63 Fillebrook Avenue, Leigh-on-Sea, 11 September 1949
This so dull life, mingled with hate and annoyance and pity. No attempt here at method or speed. The housework drags on all day – cleaning, hoovering, dusting, making beds, sewing, washing-up and so on. No one ever sits down before suppertime. It is wrong, but the smallness of the rooms and the house is so noticeable now. The nursery stuffed full of things, always untidy; the dining-room dark and gloomy – only the lounge is tolerable, and one never lives there. The cloistered life with no one to talk to, no one to laugh with – here I am like a hermit, and quite unnatural. An absolute craving for new faces, new meetings, new places. I would tell them so much, but a curious obstinacy prevents this. Always an air of mulish hostility.
24 September
Two beautiful things. A big, spacious sunset sky – elegant and not ostentatious, but curiously in the east, to the west nothing but a bank of low, dark clouds. The end of a Spergularia in the microscope – like a minute green saturn.fn1 A tiny shining ball with a ring of gauzy skin around it. Also the sails of some Thames barges half-hidden by mist. A curious thing. About to throw a piece of screwed-up paper into the yellow jug which serves as waste-paper basket, I said to myself, ‘As much chance as you have of being genius.’ It fell into the jug without a murmur, a 20 to 1 chance, at the least.
Another day of silence, listening to other people’s trivialities – a dreadful hour at night when all the completely banal information gained from a visit of relatives is repeated and reviewed. Two mathematical impossibilities I should like to see. One, a graph of the words spoken by me each day over a year – the rise and fall would be eye-opening. Near zero here, and normal everywhere else. Two, a count of words spoken by my mother and myself – David and Goliatha!
The visit by unknown relations is frightening, slightly, to the ego, and being. I feel awkward, not because I feel superior, but because I feel that they feel I am. Probably oversensitivity. But they are definitely not at home with me.
Trying to get at oneself is a continual unwrapping – each new skin decreases steadily in beauty and value after it is exposed. Always the seed of truth, the maximum fulfilment of self, appears to be just beneath the next layer. Plainly there is no end to this unwrapping, but the sensation is damping.
Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature – a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: ‘To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.’fn2 True, yet, poetry, making, is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.
25 September
3 a.m. Beautifully played New Orleans jazz, with clarinet in low register, and very jazzy tuba and cornet. Bessie Smith singing. This sort of stuff has in it the germ of music that will last.
Op. 55. Splendidly vigorous, with some of the secret lyricality of the last quartets.fn3
Writing fever. Can’t get any university work done. Full of ideas for ‘Cognac’ and full of frustration at not having the time to do them. ‘Cognac’ must aim at being popular, with art overboard. The idea came all in two hours last night and this morning.
30 September
Another appalling half-hour of talk. When screaming was close. Talk of the utmost banality, on prices of mattresses, on Mrs Ramsey’s daughter who married a doctor in Montreal. A few comments are made on poetry. So hopeless to try and explain. They would never understand. No mention of art can ever be developed in case we are ‘highbrow’ – God, how I hate that word! No philosophy is mentioned, without Thomas Hardy and Darwin getting dragged in. It is la mère. Her attitude to conversation is one of complete alertness. I must break in, and I must say something – and in she breaks and says something, whether she has any knowledge, real opinion or not. It is with great difficulty that I can keep my oyster silence. But I must not hurt. With le père, it is partly a defence; modernity is ignored, age is suspicious of invention.
I feel violent with ‘hate’ against this bloody town. Least violent, now, against the geographical situation (once I longed for Devon), most against the way of life, and then the people who allow it to sap all the beauty of life out of them. All my sympathy goes out to the boy who ran away to be a bullfighter. I’m sure he must have ‘felt’ the complete horror of this place. This town can have as much horror mentally for a sensitive person as a blitzed city may have, physically, for a turnip. It is the unsociability, the not-knowing-anyone, the having-no-colour, that kills. No interesting people to talk to, no sincere people, no unusual things to do.
Then there is ‘niceness’ as a standard of judgement – God, how I hate that word, too! – ‘a nice girl’, ‘a nice road’. Nice = colourless, efficient, with nose glued to the middle path, with middle interests, dizzy with ordinariness. Ugh!
Oxford, 6 October
Reread some early poems. All bad. It is like seeing oneself in a film walk naked through a crowded street.
But then to feel oneself unfolding, like a flower.
7 October
Lunch with Guy Hardy and Basil Beeston and a serious Pole.fn4 In the Kemp. I cannot concentrate on those with whom I happen to be. Always there are more interesting people at the next table. Beautiful women to be watched. G and BB seem so set up in the world – they sit on a terrace by the sea and I drift past, watching them, jealous, unhappy. Yet I have the jewel. I may drift to even-more-to-be-coveted terraces, and land.
Immortality is a convention, a white elephant. A futility. There is no logic in planning for it. No enjoyment, no beauty can come out of it. All life should be designed to be contained within life. Within the closed circle. Outside the theatre, the bouquets won’t be seen. The turnip who gains fame in his life, and lives, has an immense superiority over the poet who becomes famous after his death, and obscurely exists. Immortality is the gravestone of the spirit. What use is the gravestone?
5 November
Guy Fawkes night. A great crowd of people, vaguely contented at shaking off the discipline of the world as it is. The undergraduates form the largest part, for the most part just watching, with a few active spirits shouting, calling, singing, making speeches. A certain air of forcedness about all these crowds. Fireworks shooting up, and people exploding away from them when they land. The police and the proctors standing ineffectively. Buses moving slowly, cars being rocked and thumped. Many climb up the scaffolding around the Martyr’s Memorial,fn5 then a vague move is made to the Taj Mahal restaurant where there is a man climbing up, men shouting, and a solid mass of people. Water out of the windows.
Basically one cannot help feeling contempt for all this canaille, noisily and offensively drunk yet not doing anything positive. Most of them posturing in a ridiculous manner. A good many girls, who seem the most genuinely excited.
To a certain extent there is a vast good will that can be sensed; roughly everyone is together and enjoying themselves, with the police and the proctors symbolizing all kinds of emotion and, ultimately, the determinism in life. GH and BB both enjoy themselves, and look for some means to manifest their lawlessness. I have absolutely no desire to do anything else but watch, wanting to be everywhere and see everything, observing people’s faces. Roger Hendryfn6 is like me but not so finely ‘set’, for he has to pretend to a certain lawlessness which isn’t innate in him at all.
Too many of the faces are vacuous and want filling.
The sight of the girl in green, about whom I wrote the Hospital story, with a thick well set-up young man, is distressing. Above all the sight of the moon, nearly full, in a clear night sky, not particularly cold, after a dull, rainy day. I wanted very much to see one of the people who climbed the Memorial fall down to his death. The indrawn breath and sudden laugh would have been most effective.
12 November
A self-searching night at the Podgesfn7,’ with Faith.fn8
Faith, a curious kind of extrovert, conversation-dominating, with the same strident rise in pitch (when she wishes to break in on top of anyone else) as M. Confidential, bold, tomboyish – revealing about her monastic father, whom she says worries her greatly at times.
Podge and Eileen are a perfect duo; in harmony or perfect discord.
During this evening (having felt ill all day, with a certain amount of pain) I keep very quiet and feel unable to assert myself in any way. Not particularly self-conscious and oversensitive but lacking more than lost colour. Two mes: ego, thinking with and at tangents from the others, full of the right words, curious ideas and so on; and the alter ego, not being able to break into the discussions.
An empty walk home with Faith, yawning myself and she whistling and singing.fn9 I feel a vague need to explain myself, and also to know what she is thinking. A wet, warm, windy night.
I can feel more concretely a philosophy of life on occasions like these. To be persuasive, to watch and analyse, externally; internally, to record and create. It is absolutely necessary to remain balanced; that is, never to become submerged completely – always to have the intention of creating beauty for others, however reduced this infusion into action and society becomes. Theoretically I want to become a core receiving prehensions, being moulded by them, yet remaining pointed in the one direction, towards creation of beauty. I can’t pretend that this is a natural attitude; it leads to compression of feeling, to a dangerous bottling of the need to express, an overtense introversion. The advantages are 1. the forming-house for creation (although some kind of objectivity and self-criticism must be obtained), 2. that the final axion is one of external expression in fame through beauty created. It is creation which acts as a safety-valve, as well as being the ultimate purpose. The essentials are constant attention to practice of the means and a self-confident devotion to the end.
I think that this is the nearest I can get to self-fulfilment, considering, as I do now, that everything is purely relative, and that no beauty is immortal. I can see little point in immortal fame; yet can believe in the human illogic of doing good by the creation of beauty, even though it will only be temporarily existent. (Not forgetting the time-space question, when nothing that has existed can disappear.) Must strive after living glory; it is unnatural to push, but it is necessary.
We also talked of the parent–child relationship.
The crux is when the bridge of realization is reached. The otherness of parents, their separate personality, their defaults and often their inferiority. A solid link of respect should be maintained (E)fn10 – but respect can’t come when the ‘truth’ (however false) seems to be clear. One’s parents seem inferior ‘x’ and nothing can make them respected ‘y’. Only hypocrisy and convention. It’s like being C of E when there is no faith. Eileen’s interesting theory that this break is good for creating individuals; that happy families are those when the children have failed to ‘personalize’ or ‘separate’ their parents and so become submerged within the family ‘soul’ with unrealized individuality.
Going through a long period of self-discontent; no faith. Fair certainty that several of the projects, especially the plays, are good, but impossibility of long concentration and doubt about powers of technique and realization. Moreover, the consciousness that nothing will be done for at least a year. And at times the deliberate withdrawal from the world becomes too much of an effort to permit any surety.
21 November
The constant quantum of self-estimation and the temporary urges to write which must die away because there is no time to canalize the inspiration. Sense of waste.
JW.fn11 Dapper, impeccable, and fairly well off. Conventional and sociable, but without great originality except for a certain facility of wit. Easy to get on with. Not strikingly dressed. Slightly French in manner, not thoroughly English (brought up for some years in France).
GH. Ex-RAF – still a flyer in the OR.fn12 Self-possessed, insensitive, often unintentionally rude because of his certainty in self. Intelligent, but apparently not imaginative. His egoism is annoying, partly because it is not fully conscious on his part; it is not deeply objectionable, but annoying. A question of limited assurance, but still assurance. No one sensitive is ever assured. Well-liked by others.
RF. Religious, obtuse, wet. Wishes to be a schoolmaster. Earnest worker, never relaxing. Constantly a Boy Scout badge in his lapel. Bad French accent, with many stupid remarks. Naïve to an infuriating degree. Reliable, always willing to help. Keen on amateur photography; no sense of art, of beauty. Insensitive.
PW. The most interesting character. An ex-POW, with a brilliant Oxford career. President of French class and OUDS, editor of Isis. A very quiet and silent little person, chubby-faced, with dark glasses always. A problem because his past and his present silence seem to suggest hidden depths, which may or may not exist in truth. By no means infallible or intolerant – an excess of diplomacy, never impolite, brusque or outspoken. Sense of humour; well-chosen opinions and remarks. Listened to deferentially. Today, revealed a little about himself to me for the first time since I met him, i.e. his shyness in discussion, which he confessed.
MLG. An easy character. Provincial Provençal, but with no great meridional traits, except a certain quickness of temperament. Great sense of humour; polite and very conventional. Not basically a prude, yet unapproachable externally. No warmth of relationship, such as one might find in an English girl (without any implication of love).
HF (Henri Fluchère).fn13 Small, temperamental, Provençal. Sense of humour, excellent conversationalist, with sophist and sophisticated dissertations on literature. Unprepossessing appearance – a certain foxiness, slyness, which is misleading. Excellent but badly pronounced English.
3 December
Feature of twentieth century – the mass of authors; difficult to rise above a struggling welter. Need for order; genius is crowded out, stifled. It is pleasant to think of some perfect state where only the official writers may write. Increased education means increased tyroism in the arts – everyone tries their hand. Need to find a striking individuality.
Cycling along a wet road under a sky full of scudding clouds, with a full moon shining through them with a variety of strange effects, pinknesses, opaque masses. The wind very strong from the west. A feeling of momentary jubilation, being at one with nature, and sensing the good fortune of being human, the leading actor standing out from the harmonious background. This is a rather eighteenth-century sentiment, but one which is full of happiness for those that can still genuinely feel it. Everything related by love within the whole, a pantheistic joy. Science and civilization are encroaching on this relationship between man and nature, but the irreducible element of comparative immortality prevents any kind of total conquest. The sky remains. Feeling such a moment is like looking back into the Promised Land.
Three days running, a red ladybird lands on my desk in spite of the cold weather. The superstition still vaguely makes itself felt.
The question of intimacy in style – the objectivist always writes for a potential reader other than himself; he is never half alone and chez soi, never getting to the rock-bottom of things, for the style affects the expression. The subjectivist writes purely for himself, egotistically saying a thing in the way which seems to himself best to express exactly his own view of it. All creation tends to one of these two poles, which are, very approximately, classical and romantic. This is an interesting test to perform on all memoirists and diarists. What if the greatest combines the two qualities?
The vital thing is time. It is the fundamental problem of life, around which all metaphysical speculation ought to turn. Time as a notation, as a measurement, is valueless, an artificial invention. The important thing is the becoming, the dynamism.
Some arts use time more than others. Painting, sculpture, present a more or less static object. Poetry and music, the cinema, a fluidity absolutely reliant on time for effect. The miracle of photography, challenging time, fixing.
Death is simply not becoming, a loss of fluidity. The loss of the element of presence. Death kills time and enthrones, enhances place.
Life is the gift of consciousness of time. A gift which, once it has been given, cannot be rejected. Awareness is becoming. There is a continual awareness of presence.
Could death punish by stopping enjoyment and awareness, which are the benefits of time, and reward by changing time?
Awareness can give our highest imagined happiness. We cannot imagine timelessness and unawareness as a higher happiness, since they are conceptions unrelated to our present condition.
