POSTSCRIPT.

BY.

RACHEL.

JLhc lave been asked by a "Mr. Loxias" for my comments on a piece of fantastic writing by the murderer of my husband. I was inclined at first simply to ignore the request. I also considered resorting to legal action to prevent publication. However there has already been, and I am sure not accidentally, a good deal of publicity about the matter, and to stifle this "outpouring" might give it the interest of a secret document without in the end concealing what it said. Frankness is better and compassion is better. For we must, I think, feel or attempt to feel pity and compassion for the author of this fantasy. It is sad that when provided with the "seclusion" which he professes always to have wanted, what Pearson produces is a sort of mad adolescent dream, and not the serious work of art of which he imagined himself capable and of which he so incessantly told us.

I have certainly no wish to be unkind. The revived publicity about this hideous tragedy has caused me great suffering. That my own life has been "ruined" is a fact with which I have to live. I hope and believe that unhappiness has not made me bitter. I do not want to hurt anybody. And I do not believe that my frankness now can possibly hurt Bradley Pearson, who seems to be invincibly wrapped up in his own fantastic conceptions of what happened and of what he himself is like.

About his account of events there is little to be said. It is in it's main outline clearly a "dream" such as might interest a psychologist. And let me say here that I do not and cannot judge Bradley Pearson's motives in writing it. (Of Mr. Loxias's motives I will speak below.) Perhaps the kindest thing to say is that he wanted to write a novel but found himself incapable of producing anything except his own immediate fantasies. I expect many novelists rewrite their own recent histories "nearer to the heart's desire," but they have at least the decency to change the names. BP (as I shall 352 FOUR POSTSCRIPTS BY DRAMATIS PERSONAE shorten his name henceforth) alleges that in prison he has found God (or Truth or Religion or something). Perhaps all men in prison think they have found God, and have to in order to survive. I feel no vendetta-like resentment against him now, or any particular desire that he should suffer. His suffering cannot repair my loss. His new "creed" may be sincerely believed in or may be, as the whole story may be, a smoke-screen to conceal his unrepentant malice. If his tale is indeed prompted by malice we have to do with a person so wicked that ordinary judgment of him is baffled. If, as is much more likely, BP has come to believe or half believe both in his "salvation" and in his story, then we have to do with one whose mind has given way under continued strain. (He was certainly not insane at the time of the murder.) And then he must be, as I said earlier, an object of pity. This is how I prefer to view him, though really I cannot know, and indeed do not want to know, what is in fact the case. When BP went through the gates of the prison I felt as if he had died and I wanted to concern myself with him no more. To think about him, for instance with anger and rage, would have caused too much misery, besides being fruitless and immoral.

I spoke advisedly of an "adolescent" fantasy. BP is what might be called a "Peter Pan" type. He does not in his story describe his extensive past life, except for hinting that there were romances with women. He is the sort of man who likes both to hint at a past and to behave as if he were eternally twenty-five. (He speaks of himself as an ageing Don Juan, as if there were only a trivial difference between real and imagined conquests! I doubt if there were really many women in his life.) A psychiatrist would probably find him "retarded." His tastes in literature were juvenile. He speaks grandly of Shakespeare and of Homer, but I doubt if he had read the former since schooldays or the latter ever. His constant reading, which of course he nowhere admits, was mediocre adventure stories by authors such as Forester and Stevenson and Mulford. He really liked boys' stories, tales of crude adventure with no love interest, where he could identify himself with some princely hero, a man with a sword or such. My husband often commented to me about this, and once tackled BP directly. BP was upset and I can recall him actually blushing very much at the charge.

BP was of course a person painfully conscious of inferiority. He was an unhappy disappointed man, ashamed of his social origin and his illiteracy, and stupidly ashamed of his job which he imagined made him a figure of fun. In fact he was, though not for that reason, a figure of fun to all of us. No one, before the tragedy, could mention him without smiling a little. He must have realized this. I suppose it is possible, and it is a shocking thought, that a man might commit a serious crime just in order to stop people from laughing at him. That BP was a man who hated being laughed at -is pretty clear throughout the story. The rather pompous self-mocking style is a defence and a sort of meeting people half-way if they decide to laugh.

