Almost a Gentleman [antikvár]

J. A Palpable Miss M/Y Egret, Cubitt's Yacht Basin, London wi2 12 August 1955 In that midsummer I felt oddly if unaccountably idling-over on some slow charge. It was an unfamiliar feeling, something like a rare intake of heart's ease. I was twenty-five and, for such an importunate soul as I certainly was then, the auguries were discouraging if not downright damning. Trying to order the chaos of hindsight now, my spirit was partially disabled by diffidence but also fuelled by what was regarded as a reckless, untutored frenzy, a puzzling arrogance, destructive to others and to myself That seemed to be the implicit impression I created among all those I encountered in my profession. Pamela Lane, my first wife, had confirmed this only a year before, refusing to keep faith with what she saw as a pursuit of distressfiil disorder. Anyway, I was easily and happily ignorable in those days, when I must have looked most certain to go away. And quite soon. I didn't feel liberated from Pamela. The prospect of divorce never entered my sometimes wild projections of the future as I moped around the Welsh villages on an Arts Council tour of Pygmalion. I would simply resist any approximation to my feelings during those shocked, brooding months after we separated. Writing and finishing Look Back in Anger presented no purge or lasting comfort, no justification by either faith or works. I had addressed myself to events in some way. They were particular and personal, but they were not confined to the hulk of my marriage nor even to the wider constraints of general indifference, dislike or mere torpor. For the first time I had written a play on my own. It had taken me something like seventeen days in all. It had been a sprint. I was apprehensive that anyone might pay attention to my solo dash. 'Don't expect anything. Then you won't be disappointed.' It was the batde-cry of misery of my mother, Nellie Beatrice, a litde like the famous wartime catch-phrase, 'It's being so cheerful as keeps me going.' Nothing was so deadly as this sanctimonious, more-cheerful-than-thouness. I continued, then as now, to expect everything, disappointment most of all. It has been a useful mechanism. 1 was beholden to no one. Pamela had told me that our three-year-old