Black Dogs Read Free

by the very laws of nature from the process of making friends. I made for the nearest hearth. This one was in North Oxford and belonged to a fatherly tutor and his wife. For a short while I shone there, and a few people told me I was clever. But this was not enough to stop me leaving, North Oxford first, then, in my fourth term, the University itself. For years afterwards I continued to leave – addresses, jobs, friends, lovers. Occasionally I managed to obscure my irreducible sense of childish unbelonging bymaking friends with someone’s parents. I would be invited in, I would come to life, then I would leave.
    This sorry madness came to an end with my marriage, in my mid thirties, to Jenny Tremaine. My existence began. Love, to borrow Sylvia Plath’s phrase, set me going. I came to life for good, or rather, life came to me; I should have learned from my experience with Sally that the simplest way of restoring a lost parent was to become one yourself; that to succour the abandoned child within, there was no better way than having children of your own to love. And just when I no longer had need of them, I acquired parents in the form of in-laws, June and Bernard Tremaine. But there was no hearth. When I first met them they were living in separate countries and were barely on speaking terms. June had long before retreated to a remote hill top in southern France and was about to become very ill. Bernard was still a public figure who did all his entertaining in restaurants. They rarely saw their children. For their part, Jenny and her two brothers had despaired of their parents.
    The habits of a lifetime could not be instantly erased. Somewhat to Jenny’s annoyance, I persisted in a friendship with June and Bernard. In conversations with them over several years, I discovered that the emotional void, the feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one that had afflicted me between the ages of eight and thirty-seven had an important intellectual consequence: I had no attachments, I believed in nothing. It was not that I was a doubter, or that I had armed myself with the useful scepticism of a rational curiosity, or that I saw all arguments from all sides; there was simply no good cause, no enduring principle, no fundamental idea with which I could identify, no transcendent entity whose existence I could truthfully, passionately or quietly assert.
    Unlike June and Bernard. They began together as communists, then went their separate ways. But their capacity, their appetite, for belief never diminished. Bernard was a gifted entomologist; all his life he remained committed to the elation and limited certainties of science; he replaced his communism with thirty years’ devoted advocacy of numerous causes for social and political reform. June came to God in 1946 through an encounter with evil in the form of two dogs. (Bernard found this construction of the event almost too embarrassing to discuss.) A malign principle, a force in human affairs that periodically advances to dominate and destroy the lives of individuals or nations, then retreats to await the next occasion; it was a short step from this to a luminous countervailing spirit, benign and all-powerful, residing within and accessible to us all; perhaps not so much a step as a simultaneous recognition. Both principles were incompatible, she felt, with the materialism of her politics, and she left the Party.
    Whether June’s black dogs should be regarded as a potent symbol, a handy catch phrase, evidence of her credulity or a manifestation of a power that really exists, I cannot say. In this memoir I have included certain incidents from my own life – in Berlin, Majdanek, Les Salces and St Maurice de Navacelles – that are open equally to Bernard and to June’s kind of interpretation. Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers