When Truths Play False

Olivia Manning. So excited, you salivate over her name. How you look forward to a literary critical dance around her wonderful double trilogy on the Second World War. Oh dear, I must disappoint you. It’ll be a while yet before I get down to those masterpieces. Instead, a minor work, written in an interstice of peace: School for Love. A boy crosses childhood’s threshold and stumbles into adolescence. Once a pleasant meadow now an obstacle course.

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Is there is a moment, a flash of recognition, like the first epiphany of love, when you know, when you say to yourself, ‘ah! Now I’m a grown-up person’? If so, we usually get it wrong. Adolescent insight mistaken for full-blown maturity.1

What is this moment? Usually, this spark of thought: we’re better than the adults before us. That sense of superiority, a student superciliousness, as we plume ourselves on our knowledge, newly minted, thus shockingly alive. Adults? We don’t need their old opinions, their out-of-date, stultifying, corrupt concepts. What our parents think? Landfill! To see Truth for the very first time. It’s like watching a girlfriend take off her clothes. Thrilling! Also shocking…. We’ve been given a microscope to human weakness. How soft they are. And those illusions! We look down on such softness. Ridicule this myth-making. These adults warriors no longer. Losing the battle with hard truth, bested by adamantine fact, they lie wounded in some hospital room, sad cases, addicted to their conceptual barbiturates. Or they skulk home, surrendering themselves to sloppy fictions. But you are magnanimous. You’ll not expose their fantasies. You have the strength to live without such threadbare comforts.

Felix opened his lips to tell Mr Jewel how his money had come to him, but before he spoke he realized that Mr Jewel was no more deceived than he was. Whatever the truth might be, Mr Jewel did not want to hear it. He was willing to be deceived.

Mr Jewel, glancing up uneasily, met the aware, critical stare of Felix’s young eyes. He looked away at once and said with a sort of grumbling self-pity that hid nothing: ‘I’m an old man, y’know, Felix. I might have a bit of cash now, but I’ve got no one of my own; no flesh and blood. That’s what you want when you’re old - flesh and blood. You don’t understand. You’re young. You’re strong and independent. You’ve got all your life before you. You young ones are a bit hard on us old ones - you don’t know what it’s like to be old. I’m a lonely old man; she’s a lonely old woman. All she’s ever wanted is for life to give her something, just to show she’s not out of it all, not neglected. We’re all human; it’s not for us to be too hard on one another. You’ll find that out some day.’

Mr Jewel looked at Felix as though appealing for his support, but Felix would concede nothing. He lifted Faro on to his shoulders and stood up. Meeting Mr Jewel’s bleary old eyes, he did his best to smile. As he shook hands and said good-bye, it seemed to him that Mr Jewel was little better than a child, while he, knowing all he knew, would never be a child again.

I have gone too far too quickly. No-one pole-vaults from child to adulthood. All to climb a high and steep staircase. Many years yet before Felix gains the gift of self-sight, that true marker of maturity. There is only one man in these paragraphs…. 

A child doesn't understand other human beings, who are books they cannot read. This changes in adolescence; suddenly we discern motive, notice the gap between language and action, see that adults act on reasons they won’t divulge. They know what they are doing, they only pretend to believe in what they profess. It is why as teenagers we become so keen on truth. Worry about fakes. An adult knows that words are mere conventions; loose fitting gowns, not uniforms tightly moulded to each curve. We have learn to accept such realities. Nursery. Classroom. Theatre. The three stages of mental growth….

So easy for an adolescent to confuse their own innocence with moral purity. This child projects teenage notions onto an old man. But Felix is growing. He’s beginning to understand the world. The solipsism of the childish self is dissolving. A man has arrived in his ramshackle boat to take our boy off his island. Bye bye to the days of looking at himself in the clear waters of his ocean…. Now to look another person in the face. Suddenly Felix is seeing others for the first time. Of course he sees too clearly, his judgements too sharp, harsh. Here is the excitement of Truth! A new toy. A hard drug. The delight of playing with strange new things. Years yet before he learns their mundanity, accepts that truth must be mixed with habit, ignorance and illusion. That truth is only a pleasing picture to offset a dull wall…. Felix is young. An innocent looking at corruption for the first time. Also a mind still growing; thus strong on ideas, but weak on literature, that study of experience and its psychological riddles. In adolescence the complexities of life are reduced to cartoon-like clarity. The mist-filled valley of one’s first decade resolving itself into trees, road, walls, a house and that lone farmer, walking with his dog…. It’ll be another decade and a half (at least) before we talk to that man, are invited inside his home, learn an idiosyncratic history. Such a strong, penetrating vision sees only isolated objects. Only through experience do we sense and feel and grasp those invisible threads holding them together. Of course we can’t tell Felix this. Will he listen! Our boy has caught the disease of youth, the belief that truth is simple and that he knows it. Alas, the complexities of truth, one of which is that most people have little time for it, are beyond him. It is adults who attain the habit of that wisdom.

