Sunday, January 19th

WE HAD a wild rain-and-wind storm yesterday after below zero weather … so strange to wake and find the snow nearly washed away, spring in the air! But tonight will go below zero, they say … so where are we? Buffeted about and exhilarated by these changes. I have neglected this journal partly because letters have piled up again just when I imagined I was nearly in the clear after Christmas; partly because I have been deeply absorbed on the subconscious level by the portrait of Elizabeth Bowen.

Sybille Bedford is persuasive. By the end of her long biography I have to admit that Aldous does come through as a saint. Perhaps it was not good for him to be so “taken in charge” by Maria, and that Laura, his second wife, who seemed quite callous and selfish about leaving him for long periods, drew from him a greater humanity and, above all, a deeper concept of love as far as he himself was concerned and his capacity for understanding another human being. It is moving that he, such a rational being, did believe that death is a passage and the dying must be helped to make it, chiefly by “letting go.” I believe this and that we must begin to let go long before we are dying, as he himself did. It happens almost imperceptibly; some things do not seem so important as they did. It is partly the will that must let go, the driver, the implacable wanter and demander. Of course, Tamas is a great help to me because he is waiting for his walk at half past eleven; my instinct to push work a little beyond a feeling of fatigue is short-circuited by a bark; I “let go” and enjoy the letting go. Tamas has done a lot to subdue the compulsive in me.

I want to think about saints, who they are and who they are not, as far as I am concerned. In the first place, people who want to be saints very rarely are in my experience. The saint must not know he is a saint … he is far too busy thinking about other people. His preoccupations are not primarily with his own saintliness—not at all. (It reminds me of that wonderful statement by an Archbishop of Canterbury that “it is a mistake to believe that God is primarily concerned with religion.”) At the moment I think of Eugénie Dubois, who at eighty still does all the housework and cooking—and, like my own mother, always had had help until she was seventy and help was too expensive—walks miles over cobblestoned roads, (often damp in Belgium) to get in food, but has not allowed what amounts to servitude to dim, for a second, her eager participation in all the life around her, her idealism, her strength and wisdom in being always available to her grandchildren, her openness to all that is in the air if one has the imagination to catch it. (It is like her to have sent me a remarkable French book about the violence of the sixties among youth which suggests that it has been a world revolt against materialism and the distorted values of the industrial world.) She is a flame, and that flame warms and lights everything around her. Yet she is often, I feel sure, close to exhaustion.

As I thought about her I thought, not for the first time, that the chief problem women have, even now, is that they have to be both Martha and Mary most of the time and these two modes of being are diametrically opposite. I felt at first that in the case of Aldous Huxley it was Maria, his first wife, who seemed truly a saint; now I begin to understand that hers was too deliberate a sacrifice, too conscious a one. Robert Craft goes so far as to suggest in a review of the biography that there must have been a great deal of hostility under that self-immolation.

The trouble with “conscious” saints is that they sometimes exert what I can only call unholy emotional pressure. I still wince when I think of the pressure that was put on my mother as a child, left with an Episcopal minister and his family one of those years when her father and mother were abroad (Gervase Elwes was an engineer and his work took him to faraway places … Canada, India, Spain). They were determined to “convert” little Eleanor Mabel Elwes. Mabel adored her own father, who was a Fabian, and partly out of loyalty, no doubt, she would not give in—and was treated like a leper in consequence. It is clear that she had some sort of nervous breakdown and perhaps her migraine headaches began at that time. That kind of emotional pressure is wicked.

I have experienced it several times myself. Some years ago I had a friend who, invited for the day, would announce that she would not eat as she was fasting … I was to pay no attention, and have my lunch! It never occurred to her that this was a kind of emotional pressure that made me ill. The tension of our meetings was quite unbearable; I felt I was being forced toward some act or capitulation which she was demanding of me in God’s name. This is not goodness, for goodness, it seems to me, is always tolerant of the beliefs or nonbeliefs of others. We convert, if we do at all, by being something irresistible, not by demanding something impossible.