Of course he turns everything topsy-turvy in his account of his relations with our family. He says rather coyly that we needed him. The truth was that he needed us and was a sort of parasite, an awful nuisance sometimes. He was very lonely and we all felt sorry for him. And I can remember occasions too when we made absurd excuses when he wanted to see us or hid when he rang the doorbell. His relations with my husband were crucial of course. His claim to have "discovered" my husband is ridiculous. My husband was already quite famous when BP after much begging, persuaded an editor to let him review one of my husband's books, and after that he made himself known to us and became, as I think my daughter once put it, "the family pussycat."

^^^**Ml^HHBM^HV^BVM^Mm^^B^^M^^^I^^H^BMHBiMBMMViMHMi^B^BV*^HMBMiW^BM^>^BH*BiV*WV^BBHM^MWq*BiM FOUR POSTSCRIPTS BY DRAMATIS PERSONAE BP cannot even in his dream-story conceal that he was envious of my husband's success. I think this envy was an absolute obsession with him, he was eaten up by it. He knew also that my husband, though friendly and kind to him, despised him a little and laughed at him. The idea of this caused him torment. Sometimes I felt that he thought about nothing else. He naively himself admits that he had to be friends with Arnold, and so somehow identify with him and "take credit" for his writing, so as not to be driven mad with envy and hate. If an accuser is needed BP is his own. He admits too in a moment of candour that his picture of Arnold is prejudiced. This is putting it mildly. (He admits further to a general hatred of the human race!) Of course he never "helped" Arnold, but Arnold often helped him. His relation to myself and my husband was virtually that of a child to its parents. This too might interest a psychiatrist. But I do not want to enlarge any more upon matters which are obvious and which came into the open at the trial.

His allegations about my daughter are of course absurd, both as to his feelings and as to hers. My daughter always regarded him as a sort of "funny uncle" and there is no doubt that she was very sorry for him, and pity can be mistaken for fondness and can even be a sort of fondness, and in this sort of way perhaps she was fond of him. His great "passion" for her is a typical dream-up. (I will explain what I think about its origin and motives in a moment.) I believe that unfulfilled frustrated people probably spend a lot of their lives in pure fantasy-dreaming. This can I am sure be a great source of consolation though not always harmless. And a "good" fantasy- dream might be to pick on some person whom you know slightly and imagine they are in love with you and picture a great love-relationship and its drama. BP, being probably some sort of sadomasochist, of course imagines an unhappy ending, an eternal separation, terrible sufferings for love, and so on. His one published novel (he implies he published more than one, but he only published one in fact) is a story of disappointed romantic love quite remarkably like this one.

There is, I feel I must now frankly admit, yet a further aspect to the matter, and one which for various reasons, many of them obvious, was glossed over at the trial. Bradley Pearson was of course in love with me. This fact had been known to me and to my husband for a number of years and was also a subject for amusement. BP's fantasies of making love to me make sad reading. This unhappy love of his also explains his fiction of a passion for my daughter. This fiction is of course a smoke-screen. It is also partly a "substitute-idea" and partly, I am afraid, a pure revenge. (It may also be relevant that the strong attachment between father and daughter, not admitted in the story, may well have preyed upon BP and made him feel again, as so often, miserably excluded.) How far BP's love for me led him to perform that terrible deed is not for me to say. I am afraid that envy and jealousy were inextricably mixed up inside the bosom of that wicked and unhappy man. Of these matters, of which I would not have spoken if not forced to by confrontation with this farrago of lies, I say no more.

It may be imagined how profoundly this document distresses me. I do not in fact blame BP for its proposed disgraceful publication. It is at least understandable that he should have written out this dreamy-fantasy-nonsense to console himself in a place of grimness and to distract himself from serious remorse or the effort of repentance. For the crime of publication I blame the self-styled Mr. Lox- ias (or "Luxius," as I believe he sometimes calls himself). As several newspapers have hinted, this is a nom de guerre of a fellow-prisoner upon whom the unfortunate BP seems to have become distressingly fixated. The name conceals the identity of a notorious rapist and murderer, a well-known musical virtuoso, whose murder, by a peculiarly horrible method, of a successful fellow-musician made the headlines some considerable time ago. Possibly the similarity of their crime drew these two unhappy men together. Artists are notoriously an envious race.

