, they would look to me for support; but I refused to give it to them. When they began a destructive argument, they sought my eyes, but I looked away guiltily. My father answered quickly and brutally, not wanting to reopen the burning debates, ashamed before an adversary who was voluntarily silent. We ended by avoiding the ceremonies of minor importance and observed only the most solemn ones. And, I must admit, as I had nothing to offer in its stead, I was sometimes sorry to have shaken the world of their traditions. ~ 6. THE DANCE ~ The women of our house had already been living a good week in joyous anticipation of a mystery that made them forget all their dissensions. They tried to remain solemn about it, but were too excited to be able to conceal their wild childish happiness. Actually, they were busy organizing a dance, with Negro musicians and the sacrifice of a live white cock, for the purpose of exorcizing and saving Aunt Maissa. The poor woman really needed saving. Her brothers had married her off to an old man of sixty who had the reputation of being very rich. The marriage brokers had affirmed that he owned several houses. When they had been questioned, the ignorant tenants of these houses had confirmed the ownership. But the clever old rascal, in spite of his curled up mustache, his upright posture, and the great care he devoted to his dress, was only the rent-collector for an estate-management corporation. His twenty-year-old bride didn’t even obtain the standard of living that might have compensated her, by flattering her feminine vanity, for the essential element of marriage that was lacking, and helped her forget its absence. Still, her brothers had managed to marry off a girl who had no dowry, though this is the nightmare of families like ours. It turned out, nevertheless, to be a bad deal: she became hysterical and, having soon exhausted her husband, bounced back on her brothers, a pauper with two sick children.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In the first days after the declaration of war, a few Italian planes flew so high above the city that they could not be seen, and they dropped some light bombs at random on the countryside. Although the first bursts of antiaircraft gunfire frightened us, the apparent inefficiency of the aggressor soon allayed our fears. Jokes were made about the poor Italians who were more afraid of our antiaircraft fire than we were of their bombs! For a while, we continued to use the trenches in the middle of the street, and I got into the habit of taking with me a book on psychology. Before long we were using them as refuse dumps, and the children took possession of them for their games. Besides, this war meant nothing to us, nor any other war, for that matter. Not since any man or community could remember had we ever been involved in an armed conflict; those were European games and disasters, and we bore the consequences of them because our fate was linked with that of Europe, but neither our minds nor our hearts were preoccupied. When the Italians finally stopped their timid flying expeditions, the war ceased to have anything to do with our everyday life. Even the pogrom which today seems to me so significant was only an accident, a part of our way of life. And then, all of a sudden, one day we found ourselves right in the middle of the tragedy. When I think how little I foresaw at the time what was about to come and actually did come, how politically ignorant I was, I cannot understand why I still suffer such confused remorse, so much repressed self-criticism and dissatisfaction with myself. Perhaps because I might have acted more wisely, perhaps because the acute self-awareness that I have since contracted like a disease does not allow me now to recognize the young man that I was at that time. My whole conduct was based on impulse. I lived through that period like any mediocre imbecile, stunned by hunger and exhaustion, believing any piece of gossip and reacting exactly like all the others. Or is it simply that I feel indebted to my age for not having been carted off to hell or had my nails torn out of my fingers or lost a leg or an arm in a slave-labor camp? This is required by the times, whether one be the hangman or the victim. I don’t feel victimized enough, and it tortures my conscience.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I have a bad night after the play. Hugo gets up in the early morning to bring me medicine, a sleeping pill. “What is the matter?” he asks. “What do you feel?” He offers the refuge of his arms. The first time I come back from Henry’s room, stunned, I find difficulty in talking in my usual lively way. Hugo sits down, takes up his diary book and writes wildly about me and “art” and how everything I do is right. While he reads this to me, I bleed to death. Before the end he begins to sob. He doesn’t know why. I get on my knees before him. “What is it, darling, what is it?” And I say this terrible thing: “Do you have an intuition?”—which, because of his faith and his slow senses, he cannot understand. He believes Henry only stimulates me imaginatively, as a writer. And it is because he believes this that he sits down to write also, to woo me with writing. I want to cry out, “That is so young of you; it’s like the faith of a child.” God, I’m old, I’m the last woman on earth. I am aware of a monstrous paradox: By giving myself I learn to love Hugo more. By living as I do I am preserving our love from bitterness and death. The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with a deep contentment, as if this were the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all “possessed” fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one. Henry makes notes on me. He registers all I say. We are both registering, each with different sensors. The life of writers is another life. I sit on his bed, with my rose dress spread around me, smoking, and as he observes me, he says he will never take me into his life, to the places he has told me about, that for me all the trappings of Louveciennes are right and fitting, that I must have them. “You couldn’t live otherwise.” I contemplate his sordid room and exclaim, “I think it is true. If you put me in this room, poor, I would start all over again.” The next day I write him one of the most human notes he has ever received: no intellect, just words about his voice, his laughter, his hands.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  There would need to be a table for the telephone to the projectionist, she said, then stopped to consider the empty shelf . “And whatever I’ll need for Dolby Sound,” she added then. As I describe these very clear memories I am struck by what they have in common: each involves her trying to handle adult life, trying to be a convincing grown-up person at an age when she was still entitled to be a small child. She could talk about “My IRA” and she could talk about “Dolby Sound” and she could talk about “just noticing” she had cancer, she could call Camarillo to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy and she could call Twentieth Century–Fox to find out what she needed to do to be a star, but she was not actually prepared to act on whatever answers she got. “Little Toys” could still assume equal importance. She could still consult her pediatrician. Was this confusion about where she stood in the chronological scheme of things our doing? Did we demand that she be an adult? Did we ask her to assume responsibility before she had any way of doing so? Did our expectations prevent her from responding as a child? I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra . On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she had liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.” In other words, despite having just been told what had seemed to me as I watched it a truly harrowing story, a story that placed both parents and children in unthinkable peril—a peril to children more unthinkable still because its very source lay in the bad luck of having been born to these particular parents—she had resorted without hesitation to the local default response, which was an instant assessment of audience potential. Similarly, a few years later, taken to Oxnard to see Jaws , she had watched in horror, then, while I was still unloading the car in Malibu, skipped down to the beach and dove into the surf. About certain threats I considered real she remained in fact fearless. When she was eight or nine and enrolled in Junior Lifeguard, a program run by the Los Angeles County lifeguards that entailed being repeatedly taken out beyond the Zuma Beach breakers on a lifeguard boat and swimming back in, John and I arrived to pick her up and found the beach empty. Finally we saw her, alone, huddled in a towel behind a dune. The lifeguards, it seemed, were insisting, “for absolutely no reason,” on taking everyone home.