A teenager draws in black and white. He’ll hit thirty before he starts to paint in colours

The novel is a case study in such growth; the plot the unfolding of Felix’s consciousness as it grows out of a childish literalism, an uncritical belief in appearances. When he first arrives in Jerusalem Felix believes the hypocrisies of Miss Bohun, a typical religious fraud who, forever praising her own piety, is only interested in pound notes. Miss Bohun a fantastic grotesque, whose secret - at dinner with a new guest - is unexpectedly revealed.

Miss Bohun, as she sliced the meat, talked loudly and with a wild gaiety. Felix could not keep his eyes off her. He had never seen her so animated so - yes, happy. He realized that Miss Bohun was happy. Little pink patches glowed on her cheekbones; her eyes were not half-shut now but open and shining…

As Miss Bohun sliced the meat, her voice rose higher and higher in a sort of exaltation of gaiety: ‘I do hope you’ll be comfortable in my room. It gets the morning sun which I always enjoyed so much, but you must not worry about me. I shall be very happy in the attic. Very happy. The carpenters have done a wonderful job, and - this is important - I shall be nicely tucked away up there. I shall have quiet. I cannot tell you what that means to me! You must realize, when I’m seeking inspiration for my sermons - the voice is so thin, the thread that carries it so very, very thin, and the birth-pangs so terrific, that the slightest sound can disturb it; the slightest jar.’ She touched Mrs Ellis’s arm confidentially, causing her to turn in a startled way…

Later we learn that during the Ever-Readies annual show Miss Bohun dresses up in men’s clothes. It confirms what we see here: this woman, who runs a fanatical puritan cult - the Ever-Readies are waiting for the apocalypse - is a repressed lesbian. To the reader the true nature of Miss Bohun - greedy, selfish, cold, nasty - is apparent, and is confirmed in her interactions with Mr Jewel and Mrs Ellis. At first Felix cannot see behind her words; although often he feels something is wrong. The dilemma of a child who, because their understanding is not as developed as their instincts, feels the world just out of reach. Although Felix senses something is not quite right, he has a natural sympathy for this woman, who has taken him in after the death of his parents; thus he believes her false phrases, on which he puts his best gloss. Such gaps between instinct and knowledge can tease a child to distraction. Poor Felix! He cannot grasp her motives. Miss Bohun loves cash, and is using his vulnerability to rip him off: she is charging too high a rent for his board.

Mrs Ellis, young, beautiful and intelligent, captivates Felix. She is the axle around which his education turns; for she radically changes his perspective. Each one of her statements rings out with the clear tone of a percussive instrument: ding! This boy is hearing truth for the first time. Suddenly the world has completely new meanings. Miss Bohun now seen through Mrs Ellis’s eyes.

This has its dangers. Mrs Ellis too is changing. Pregnant, her beauty begins to recede. Worse: pregnancy is a centripetal force; the body, jealous for her attention, pulls all consciousness into its self. Her own child to think about she is losing interest in our hero. Then Miss Bohun chooses the right moment to sever the connection: you shouldn't be taking him to disreputable clubs, she says. This shames Mrs Ellis into ignoring Felix. Badly hurt by this rebuff, he reacts in the usual fashion, questioning her authority, rejecting her opinions, especially when she crudely exaggerates Miss Bohun’s faults (the relationship between these women has deteriorated badly: they ignore each other, though living in the same house). Felix oscillates. He moves back a little towards his landlady, but cannot return to his previous naivety: he has absorbed too many truths to think her honest.

One pupil, a Greek, counter-attacked by asking Miss Bohun to help organize an entertainment that would bring in money for the Greek refugees encamped, she said, in misery down at Rafah. The appeal grew impassioned and was not brief. Miss Bohun apparently did not interrupt it, but when it was over she replied in cooly measured words: ‘I would like to help you, Madam Babayannis, but I am forced to think of others. My time belongs to many things. First, of course, to the “Ever-Readies”, then to my lodgers; fifteen hours a week of my time belongs to my pupils; it does not belong to me. And then I have this house - some of my time belongs to that. Besides, I know how much organisation costs. I feel I owe it to myself never to take on that sort of thing without payment. It would not be fair to my other commitments.’ There was a pause during which Madame Babayannis must have sorted out this reply, for her voice same in a sudden explosion: ‘Ah, Miss Bohun, this is a new thing - the property of time.’