Given the gifts of awareness and time, it is futile to pursue timelessness, like the mystics. The gift of awareness must be fully enjoyed, since it is the highest potential in the present condition. This belief is necessary, though not absolutely true. It has relation truth.
Absolute happiness is timelessness and unawareness, but imperfect organisms cannot apprehend absolutes.
Leigh-on-Sea, 16 December
Spasm of hate. Trying to listen to Mozart 465 Quartet, when M[other] seems, almost deliberately, to spoil it. Mounting unease and fury and sense of martyrdom. Partly the fury is the fact that all (fundamentally and now in this incidental environment) is arid to them, and all reproach creates a guilty conscience. Finally (in the middle of the third movement) the decision that the decorations should be put up: ‘Everyone else has put them up. The Farmers have put them up.’ We are out of line, horror! Father, up till now, a passive spectator, infuriates because he remains passive, i.e., instead of saying, ‘Whenever! It can wait,’ he mumbles, ‘Better get it done,’ and starts fiddling about with the streams of coloured paper. Partly I feel this is to annoy the highbrow in me. I switch off the wireless, and help in a savage, couldn’t-care-less way. For some time I feel willingly that I could like killing them. When they remonstrate about burning some barren strips of holly, I find joy in burning it deliberately, to show that I think it nonsense and that hanging Christmas decorations is for me a duty, not a pleasure. Hazelfn14 begins to cough and cry, she is ill. I feel an accession of pity, and in a way the spirit of Christmas immanent in the decorations, though only very vaguely, releases my fury. I help carry coal to light a fire and so on. F scorches a hole in his new flannel trousers against an electric fire. I cannot help laughing when he tells me this. A thing I inherit from him – amusement at minor pains and misfortunes. It is the point of absurdity which pricks the situation, and the progress of the evening ends up on a Beethoven sonata and the feeling that an ugly series of incidents have resolved themselves.
This atmosphere of tension is frequent here at home, being mainly caused by the confined space, living all the time in the same small room, when all relationships have to go on the level of the LCD, i.e. M, on the level of triteness and mundanity. My sympathy goes towards F now. The difficulty for me is correlating the mood – dutiful and necessary attitude which is to be adopted and the actual attitude I have created at Oxford. There is a wide gap between the two milieux. In the intellectual and aesthetic sense I have developed out of the rest, yet I have to try and conceal that in order to make life livable. Always present, too, is the guilty knowledge that financially I am a passenger in a leaking ship.
Hazel is an interesting test-object for egotism. Financially it is to my benefit that she should not exist. I don’t feel particularly jealous that love should be diverted from myself to her, but annoyed and pitiful that she should swallow up the affection of such old parents. I pity her because she will grow up in an old-fashioned way, with antique views and a conventional cliché mind. Her only hope of being modern is that she is left an orphan, or that I distract her away. Also she is a sister, my family; but the disparity in age destroys all close love and family sense. She merely seems like a small pet. But the change will come when she is fifteen, or at the most by the time that she is twenty. Then I shall, perhaps, be a middle-aged failure in need of rejuvenation, et la voilà! But now, at present, she seems to threaten all the peaceful old age of the two people whom I must wish to see happy. She is a Fowles, nervous, intelligent, sans intellect, sans culture, I see it all coming. Also she is weak in health and there will be trouble. I realize that they, now, could not be happy otherwise. But it is the now and the otherwise which jar. To me it seems they would have been happier in another set of circumstances, where they had little but their own comfort to consider. Admittedly having to be parents to youth makes them artificially younger, but that does not make me happier. And the child H twists the dagger in the wound when she says, ‘John’s my father, you’re my grandfather and M’s my mother.’ With a kind of diabolically inglorious perception.
Writing a poem is like standing on some shore and saying, ‘I shall row to that enchanting island over there.’ But when I start rowing, the joy of the action makes me lose all sense of direction, and of course eventually one returns always from where one set out, plus experience, but minus perfect success, which is unattainable. And when, later, I look back over the route, the rowing which was joy, it seems ridiculous, petty.
Beauty of Leigh marshes. The wasteland, the wilderness, the sanctuary. The narrow ugly line of Canvey Island, a thin, distant bar with the square blocks of houses, low clumps of trees. Canvey Beck, the deserted point. The Hadleigh hills, graceful and English, soft and solid, and the thoughtful ruins of the castle. The smug, impersonal town, with its rows of similar houses. Old Leigh, with its spikery of masts and patterns of boat’s hulls, with character. Southend pier, beastly like the railway line, scarring the sea as the other scars the land. The Thames, flat and magnificent.
The mud-flats, all distance and middle-distance, and no nearness. The desolation of the sea-walls and the saltings. Only winter is congruous. The austere birds, the meadow-pipit, the curlew and the redshank the perfect soloists and inhabitants. Aloofness and wildness. When the wigeon whistle all the town recedes into oblivion. Their spirit transcends all its badly constructed material.
The constellations of black stars, the moving skeins of gulls and curlew flying out to sea in the distance, against a yellow western sky. A sunset, a red, tawny sun sinking into the golden, ragged tops of a low, heavy layer of blue clouds, miles and miles away over London. The excited chattering of flocks of small waders as they follow the edge of the ebbing tide, an insight into a society as far removed as that of Mars. Hearing them is like some sight of a fabulous planet. The pleasure of fighting the wet and the cold, and feeling animal and strong, elemental. Of being alone on a difficult quest, with all the lights of those in comfort twinkling ashore.
The smell of the tide and the islands of reeds in the flat water. The two trees.
The pleasure of knowing a place intimately. The run of the tide, the guts, the runnels, the kinks in the walls, the mussel-bed, the places to hide.
29 December
Confused Christmas with many petty worries and malaises. Unpleasantness of small children. Stupidity of adults. Impossible to talk with, unless it is mundanities. All a bit puzzled and embarrassed by me. I want to be myself to them, but the slightest move in that direction leads to puzzlement.
Sensitivity is one of the easiest diagnostics of the quality of humanity. No one truly sensitive can hurt another human being.
Adrift, waiting for a current, or a view of land which isn’t a mirage. So many abstract -isms, so many real and minor troubles now. So many little mice scratching, when there should be dragons to kill. Being in a cell and searching for a loose brick; and if it was loose, would my future commit itself? Here I have to make life into a prison, and lock the door upon my real self. It is a kind of suicide for reality. For if only what is, is real, then the what I feel I would unrestrainedly be, in other circumstances, is a ghost. Hate for this town, its cheap, shoddy travesty of life.
2 January 1950
A girl in Southend High Street, cheap, sloppy. But pretty, and curiously, afterwards, I realized with a touch of Lawrence about her. I tolerate Southend High Street; it has a certain brassiness and individuality of character which is refreshing.
Hazel, at tea: ‘I suppose you were all sitting here at tea, facing the fire like this, before me, when I was in heaven.’
Another phase of vague illness again; like sleeping in a haunted house and not seeing the ghost. This morning I escaped the miaiseries and walked along the path between Chalkwell and Old Leigh. A raw, dull day with a wind and all-pervading greyness. The tide full in, and the sea faintly grey-green, ugly. Few people about; at sea the hulls of the small yachts and motorboats wintering at their moorings. No birds but seagulls, resting silently on the sea, or uneasily flying up. The fishing fleet moved out of Leigh into the gloom of the east coast, smacks painted grey and green, with their crews on deck. I envied them for their free life. Old Leigh is a single narrow street, with salty, muddy houses, still retaining strongly the character of fishing and naïveté. The railway line, in this case, preserves the community – its special nature. Past Old Leigh, the cockle-sheds, a dark line of huts. The boat-building shed. The beginning of the sea-wall, the corporation dump, the loneliness. In a sense all nicely divided and gradated. A bleak sort of affection is possible.
5 January
A whim to go afar. To Canvey Island, up the sea-wall to Shell Haven.fn15 A pale, cold, half-fine day; obscure blueness and insistent clouds, general bright blue-greyness, making in the morning the grass very green and the water grey and ruffled, an aqueous brightness everywhere. Later the weather settled into a cold, windy dullness. This part of Canvey isolated, overrun by rabbits. I meet a friendly man, with a red face, carrying an old sack bag with a bottle in it. One of the few countrymen left. Then on into a wasteland of rubble-dumps, with to-and-fro lorries, cranes, wharves, distant oil-tanks. One or two houses deserted, forsaken; few birds. A strange part of the world. It seems so deserted in contrast with the oil-shipping atmosphere given by the tanks. I don’t pass a soul. The creek here is wide, bleak and impersonal, another world from Old Leigh.
Past the oil-tanks home, they seem without men; past a white house set in a few shrubby trees, with one room lit on the top floor, past and around a deserted army camp, full of huts, towers and desuetude, back into the myriad-housed centre of Canvey. All bungalows and jerry-built, yet full of television aerials. The people, this centre, seem to ignore the desolation and harshness of the rest of the island east, with its hundreds of acres of grassland and marshy drains. Like the heart of the lettuce.
Denigrating effect of Oxford, like a pin balloon-pricking. Essential unfriendliness. Thirst for purpose and duty. Complete doubt as to future and literary ability. Depressing Schools results – either failures or successes.
All day walking about, seeing tutors, meeting people. A wet, warm day. The pavements at night remind me of things I have forgotten, summer somewhere and feeling very happy – a curious smell, very West wind, blossoming from them. Nostalgic; and above the nostalgia a layer of unhappy what’s-the-good-ness, being sensitive, feeling, living in the past, when the present is what it is. Here is the home of rivality, of comparisons. Chacun pour soi, socially, academically. Everyone has assets beyond me.
Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, listened to on a grey, dull Sunday, when I feel alone, as always on Sundays. Deeply enjoyed. So many things felt. The optimism wrung out of the mass of pessimism, the absurd fardeau of life. ‘There is no happiness; only the longing for it.’ ‘My soul is like a piano, whose key has been lost.’ Frustration, ennui, acceptance. Chekhov knew how out of the sisters’ misery, so typical, so universal, so timeless, would come the beauty, the joy and tragedy, catharsis, the strangest help. Basically, a realization of man’s position in an indifferent world, the glow of full consciousness vaguely felt. Masochism, pity for the general through the individual, the general being incomprehensible, non-existent except through the individual. Tragedy should create pity, should broaden, deepen, emancipate the sympathetic imagination into a realm where the consequent will to creation, action, can be realized; should create ghosts with the will to climb into real life.
19 January
News that the specialist has diagnosed my illness;fn16 relief, sense of vindication, slight regret for the past state, masochistic. Not altogether an ill wind; so many depths would have been unplumbed. Suffering is essential to know oneself. Introspection. A return to normality is not altogether a blessing.
Splendid evening light over afternoon London, gilding quite literally everything with beauty. I have never felt so sensitive – in all directions, in all objects, sudden apprehensions of subtle charms. The River Thames a beautiful pale glowing blue, the concrete of the normally off-white bridges, a pink-gold soft opal. The sky intense, tinged turquoise.
Curious interstate of a dream – an exact continuity. I dreamed I was exactly where I was, lying in bed in the home, waiting for the nurse to come and inject. But in the dream someone was also waiting and the lights were on (actual time 4 a.m.), and an announcer had just said on the wireless that someone called Ray(mond?) Noble was going to play the piano. When the nurse came in actually, she came in in the dream. For once I didn’t seem to wake immediately.
30 January
Three nurses here, strong types in the subtle distinction category. One a full big-breasted strong girl whose body smells, whose approach, with a bright smile and a bright remark, is healthily sexual, like a barmaid or a Scandinavian (she is blonde). Her natural element and position is bed and open-limbed. Two, a mousy, unobtrusive, small, flat-cheeked girl, feminine and unsexual, with a certain gentle prettiness. Shy and unassertive in approach, a faint, conversational smile. All her life in a minor key, in the background, negative, though not without its charm of faintness. Three, better, a year older, trim-figured, good legs, nice breasts, quite a pretty face, tinge of Jewishness. Practical, aloof, cold. Suggestion of sexuality, but carefully locked away. The best-uniformed. Self-contained, indifferent to all but the quick, efficient execution of the job. Smart office-girl, gin-and-orange type. Interesting to have them on a voyage, or to sleep with them all, not particularly from desire, but better to be able to classify and distinguish them.
The tissue of life. The pain and embarrassment of the cure; its apparent unsuccess; the boredom; the frustration, sexual and adventurous; the three young nurses; the mad old senile women, vaguely heard, never seen, phantasmagoria from outside; the dull, little room, the empty bed, the green chair, the china Alsatian climbing up the green steps, the insufficient wireless, the silver half-hunter wall-engraved; the unattractive meals; the routine, the bed being made; the ugly patch of garden out of the window; the occasional golden light (Claude) in the sky. The parental visits, the prompt retreat into the shell, the banalities, the poses, the indifference, the guilt of ingratitude. The withdrawal from life, from reality, from responsibility, like a toad in his flower-pot by a busy walk. Like a bee still in his honeycomb cell. Waxed, silent, indifferent, falling into a despair, self, groping back into the cave so that no one is at the mouth of the cave to deal with passers-by. Only a voice shouting out of the darkness, angry at being disturbed, back over my shoulder.
Extraordinary inversion of sickness. Because I feel myself no better, a kind of compensatory masochism, not so much a psychologically whining self-pity as a tight-lipped stoic self-dramatization, arises. The tragedy of the vague illness and its vague effects on life become real, and the sense of difference, the growing away from the normal world is universal. Most of my day-dreams are violent reactions into a hard, active, adventurous, romantic life; I become lost in them more easily in a stagnant situation like this. Some are the ideal fulfilment of past or future potentialities, more often, naturally, the latter. Others are outside even the realm of potentiality. This placing of the ego in a tragic (or again a day-dream tragic, a potentially tragic) frame, though pernicious, cannot be willed away. It’s like a leak in a boat; for a long time one can keep pace, then it wins. Baling is done in two ways – by an effort of will, by concentration on externals, both periodic things. The natural self-interest will always win through, though again it is equally periodic, even when there is no will to persist. As always, it opens doors into gardens and storeyards of self-realization.
