Sullivan rues his lack of success in life in this bittersweet middle-aged memoir. This Irish-born science journalist displays scorching if ephemeral passions for mathematics, Beethoven, and women that keeps the reader going, reminding one of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Toward the end of the book, when we imagine the writer to be in his thirties, he is loafing amongst the European literati, obsessed by a morbid sense of sin and futile daydreams.
I had reached, nevertheless, a state of almost complete inanition. I had become a great dreamer of day-dreams. And the day-dreams were of that peculiarly degenerate and futile species which consists in planning what one would do if one was very rich. I cannot say how this obsession first took hold of me. Perhaps it arises naturally when one reaches a certain level of moral weakness. But I know that I spent days, even weeks, in planning what I would do if I had half a million pounds.
"I suppose that most men, sooner or later, arrive at the stock-taking time of life" Sullivan begins. He has lived through several passions and now finds himself left high and dry at middle age, "a person of certain indubitable limitations, and with certain doubtful capacities." Sullivan attempts to sort through his experiences, in none of which he finds a great deal of satisfaction, in a moving effort to salvage some guidance regarding his place in the universe.
It seems that I am a man without any marked talents. The point of living, for such a man, is not to be found in his work. The real purpose of his life is to be found where most people have found it, in the rearing of a family.
Will JWN go on to marry and raise rosey cheeked children in a London suburb? See 1939.
I had arrived at that time of life when adventure is over and when, further, there is no desire for it. It is not, to begin with, a peaceful state. One still suffers, occasionally, from undisciplined desires and unjustified hopes. There may even be random attempts to make of life something more moving and coloured than it has become. Perhaps a secret belief in the possibility of miracles may still, for a time, persist. I know that once or twice, during those days of indecision, I came near some kind of rash outbreak. I resisted my growing realisation that the experimental period was over and that, unconscious and haphazard as may actions had been, I had none the less shaped myself and my life, and that no radical changes were now possible. At times I would have welcomed almost any change rather than face that conclusion. But now the feeling of rebellion has grown fainter and I am free to wonder, dispassionately, at the process.
I have thought it well, before coming to a decision, to spend part of my savings on securing the leisure necessary to make some sort of survey of my life. This book is the result. I wanted to write it, and I had an idea that it might help me. Not, of course, to solve the practical problems connected with my future. They, as I have said, are trivial enough. But, having arrived at this point, which I feel is the end of life in the sense that it is the end of growth, I am curious to see whether I can trace any sort of coherent pattern in the process. For I cannot believe that any future that I can anticipate will appreciably modify the significance of what is past. Seeming waste, fruitless suffering, unfulfilled hopes, will none of them receive any meaning from the future that they do not already possess.
Sullivan is the son of a working class man, a strong fierce, rebellious man, of whom his more delicately refined son is both proud and ashamed.