I would like to say this at the end, and I am sure I speak also for *:',;, FOUR POSTSCRIPTS BY DRAMATIS PERSONAE my daughter, with whom I am temporarily out of touch, now of course herself a well-known writer and living abroad. I bear him no malice and, in so far as he must be regarded as seriously unbalanced if not actually mad, I feel sincere pity for his undoubted sufferings.

* K 357 POSTSCRIPT BY JULIAN have read the story. I have also seen the other postscripts, which I believe the other postscript writers have not. Mr. Loxias allowed me this privilege. (For several reasons which I can guess.) However I have little to say.

It is a sad story full of real pain. It was a dreadful time for me and I have forgotten much of it. I loved my father very dearly. This is perhaps the chief fact which I have to offer. I loved him. His violent death drove me nearly mad. I was nearly mad during Pearson's trial. I cannot recall that period of my life except as patches in a haze, as scenes. There is a mercy in oblivion. Human beings forget much more than is usually recognized, especially when there is a shock.

Not so many years have passed since these events. Yet in the life of a young person these are long years. Centuries separate me from these events. I see them diminished and myself there as a child. It is the story of an old man and a child. I say this, treating it as literature. Yet I acknowledge that it concerns myself. Are we what we were as children? What stuff is that which persists? I was a child: I acknowledge myself: yet also I cannot recognize myself.

A letter, for instance, is quoted. Did I write this letter? (Did he keep it?) It seems inconceivable. And the things that I said. (Supposedly.) Surely they are the invention of another mind. Sometimes the reactions of the child are too childish. I think I am "clever" now. Could clever me have been that child? Sometimes too there are thoughts which I could not possibly have thought. Thoughts which have leaked in from the author's mind. (I am not a very convincing "character.") Was I not muddled and frightened and without precedents? It seems like literature, yes.

My father was quite right not to encourage me to write. And Pearson was wrong to encourage me. I see that now. It is profitless to write early, one understands nothing. One has no craft and one is 358 FOUR POSTSCRIPTS BY DRAMATIS PERSONAE the slave of emotion. Time of young days is better spent in learning. Pearson implies that my father thought little of my abilities. The contrary is the case. My father was a man who often said the opposite of what he thought. Out of modesty or fear of destiny. This is not uncommon.

Dr. Marloe describes the book as "cold," and one understands him. There is a lot of theory in this book. Yet also it is a very "hot" book (too hot), full of unstudied personal emotions. And of immediate judgments, sometimes not good ones. Perhaps it needs, like a poem, to be again and again reflected? Perhaps any novel needs further reflection and a truly great writer would write only one novel. (Flaubert?) My mother refers to me rightly as a writer but wrongly as well-known. (I am a poet.) So I am careful and sparing with words. There is a ring in what Pearson says about silence. That part I liked. He may be right that an experience is richest not talked of. As between two people talk to an outsider destroys. Art is secret secret secret. But it has some speech or it would not be. Art is public public public. (But only when it is good.) Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) It is not science or love or power or service. But it is the only true voice of these. It is their truth. It delves and chatters not.

Pearson always hated music. I can remember that. I can remember his brusquely switching off my father's record player. (A violent act.) I was a small child then. I see the scene. He hated it. Mr. Lox- ias must be a good teacher. (Indeed I know he is: if "teacher" is the word.) But is there not an irony? Pearson worked hard at writing all his life. I saw his notebooks. They looked liked work. There were a great many words there. Now there is music and no more words perhaps. Now there is music and beyond it silence. Why?

I confess that I never read the books that Pearson wrote. I think there is more than one. My mother is wrong here. I did not think he was a very good critic either. I think he understood only the vulgar side of Shakespeare. But I admired what I thought of as his life. He seemed an example: a lifetime at trying and failing. It seemed remarkable to go on trying. (Sometimes it seemed stupid however.) Naturally I admired, my father too. There was no conflict. Perhaps some prescient instinct made me love the idea of a small publication. (A poet who is a novelist's child must deplore the parent's verbosity.) The idea of the secret worker making little things. But it was only an idea. Pearson published as much as he could. If my father was the carpenter, Pearson was certainly the walrus.

This is not a personal statement. Words are for concealment, art is concealment. Truth emerges from secrecy and laconic discipline. I want to argue about a general matter. Pearson seems to me merely sentimental when he concludes that music is the highest art. Does he believe it? He is parroting. No doubt Mr. Loxias has influenced him. Music is an art and also a symbol of all art. Its most universal symbol. But the highest art is poetry because words are spirit at its most refined: its ultimate matrix. Excuse me, Mr. Loxias.