Writing it down and reading it, objectively, make it seem all false.
3 February
Dostoevsky, House of the Dead.fn17 The calm objectivity, the coolness of it all. Immolated. Also the monotony, greyness, illuminated by his super-journalistic spirit. ‘The passionate desire to rise up again, to be needed, to begin a new life, gave me the strength to wait and hope’ … ‘though I had hundreds of comrades, I was fearfully touchy, and at last I grew fond of that laziness’ … ‘and sometimes I bless fate for sending me this solitude, without which I could not have judged myself like this’.
His prison was like this illness of mine, a barrier from freedom, a thing to be hoped past, imagining freedom a much more real thing than it is. In such a situation there are only two loopholes, hope, or if that is impossible, like his old Russian Believer, martyrdom; glorification and suffering through abject humiliation.
12 February
Long, vague period of dreaming and frustration, dull despondency. Work in spasms, conscious of the irresponsibility of such a habit, and the certain penalty. Universally ambitious, and nothing to aim at. A psychological claustrophobia. No literary inspirations, and that way no self-faith. Living half of each day in a dream. Usually of some Provençal farm where the masterpieces grow like grapes on the vine. Antithesis to this quiet, drily inhabited little house in a grey and bourgeois suburb. Not that I hate the bourgeoisie here except in as much as I have to form part of it. Find distraction in Herodotus. Other ages, other manners; but fortunately the same powers of imagination. The future seeming definitely to assume a forbidding shape. No set lines. And all around other people are springing up, marrying, mixing, loving, quarrelling, being. I vaguely drift on the time point, with no volition to leap out. Then this illness shows no sign of being cured, when everyone feels it should be. Myself, I begin to grow indifferent to it. Here also, the absolute friendlessness is a little saddening. Not one visitor in three weeks of nursing-home. Tant pis! I can support it, but unnaturally. The immense gap between child and parents also is ridiculous and tragic, unnecessary and inevitable. The innate sensitivity only makes things more felt in secret. No common ground at all. I too proud and abstracted to want to talk trivialities, to discuss the deep, loved things (because I have to formalize them to make them be understood – I hate having to descend to explain the heights where I feel at home), they too absorbed, too enfoncé in the minute details and facets of the vie quotidienne. Even if both sides made a sincere effort to attain a rapprochement, the disparity would still be the same. Even the smallest external noise infuriates me during music; they always treat it as secondary to food, conversation, paper-rattling, or Hazel. The difference in environmental norms accounts for much – a boarding-school, an officer’s mess, a university, all have led me into a much wider plane than twenty-five rather introvert years in the same quiet household, where the class has slipped.fn18
Long period of détente, which I so much want to leave. I feel as if I am running face on to a windward shore, ugly cliffs, with my one gap offering salvation, Scylla and Charybdis narrow. Perhaps it would be better to be wrecked, lost in the way of an existence of mediocrity. Yet I must regard a year in France as a continuation of the détente.fn19 The thing to concentrate on there are the two plays. The stories are all too occasional. The torture is the slow one of seeing youth, première jeunesse, spring, slip past untasted, unexplored. I would seize any chance of some extraordinary experience – exploration preferably. Here, life is only one truth complete. No extra-spiritual enjoyments. Physically on the bedrock of mundanity. Worst of all, no attempt at escape. One can sit and write about the necessity for will, for élan vital, but actual experience crumbles to dust.
Fascination of listening in the small hours of the morning to Election results. The constant interruption of the music and the numbers counted floating out of the loudspeaker. Interest grows like a child’s interest in a match boat-race in a gutter. The Liberals play a magnificent spoiling game. The Conservatives creep up, stealthily. A dull, wet night.fn20
A mixed day. At home with the Election à l’arrière-fond, unsettled, queasy at setting out in the world again. Nerves temporarily out of control. Then meeting TS at Paddington and travelling with him. At the MF I find it difficult to adopt a new role – the old one of reserved coldness still clings, an old shell. At table I find it impossible to talk lightly, although speaking better French than the others. Afterwards, in a spasm of insouciance, rather desperate when so much work has to be done, I went with Guy to the Experimental Theatre Company, Chekov’s The Bear and Fielding’s Tom Thumb. Played in a small uncomfortable hall, on a tiny stage, with a resultant atmosphere of intimacy which is excellent. Rather over-acted, and both pieces far from faultless, but an enjoyable evening. It is unfortunate that Merlin Thomasfn21 should be there, and more that he saw me. Feeling a small boy guilt. The faint charm of Oxford was in the theatre, the glow of a young and intelligently human society. Walk home through the wet, warm, rain-shining streets with GH. The Woodstock Road is solemn and full of ghosts. Girls stand saying goodnight outside Somerville. We talk and the distance passes unnoticed. Strange, sociable Oxford. Where everyone is received and everything is moderate, where extremes and the essential knowledge are rarely discovered. The great sturdy mass of creatures of tradition balances the boat of the present.
Stomach bad again. Disgust with body; even with mind. I can return out of my body, separating myself from it objectively, and I would like to do the same thing with my mind. Could I leave my mind as well? Can the mind be left and walked beside, walked away from?
7 March
Sudden pain again in prostate. It always jabs when I slow up my pessimism. Today I have felt more than usually happy, so it had to return. I see no end to this. I have never felt cured, after the period in the nursing-home. If I had been really cured, I should have felt it intuitively. The mental will to get better has never been present, because the mind knew the body was still ill. So?
9 March
Another day of illness. Impossible to eat. Trying to force food down is a torture. So joy-destroying. From time to time I have an excess of sorrow that I can’t justify myself to these people. At dinner everyone was gay and laughing, the candles were alight. The dinner was excellent. They talked of various things and, because I say nothing, must think me wholly heavy and stupid. But I wanted violently to be sick, and it was all I could do to sit at the table, let alone smile and make witty conversation. I feel upset at estranging people who fundamentally would like me. The desire to shine in society is an egotist one, but to renounce it is unnatural. People do not understand renunciation. Sometimes they admire it, but they never understand or fully sympathize with it. All this social and psychological trouble springs out of the basic, physical deficiency – I haven’t sat down and enjoyed a meal for two years. I can say that without exaggeration. Always there was nausea, or no appetite – capable of eating, but not of enjoying. That, combined with the general weakness and faintness, drains the positive aspects of life away. Even the conscious act of ignoring or minimizing the illness brings no solution – in itself it is a form of hypochondria. In these things self-pretence is hopeless.
The imagined truth dominates all. I am beginning to find it difficult to remember the time when I felt completely fit and well. When I walked out on a spring day and felt life like the sap in the trees. When I could drink myself sick without danger, when I could eat twenty times what I do now. I write this in the hope that one day I shall be able to look back and smile. But now I have no faith at all in the possibility of such a day coming.
26 March
Lately have had many ideas and thoughts, but no desire to record. A gentleness, an unstiffening of the creative will. One happy mood, cycling at night past Keble; this has happened before, so there must be a sprite near by. And then another time, a night wind, cold and steely, blowing in the strangely deserted Banbury Road, giving a sudden sharp impression of loneliness, of having blown all round the world without touching a single human. The wind of a world without men, without life. A middle-aged woman chasing a small black dog up the Woodstock Road, calling more and more desperately ‘Roland, Roland’, apparently without avail.
Depressed at not knowing at all what I am, or shall be. The want always to write, the feel of duty about work, conflicts, doubts, chaos. Contempt for eminence in a profession. Something better than that. All these clever dons and clever undergraduates add up to nothing for personal immortality. They don’t seem to be sensitive about this. They accept their limits, which is monstrous. One would imagine them always striving, with their fine brains, to immortality. Instead they accept their niches. The secret is never to accept minute-to-minute, day-to-day occurrences. To be always searching, always dissatisfied.
There are empty futile moods where hope, self-satisfaction and above all will are absent. A petulant ennui, a sense of individual uselessness.
Two causes for hate. Being born into an age and place where the civilization has been crowned, and now is a decadent monarchy. Thus France culminates in her seventeenth, us in our sixteenth, Germany in her eighteenth to nineteenth, Russia in her nineteenth, Italy in her twelfth–fourteenth–fifteenth (and Rome). Coming at the tail-end, one has no chance. It is impossible to surmount the barriers inherent in the age. Secondly, to be destined to the most limited and perishable of arts, literature. Pictorial art and music both last longer and appeal more widely. Poetry is the most confined of all. To write it is an art of self-denial. The only hope is a great new American culture.
For a moment today I thought that I was thinking in time with the music; a sudden double jump in my thought corresponded exactly with a double upsurge in the music (Schubert 8th). Could music be interrelated with sound-nerves and so pulse perhaps with intuitive force in the brain? Why does some music create especially aware and creative moods in me? Perhaps some electro-magnetic connection between the sound-waves, the emotions arising out of certain notes, the stimulation in the particular (my literary) sphere.
Beethoven’s genius is a particular sensitivity to universal reality (with joy and pain as basic themes, life and death), crystallized in an attitude intuitively chosen to express most absolutely that comprehensive sensibility. There is no religious emotion. It is pure fundamental emotion, deeper than religion. Human emotion.
Excellent study of Beethoven by John Sullivan.fn22 Objectively romantic.
I cannot stop reading his life, the fascination of positiveness, his dominant genius. Even reading descriptions of the last quartets makes me melt for the feelings he has aroused in man. He died exactly 123 years ago yesterday.
D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy.fn23 Queer, naïve, tremulous writing. Flashes of childish hate. Psychological inconsistencies, a dream- or insane world. Astounding ‘feel’ for countryside. Yvette, an almost Pre-Raphaelite maiden. The gipsy satyrnine, elemental, full of natural desire. All of the characters are distorted, almost surrealist.
D. H. Lawrence, St Mawr.fn24 Different from the last, fuller, more rich and coloured. Symbolism of pantheistic nature, creative urge (= St Mawr). All the characters are again supernaturally distorted. Brilliant portrayal of landscapes – the ranch description is magnificent. Many pathological touches – yearning for the South, hate of ‘middle’ (i.e. bourgeois) civilizations which do not possess, or destroy, all finer perceptions of nature. The artist, the poet (in the widest sense of ‘poet’) against the normal universe. L can’t integrate himself with reality. He sees reality so acutely, with so many nuances of mood and feeling and underlying philosophic content, that he inevitably forces himself (or is forced) into a position different from those who see reality in the normal not very acute – even obscure – way. He doesn’t himself seem to realize this fundamental cure for his split with society. Very little pity for the ‘middle’ civilization. The line of descent to Aldous Huxley is clear. As a stylist, the roughness and romanticism, the decadence in his expressions, will date quickly. Too many longueurs, too many too rich sentences.
Lunch with Connie Morgenstern.fn25 An unusual personality. Her eyes are almost abstract, faint blue or pale blue-grey, almost meaning nothing. They give nothing away. When you talk to her they shift a very small amount continually, with an impression of vagueness, of disinterest, of rootlessness. She has little bursts of enthusiasm and amusement, but usually periods when it is difficult to talk with her. She always seems to be wishing she were somewhere else, in another sort of life or body.
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Most impressive – far and away the best novel I have read for a long time. Much better than Huxley or Waugh. He has their satire but seems to get right down to the bottom of it – a question of environment and heredity and civilization. The futility and tragedy, self-realized by the characters, i.e. Daisy and Jordan, is inevitable. Gatsby is the only character out of the age, who steps in and tries to conquer, and of course fails.fn26 The story is as subtle, inexorable, concise and restrainedly objective and profoundly tragic as a play by Racine. Gatsby tries to attract the age by the age. A subtlety is the subjective frame used – one knows that this is part Scott Fitzgerald as he is, and part seen objectively by his genius. Thus everything is slightly distorted – or better, put on the same level – by his semi-blinded vision, i.e. he in a way accepts the age, because he is in it, and this gives him a sympathy, only a superficial one, but still sympathy for his people and their dilemma. Basically of course, he is against, he condemns. But there is that pity which is missing in Antic Hay and (in a different key) in Brideshead Revisited. Also a very supple, easy and in some ways poignant style; flashes of beautifully felicitous sensation of mood (the first entry into the Buchanans’ house). All his tense scenes are finely handled. This is much more durable stuff than Lawrence. Another aspect – the classic faithful love-affaire with unrequited love and tragic ending. There is a quiet immense and not too simple, not too complicated fatality in the way the story unfolds. Strongly constructed, architecturally.
Brayfield. April 1 weekend. A long cross-country journey, with not very attractive black and green landscapes. Some old county towns with ugly small-factory suburbs. Interesting series of passengers, little glimpses of other people’s lives. Three strange Lithuanian or Slav men who come together on the bus, and then sit very far apart, without speaking, without talking to each other. They all have fat tanned faces, new gaberdine mackintoshes and hats whose brims are turned up all the way round, which makes them look vaguely stupid. This combined with their strong, heavy faces makes them ominously, coarsely brutal. They get off the bus separately, but meet together on the kerb. They look like Chicago thugs, almost inhumanly merciless and unscrupulous, idiotically out of place on a country bus route. One of them looks out at a passing pretty girl in a deadly material calculating sort of way – not a look of admiration, nor of sexuality, but pure brutish interest, like a thinking bull. The conductors call me ‘Sir’ – and no one else.
Brayfield, a large house on a large estate, a kind of Brideshead, ruined by the army in the war, now derelict, useless, the house of another age. There are ugly huts of corrugated iron and brick dotted about over the park, which festers with similar eyesores. The house looks out over a hill down to the River Ouse and the small and nicely isolated village of Newton Blossomville, and a long line of uphill country beyond.
Michael F a curious phenomenon.fn27 County, but in some strange way unscrupulous about keeping to strict county standards (like Major Lawrence).fn28 Long, lean-faced, blue eyes, fair hair, with a mock naïveté. Responsible, the young squire. He goes to church in his two parishes, twice on Sundays, so as to be the dutiful churchwarden. This annoys Constance. A very charming person, with apparent (often feigned) interest in all you say. Extremely polite, without ever seeming so. Very thorough way of clearing his nose after blowing it; quite an operation, each nostril receiving comparatively prolonged attention. Listening to a Third Programme satire: ‘Jolly funny! But if you chaps hadn’t been laughing, I should have thought it all serious.’ Typical of the mock naïveté. He has a very flexible way of being his age. A wide range – sometimes the boy of 20, at others the serious, worried with responsibility man of 30–35.
