On Obsession

‘Then what do you want from life, Netta?’ he asked.  ‘What are you gettingat in it all?’

      When theirfood had come he had ordered wine, and now, if not drunk, he was careless andbold with drink.  Otherwise he wouldnever have asked her a serious, direct question like that.  To ask Netta a serious direct question, inthe ordinary way, was simply to ask for one of those hideous cuts across thesoul she knew so well how to administer. But now, because of what he had drunk, he felt he could take the cut ifit came.  If it hurt, he wasanaesthetized.

      They hadfinished their meal and were having coffee. Eddie Carstairs was still at his table in the corner, though most of theother tables were deserted.  There were,however, three people making a good deal of noise at a table nearby, so hecould speak in a normal voice without being overheard.

      ‘What do youmean?’ she said.  ‘What do I want fromlife?’   

      ‘Just what do you want from it? . . . ‘Do you want to be asuccess on the films, do you want to be married, do you want children – what?’

           ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘But youmust, Netta.  You must know somethingabout what you want.’

      ‘No, I don’t,’she said vaguely, looking at a passing waiter, and speaking as a mother, watchingthe screen at a cinema might speak to her talkative child.  ‘Do you know what you want?’

      ‘Yes.Of course I do.  I know what I want.’

           ‘What?,’ shesaid, and looked at him.

      He pausedfor a moment, reluctant to start anything. He knew it could lead nowhere, could do him no good.  But why shouldn’t he make love to heronce in a way, why shouldn’t he get something backfrom the money he was spending, a littleof the luxury of telling her he loved her, of speaking his heart.  He hadn’t opened his heart to her for months.

   

      ‘I want you, Netta,’ he said, looking into her eyes. ‘That’s all I want.’

      ‘Allright,’ she said.  ‘So what?’

      ‘Whatdo you mean,’ he said, ‘So what?’’

          ‘Just “So what”,’  said Netta, and she was again looking at thepeople in the room behind him.

Illustrations:

Top:  Alex Katz: Ann Lauterbach, 1978

Bottom: Alex Katz:  Pas De Deux (Red Grooms and Lizzy Ross), 1994

Music Link: On Obsession (Peter Blegvad) 

Text:  Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (The Third Part, Chapter 4).  London, Constable, 1941.

Foretold -- Three incredible beginnings of novels (In my beginning is my end)

 

FOG was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

     There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty feet above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once.  She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon. 

     -- Henry Green, Party Going, 1939

 

HUDDLED up in a cope of gold wrought silk he peered around.  Society had rallied in force.  A christening -- and not a child's.

     -- Ronald Firbank, Concerning The Eccentricities Of Cardinal Pirelli, 1926

  
Click!... Here it was again!  He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again...Click!...

     Or would the word 'snap' or 'crack' describe it better?

     It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise.  It was the sound a noise makes when it abruptly ceases:  it had a temporary deafening effect.  It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead.  And yet he was not physically deaf:  it was merely that in this physical way alone could he think of what had happened in his head.

     It was though a shutter had fallen.  It had fallen noiselessly, but the thing had been so quick that he could only think of it as a crack or a snap.  It had come over his brain as a sudden film, induced by a foreign body, might come over the eye. He felt that if only he could 'blink' his brain it would at once be dispelled.  A film. Yes, it was like the other sort of 'film' too -- a 'talkie'.  It was as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed.  The figures on the screen continued to move, to behave more or less logically; but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world.   Life, in fact, which had once been for him a moment ago a 'talkie', had all at once become a silent film.  And there was no music.

     He was not frightened, because by now he was used to it.

     -- Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square, 1941