Most important of all. Pearson was wrong to identify his Eros with the source of art. Even though he says one is a "mere" shadow of the other. Indeed it is the hotness of the book that I feel, not its coldness. True art is very very cold. Especially when it portrays passion. For only so can passion be portrayed. Pearson has muddied the waters. Erotic love never inspires art. Or only bad art. To be more precise. Soul-energy may be called sex down to the bottom. (Or up to the top.) That concerns me not. The deep springs of human love are not the springs of art. The demon of love is not the demon of art. Love is concerned with possession and vindication of self. Art with neither. To mix up art with Eros, however black, is the most subtle and corrupting mistake an artist can commit. Art cannot muddle with love any more than it can muddle with politics. Art is concerned neither with comfort nor with the possible. It is concerned with truth in its least pleasant and useful and therefore most truthful form. (Is it not so, you who listen?) Pearson was not cool enough. Neither was my father.

Even this does not explain. Pearson said that every artist is a masochist to his muse. Though by now perhaps he has seen the falseness of this. (It is possibly the key to his own failure.) Nothing could be falser. The worshipping attitude concentrates on self. The worshipper kneels as Narcissus kneels to gaze into the water. Dr. Marloe says artists give houseroom to the universe. Yes. But then they cannot be narcissists. And of course not all artists are homosexuals. (What nonsense!) Art is not religion or worship or the acting out of obsessions. Good art is not. The artist has no master. No, none.

Julian Belling

Mr. Loxias who has read the above tells me 1 have not said whether I endorse Pearson or my mother. I have not seen or communicated with either for several years. Naturally I endorse (roughly) what my mother says. However what Pearson has to say is true in its way. As for Mr Loxias, about whom there has been speculation: I think know who he is. He will understand when I say that I have mixed feelings about him. What does truth mean to him, I wondc I feel I should in fairness add something else. I think the child I was loved the man Pearson was. But this was a love which words cannot describe. Certainly his words do not. A 1 failure.

Editor's Postscript

Since the foregoing documents were collected my dear friend Bradley Pearson has died. He died in prison of a quick-growing cancer, which developed soon after he finished his book. I was his only mourner.

There is after all little for me to say. I had thought, as editor, to have written a long essay, criticizing and drawing morals. I had looked forward with some pleasure to having the last word. But Bradley's death has made a lengthy commentary seem otiose. Death cannot silence art, but it can suggest spaces and pauses. So I have little to say. The reader will recognize the voice of truth when he hears it. If he does not, so much the worse for him.

I cannot forbear to make a few remarks, most of them obvious, about the postscripts. Mrs. Belling says, in part rightly, that words are for concealment. How little the postscript-writers have been able to avail themselves of this decency. These people are indeed on display. Each lady, for instance, asserts (or implies) that Bradley was in love with her. Even the gentleman asserts it. Touching. However this is a small matter and to be expected. Equally to be expected are the lies. Mrs. Baffin lies to protect herself, Mrs. Belling to protect Mrs. Baffin. How conveniently hazy Mrs. Selling's memory has now become! This is an understandable piety, although mother and daughter have long broken off all relations. "Dr." Marloe, who told the truth at the trial, pusillanimously fails to repeat it now. I am told he has been threatened by Mrs. Baffin's solicitors. "Dr." Marloe is no hero. For this we must forgive him. Bradley, who never saw these sad "postscripts" to his work, would have done so.

My intention in publishing these papers was originally twofold. First, to give to the public a work of literature. I am by nature an impresario, and this is not the first time I have been thus instrumental. Secondly, I wished to vindicate the honour of my dear friend, to clear him, briefly, of the charge of murder. That I have not been assisted in this task by either Mrs. Belling or "Dr." Marloe is, as I say, not surprising, though it is saddening. I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them. In pursuance of my second objective, I had intended to write a long analysis of my own, rather like a detective's final summing up, pointing out discrepancies, making inferences, drawing conclusions. This I have decided to omit. Partly because Bradley is dead. And death always seems to commit truth to some wider and larger court. And partly because, rereading Bradley Pearson's story, I feel that it speaks for itself.