Roger Pierce – affable, pleasant, like a cocker spaniel, a well-bred one. Also, like M; the half-anti-high-brow naïveté. But on the whole more intellectual than M. Keen on fishing. He wears a very old coat and torn trousers well. A good social person, sound and tolerant, fairly deep without being complex.
Constance heavy-eyed but happier. Efficient in an inefficient way. Full of little moods. Being a guest with them, one is made to feel almost at once that one is not a guest. Work has to be done, and shared. The best of things (food, etc), does not go to one, unless it should happen to be by chance. No conscious effort to please. On Sunday they ride off and away in the afternoon. They do not feel responsible in the old (or possibly just middle-class) close way – where host and guest are linked every minute of the day by a kind of faked intimate convention.
Characters. M’s sister B, tall, slim, corduroy trousers and tweed coat, fair straggly hair, with sharp, determined features, a little hard. Horsey. Always busy feeding or cleaning out. Her husband, ex-Russian, Colonel Paul Rodzianko, thick, heavy, tall man who speaks broken English, has a bushy colonel’s moustache, and has apparently still the serf complex. A famous show horse trainer. Annoys the Fs because he won’t help clean out the stables, etc. They obviously think him rather a fraud.fn29
Mrs Farrer,fn30 a sharp-minded and -tongued late-middle-aged lady, still active and interested. Still rather the ‘grande dame’. Religious and practical, and incurably well-bred. With strange eyes, blue and rather lizard-like, which she uses a great deal when talking. She must have been very minxishly pretty when she was young. Too clever and sharp to have a son as naïve as Michael pretends to be. She is like her younger daughter and R (whom C dislikes for his egotism).
Lassie. A curious blue- and black-eyed Welsh collie. Her eyes have a strangely remote look. Affectionate. Scared-stiff of the ewes. Much too much of a pet in a farmer’s house.
Dick. A thick-necked rather self-consciously (because we are all younger) proud good farmer. Financially shrewd, and plainly in the game for money as much as anything. Not county, with slight accent and roughnesses of language. His wife, shrewd also, self-possessed, with a little air of possessiveness as regards C as if she wants me to know how close she is to the Farrers – which makes me suspect she would judge people rather harshly on purely snob grounds.
The house is locked up, weather-beaten; even the façades seem musty. Remnants of garden, of flowering shrubs.
On Sunday morning I go for a long walk in the country to a wood on the estate. Past a nice old church at Newton, along an uphill road, where the wind is cold and strong and it begins to drive rain as a shower comes. A beautiful April day, astringent, with spring coming, the country going green, with flowers – violets, primroses, celandines – in the hedges. A distant, flat landscape, with smoke-grey woods, red houses and mist-green fields, the whole mottled with sunlight and cloud. A large sky, white cloud and bright blueness, in the dark-grey intervals where the showers are raining. I chew the honey out of white violet flowers, and walk with Lassie, pleased that she follows me, a stranger. The wind is cold, the road deserted, everything sharp and clean and expectant. I feel happy sheltering out of the rain under a straw rick especially when I continue on to the wood, exultantly drying in the blue burst of sunshine which follows the rain. The wood is deserted and I walk quietly down the paths, listening to birds, feeling so content to be in the real country again and alone, after so long. I still feel the old pantheistic sympathy, the feel that I know everything that’s going on, the delight in little things, little scenes, in the ever changing atmosphere of each second. A great tit’s cap, brilliantly glossy and iridescent in the day’s brightness. Jays screeching, a missel-thrush, robins, singing. Fragrant blossoms, Clumps of primroses, and the sweet taste of violets.
A feudalism still survives, an ambiance of country-old respect for the main family. All the villagers know the big house and ‘Mr Michael’. ‘Mr Farrer’ still means the père, some time dead. It is impossible to imagine communism invading an atmosphere like that.
Basil B. Full of intimate details of a seduction he managed over the weekend. A kind of cock-crowing, full-bellowing satisfied smugness. His virility is proved by it; he causes envy and admiration, and yet it is a mixture of egocentric pride and psychological sadism. The question is (when I feel hostile to his ‘confession’) why exactly does one dislike these revelations? Is it pure jealousy and envy? Or a kind of prudishness, a subconsciously offended morality (subconscious because one, or I, would do the same thing without any qualm)? Is one naturally hostile to intimate confessions when they come from friends, because they open new and unknown vistas where before it was imagined that everything was known? The faith of previous accumulated knowledge is shaken by the need to adapt it to the fresh circumstances. In this case, too, I could not help feeling that B was exaggerating, if not indeed totally inventing – a kind of seducer’s licence, like the traditional fishing story.
Impossible struggle between wanting to write and think, and having to do all this abominably unnecessary philology and other work, which resolves itself in a struggle between a guilty conscience and a willing acceptance of the challenge – and out of the struggle comes my indecision and doubt.
Peter Nurse.fn31 Schools-conscious. Continually asking me questions, and answering them for me. Has all the characteristics of a certain first. Spends all his time talking shop. Knows all the critical answers. I hate people who are academically sound, who accept the futility instead of resenting and rejecting it.
Constance. Tea and walk around Oxford. She is looking especially striking, younger than usual. She has a curious magnetic attraction for me, yet I don’t feel at all in love with her. It’s just comfortable and pleasant to be with her. Even being silent with her is without strain. Her quaint moods and the sullen, handsome way she looks when she isn’t doing anything in particular.
Leigh-on-Sea, 6 April
Flowering of spring, happiness, lightness, joy and certainty of self.
Infuriating evening in a way, although I don’t feel particularly annoyed. The Ninth is played. Mother counts her stitches aloud and rattles the paper. Father goes to sleep. I feel sick and sad that something which penetrates right into the heart of me runs off their backs like water off a duck’s. Complete separation of feeling. More and more comes this sense of divorce with the world. Sorrow for the world’s insensitivity and insufficiency and pride in my own awareness and intellect. And again sorrow that the world doesn’t want to be raised, but that the effort to lift it up must be made. Atlas is eternally needed.
Quai des Brumes.fn32 Beautifully made film. Simple tragedy of sordidity. Kafkaesque despair. The really beautiful profile of Michèle Morgan. A hundred subtle and striking touches, with a wonderful theme tune, simple and nostalgic and dramatic. Being here, there had to be sniggers and laughs in the audience – some of them quite literally didn’t seem to understand anything about it at all. During the kissing scenes, whispers behind: ‘This is a bit of all right,’ and a woman saying, ‘We oughtn’t to have brought him.’ They laughed at the end, when the dog strained on the leash to get away from the cabin. It is terrible to think of so many people so incapable of imagining or feeling tragedy. The English are naturally averse to catharsis, to sensibilité, to the enjoyment of tragedy. They are afraid of emotion. I hate the damned condescension of Basil G,fn33 who says of the film ‘one of them things about life in the raw’ – in an amiable, tolerant, amused sort of way, as if life in the raw is something of a joke, and not real compared to the silly, conventional routine of a suburban semi-man-about-town. The average Englishman can’t imagine, and can’t feel, and even if he does, is too inhibited to ever show either quality.
9 April
New word to describe how I felt this morning – perferridity. Life seemed to be rushing past – whole phases of existence and awareness tumbling out, pressing on each other’s backs to get past me, through me and out of me. Spurs of doubt, of assurance, near-crises of nerves, faintness, sense of illness and death. The sudden desire for normality and an afternoon’s golf. By the 14th hole I feel tired and relaxed – some kind of physical labour is necessary for me.
Symptom of this morning. It suddenly seemed to me that my heart was beating like a sledge hammer – a pulsating, terrible, audible thump, thump, thump. I didn’t know what to do. I felt faint, horribly ill. I went in the garden, smoked a cigarette. Went back into my room. By keeping calm I traced the thumping sound to the clock – the noise produced by the pendulum. I get too convolute here.
12 April
Strange uneasy state I’m in. Literally no work done in this vacation, so that a Third or Fourth, and probably a fail, is bound to ensue. I keep on saying, I must fail, to keep free, to give my real self a chance. A Second would certainly mean oblivion. Teaching history, not making it. Money, money, money. If only there was enough money for two years’ peace. Time to think, time to read, time to slowly, unpressedly, create. I see myself now failing, being penniless and getting work somewhere on a farm, a ship – I don’t know. And fortunately don’t much care. Oxford’s been sucked dry.
Sudden shock of seeing a very pretty girl, after a round of not very interesting golf on a dull, heavy afternoon. So out of place, so unexpected. An auburn-haired, minxish little slut, dressed in a long dark-azure blue corduroy coat, with black semi-ballet-slipper shoes on – the black shoes, a few inches of stocking, the blue coat, the auburn mop of hair, shortcut as is the style. She walked affectedly, rather awkwardly, as if she wasn’t used to walking anywhere. A bright flame in the dull London Road of little shops, sooty houses and ugly advertisement hoardings. In me she arouses a queer sort of aching pain, a sureness in the heart – almost the perfect girl to be purely sexual with. She is the unfulfilment of spring, spring unseized.
Oxford, 18 April
Drinking with John Lee.fn34 A very sound earthy, Rabelaisan type. No finesse, and no wetness, no insincerities. In Whites’. The polyglot, on-the-fringe clientèle – socialists and literary and seedy, a few semi – demi – mondaines, bar-sitting, looking round. One, a pretty, sharp little girl, keeps on looking at the door, though not waiting for anyone – impression of waiting for something symbolical to arrive. Kafka feeling. Upstairs, a blonde with a green dress, deeply split, young, silly, drinking too much, making eyes, exclaiming, laughing with her men. Somehow so sparse of real pleasure and joy. For her, drinking in a smart bar, talking with vaguely raffish men, smoking, doing nothing, just existing, seems to cause an ennui below the surface, a vague sense that life isn’t being fully realized. Probably a naïve, sincere, natural approach would upset her veneer of lacquered calm and conventionally smart-barish behaviour.
Jour de Fête. Fine French film.fn35 Almost documentary background of French provincial village-town. Rich, accurate atmosphere. Tati, a long, individual, gawky clown.
25 April
Snows. Very cold, and all the trees in bloom. Strange mood in the air, the wintry feeling of a new age, a new system of seasons coming.
26 April
Illness is coming back. I feel possessed, malignly. I understand the medieval superstition – if only I could believe in a spiritual imagination, even of a miracle at Lourdes. But I know it is only a germ or some physiological abnormality. I can’t escape the body by romance. There is nothing spiritual.
In the afternoon, we walk in the Parks. A bright, warm, day. People in bright clothes, punts, swans, mallards on the pond. One brood of six fluff-ball ducklings. Shaughan, a young red setter, undisciplined, sinuous, aristocratic, bounding and running all over the path, the grass, sniffing people, chasing other dogs, fluid, never immobile. A little boy in bright red trousers, and a small girl in a bright red coat, looking at the dull-green, sun-shot river, with a bunch of yellow celandines in her hand. There is a pretty quality in park scenes; the statuesque background of trees, paths, greenness. Then the moving dots, the various-coloured dresses, the dogs, the perambulators, the children. The flashes of bright, crude colour, the bright reds and blues, are the decorative blobs, the Dufy element – it is all simple, naïve, pleasant. A park is a pleasure. The paths lead nowhere, are no short cut, so everybody is walking for pleasure. Fast walking is a sin.
Basil tries to help a small boy fly a toy glider. Because it isn’t heavy enough, he puts sixpence in a clip on the nose. The sixpence falls out on the grass and is lost. He explains carefully to the boy how to fly it, why it flies, why it doesn’t fly well at this moment. Then throws it himself and breaks it. I, and Peter Malpas, can’t help laughing – the little boy wants to cry. It is cruel to laugh, but there is a humour in the second. Basil kneels down, talks, explains, gives the little boy a shilling. The father comes up, Basil talks more, all is well.
Basil is immensely correct in all his nuances of action and behaviour, like a skilful fencer with life and personalities. Polite and charming, crude, always at the right moments. Unconsciously people surrender to his expertise in the petty relationships of life, his savoir vivre. He possesses adequately, or well, practically all the social attainments.
Also we saw a hornet in the road, a big yellow buzz. It settled over a drain, a fat, broad, powerful wasp-like creature. I rode at it on my bicycle, but it escaped down a hole in the drain-cover, and flew up as I passed over. A fearsome brute.
These days mean nothing. One exists, one is happy, one is sad. No more, no positive gains from them. No setting of these days in eternity, no setting them in a fire of glory. That’s the great fault of Oxford – one slips, one slides, gently, easily, comfortably into an unworried indolence, where all the days are old gold and every point is blunted. It’s almost as if there was a filter around the town which sieved out all the sharp anxieties and extreme joys of existence.
3 May
Podge Porter comes in in the evening, and tells of the break-up of his marriage.fn36 His calmness and cynicism implied are strangely incongruous. He treats it impassively, without crying or breaking in any way. His attitude to life is a queer mixture of realism and cynicism, a compound of natural and artificial disappointment in the face of things. He is a sharp anti-romantic, a pricker of balloons. Eileen he likens to Orestes, dangerously impotent. He lacks the touch of heart, but is such a pleasantly astringent, real character. Intelligence and bitterness and a sense of humour make a good trio. He introduces all these realities, these domestic and financial worries, these cosmological reflections on the absurd in trivial things, with an amusing mock air of showmanship. His ultimate use of the Socratic method – faint ignorance – positive, attacking, destructive criticism, form valuable assets in any friend. His sort are few and far between, though he’d be the last to agree.
6 May
The swifts – i.e. full summer – arrived this afternoon. Flying around in the low-cloud mist.
