Read An Honest Ghost for Free Online

survival.

15.
    Eleanor “sprang from a noble race.”
    “If you want to call it that,” she said. “I’m always kind to people who have good Louis Quatorze. No one’s supposed to know about that,” she said, more resignedly than annoyed. I found it all repellent and queasy-making.
    As a child she was lonely and shy in public, with a “desperate inner life.” Once she thought she heard voices and stopped, only to hear nothing at all. At this point a wonderful piece of luck came her way. Flowering puberty. A great deal of what we value in civilized life depends upon it.
    There were stormy scenes at home, sobs, moans, hysterics. And then, who knows how or why, the situation gradually improved. The struggle, if there were one, need not be described.
    Traits that we all recognize in ourselves are, in her case, blown up into intense inner (and sometimes public) dramas. She was under the spell of that timorous curiosity which leads women to seek out dangerous emotions, to go see chained tigers, to look at boa constrictors, frightening themselves because they are separated from them only by weak fences.
    Little is known about her mother—there were no exciting stories about her—who died when Eleanor was only eight years old. Eleanor took no notice, as if regarding such an incident as too trivial to heed. “To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.” The paradox is not confined to poetry.
    She stood in the darkness leaning against the wall and watched Greta Garbo. Beside her was a Jewish boy, a hump-back, with a face that hunger had sharpened into a painful beauty. He smiled wistfully and touched her pretty hair and said, “You’re gorgeous, you know,” and went back to his room for the night. Eleanor loved the evening entertainment.
    Everything lay beneath a peculiar shimmer that made all it touched smaller and more delicate; she felt a bit dizzy and sat down.
    On such unproductive occasions I don’t linger very long.

16.
    I am sitting in my room, looking at the houses and gardens across the street, while all kinds of thoughts pass through my head. Scared of the trap of being less desired than I myself desire, the trap that is called being in love.
    Better take two of those blue pills tonight.
    The object in your hands is not a novel. Novels seem like desperate attempts at control, and poems like attempts at grandeur. The novel is a monumental waste of time.
    The worse your art is, the American poet John Ashbery once remarked, the easier it is to talk about it. Originality is therefore the price which must be paid for the hope of being welcomed (and not merely understood) by your reader.
    Miracles happen every day. Each is in a different style.
    Introspection, however, is not to be enforced. Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.

17.
    David gave a great sigh. “But where are you going, Eleanor?” At first, he was so overwhelmed by her beauty, her charm, and her powerful personality that he could scarcely speak. Suddenly their eyes met, and she smiled to him—a rare, intimate smile, beautiful with brightness and love. Now that this handsome young man was proving himself a reality she found herself vaguely trembling; she was deeply excited.
    Please, David, she pleaded, you mustn’t feel so badly. We only want to make you happy, to make you finally you, David dear.
    Now he’s really in trouble.
    The deeper you go, as a writer, into the minds of your characters—the more detailed and refined your registration of their thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, scruples— the slower the narrative tempo becomes, and the less action there is.
    I was in the kitchen fixing iced concoctions. I will not let any gloomy moralizing intrude upon us here to-night.
    I