Humiliation

London is the first city of humiliation: London does it better than anywhere else. I should know, its latest victim. First my divorce — you would think, what with war in Korea and the death of King George — that the Times would have more newsworthy events to report than my decree absolute from my wife of 18 months. ‘Novelist Yves Hill divorces, confesses to adultery’. Of course I confessed — only to spare myself the further wounds, the death by a thousand cuts, of admitting to Felicity’s adultery with that zero, that nul, that parvenu nonentity Gerald Laing-Turner.

Yet after the humiliation of the divorce came the further humiliation of the publication of my fourth novel, Oblong (Dunn & Melhuish, 10s 6d) and the sudden, brutal auto-da-fé of my long-nurtured reputation. Does it seem crass to admit that I felt this last humiliation more keenly than the first? I am still an artist, after all: I have stopped being a husband.