8–9 May
Lucien Jacques – a small-faced insignificant little man with grey hair and beautifully soft and meek hazel eyes. A very mild and wise gentleman-peasant. Simple and fresh. Intelligent. Knows Matisse. For several years he was a shepherd in Provence. He has that air of calmness and peace, of animal intelligence and meekness, which only an intensely human nature saturated in wild nature – flowers, scents, landscapes, countries – can give. A delightful person. I can’t think of anyone who made such a charming impression so quickly.fn37 Such a relief after the impatience and cynical worldliness of a Fluchère. A quiet, human person. Pleasant to all the world. He strikes one as being a simple lover of life, yet profoundly, not naïvely, simple – the great thing is his peace. How striking it is when you strike these people who have achieved their peace.
9 May
Lucien Jacques. Today confirms yesterday. Admirably set in his world. Intelligent, humble, with little flashes of self-pride. Favorite composer – Mozart. He’s known H. G. Wells, Gide, etc. Such a remarkably adaptable person. He speaks very quietly and slowly, but people stop and listen to him. His words are simple, sometimes a little bizarre, pittoresque. It is extraordinary how he brought the sun with him – these two days have been completely bright. Quite literally no cloud for forty-eight hours. He has the Midas touch. Fat, pudgy sensitive hands. Incessant smoker. He has a way of sitting which is entirely relaxed, round-shouldered without seeming unpleasant or slouched. When he eats, he holds the knife and fork firmly, peasant-wise without thinking of the environment – whereas we tend to hold the knife in a line with the forefinger, his is held at an angle, clumsily almost. He sat in the garden this evening, in the setting sun, back against a tree, the beret over his eyes, his knee raised, one arm rested on it with drooping wrist, the other leg straight out, the whole pose redolent with neat and – although he must be fifty – adolescent ease. A pose you couldn’t learn except by being a shepherd for seven years, sitting in excessive heat and watching your flock, for weeks, for months. Sitting like that he looked as if he could sit for ever. Around his eyes he has wrinkles through constant smiling.
I hate May fine weather. It’s too perfect. Absolute beauty, happiness is always imperfect. Near the summit, but not the summit.
18 May
The first day of summer, a dreadful day. A pale blue sky, white fluffy clouds, no wind, heavy, a dull brightness everywhere. Mundane fine weather. Too many ugly flowers ostentatiously blooming, and people look depressed. Heaviness is inherent in most English summer fine weather.
Talking with Merlin Thomas about the future. I feel guilty and ashamed and a little bit resentful that I have chosen to do badly. When I told him that I daren’t do well, he pooh-poohed it and said, ‘I put you between 1 and 2, on the borderline.’ That is so unlikely that I can say nothing. I wanted to tell him all about this great bout of denial, but it is usually impossible. I do not look forward to the revelation, either with him, at home, or elsewhere.
Villon. How he stands out in the literary forest! Stark, black, dramatic, naïf and finished at the same time, morbid, ironic, gay, self-pitying, always muscular, nervous, contorted. Tense. There is no relaxation, no interlude long enough to break the strain. In literary stature he’s very thin and very tall. There is no fat to waste away, only a tough, irreducible core.fn38 No false romantic qualities, no softness or sentimentality (he’s at the opposite end of the scale from Wordsworth, who is for the most part reliant on softness and sentimentality for his effects. W is not half as immortal as V, but his medium, romanticism, is much harder to work in).
All one evening feel purposelessness like a fog around me. Fog which won’t ever lift. I reread the Pandaras play and see so many defects, longueurs, that it makes me yawn. The essential is to try and try again, and aim at the essence of one’s imagination and creative intelligence, which lies always just ahead, in a new world around the corner. The vital core alone; what will both penetrate the reluctant future, and dazzle the present.
Bump Supper. Written tonight 1.15. A masculine medieval orgy. Drink, drink. Shouting, marching, lawlessness. I remember stabbing at a fence with iron bars. Sitting in the far corner of Hall. Too tired now.
Tutorial with Harding.fn39 Oxford the imperturbable. He is intolerably slow and exact, meticulous. A sleepy, soft, profoundly unemotional sort of voice, but with no drawl, no engaging qualities. Dry as a desert. Another little man there – he comes almost exactly in the ‘little man’ category of insignificance – had a notebook with a white label pasted on the cover and the words ‘Eighteenth Century Literature’ carefully written on. Each letter must have taken some time to write, because the bars and curves were thick, made by many parallel strokes of the pen. There were little flourishes – but nothing exaggerated. The psychology of someone who wastes his time drawing in letters like that is of a retarded schoolboy nature. I was interested to imagine myself in his place, decorating with such ease. Such an unimportant function. It was as difficult as imagining myself in Patagonia. Anyhow, such people should be banned from action.
28 May
In a sunny spell – the day fitful, cloudy – at 10.21 this morning a bottlefly with an emerald abdomen settled on the grey and black sunlit sill of my window. I could write a poem. Instead I wish to record it. At 72 Woodstock Road, 10.21 a.m., May 28, 1950, in short sunlight, a small fly with a green belly. En fais ce que tu veux. I wish to record; each trembling, infinitesimal point of light which makes the whole symphonic illumination of life.
To be precise, I should say, schoolboy-fashion, 72 Woodstock Road, Oxford, England, this world, this system, this galaxy, this cosmos. And just as we think of one cosmos, I think of several, all expanding and all approaching. The interpenetration of cosmi! Like spokes of wheels, as interpenetrating and mutually destroying.
Weekend of no work again. In the evening out with Basil Beeston, John Lee. The morning, it’s Whit Sunday morning, I had an awful head and a taste of acrid futility, both in my mouth and my mind. The dull, drab despair of a hangover. The futility of it. The futility of my futility. I hate myself for having done things I myself despise. I sat and tried to work, listened to the wireless, thought, dreamed, hated it all. On a morning like this one could kill oneself in a sudden fit, out of pique, knowing that it would be regretted afterwards. Sad and depressed with the vague inflation and deflation of moods which go with drinking, the feeling that it is a (I hate giving myself to anything, including alcohol) second-best thing, a waste of time. That one could be so much better occupied otherwise.
I try and exist, be existentialist, enjoying the second for the second, but something nags all the time, the suspicion that there might be an essence I have missed. Also there is always tomorrow and yesterday. For as long as we know so much about them, it is impossible to shut oneself up in today. The past is a judge and standard for the present. Real pleasure in a moment in itself, but the afterglow depends on the insight it has set against the past. And the future is a test-ground for the dreams we elect to create. A cupboard for ideals, belittling all present actualities.
Lying in the garden most of the day. Hot, lazy day. Many people about; Constance came to tea, slim and silent and secretive as usual. We sat on a rug, and sipped China tea, talked a little. I felt contented, bien. Later we went to the Podges. We sat in the garden and I played with a kitten whose eyes were sea-green or mauve, depending on the angle. The Ps were abnormally cynical, but showed their usual facility for plunging quickly into metaphysics and philosophy and life and art. They are expert at heightening the subject. We talked about careers and sincerity. They refused to believe that I could become a farm labourer without intellectual malaise. I felt in me hardening this vague resolve to experiment with my life, to try and be ideally honest and sincere. That is my only chance, use it as well as you know how, savour it. It’s no good working for an examination which will lead to a safe career and stagnation. That is a solution open like a door which must not be entered. Despise the chances into safety, that’s the true solution. They kept on talking about bald facts. Thank God I still am young enough to mould hard facts, having no responsibilities to hamper me in the work. The evening was useful, for although I didn’t say much, as usual, I could generally crystallize my own feelings. I felt violently convinced of free will, that I was prepared to accept my own beliefs and act by them. I am sure I want to choose my own way of living, that is, to write. That I want to be as free as possible, in order to give the artist in me elbow-room.
2 June
A tutorial from Harding yesterday was hell. Two hours of completely useless lesson. Two hours so appallingly wasted that they seemed like two years – a real sin, pure vandalism. His slow, uncertain manner of talking, searching for words. He fiddles with his spectacles or his shoelaces while he tries to think of something to say. He respects platitudes, stresses obvious points. There are long silences in his delivery, so long that it becomes ultimately embarrassing, infuriating, amusing. A complete lack of live sympathy towards a work. Academic dehydration. No sense of humour. He has an irritating way of heightening his stress, expanding, oiling his voice, or words or sentences of conventional appreciation and admiration. As if he isn’t forced by genuine admiration to speak so, but rather by convention, purely and simply. My head was splitting, cracking with frustration. I was bowed and furious, tense and het up that such a baby should be a tutor. The others kept stony, non-committal faces. Outside I saw two people walking suddenly stop and clutch each other with desire, kissing intently. Her hand slipped over his head. As Harding drowsed and drifted on, I dreamt of her lips in Queen’s Lane below.
8 June
The daily hell and paraphernalia of Schools. It means getting up early, putting on subfusc and white tie, carrying gown and mortarboard, entering the building, climbing up the stone stairs, into the great room with the bent figures, and then writing, writing, writing. Each night cramming frantically for the morrow. Moods of elation, braggadocio, humour, despair, fatigue, delirium, depression. Now I am in it, I take it seriously and surprise myself with the amount I manage to drag up out of the past. It is impossible to resist the excitement of beating the examiners. But now I shall fall between two stools. Intelligent, but lazy.
14 June
Schools. Today I did the most difficult exam and passed it. A relief and a feeling of smug jubilation. No one could have done less work than I have, or deserved less credit. I have had luck, and my method of intense work just before that examination is, I am sure, the right one. Every night I crammed really hard, and have had no difficulty with questions. What a farce and terribly bad test of a person it all is! Ridiculously inefficient. It is mainly a question of memory. On Flaubert, for instance, I had one question. One question to test so much reading! Fortunately I have taken it all in the spirit of a farce, as if it was a game to be played – as well as possible. Taking Schools seriously must be misery indeed.
16 June
E. M. Forster, Howard’s End. A slightly insipid, uncharming book. A queer, feminine, faintly fusty flavour. As if written by an intelligent rabbit. Unpleasantly weak little moral, philosophical, psychological and metaphysical difficulties. Comparative felicity of style, but no really striking descriptions. Some of it is a little sensible, romantic. It may be true, but I don’t like its inconclusiveness and cynicisms. An atmosphere very slightly soft, overmellow, sickly.
19 June
Last day of Schools. A difficult exam, which I did badly. Afterwards I felt half good, half bad. It is almost an anti-climax, but not quite. A great relief after the end of an unpleasant period. A new sense of liberty and freedom, and purposelessness.
20 June
In New College garden on a sunny, breezy afternoon, reading Wuthering Heights. It is immensely refreshing to read narrative without symbolical or psychological asides halting the progress. A pretty girl came into the garden in a beach-dress, pulling her skirt right up, bare-shouldered, lying on her back against the grass bank. Enter Isaiah Berlin,fn40 fat, cosmopolitan, unpleasant by conventional English standards, and slim, very fair-haired, young James Joll. Both in dark suits. They cavort around the corner, where the girl is, her head covered by a small cape, look sideways at her, talk about her, smile amusedly and smugly. I try and think how, exactly, and realize it is monastically. Like monks seeing a shepherdess bathing. I have a vision of Isaiah B disappearing like a porpoise, with his owl’s head, big eyes and fleshy lips looking back reluctantly as he sank, passed into the deep, dark-green shade under the chestnuts. For a moment he was uniquely satyric.
21 June
Interesting evening, the Podges, and a minor film director friend, Stephen? He is tall, almost aggressively unconventional, young for his age (35–7ish), with a tremendous naïf enthusiasm for Communism. He denied this, but his left wing was so far extended that ‘socialism’, in such an attitude, is a euphemism. Bitter against the middle-classes (from which he came). Admitted himself as a born revolutionary, speaking of it as a natural accomplishment, like skating or swimming. Hate of America, Capitalism, Toryism. A dangerous, narrow, intense person. Rootless and destructive. The Podges, as usual, cynical and gaily, absurdly pessimistic. Eileen has a way of cutting through posturing which is refreshing. Being with them, after a week of idling, self-centred amusement and indulgence, was like a cold shower. Talked of war, of economics, of the chances of existence, survival. Adult, serious pessimism. Like a sudden bar of black across the thin bow. I said nothing, was passive, listened, and felt aloof, wise, profounder than they. And listening to the Communist, felt the truth of Voltaire – ‘cultiver notre jardin’ – unalterably true in times of disrupted existence like the present. That means, be self-centred without being selfish, be and live self-contained, help where needed, be tolerant, be content, be mediocre, philosophize, and enjoy nature and simplicity. And never, never commit oneself over ideals. Martyrdom is never worthwhile. Latitude of mind is more important than longitude.
As I left, they gave me a keepsake, Juno and the Paycock, and wrote in the flyleaf. The kindness touched me: whatever our divergence of views, I feel in complete – in the best sense – sympathy with them. They are among the people I would least like to see disappear. Basil Beeston has the common-sense, similar nature; Roger Hendry has the train-power; Guy Hardy the charm. Podge and Eileen manage to combine all these. I think of them as one personality.
Most of day with Basil at Minster Lovell. We painted the views. I was too impatient and too bright as usual. Used too many crude colours. Later did a cubist view of the same site.
Leigh-on-Sea, 27 June
I have seen too much pleasure these last few days. Basil is an excellent companion, but he drowns my better self. Too much self-enjoyment with him. I have written no poems, nothing, for a long time. Yet my life is full and, except for that, happy. Life must be empty to create. I feel myself in a vacuum, between two worlds here at Leigh. Oxford behind, having done its best and worst by me. I feel a new physical self growing – stoutish, tanned, round adult-faced, with the top outside creases of the eyes drooping, down-angled with good humour and crinkled smiling. A new hedonist, more assured, more dominant and assertive self. Yet I am feeling profoundly immoral, as if my acceptance of no absolutes has gradually sapped the base of my sense of justice, fairness, duty and respectability. At this time, too, the news of the Korea incident overshadows faintly the vivid events of personal existence. The Americans have gone in, and are even being killed this moment. War is rubbing hands.fn41
Brayfield: pleasure of doing hard work again, sensing the strain and the rhythm of manual labour. The responsibility of driving a horse and cart through two or three miles of lanes. I felt like a test pilot on a new plane. My hands are very soft. Blisters come off the pitchfork handle in next to no time. Swallows nest all round the house – in a slit in the stables, in the roof of the potting-shed. Happy, beautiful, glossy, azure-singing creatures. Twelve turtle-doves sprang out of a green-yellow field of clover and charlock, giving a beautiful impression of black-and-white fan-tails splayed down, and bronze backs. A wayside-trimmer, man with a scythe, who carried a stone in his belt behind him, an especially designed leather belt. The way the haystack was put up, commented on by everyone, passers-by and all. The sense of a closely knit community. MF knows apparently everyone, adults and children. Newton Blossom-ville – jerry-built name! – has nine more inhabitants now than in the Domesday Book.
