In the distant and by now duly black & white year of 1904, the Irish playwright [George Bernard Shaw] published a little but very intense piece about a woman, intriguingly named 'Candida', who finds herself before an unusual, if only in form, choice between two very different men. One of these men was her husband, the Reverend James Mavor Morell, a [Christian Socialist Movement|Christian Socialist] of the [Church of England], already into his forties but still sturdy and handsome, polite in the household and vehement on the pulpit. In his sermons, Reverend James strongly condemned the avarice, selfishness and gereralised lust for money that seemed to be norm by these days in [England], while maintaining that socialistic reforms, put forward by the gust of religious sentiment, would be a cure for such lamentable state of affairs. But Morell was an intelligent man, and the only reason he believed that he was so successful in his preachings - as the local figures kept assuring him - was because he has chosen, consciously or otherwise, to overlook the palpable fact that every single one of his neighbours was still greedy and selfish after all those years of hearing his words of condemnation. Every Sunday they would applause enthusiastically, and would rally around to compliment him for the splendidly inspired speech, but when Monday came they would seamlessly go back to their day-to-day money run. He was a very practical man, though, and as such much more fond of keeping his letters meticulously organized over his working desk than of having to deal with the enigmatic workings and motives of the people, beneath the churchgoing facade.
The other man was a certain Eugene Marchbanks, a (very) young poet of aristocratic origin, not a dilettante, though, but a gauche, an eighteen years old who was "found" by Rev. Morell wandering in the Embankment, in London. Marchbanks was skinny and pale, almost effeminate in his fragility, and in his manners he had a thrust of Dostoyevskyan eloquence that frequently manifested itself as a brutal and childish frankness (For example, Mr. Morell personal secretary cultivated her love for the Reverend with the stoicism of a middle-aged woman's consciousness of having nothing to offer him that her rival couldn't, except for quiet dedication. Marchbanks got this picture in a pinch, and by talking openly to her about her feelings he'd somewhat spoiled the enchantment of unspoken heroism under which she had concealed her love). Thus, to those people who are self-assured enough to believe they are "in control" of things, Marchbanks would appear to be a brilliant and witty critic of the superficiality of human relationships, while not lacking a good dose of the typically contrived egocentrism of the subgenius. Conversely, to the insecure and fearful lot who in one way or another bury the true conditions of their lives under the normalizing model of frozen traditions and agreed-upon falsities, Marchabanks was no more than a vexatious infant who'd run from here to there "breaking stuff", embarrassingly and futilely exposing things that would be better if passed over in silence.
And then there was Candida Morell herself. She was the the kind of woman that would fit the fancy of both young chivalrious poets and methodic guileless clerics alike. She was thirty-three, beautiful, clever, sensitive and courageous. Everyone loved that woman.
After a few convolutions we will be lead to...
TWO ENGLISH POEMS
I
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have
outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy waves laden with all
hues of deep spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things
half given away, half, withheld, of joys with a dark
hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd
ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams,
and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry
heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly
beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name,
the lilt of your laughter: these are illustrious toys
you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find them; I tell
them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars
of the dawn.
Your dark rich life...
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those illustrious toys
you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile
—that lonely, mocking smile your cool mirror knows.
II
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of ragged
suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long
at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men
have honoured in marble: my father’s father killed in the
frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide
of a cow; my mother’s grandfather –just twenty four-
heading a charged of three hundred men in Peru, now
ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever man-
liness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow –the
central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with
dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of yellow rose seen at sunset, years
before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself,
theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my
heart; I am trying to bribe you with
uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
1934