The Marrying, Divorce and Early Middle Age of Edward Albert Tewler
Chapter 1
Species Homo Tewler
I AM telling the simple life story of one individual Londoner, and I am pledged not to stray from a plain objective narrative1; nevertheless it has already been necessary to supplement this record of acts and deeds by statements of a more general nature, to place the story definitely” in its historical perspective. Just as if you are making a deposition2 about murder on the high seas you have, if possible, to indicate the latitude3 and longitude4 of the ship. It has been necessary, for instance, to indicate the r61e of the feudal5 and Christian6 traditions, if the story is to be read understandingly by an enlightened American or Russian or Chinese reader, or to have any value for that posterity7 to which, under the restrictions8 of the present paper shortage, it is mainly addressed. And now furthermore in one brief but concentrated section we must broaden our reference wider still and show not merely Tewler in terms of terrestrial latitude and longitude but Tewler in relation to the starry10 universe, to space and time and ideals . . .
We have already called attention to the general nature of the Metamorphosis through which Edward Albert passed out of his tadpole11 stage. We must expand a little more on that, because it explains why his love life, as we may call it, was widely different in its nature from the simple, concentrated, exciting and even beautiful romanticism, which the literature of our present social order is preserving for the inspiration of posterity.
In the plays and novels of that now rapidly vanishing past, from which, like people who have been salvaged12 from a severely13 bombed city, we are emerging stunned14 and uncertain; in that literature, I say, the characters are definitely described as being “in love with” so and so. This being “in love” is a specific concentration of desire and affection upon the “object”, who is always of the opposite sex, and it excludes all other interests. The character “falls” into it, It is presented as the common quality of all the humanity that is fit to print. A rake is a person in whom this state of mind is less enduring than usual, but when he is in it, he is in it as simply and entirely15 as a really good man. And most villains16 are made villains through scorned and unrequited love. The tragedies of life are when A is in love with B and B on the contrary loves G or anyhow does not return A’s love. The dark side of love comes up when B, for mercenary reasons, pretends to be in love with A. And further B may love C unknowingly when believing himself or herself to be in love with A. Moreover, there was a process, exactly parallel to religious conversion17, when B “learnt to love” A, or gradually fell out of love with A and into love with C. Around this primary system of adult loves were grouped equally firm and invariable loves — of mothers, of sons and daughters.
Just as hardly anyone in that idealistic past, believed his religion, which was really far too complex and artificial for any human brain to understand and believe, but only liked to believe he.believed it, so the worthy18 generation into which Edward Albert was born liked to believe it had a simple, explicable, and generally acceptable “love life.” In each case there was a fundamental falsification of reality. The story our progenitors19 told was not how they were actually behaving. It was just how they wanted to believe they behaved. But why did they all, Edward Albert included, distort reality like that?
The normal human being, you may have observed, has a passion for autobiography20. You have it yourself. If you deny it indignantly, that means merely that you have it in its more passive form. I have told you something that you resent because it does not tally21 with the story about yourself that you tell yourself. This passion becomes oppressively manifest5 for instance, in fellow-travellers on ships, whose minds have been relaxed by a flux22 of strangers at leisure, and it is particularly evident in general conversation in America. At bottom every American seems to be in a state of wonder at his own high and profound motivation, and as anxious to make himself believe it all as to convince you.
And this is natural enough, and was to be expected, because the riddles23 of human conduct are far more difficult than those of any other animal. The onrush of social life has come to this lonely-spirited ape, for that is what we still are fundamentally, at headlong speed, through a conspiracy24 of inventions and devices, in a few thousand generations, and he has found himself involved with an ever-expanding multitude of fellow-citizens, whom he is disposed to fear and to hate and to get the better of in almost equal measure.
This is no mere9 theorising, or it would be quite out of place here. This is simply a repetition in general terms of the case of Edward Albert Tewler as it has been put before you in the preceding two books, unobtrusively for the most part, but with an outbreak of explicitness25 in Book the Second, Chapter Three. It is the case of Homo Tewler > which includes all of us — Homo sapiens existing as yet only in the dreamlands of aspiration26. This poor uncomfortable creature is continually doing its best to make a plausibly27 consistent story of its behaviour both to itself and the social world about it, and to be guided by that legend so as to escape an open breach28 with its environment. The urgency we are under to pull ourselves together and make an acceptable account of ourselves finds its outlet29 in these yarns30 about religious experience and consistent love that we force upon one another at every opportunity.
So it has been since the ancestral Tewler (Pithecanthropus Tewler) found himself coming down from his nice safe tree nests to the agoraphobia of the ground level and, with the most strenuous31 suppressions of his primary instincts, living in ever-expanding communities. He wants intensely to say,
“You can rely on me to do this. It is quite impossible for me to do that. But since I am a Moslem32 you cannot expect me to do that! No healthy Englishman would dream of . . . ”
He says such things to himself, and will hear of no other possibility of conduct outside their scope. The last thing he will do is to admit our common, essential and unavoidable incoherence. He fences himself about with taboos34 and customs and creeds35, and the more energetic sort of people, themselves believing, have been only too ready to assist their weaker brethren and strengthen their own faith, by guiding and controlling them. This is right and lovely, and as for that? Oh! you’d never do that! The sage36, the teacher, the priest, the guru, have kept their fingers pointing steadily37 away from fact towards the ideal.