Countless minor ills attendant on the new life. Blisters, cuts, bruises. I have lost all sense of physical stress and strain, long endeavour. They all, in their ways, criticize me; the criticism of the countryman, happy and pleased to criticize. Frank and Jack, the one dour and complaining, a real groaner, the other more humorous, still complaining, but with a twinkle. They all hark back to the old days, the time of their own heyday. Catastrophe today. I led the cart with a full hayload out of the gate and caught it in an unseen hawthorn, which tilted the cart, capsized it, throwing Trooper, the carthorse, off his feet. Shock and panic. Trooper struggled. I held on to him. The others ran back. There was a frantic scuffle for a few minutes, trying to get the chains off. Dust and flying hooves. Luckily, no damage. I got off with a scratch. Michael almost laughs about it – he overrides temper and obstacles with extraordinary – almost debonair – ease.
M the long-legged, thin, upright bundle of energy. Continually on the go. Stops moving at eleven, is at it again at five-thirty in the morning. Walks all over the place, probing, looking out, making sure. 14–16 hour day. ‘I’m too tired to get anything done for myself – reading, let alone writing.’
6 July
Work and tiredness drug all the finer side. One notices things, remembers them a few moments, how to transmit and write them down, then they go. The veins of all this are dirt and strain. Constant muck and constant labour. The routine of feeding and cultivating is inexorable, always nearly out of control. There are fine moments. The goslings, stupid and always panicking, follow-my-leader, with minute wings and twinkling legs. The two hounds, Goddess and Gordon, always hungry, mangy, lanky, searching, familiar yet aloof, with no sense of discipline.
Michael Farrer is a curious intro-extrovert character. He is cheery, polite, and charming to all the world, yet he never wants to penetrate intimately into another person’s thought or character. All his solicitude is to do with minor matters. He has his well-defined personal vocabulary of slang – fancy way of creating names for conditions – Henry Chillington = chilled cold. I am Wellington, for no reason at all. Also ‘operation pigfeed’, and so on. The Fs have a strange unsentimentality to life. Only very occasionally does the crust crack and the real human show. M says almost the same things to everyone, treats them all with a sort of bluff, trampling good nature. He has no sensitivity apparent at all towards other people, but his rough blows are so wrapped around with charm that they can’t hurt, at the most push almost harmlessly. He and Mrs F talk and have little polite exchanges of presents, as if they both know it is only a game, not real. Exaggerated pleasure in giving and receiving. Constance is often given sentiments she very rarely has: ‘Constance was awfully pleased, sends all her thanks …’ etc. Michael covering up for her.
Constance talking horses and show-jumping, repeating herself, being horribly authentic. I sit and smile and say nothing, and get very bored and irritated. I hate horsiness. Treating animals and athletic girls like toys, the sweat-and-sawdust fraternity. It seems so absurd treating and discussing such topics with universal seriousness.
17 July
The hard deadening routine at Brayfield. This has slipped altogether out of control, because I have been always too tired to do anything about it. This agricultural existence, undermanned and staffed, is too intense and rushed to suit any but the human animal. There’s no time for anything else. Michael can take it. He doesn’t appear to need the relief, the contrast of any kind of intellectual or artistic life. It’s all work and no play. My day varies, but roughly 7–9 chicken- and calf-feeding, and the geese; 10–1 hay-making, or sugar-beet-hoeing; 2–5 the same; 5.30–7 feeding, egg-collecting. But somehow the day never seems ended till about 9 o’clock. One day I worked from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. with only two breaks – one hour for breakfast and half an hour for tea. At times all the countless jobs and the fatigue get on top of me, and I have to fight hard to prove the point of working. But it has acted as an excellent purge from Oxford – hard labour, recontact with the country, the feel of closeness to the true life. The animals dying and being born, the sense of a continuity beneath all the incidents; the torch carried on, regardless of the manners of falling out. I couldn’t live all my life at this continual hard pressure. Existence becomes a mockery. One does voluntarily what it would need a convict camp to enforce otherwise. There are compensations. I enjoy tractor-driving. The tractor is a kind of big and expensive toy.
Two episodes I remember particularly, one pleasant, one not. One was a ram lamb which was maggot-struck, eaten all over the back by maggots, so that they had crawled through the skin into the inside. It was a terrible thing. We put it in a dusbin of Jeyes fluid and bathed it; nearly a quart of maggots came out. Later, I tried to pick the maggots out with forceps from the holes they had eaten into the flesh. The lamb died half an hour after having the bath. A ram in a dreadful thicket. The senseless cruelty of such a death is appalling. Bitter, absurd existence. The other was a pile of old honeycombs in the disused railway carriage; they still retained the rich, luxury aroma of long-past honey, a hot, subtle, heavy, velvety honey-waxy sort of scent, toned down by fustiness, age and airlessness. A scent like a still nostalgic backwater, full of memories, emotional and physical. Of richness and luxury, country healthy luxury, of the spacious golden age. One of those very mellow and evocative scents.
Feeding piglets by bottle; the strange tenderness one feels for them. Their mother had no milk. They died one by one from weakness. They scuffle and squeal and seek warmth avidly. Their eyelids and lashes and minute feet are rather beautiful, shell-delicate. Sheep-dipping. I fixed, improvised a bath, a sheet of iron and some hurdles. One fine morning we pulled the fifty sheep through. Tiring work, because they had to be bathed, being too big and unwieldy to be immersed otherwise. We got soaked. The village policeman watching laughed, and called me ‘old man’. He’s supposed to be very strict. He’s young and evidently wants to get on.
The sameness of the days is inescapable. They merge in a sinister way, like hidden doors, so one doesn’t know where they were. One gets to know fields and animals and people and becomes absorbed by the drift of the current, stagnant, forgetting how to weave out of the current. The country is its own clock.
Korean situation overshadowing all. I feel indifferent and apathetic to it. I’m convinced Communism is best for S. Korea, and also that it is the worst possible thing for ourselves. If only the relativity of it all could be seen by both sides. In some ways for the Communists it is a crusade.
Viva. One is shepherded into a room of Schools. Five dons, two women, three men, sit around a table, three at the head, two at the side, like a naval court-martial. One by one, we walk up and speak with them. I only had a few minutes, speaking in French. Reading the last speech of Phèdre. Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely. The usual slick, original, spell-binder. Soon back to the relentless routine of it all. The makeshiftedness.
20 July
I felt ill all day. A bit sick and a bit faint. Nausea. But had to work hard. In the morning dug a pit to bury a pig in; it reminded us both of digging a shit-trench, and that we might soon have to be doing that. Michael saying ‘I don’t know what I shall do about the farm if war breaks out’ – as if staying to work it was impossible. His conscientiousness is remarkable. Yet I mildly despise him for it. I can’t help feeling that his long hours of work, his stubbornness, his sense of duty, both in parochial-public, and in private, things, all indicate a mind which has seen so far and no further. Excellent part in the community. But it remains for the unattached like me to be left.
Tony. A little fair-haired boy with dark eyes and a good knowledge of birds. Shy, simple, not quick, but not a fool. Not town-precocious, but country-wise. His parents are very poor. Fine potential human. The same thing occurs to me when I see that Lord Lake gives £350 annual subscription to the Oakley hounds. How I hated that! Dozens of rich farmers and herdsmen giving money to the hunt. I should destroy hunting like a plague if I had the power. All that money should be directed to small boys like Tony, so that they could afford hooks and gut to fish with, and binoculars to watch birds with, and books to read.
23 July
Beginning to feel again my ‘touch’ with wild things. The secret is slow, very slow movement, and the cultivation of an intuitive sense; and developing the continuity of awareness in observation. Not just at odd times, but always. I watched a water-rat swimming in a pool of water-lilies, a sniffy enwhiskered creature, gentler and more amiable in appearance than the common rat. It swam about the pool without hurry, efficiently, not lazily. Swallows singing; I could never praise the sound enough.
Helen Sanders. A heavy, black, squarish creature, with a thick uncouth voice. A minor contretemps arose. I was left alone with her this morning for an hour. I didn’t speak to her. I was reading, there was a concert of music, she would have bored me. Later, when they thought I was out, I heard her complaining that I hadn’t said a word to her all the time.
To myself I say, ‘Je m’en fous.’ I’m not interested in her; the thought of kissing her is repulsive. But all my motives seem bad. It is self-centred in the extreme. Rude and embarrassing to her, intolerant of faults which are probably inherited. But I don’t care and I’m content to be independent and sincere. But modelling action on reaction is impossible in society.
This episode is a terrible period of détente – my intellectual and creative self stands absolutely still. I stagnate. I do my work, exist. Don’t create.
26 July
Letter from Podge, to say I have a Second at Oxford. Great sense of joy. I had half expected it. No one will believe me when I say I did no work. But it shows how the system can be foiled by intelligence and sudden effort at the right time. I got through on the few intense hours of work each night before the examination. It seems such an unimportant thing, like a foreign travel visa in comparison with actually being abroad.
29 July
A strange mixed dream. I was alone with Constance in the cottage at Brayfield, and there was the faintest hint of electricity between us – a tension and embarrassment. If she’d come, I should have been powerless. But I dreamed instead. I was in a hotel bar, where I went with a man, a friend. There was a girl leaning against the bar, drinking, alone, who didn’t turn round. My friend talked with someone, and suddenly the girl turned to me and said: ‘Are you going to have another one?’ I was shocked by the direct approach and said brusquely, ‘No, I only wanted one.’ But later we were walking together down a corridor. There were other people. Later I realized it was la petite Suedoise whom I met and so liked on the Copenhagen ferry.fn42 Curious use of nostalgic past memory to express present frustration.
31 July
Letter from Curtis. Poitiers is open. Future smiles.
1 August
Unusual depression of father. The Korea war threat, business affairs. How terribly life has nagged at him. Hundreds of minor circumstances, and he unable to make the big cut, the final slash. The environment is like a leech. It forces everyone back into themselves. No freedom of action or thought, no whimsy, no exuberance, no sincere mutual relationship. Only a tissue of suburban conventions. A dry, precise, mouse-like, mole-like rut. He cannot be persuaded to risk the financial reefs of a change. Any anchorage is better than none. But a new, safer, healthier place would rejuvenate like a spring morning. The way he walks around the garden, ditting and dabbing, just looking. The garden full to impossibility, and yet he talks of a half-acre garden as ‘colossal great place’, ‘immense’, and so on. He is as difficult to flush as an old pheasant. He can always find new cover, new obstacles, new pretexts. An almost humorous way of assuming the very worst about everything. It is terrible also to see him so without interest in anything. No hobbies, no outside interests. The reluctant snail. I wish very much that I could have a car for a fortnight. I could find a new world for him.
Butler, The Way of All Flesh.fn43 I found it heavy-going. Too much middleway tolerance and wisdom, too thorough, too mild, too humdrum, too objective. Yet the passage on how we ought to live more as animals, enjoying the present, and ignoring all but the immediate past and future, has impressed me. In it I find much of my own present vaguely self-centred, vaguely existentialist manner of living. I ought not to go to France. But I go. Improves more as one reads it. Definitely a major novel. Shades of Fielding. The great fault is the lack of fire, of life, of an ever-present soul. The soul died as the book was written. It smells like a classic, and ought to be read in a classic edition. So thorough, so assured and controlled. The very antithesis of Lawrentian style.
1–31 August
The holiday in France 1 Aug – 31 Aug.fn44 As holidays go, not a success. A variety of reasons. Dissympathy with the others. If I’m not being sometimes intellectual, highbrow, I feel depressed.
Then France has lost its freshness for me and I haven’t found its profundities as yet. I’ve got over the novelty of the first taste, and haven’t achieved the grateful familiarity of the old customer.
I wasn’t very well, and couldn’t write. I felt bottled up.
I don’t like travelling so far and so fast. I like vegetating.
Financially I ought not to have gone.
Frightful depression this town brings on me. The sedentary, cloistered, inward way of life. I sit about all day, trying to think, plan, write, all the time only dreaming. I feel frustrated by my poverty, which seems to threaten to cut me off from the future. I feel myself growing old, yet have no great pleasure, no experience. An introvert, dwarfed existence. Living with people to whom I can scarcely talk, and they my parents. No common subjects. All the old trouble. Sexual frustration. The feeling of irresponsibility, drift, weightlessness. Twenty-four and no job, no prospect of success. Aimlessness and futility. And now I feel I can’t make the effort to escape. It is a mistake to go to Oxford without money. One sees a promised land and can’t afford it. One ought to work and earn money and be able to afford a life of one’s own, a physical life, a wife, a car, a home. My life is wasting, wasting, wasted. Here, even depression is only a mediocre gutless thing. The gutlessness of life.
12 September
Haydn. Op. 772. F Quartet. Elegiac simplicity of third movement. There is something strangely naïve and lovable about Haydn. Never very clever or very intense like Beethoven or Mozart. He is rather sad, or rather gay, always interesting, never harsh. Elegant domesticity.
I have a new way of keeping butterflies. Take the wings off the body, gum them to a strip of paper and then enclose them in a cellophane envelope. The work is without any point scientifically. A collecting of odd specimens – a sort of souvenir addiction, which I try and combat with other things. But here there is beauty. One works with beauty. The wings are so beautiful. Especially the pale-green opalescent sheen on the wings of the Chalkhill blue – a pale washed blue suddenly flaming into this strange remote iridescence.
