Postcard | 16 January 2010

At the end of Anthony Powell’s The Acceptance World, Nick Jenkins contemplates a postcard from Jean arranging their rendezvous. The postcard portrays a woman sitting on a man’s lap on a red velvet chair in a bedroom, exchanging “ardent glances … evidently on the best of terms.”

One could not help thinking how extraordinarily unlike “the real thing” was this particular representation of a pair of lovers; indeed, how indifferently, at almost every level except the highest, the ecstasies and bitterness of love are at once conveyed in art. So much of the truth remains finally unnegotiable; in spite of the fact that most persons in love go through remarkably similar experiences. … The matter was presented as all too easy, the twin flames of dual egotism reduced almost to nothing, so that there was no pain; and, for that matter, almost no pleasure.

……

The fact remained that an infinity of relevant material had been deliberately omitted from that vignette of love in action. These two supposedly good-looking persons were, in effect, going through the motions of love in such a manner as to convince others, perhaps less well equipped for the struggle than themselves, that they, too, the spectators, could be easily identified with some comparable tableau. They, too, could sit embracing on crimson chairs. Although hard to define with precision the exact point at which a breach of honesty had occurred, there could be no doubt that this performance included an element of the confidence-trick.

And the last line of the novel:

Perhaps, in spite of everything, the couple on the postcard could not be dismissed so easily. It was in their world that I seemed now to find myself.

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