And as long as the circumstances of the life of Homo Tewler have not changed too rapidly for these guides to accomodate themselves to the new conditions, his societies have been able to get along by clinging to this or that particular compromise with truth, which provided an effective method of cooperation. The cooperation might be imperfect, but it rubbed along.
For long ages Homo Tewler managed to pretend that his private imaginations and the more unpleasant realities of his behaviour were not actually there at all, that the misbehaviours of his fellow-creatures were “abnormalities” and lapses38 which he did not share —“Oh, quite impossible!”— or that they were due to diabolical39 possession of an exceptional tort. It was only with the advent40 of psychoanalysis that a complex tangle41 of fancies and dreams that he had hitherto denied and smuggled42 away, was dragged out shamefacedly as his “sub-conscious” into an almost too vivid light of day.
“What’s all this?” asked the psychoanalyst, “I’m really surprised at you,” like a conjuror43 taking a rabbit out of the good man’s hair. We all had a sub-conscious, he declared. Every one of us. All. But — we began to remember things we had been in the habit of dismissing from our minds. It was most disconcerting.
Freud and his psychoanalysts suffered from the disadvantages of a classical education, and in their researches into the concealments of their troubled patients, they found remarkable44 reminders45 of the sonorous46 taboo33 tragedies of the Greeks. Impressed by the irrational47 freaks of adverse48 incidents, and unable to believe the dreadful truth that Nature, pursuing a course as yet undeciphered, cares not a dam for her individual offspring, Homo Tewler has always pitted his poor cunning against the Indifference49, in the hope of finding lucky and unlucky observances that will compel It to behave and misbehave. Magic was primitive50 science in practice, and its observance was Taboos. Taboos still rule our minds. We break a Taboo and nothing we believe will arrest the consequences. It is Fate. Scarcely anything will persuade us that Fate doesn’t care a rap about it, that the calm of the Indifference is unruffled. We keep on fussing. You mustn’t marry your mother-inlaw, even if you don’t know she is your mother-inlaw, or look, like Ham, at your parent’s ill-adjusted dress. Oh! it’s just awful for you if you do. If you meet a black cat or three magpies51, cross yourself or go home and hide. But these scholar-psychiatrists chose to elevate their Greek classics to a sort of history of the human imagination, and invented (Jung chiefly) a great Oedipus complex, a lesser52 Electra complex and all the rest of the psychoanalysts’ Classical Walpurgis Night, to systematise our mental chaos53. With these Fate dramas they entangled54 the Hebrew idea of original sin, which also manifestly arose out of a legend of a broken taboo and a curse. (You can’t be too careful.) Adler, as we shall see later, with his “inferiority complex”, came much nearer to the main reality of human imperatives55.
A little less of the classics and a trifle more of biology, and the psychoanalysts would have understood that this “sense of sin” of theirs is neither more nor less than the natural discomfort56 of an imperfectly adapted animal to its environment. It has no more to do with some profound universal conviction of transgression57 than a coat that is tight under the arms or the wrong spectacles. Now that the environment of Homo Tewler has begun to change at a pace and to an extent that would have been absolutely incredible fifty years ago, a ruthless urgency calls upon him to adapt his mind and his way of living to these vast demands and become Homo sapiens indeed, before utter disaster overwhelms him. Can he? And will he? He is much more likely to give way to storms of taboo terrorism, to mutilate and prostrate58 himself, to seek to propitiate59 the offended fetishes by violent persecutions, to revert60 to inquisitions and witch smellings. . . .
At this point the Censor61 intervenes and objects that if this goes on, our story will cease to be a specific monograph62 upon Edward Albert Tewler and will become a general dissertation63 upon human life, which is precisely64, says the Censor, what I undertook to avoid. I would dispute that, were I not afraid that the reader would take sides with the Censor, In the Introduction. . . .
But there is no need to wrangle65. What I have said I have said. I will revert now to our “specimen” of Homo Tewler var. Anglicanus and tell how he lived into the opening phase of our world catastrophe66 and what he said and did then. I will do my utmost henceforth to stick still more closely to the record of his individual acts and experiences.
Yet I must admit here that I join with Mrs Richard Tewler in deploring67 the inaudibility of Mrs Humbelay. If only we could have heard those lost trailers of hers, we might have benefited greatly from her unlimited68 store of obscure and occasionally, what many people might be disposed to consider, obscene wisdom. I could have quoted her and that would have been indisputable story-telling. . . .
It has to be recorded then that Edward Albert never in the whole course of his life really loved or felt honest, generous friendship for any human being such as the codes of our literary tradition require. That demands an amount of deliberate mental synthesis of which his early education and upbringing had already rendered him incapable69. How he worked out his own conception of an acceptable religious life has been told. He became a moderate Christian after the fashion of the majority of his fellow-countrymen, occasionally he went to church, some Anglican church, but he rarely did so unless there was nowhere else to go or he had some personal incentive70, and he thought about his religion as little as he could. There it was, like a passport put away in a safe, and you did not bother about it until there was a call for it. Then out it came. “Pass Christian!” (“Them Atheists will look a bit silly!”) His sexual development was more confused and complicated than his religious history, it had become entangled with a number of factors in the metamorphosis which were essentially71 independent of sexual reproduction, and to that greater complex we must now address ourselves.
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narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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deposition
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| n.免职，罢官；作证；沉淀；沉淀物 | |
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latitude
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| n.纬度，行动或言论的自由(范围)，(pl.)地区 | |
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longitude
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| n.经线，经度 | |
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feudal
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| adj.封建的，封地的，领地的 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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posterity
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| n.后裔，子孙，后代 | |
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restrictions
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| 约束( restriction的名词复数 )； 管制； 制约因素； 带限制性的条件（或规则） | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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tadpole
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| n.[动]蝌蚪 | |
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salvaged
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| （从火灾、海难等中）抢救（某物）( salvage的过去式和过去分词 )； 回收利用（某物） | |
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severely
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| adv.严格地；严厉地；非常恶劣地 | |
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stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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villains
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| n.恶棍( villain的名词复数 )；罪犯；（小说、戏剧等中的）反面人物；淘气鬼 | |
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conversion
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| n.转化，转换，转变 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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progenitors
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| n.祖先( progenitor的名词复数 )；先驱；前辈；原本 | |
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autobiography
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| n.自传 | |
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tally
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| n.计数器，记分，一致，测量；vt.计算，记录，使一致；vi.计算，记分，一致 | |
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flux
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| n.流动；不断的改变 | |
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riddles
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| n.谜（语）( riddle的名词复数 )；猜不透的难题，难解之谜 | |
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conspiracy
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| n.阴谋，密谋，共谋 | |
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explicitness
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aspiration
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| n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出 | |
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plausibly
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| 似真地 | |
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breach
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| n.违反，不履行；破裂；vt.冲破，攻破 | |
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outlet
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| n.出口/路；销路；批发商店；通风口；发泄 | |
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yarns
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| n.纱( yarn的名词复数 )；纱线；奇闻漫谈；旅行轶事 | |
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strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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Moslem
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| n.回教徒，穆罕默德信徒；adj.回教徒的，回教的 | |
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taboo
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| n.禁忌，禁止接近，禁止使用；adj.禁忌的；v.禁忌，禁制，禁止 | |
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taboos
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| 禁忌( taboo的名词复数 )； 忌讳； 戒律； 禁忌的事物（或行为） | |
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creeds
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| （尤指宗教）信条，教条( creed的名词复数 ) | |
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sage
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| n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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lapses
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| n.失误，过失( lapse的名词复数 )；小毛病；行为失检；偏离正道v.退步( lapse的第三人称单数 )；陷入；倒退；丧失 | |
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diabolical
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| adj.恶魔似的，凶暴的 | |
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advent
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| n.(重要事件等的)到来，来临 | |
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tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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smuggled
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| 水货 | |
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conjuror
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| n.魔术师，变戏法者 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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reminders
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| n.令人回忆起…的东西( reminder的名词复数 )；提醒…的东西；（告知该做某事的）通知单；提示信 | |
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sonorous
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| adj.响亮的，回响的；adv.圆润低沉地；感人地；n.感人，堂皇 | |
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irrational
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| adj.无理性的，失去理性的 | |
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adverse
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| adj.不利的；有害的；敌对的，不友好的 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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magpies
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| 喜鹊（magpie的复数形式） | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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entangled
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| adj.卷入的；陷入的；被缠住的；缠在一起的v.使某人（某物/自己）缠绕，纠缠于（某物中），使某人（自己）陷入（困难或复杂的环境中）( entangle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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imperatives
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| n.必要的事( imperative的名词复数 )；祈使语气；必须履行的责任 | |
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discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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transgression
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| n.违背；犯规；罪过 | |
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prostrate
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| v.拜倒，平卧，衰竭；adj.拜倒的，平卧的，衰竭的 | |
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propitiate
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| v.慰解，劝解 | |
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revert
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| v.恢复，复归，回到 | |
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censor
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| n./vt.审查，审查员；删改 | |
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monograph
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| n.专题文章，专题著作 | |
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dissertation
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| n.（博士学位）论文，学术演讲，专题论文 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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wrangle
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| vi.争吵 | |
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catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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deploring
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| v.悲叹，痛惜，强烈反对( deplore的现在分词 ) | |
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unlimited
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| adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的 | |
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incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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incentive
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| n.刺激；动力；鼓励；诱因；动机 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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