15 September
James Grieve. A very aristocratic apple. One of the best for texture and flavour. I enjoyed picking a boxful this morning; tall, pale-green, white-green going to yellow-green apples, some going red. Most of them were clean.
Homer, Iliad. So great and vast and mythical that it is almost beyond criticism. The astounding thing is the kind of tolerant amusement with which Homer sees both men and gods. He is above both of them. All the actions and episodes are stylized in a neat, clean manner. Very highly stylized, a kind of vase-painting stylization. But there are touches of humanity and brilliant metaphors here and there. A love of simple objects and their elementary shapes and qualities. The effect of Homer’s humanity is one of irony – he presents the hero (in which can be counted the gods) alongside all their faults. They are constantly betraying their own perfection. Like mimers whose masks keep on slipping. In fact the creator of heroic mythology seems to be laughing at it all at the same time. Another point is the humour. A sense of humour which can survive 3,000 years is of astounding vitality – i.e. the games scene, where Achilles is taken in by Antilochus’ obvious flattery and Agamemnon’s unwon prize.fn45 Achilles is objectively seen, and portrayed more black than white. An impossibly self-conceited bully. His only redemption is the short speech in the final Priam scene.fn46
Diomedes is another cocksure lout. As usual Odysseus is the engaging character.
One feels sorry for the Trojans as a rule. The Greeks, except Nestor and Odysseus, are rather heavy and sulky and egocentric.
23 September
Wildfowling on Leigh marshes. A cold day with a high wind. The marshes absolutely deserted except for the mussel-picker. The sky massed with clouds. A fine sunset. And the thin line of jewels, diamond, emerald, ruby, orange lights of the illuminations, four miles away across the mud, extending along the Southend front and up the pier. It was pleasant to sit in the darkness, with the incoming tide lapping and creeping onwards, meaning danger, the unset sunset behind, the steel-cold wind, the cries of redshanks and dunlin and ringed plover, and the bright lights of civilization a long way off. It is the same feeling that one gets on a mountain-top, looking down on the villages and towns of the valley. The delight of isolation.
I had some promptings about the ethics. I shot a curlew, which fell wounded a hundred yards away. I ran up to it. It was crying in a feeble, puzzled way, and tried to flap off.
From this two conflicting emotions. Pleasure, at having outwitted and caught a very wild creature. That came first, immediately. Then, thinking, sorrow at having wounded it, doubts about the justice of it.
Absolutely, there can be no doubt. It is wrong to shoot. Hunting and killing give pleasure, cause pain. It is the animal which is so excited by the chase. I wonder if it is a sublimation for sex. It would be interesting to know.
Then can an animal feel pain and reason it? Has it any self-consciousness? Is pain increased by self-consciousness? Guided partly by instinct, is pain only a form of acute danger reflex, with no special implications of suffering?
25 September
Alan Fowles.fn47 Tall and cadaverous, pale in the face, round-shouldered, he walked across the other side of the street from me. He wore an old brown overcoat, red-brown, and a dark-brown trilby, and walked into Chalkwell Park, cold and wintry and deserted, with the grey Thames in the distance. What a terrible life. He walks with his eyes fixed in front of him, as if he is afraid of seeing anyone, or dulled, stunned by the poverty and monotony of his existence. Even his ears seem flattened back, like a poor dog too starved, too whipped. It suddenly seemed terrible to me that he was my half-uncle. I begin to visualize my grandparent that side. He spent all his money and spawned like a rabbit. I imagine him self-indulgent and self-righteous. From him comes that streak of self-pity and weak will, that dull miserable powerlessness to act which seems the curse of the male part of the family. A kind of timidity and sensitivity about change, about trying to climb. An abnormal contentment with lot.
He was on the other side of the street, and so I didn’t speak to him. And I felt ashamed. Partly because his life had been – through no fault of his, the fault is an appallingly pure hereditary one – so feeble and without colour, so flat, dull, drab, grey. And he must have been imaginative enough to have felt some of the waste, the terrible desert of it. Partly because I am animally ashamed to have him as a relative.
E. M. Forster, Passage to India. A great novel, but somehow it doesn’t satisfy. It doesn’t communicate. Forster creates a kind of dry barrier of objectivity. Everything is seen through a glass. Structurally I thought the last part an anti-climax. The narrative travels, fast and absorbing, till the end of the caves. The last episode is muddled, and the ending almost trite. What he has done so well is the view of Anglo-India. His method is on the whole gentle objective satire, as if he says to himself, ‘I shall paint them in a satirical manner, as if one is ultimately uninterested in the matter.’ There is no personal bitter element. He tries to see both sides too much; because he hasn’t the stature of an Olympian. He never saw a daemon, not even the tail of one, and there are flashes of the intelligent rabbit again, as in Howard’s End. His style is not supreme, sometimes a little gauche, or inelegant, or over-romantic, ‘dated’. I hate those clever, wise generalizations aside, which interrupt the reality and create the puppet atmosphere, which is all wrong. He is too finickety and feminine, almost too academic, too bourgeois-humanist, look-at-me-I’m-not-condescending.
Chap 14. ‘Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it.’fn48 Typical clever aside. But also this sums up a trait in EMF – one feels that he is pessimist and disillusioned and that he can only write by an effort of will, and that his credo is rather that of Mrs Moore in the caves, an empty one.fn49 He never sounds eager. Usually reluctant. Perhaps he realizes that he lacks the final touch. On the whole it is a carefully observed, brilliantly conducted, historical social document. Not a novel, and not a work of art except as a piece of documentation.
Father. His absolute listlessness, disinterest in life. He spends the whole day staring out of the window, doing the crossword, walking about, money-jingling, making a fuss about a hundred minutiae, which are his only barriers against complete nullity. It is terrible when one has lost all desire to have interest.
2 October
Sudden fit of black depression. A lovely, cold windy day. But oh the dull endlessness of the town and the people and the buildings and the moods. Money is at the root of it all – with no money one can’t afford friends, male or female. I can’t go and see them. They can’t come here. I can’t afford to know a girl. I can’t afford anything, clothes, books, records, anything. I sponge here. I should be working, but I hate work and a fixed confine. I have no energy to get things typed, to attempt publishing. I have no will to get out in the world.
Here I know no one. I haven’t spoken a happy, spontaneous word since I came back here in Aug. There’s no spontaneity in the few things I say. They are all thought out, deliberate. I almost forget what talking is.
And I see all this reflected in F. He spends all his time groaning and mumbling and sniffing and coughing, in a kind of dreadful psychological hypochondria. He casts a dull, funereal gloom over everything. All his intonations have the groan as their basis.
Then there is the complete lack of any sign of affection or family love. I can’t believe it’s all come purely out of my own reserves. I don’t know why I’m emotional and dreamy and sensitive below and dry and cold and reserved on the surface. Something must have put the crust there. Something hardened me. I put all the blame on this travesty of life in the drab suburb of an ugly town. Most accept the pattern. They may complain, they may even genuinely feel. But they accept. Because I don’t accept, yet I’ve got to live in it, I form a hard crust. I live by all the conventions, masks with nothing behind.
I’ve seen other worlds to compare this with – that’s the stab of realization. Comparison. Knowing how others live.
And there’s no way out. I write and I write and I know I never write well enough. It’s only the fact that I still glimmer with the hope that one day I may write well, it’s the only thing that keeps me sane. Or keeps me still rebellious. I wouldn’t go insane – the crust’s grown too thick. I’d just sink back into the rut. Get a job, and become a Fowles, an ordinary mortal, oblivious of ordinariness and doubly careless about mortality. That seems impossible now. But I may one day accept oblivion.
I’ve partly written the depression away.
In the peak of it, as I was cycling home from golf, I had to pass a small boy holding a ball ready to throw at another boy. As I got near him, he suddenly raised his arm and shouted at me, ‘Get out of the way, you.’ He said it with a peculiar violent harshness and hatred in his tone. He had a Southend accent – ‘Ge’ ou’ mer wäi, yew’ – and the air of a bully in embryo. I was feeling so sad that I just stared at him without saying anything. He was just an ill-bred little lout with the lout’s genius for saying the cruel thing clumsily at the right time. Some hostile god might have been in him, Homer-fashion. Somehow the action was so typical of the crudity and coarse ignorance of this jerry-built town, that I almost felt the whole place had found a voice. It was diabolically well timed. And the advice is implicit in the relationship between the two worlds, my minute individual one and their giant sprawling suburban one.
6 October
The ridiculous situation of Allen and Wright, where a manager can steal £300 in the year and nothing be done. His name is Wood. He has a mistress, besides his wife, and so presumably needs money. He runs the handling of orders and all trade. He runs the shop. It’s not known whether he takes money or goods, but the profits are always less than they should be. This year it is about £300. And there is no direct proof, so no case can be proved. Also, he is a skilled manager and has the business at his fingertips. He knows the ropes, how to order, how to sell. If he went, sales would drop. It’s a terrible situation, where a man like him can control all the laws of morality. Where he’s got absolutely the whip-hand. F wants to sit under it, has to sit under it. It’s the old story of the servant who knows he is indispensable and takes every advantage.
9 October
Death of Sheila.
A sudden illness, a paralysis of the hind limbs with complications in the liver. This day – the vet came to destroy her at 9.30 p.m. – was harrowing. She could not move, and was in pain whenever anyone tried to shift her. We put her in the cupboard under the stairs. There she sat and whined gently, with a terrible – truly terrible – look in her eyes. A terrible fear – she was always a strangely timid, sensitive dog – of the unknown, this dreadful and painful punishment; a bewilderment; an agony at the danger of it, the leaving of life; and a kind of soft luminous frenzy at being unable to communicate. Her eyes seemed extraordinarily large and soft, her ears lay back and she looked up, suffering, suffering, and we were appalled at the impossibility of communication. It was as if she was looking at us across a great abyss, which we had never seen until this moment; and gradually she seemed, as death became inevitable, to be looking at us from, and belonging to, another world. It is not so much the pain which is so shattering, but this dull incomprehension. To see her sitting there, shivering and sniffling, with her great eyes watching us, and we watching her, and our voices and the intensity of her effort to understand, to make us understand.
The vet was a little man with a curious rictus smile, and a way of speaking as if he was not really convinced that we believed him. Very earnest and anxious. In some ways a clown with his seriousness and little quirks of humour. A way of saying small things in an important manner. He did his best, his ignorant best. It is a uniquely difficult science.
The whole house was upset. Hazel at first tried to make it lighter than it was, and then, towards the end, tried to prevent us hearing her cry by shutting doors. Then she broke down when the vet was coming to destroy. Such a tiny tragedy, but so large in the small circle of a closed existence. She has become so much a part of life; her presence at mealtimes, her bouts of playfulness, her having to be put out at nights. The eyes and ‘sweetness’ of her, the gentle humanity of her. One was spoilt, treated indulgently.
Because of her astounding good nature. No dog was ever gentler. She had a sweet dignity, a playfulness, an aristocratic repose, an aloofness outside the home, a feminine timidity, though a proper doglike anger towards mice and cats. Most charming of all, she was never bored by one’s advances.
I treated the whole incident with outward nonchalance and coldness. One can only be dry-eyed about a dog. A dog is a dog, and that Sheila should have become almost – to Mother and Hazel – a member of the family is only a reflection on their way of life. But loss of animals is a strange thing. It is less restrained and almost as deep as human loss. I put my arm around her when she was crying with pain and willed fiercely that she should relax, and her poor wracked body did sag slowly, very slowly, with frequent jerks awake. But it is at such moments when one is doing one’s spiritual utmost to understand and sympathize and soothe, that, even though it is a complex human dealing with a domesticated beast, one gets a sense of the Franciscan universal sympathy, the poignant fraternity of existence.
To us also, come from Poole,fn50 she was a sort of link with Devon, with Ipplepen and all the happiness I had there. Especially Poole, with that fine old couple. I remember seeing the puppies in the barn, and the difficulty of choice.
I helped the vet carry her corpse out after he had killed her. It was in a sack, which we threw into the boot of his car. Already she was a memory. Still poignant, when I felt her still warm bedding, and picked up her collar, and saw some of her hairs on the mat, and remembered and remembered and knew memory is a thing which fades, and she’s gone for ever.
11 October
The race against time with the Pandarus play. I can’t be certain of it, having it so close to me all the time. The fault is that it is too topical, too connected with present thoughts and fears. And too wordy.
A new view on my parents, which embraces all their faults – or better, the qualities they lack. They have no sense of style. They can’t tell a stylish jug from a pretty jug, they don’t feel the style of things, of a book, of a piece of music, of a meal, of a flavouring, of life. It is the same as lacking aesthetic sensibility, but goes deeper, is more comprehensive as an observation. It is, in fact, the great criticism of suburbia. It lacks altogether the sense of style – it has conventional and very restricted ideas of beauty and above all of ‘prettiness’ – but no ability to see style in spheres outside the arts. Every little movement is style. Even pure nature has its style. There are varieties of style in landscape, in the shape of flowers, in the flight of birds.
H. James, Roderick Hudson. Something about James bores me. A long-windedness. A disembodiedness. But perhaps it was my mood – one should never judge a book till it has been read three times, and at intervals.
15 October
An excellent wireless documentary on the finding of the mother of Aesop’s tomb. There is something immensely exciting and romantic and poignant in the thought that they found in her cosmetics box an instrument ‘pointed at one end, to clean the nails, and round and flat at the other, to press back the cuticles’. Such a fact makes time lose all its horror. Yesterday’s death is the same as the death of 5,000 years ago. How the ancient Egyptians ‘live’ still! Really through their immensely vital art. They seem like exotic yet intimate neighbours.
Finish Pandarus. This is the third writing, and the first one with any structural strength and ‘set’ language. The difficult is to get the language hard. I feel pleased it is finished. A lot of polishing and pruning remains. Some of it is too sentimental. Too high-flown. But there is some good theatre. I shall never get it in in time.