Felix knows that Miss Bohun is a fraud. Growing up, he is acquiring the ability to question experience, to contrast personality and behaviour against the words used to describe them. When subjected to examination Miss Bohun comes out poorly, and his affection seeps away. The animal reaction is to find another protector, whom he can love; alas, Mrs Ellis fails him. This too an education. To recognise her defects, the limits to her tenderness, represents a new stage in his growth: he is learning to lean upon his own self. Even his dead mother can no longer supply a foundation…seen through Mrs Ellis’s too critical eyes she appears naive. This boy is learning to view the world through the ideas of others. However, it’ll be a long time yet before he exercises his own judgement; the teenager apt to lean too heavily on the cynic’s view, a critic’s concepts. A child reaches adolescence when he recognises that adults live in a world of half-truths and lies. To be a man is to accept this as natural. For now Felix is infatuated with that strange teenage fantasy: truth is all that matters, and he has access to that truth, which must change all things.

It seemed clear to Felix, from some of the things he had heard his mother and Mr Jewel say, that they had grown up in a simpler world; and, being simpler, a world in which hypocrisy had had things all its own way. But it didn’t have things all its own way with Mrs Ellis and Felix. Oh no! They were young and knowing; they saw through Miss Bohun…

The solipsism of our adolescent years, when we think we have special insight and are sophisticated. A simpleton’s view. The mind working overtime, it doesn’t realise that soon it will have much leisure, as the routine concerns of job, family and neighbourliness do all the work. When earning cash and making kids hard truths (a tautology, for truths are always hard) fade into the background. To manage affairs is to prefer the friendly smile to the dour sermon…. Truth finds its natural home amongst teenagers and young adults, who do not have to test it against their own survival. At this age we turn life into a comic strip; blind to the fact that we ourselves are the main cartoon. 

Before long he’ll become an even bigger cartoon. A few years back in England, and Felix will be like those intellectuals in the Innsbruck, confident in the truth of their ideas and their ability to transform the world, so sure of their immunity from its banalities and corruptions. He’ll copy these Jews and Arabs, friends in the cafes of Jerusalem, who think they will not be coerced, never to join sides in the war that is about to begin. Their shared intellectual interests, their Kafka and Joyce, a fortress, their armour-plating. It’s not only children who are naive. And like adolescents these chaps also feel something is wrong. Their fear in this period of peace shows it. The end of the European war is bad news for these characters; for the next one, here in the Middle East, will destroy their amity, ruin their beautiful ideas, send each to their own side of the firing line. Soon there will be no safe place, no no-man’s land, in Palestine. When the Zionists and the Arabs fight, each to become the other’s enemy. For now ideas rule. These intellectuals young men who believe in the fantasy of the idea, its magic force, its immense power, its irresistible influence. Words as strong as bulldozers….

Those who won’t give up their big idea, even when reality overtakes it, become like Miss Bohun; someone whose beliefs are separated from their actions: her beautiful Christian thoughts a cover for selfishness and greed. To a boy it’s all lies. The reality is more complex. None of us can leave our past wholly behind; a past that includes our beliefs, which are desperate to hang around - ideas so gluey. It is why when we grow up to be practical adults we find our concepts holding us back, dragging us down…. It is not easy to give up old ideas. Better to keep them and empty them of all content. Miss Bohun is a Christian. She is also a hypocrite.

Beware of big ideas, they will tie you to the mast of some sinking ship. Miss Bohun is a stunted adult because she hasn't cast out those strong adolescent beliefs, which have inhibited her emotional and sexual growth. A school for love? This woman ignorant of life’s lessons. As a pupil we learn facts and concepts, but the real education takes place in our feelings; Felix growing up because he has loved and lost Mrs Ellis; such loss, accepted and wisely reflected upon, maturing us. Other people, not textbooks, our greatest teachers. Other people. They force us to see beyond ourselves; to recognise a world existing outside our own ideas. One day Felix will push Narcissus into his pond.

Review: School for Love

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1. A masterpiece on the conflict between adolescent and adult mentalities: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.