Two things remain. One to give some brief account of Bradley Pearson's last days. The other to take issue (on a theoretical point only: I leave the facts to her conscience) with Mrs. Belling. The latter I will do first, also briefly. Art, my dear Mrs. Belling, is a very much tougher and coarser plant than you seem to be imagining in your very literary piece. Your eloquence, which verges, I fear, on the romantic, even the sentimental, is that of a young person. When you are older in art you will understand better. (You may even then be privileged to understand Shakespeare's vulgarity.) About the soul we speak always in metaphors: metaphors which are best used briefly and then thrown away. About the soul perhaps we can only converse directly with our intimates. This makes moral philosophy vain. And there is no science of these things. There is no depth to which you, Mrs. Belling, or any other human being, can see where 364 EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT you can make final distinctions about what does and what does not essentially nourish art. Why are you so anxious to divide that great blackamoor in two, what are you afraid of? (The answer to this question could tell you much.) To say that great art can be as vulgar and as pornographic as it pleases is to say but little. Art is to do with joy and play and the absurd. Mrs. Baffin says that Bradley was a figure of fun. All human beings are figures of fun. Art celebrates this. Art is adventure stories. (Why do you deride adventure stories, Mrs. Baffin?) Of course it is to do with truth, it makes truth. But to that anything can open its eyes. Erotic love can. Bradley's synthesis may seem nai've; perhaps it is. Behind his unity there may be distinctions, but behind the distinctions there is unity and how far into that vista can a human being see and how far does an artist need to see? Art has its own austerity to it reserved. At an austere philosophy it can only mock.

As for music, which Mrs. Belling acutely says is the image of all the arts but not their king: I am not disposed to disagree. In fact I am well placed to appreciate her argument. Known as a musician, I am in fact interested in all the arts. Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human communications. But the arts form not a pyramid but a circle. They are the defensive outer barriers of language, whose elaboration is a condition of all simpler modes of communication. Without these defences men sink to beasts. That music points to silence is again an image, which Bradley used. All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. The creator of form must suffer formlessness. Even risk dying of it. What would Bradley Pearson have done if he had lived? Would he have written another book, a great one? Perhaps. The human soul is full of surprises.

Bradley died well, tenderly, gently, as a man should. I so clearly recall the look upon his face of simple vulnerable surprise when (I was present) the doctor told him the worst. He looked as he had looked once when he dropped a capacious teapot and saw it break. He said, "Oh!" and turned to me. The rest was fast. He soon took to his bed. The hand of death modelled him speedily, soon made his head a skull. He did not try to write. He talked with me, asked me to explain things, holding my hand. We listened to music together.

On the morning of the last day he said to me, "My dear fellow, I'm sorry--to be still here--so boring." Then he said, "Don't make a fuss, will you?"

"What about?"

"That opera--"

"Which?"

"Rosenkavalier." After that he was silent for a while. Then, "How did it end? That young fellow--what was his name--?"

"Octavian."

"Did he stay with the Marschallin or did he leave her and find a young girl of his own age?"

"He found a young girl of his own age and left the Marschallin."

"Well, that was right, wasn't it." Then after a while he turned, still holding my hand, and snuggled down as if to sleep. And slept.

I am glad to think how much I comforted his last days. I felt as if he had suffered the lack of me throughout his life; and at the end I suffered with him and suffered, at last, his mortality. I needed him too. He added a dimension to my being.

As for my own identity: I can scarcely, "Dr." Marloe, be an invention of Bradley's, since I have survived him. Falstaff, it is true, sur- vivid Shakespeare, but did not edit his plays. Nor am I, let me assure Mrs. Hartbourne, in the publishing trade, though more than one publisher has reason to be grateful to me. I hear it has even been suggested that Bradley Pearson and myself are both simply fictions, the invention of a minor novelist. Fear will inspire any hypothesis. No, no. I exist. Perhaps Mrs. Baffin, though her ideas are quite implausibly crude, is nearer to the truth. And Bradley existed. Here upon the desk as I write these words stands the little bronze of the buffalo lady. (The buffalo's leg has been repaired.) Also a gilt snuffbox inscribed A Friend's Gift. And Bradley Pearson's story, which I made him tell, remains too, a kind of thing more durable than these. Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

P.L.

The End