This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian’s personality.” ‘Y'know,’ he said, 'Julian is like one of those people that’ll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest.’ I have thought a great deal about this passage, also about a particularly shrewd remark once made by, of all people, Bunny. The face one shows him he invariably reflects back at one, creating the illusion of warmth and depth when in fact he is brittle and shallow as a mirror.’ (…) But what you call his “Asiatic serenity” is, I think, a mask for great coldness. To a friend he wrote: ‘Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. George Orwell – a keen observer of what lay behind the glitter of constructed facades, social and otherwise – had met Julian on several occasions, and had not liked him. That should not be a particularly difficult truth for me to accept at this point but for some reason it is.

And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy.īut still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality or why – even in the light of subsequent events – I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.īut even in fairy tales, these kindly old gentlemen with their fascinating offers are not always what they seem to be. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. I could say that the secret of Julian’s charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. Now, of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme.

It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.

“I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort.

Julian morrow the secret history