24 October
A tubby little taciturn old man, seedily dressed, rather like a shrewd toad, came today to buy clothes. He turned them all over expertly and thoroughly. And offered me thirty-five shillings. Thirty-five shillings for a suit, two coats, a pullover, a shirt, all in good condition. I refused the offer. He pulled out a pound note and a ten-shilling note, as if the sight of so much money would make me lose my head. I refused again, and he hopped quietly away.
Herodotus.fn51 Finished after six months. Very, very much enjoyed. The great and superb thing about him is his humanity. That he was gullible and inaccurate and undignified are to me added enhancements, especially as he has none of these faults to any excess. One is struck by his curiosity, his love of minor incident, and at times an almost super-temporal amusement of human foibles. His work abounds with themes fairly crying out for modernization. A vast orchard of ideas. Again and again the essential essences of humanity are rubbed in; but on the other hand he has the spiciness and exoticism of a strange and barbaric past. I have marked the important passages; important because they are amusing, aesthetically pleasurable, or interesting, revealing. More often than not the so-called important history – the dry facts of the case – are boring and valueless except to the historian. It all depends on whether you think it is more important to know where X was on a certain day, or what he ate. I think the latter is far more important. The loveliest book is the one about Egypt. The first four are better than the last five, and if I had to prepare a complete edition, I should choose them entire. The translation is undoubtedly a ‘classic’, as ‘classics’ go. The most original quality in Herodotus – his mixture of academic objectivity and charmingly irrelevant quaintness.
25 October
Indecision about Pandarus. At times some of it seems superb. Then at others it seems terrible. And now it is really too late to do anything about getting it in. I feel I can never become sufficiently objective. If I carry myself away with a piece of writing, I distrust it when I wake up. Mainly because the words act as keys to the original inspiration and instead of creating in themselves, I know they are only stepping-stones to the other shore.
I begin to feel that my chief virtue from the creative point of view is my sharp sense of criticism, a flair for faux tons. At the moment I can’t apply this at all successfully to what I write. But I think I shall eventually be able to encompass that duality. T. S. Eliot seems to me to be preeminently a creator by self-criticism. His greatness is due to the particularly acute sensitivity of his critical faculties, not to the ease with which he can temper his positive urges by this negative value.
Father – who has no aesthetic sense – attacks all questions of aesthetics as a matter for disputation. He says, ‘That is the greatest symphony so-and-so wrote,’ and in the statement there is an implicit challenge. Never a quiet remarking enjoyment, a mere expression of personal pleasure.
28 October
For three days a terrible rush to try and get Pandarus typed out. But the effort will fail. It has to be handed in by Nov 1st. I can’t type fast enough, and at the same time I know it isn’t ‘set’ as it should be. Over all the hurry I feel a kind of dull distress, as if yet another chance of proving myself by external standards has been allowed to pass. There is always the tempting possibility, however remote it may seem, of gaining sudden fame. Yet I must have the will to withhold. Living in such isolation as this, quite literally encased inside my profoundly monotonous vie quotidienne, I can only rely on the certainty of my own judgements. And since they are obviously only capable of a very limited objectivity, I have to be absolutely certain of their validity before I can venture outside. The faintest impression of softness, of false values, must be sufficient to condense. And Pandarus is full of weaknesses. Even I see that. In poetry it is easy. One must create and destroy in oneself, in oneself only, until the ruins achieve a certain height fit to be built from. There is a parallel in the growth of coral to above the surface of the sea. Poetry now being an uncommercial art, at least one can keep it pure, unalloyed with more temporal considerations. Economy of output is the salient characteristic of the pure poet. Villon and T. S. Eliot spring to my mind. Not Shakespeare, not Dante.
But in a novel or a play the decision is much more difficult. The Devil is dressed up in the guise of ‘Get published at any cost’. There’s a tremendous desire to betray oneself, be one’s own Judas, for gold, actual or metaphorical. In a way I feel content that Pandoras won’t be tested, put ‘outside’, since it would only be there with my reluctant consent. But the proposal of withholding much longer is desperate and frustrating. Especially as I have let the career side of my life slip and slide away. The inside gains at the expense of the outside.
fn1 A plant, known as the sea or sand spurrey, which grows in sandy regions and salt marshes.
fn2 Blackwood (1869–1951) was a British writer of supernatural fiction. Affectionately known as the ‘Ghost Man’, from the 1930s he enjoyed a very successful second career broadcasting his stories, talks and dramas on BBC radio.
fn3 At Oxford, JF had become a great admirer of Beethoven. Here he is referring to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony (No. 3 in E Flat Major).
fn4 Guy Hardy and Basil Beeston were two of JF’s closest friends at Oxford, who shared his interest in wildlife and nature. Guy Hardy was at Corpus Christi and had travelled with JF on an ornithology trip to Norway (see introduction here). Basil Beeston was reading Engineering at New College.
fn5 A monument erected in Oxford in 1841 in memory of the Protestant leaders Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, whom the Catholic Queen Mary I had burned at the stake after a trial for heresy in 1554. It is situated in St Giles outside Balliol College.
fn6 Roger Hendry was a friend and contemporary of JF at New College. He read Greats and introduced JF to the music of Beethoven.
fn7 The ‘Podges’ are Fred ‘Podge’ Porter, and his wife Eileen. Podge, whom JF had first got to know during the spring of 1948 on a visit of Oxford students to Aix-en-Provence, was studying French at St Catherine’s College. After graduation Podge became a teacher at Magdalen College School in Oxford. Twelve years older than JF and a confirmed Marxist, he was a close friend and an important influence in shaping JF’s radical views.
fn8 Faith Faulconbridge, who was studying English at St Anne’s, had been one of the students on the 1948 Aix-en-Provence trip. After Oxford, she became a teacher and sculptress, and married Christopher Tolkien, son of the author and Oxford don J. R. R. Tolkien.
fn9 ‘Home’ was La Maison Française, then at 72 Woodstock Road. The Maison had been founded by the Universities of Oxford and Paris to encourage cooperation between researchers, lecturers and students from the two institutions, and every year provided board to a number of undergraduates and scholars.
fn10 i.e. Eileen Porter.
fn11 Here and in the paragraphs that follow JF gives character portraits of some of his fellow residents at the Maison Française.
fn12 Officer Reserve.
fn13 The then director of the Maison Française.
fn14 JF’s much younger sister, born in 1942, fifteen years after him.
fn15 An oil refinery and storage depot built by the Shell oil company at Canvey Island on the north bank of the Thames estuary.
fn16 The diagnosis was amoebic dysentery. Soon afterwards JF was admitted to a nursing home in London.
fn17 Published in 1861, House of the Dead was a fictionalized account of prison life in Siberia, which drew on personal experience. A decade previously Dostoevsky had served a sentence of four years’ hard labour.
fn18 The family tobacco firm, Allen & Wright, had been struggling for many years and the Fowles family had to accustom itself to a life of reduced financial means.
fn19 Through his tutor at New College, JF had been offered the opportunity to take up a year-long post as a lecteur in the English faculty at the University of Poitiers.
fn20 The General Election took place on Thursday 23 February 1950. Counting in 267 mostly urban constituencies began after the polls had closed, and the results were announced on the radio through the night. When the votes of the remaining constituencies were counted the following day, Labour’s landslide majority was reduced to a slender one of just six seats.
fn21 JF’s French tutor at New College.
fn22 Beethoven, Penguin, 1949.
fn23 Discovered after Lawrence’s death in 1930, this short novel tells the story of Yvette, a clergyman’s daughter, who, longing to escape from the stifling social convention of her world, falls in love with a gipsy.
fn24 Written in 1925, St Mawr is the story of an an American girl Lou Witt, who after many years in England, brings her stallion, St Mawr, to a ranch in Texas. Here she experiences a vitality that she was unable to find in Europe.
fn25 Girlfriend, and later wife, of JF’s New College friend Michael Farrer (see note here).
fn26 Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan were in love before the war, but Daisy wouldn’t marry Gatsby because he had no money. Many years later, she is in a loveless marriage with the rich but dull Tom Buchanan, and Gatsby is a wealthy man with a mysterious fortune who throws lavish parties in his Long Island mansion. When Gatsby discovers that his neighbour Nick Carraway is a distant cousin of Daisy, he persuades Nick to arrange a meeting with her. Still in love with Daisy, Gatsby tries to persuade her to leave Tom, and the tragic events that follow bear out Nick’s warning to Gatsby that ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ Jordan is Daisy’s girlhood friend.
fn27 Michael Farrer, who had studied Agriculture at New College, had graduated a year before JF and was now managing the family estate at Cold Brayfield in North Buckinghamshire after the death of his father Major Denis Farrer. Through his mother Joan, a sister of the 2nd Lord Redesdale, he was a cousin of the Mitford girls.
fn28 Major Lawrence was a retired army officer who lived in Ipplepen, when the Fowles family were living there during the war. He befriended JF and, among various country pursuits, taught him how to poach. See introduction here.
fn29 A White Russian, Rodzianko had been Edward VIII’s riding instructor and trained the Irish show jumping team. Michael had an older sister Barbara, but it was actually his sister Joan (known as ‘Robin’) who was married to Colonel Rodzianko.
fn30 i.e. Michael’s mother, Joan Farrer (née Mitford).
fn31 Peter Nurse was studying Modern Languages at Magdalen. He did get a first and, after postgraduate studies at Oxford, became a lecturer in French at Queen’s University, Belfast, and then at Kent University.
fn32 Made in 1938 by the director-writer partnership of Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, Quai des Brumes was a fatalistic and symbol-laden story of doomed love which captured the mood of pre-war France. Jean Gabin plays an army deserter who falls in love with a girl (Michèle Morgan) in Le Havre, the port where he is hiding from the police. After killing the girl’s ill-intentioned guardian (Michel Simon), who is mixed up with a group of gangsters, he tries to get passage on board a ship leaving Le Havre, but is killed by one of the gangsters before he can make his escape.
fn33 Basil Glover, a neighbour who lived across the street from the Fowles family in Leigh-on-Sea.
fn34 A fellow student of JF who was studying PPE at New College.
fn35 Made in 1948, Jour de Fête was directed by and starred the French comedian Jacques Tati as a village postman.
fn36 In the event, Podge and Eileen continued to remain married for many years in spite of severe strains.
fn37 The son of a cobbler, Lucien Jacques (1891–1961) became a painter, writer and poet. His wide literary acquaintance included Jean Giono, with whom he translated Melville’s Moby Dick into French. After the war he lived for several years with shepherds in the Lure mountains.
fn38 François Villon (1431–after 1463) fled Paris in 1455 after killing a priest. Imprisoned several times afterwards for violent crime and theft, he composed his Ballade des pendus under sentence of death. His other surviving work consists chiefly of Le Lais (or Petit Testament) and Le Testament (or Grand Testament), which offer an account of his turbulent life. His verses were often in a satirical vein, but as notable for their sincerity and deep human sympathy.
fn39 i.e. F. J. W. Harding, a lecturer at New College.
fn40 The celebrated philosopher and political theorist, then a Fellow of New College, was JF’s ‘moral tutor’, responsible for offering guidance on personal matters.
fn41 After the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Korean peninsula was divided into two zones along the 38th parallel, the north occupied by the Soviet Union and the south by the United States. In 1949 the US occupation ended and the Republic of Korea was established in the south. But on 25 June 1950 a North Korean force of 135,000 men launched a massive attack across the 38th parallel with the intention of reuniting the peninsula. President Truman committed US forces to South Korea’s defence and two days later, on 27 June, the UN Security Council passed a resolution recommending that its members help South Korea ‘to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security to the area’.
fn42 This encounter probably took place during the long vacation of 1949, when JF travelled to Scandinavia as part of an ornithology expedition. See introduction here.
fn43 Published in 1903, a year after Samuel Butler’s death, this semi-autobiographical novel follows the fortunes of Ernest Pontifex, who seeks to escape the restrictive influence of his immediate forebears and to return to the simplicity of his great grandfather, a village carpenter. Cf. JF’s autobiographical essay The Tree (Vintage, 2000), p.14, where he writes: ‘My great-grandfather was clerk to an attorney in Somerset, and I think his father was a blacksmith. I like having such very ordinary ancestors, but my father, being only a generation away from the great rise out of immemorial West Country obscurity into well-to-do mercantile London, did not.’
fn44 JF drove through France to Andorra and back with a couple of friends, stopping off to camp along the way.
fn45 In a running race at the funeral games for Achilles’ fallen comrade Patroclus, Antilochus, the son of Nestor, takes the last prize after Odysseus and Ajax. Within the hearing of Achilles, who is giving out the prizes, Antilochus comments how the only Greek capable of defeating Odysseus is Achilles. Pleased with this praise, Achilles gives him an extra half-talent of gold. The final event in the games is the javelin competition, but when Agamemnon stands up for the competition, Achilles says everyone knows how he is by far the best javelin-thrower there is and gives him the prize without the event taking place.
fn46 Priam begs Achilles to allow him to fetch back the body of his dead son Hector in exchange for a ransom. Moved, Achilles agrees and tells him that he will restrain the Greeks from fighting for as long as he needs to mourn his son.
fn47 One of the children of JF’s paternal grandfather by his second marriage (see introduction here). JF recalls him as a man of ‘no gifts at all’ who failed to find any kind of a career.
fn48 The opening words of chapter 14.
fn49 Frightened by an echo during her visit to the caves, Mrs Moore was filled with a sense of despair, and emerged with the conviction that ‘Everything exists, nothing has value.’
fn50 Poole was a small farm near Ipplepen owned by a couple called the Hills.
fn51 Born in Halicarnassus, in Caria, in 484 BC, Herodotus, ‘the Father of History’, describes in his History the war between the Persians and the Greeks in the early years of the fifth century BC. Although he is often criticized for his lack of historical rigour, his account stands out for its sympathetic good will and an encyclopedic interest in other cultures. Besides the historical details of the war, he also writes at length about the customs, manners and legends of the many places he visited in the course of his extensive travels. He died at Thurii in about 420 BC.