The normal healthy boy does not worry very much about his soul. And perhaps he is right. You will not make a plant grow in the earth if you are always digging it up to look at the roots.
Did you like this, honestly ? I'm frightfully glad. That was Bach. By Jove, how ripping. Yes, I am most ferfully braced you liked it.
One cannot imagine finer than that. Their heritage to us is, quite simply, in that memory. And as a young poet, who gave his life no less for England because upon a lonely island, far off in the Mediterranean sea, he has written -
And so this weakness, which at first seemed so pleasant and even harmless, will, unless you tear it out by the roots, grow and grow, until, at last, like some terrible cancer, it poisons your whole life. The hospitals today are full of boys, only a few years older than yourself ; now hopeless, incurable madmen.
All the conspirators est le premier roman de Christopher Isherwood, paru en 1928. On y lit la défaite d'un fils à sortir du cercle maternel, la fin lamentable d'une ambition qui n'en était même pas vraiment une, d'une velléité, plutôt, sur fond de croquis au vitriol de la bourgeoisie anglaise d'après guerre. L'influence de Joyce mais surtout de Woolf (To the lighthouse, tout particulièrement) est très nette, au point que certains passages semblent presque tenir du pastiche mais la vérité psychologique l'emporte sur l'exercice de style.
Et puis, il y a cette phrase finale, adressée à Allen qui partage bien des traits d'Isherwood (étudiant en médecine, par exemple, mais aussi contempteur de la "high society") par Philip, le vaincu, vaincu au point de faire de sa défaite une gloire ("battu content") :
You see, Allen, what I really dislike about your attitude is that it gets you nowhere. You refuse to venture, that's what it is. You're timid. Oh, I grant you one's got to have the nerves ...
Cette adresse qu'Isherwood semble se faire à lui-même ne restera pas sans lendemain : en 1929, Isherwood quittait l'Angleterre pour rejoindre Auden à Berlin.
Christopher Isherwood, All the conspirators, New Directions, 1958
