very stuff of a great artist, what Keats, speaking of Shakespeare, famously
called ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason’.^36 Constant certainly had this rare faculty, though it did not
prevent him, in all his creative writing, from searching for ‘facts and
reasons’. However it is no disparagement to the active creative
intelligence of Constant the novelist to see the shaping of that intelligence
in the experiences and relationships of his early life. And for a child who
appears to have inherited some of the gentleness and sensitivity of his
mother the fundamental experience of those early years can only have
been one of traumatic rejection. In order to grow up into an adult who
feels secure in himself and able to give love, a secure and stable bond of
affection is essential during childhood. On this, good sense and clinical
observation concur. When unable to form that lasting bond, or when that
process of attachment is repeatedly disrupted the long-term consequences
are:
- acute distress in the child, a phase of protest and despair which leads
eventually to its detachment from people and from the world around it;
that is, a defensive withdrawal;
an inability to form lasting bonds and compulsive self-reliance;
anxiety associated with separation persisting into adult life, and a
tendency to be overdependent and overeager to please.^37
When the situation a child finds itself in discourages it from expressing its
emotions, it is driven in on itself to bear its sorrows alone, and the harm it
suffers is likely to be greater. In many respects separation anxiety and the
symptoms of what Bowlby calls ‘disordered mourning’ tend to be similar,
and Constant’s predicament was such as to produce in him the reactions of
both. Although, Bowlby notes, there may be no intellectual impairment in
a child thus afflicted, other results of separation and bereavement can
include:
- ambivalence towards any person who is loved;
compulsive wandering, perhaps with the urge to recover the lost loved
one;
‘depersonalization’ or ‘derealization’, that is a sense of inner emptiness
and the sense that a glass wall separates the sufferer from the world
around him or her;
The grief that does not speak 25