Crossing to France. Uneventful, except for one incident. That a pretty tomboyish Swedish girl was in my compartment at Victoria. I smoked outside in the corridor during the journey to Newhaven. In the hope that she would come out. But she didn’t. On board the boat I saw her standing at the side of the bar. I went and got a drink, and she actually moved up beside me. And still I hadn’t the courage. I moved back to the side of the bar, watched her out of the corner of my eyes, and noticed that my hand was shaking. What a terrible state to be in. I think, in all sincerity, that I would have spoken then. But at the crucial moment, just as she was four feet from me, and taking her first sip of her drink, out of the blue came the voice of an American.
‘Well, that’s starting pretty early.’ As she turned: ‘You shouldn’t do that till you get to France, you know.’ She smiled a little. ‘Are you Scandinavian?’
‘Yes.’ And away they went, a Jewish-looking American, and a Hellenic-looking cosmopolitan youth of eighteen. He wore a check shirt of bright red, had thick lips, a slim body, sallow skin and a worldly, absurd and corrupt manner. They went conversationally away. I listened for a few minutes, envying the slickness of the American technique, the way he could carry it off before a whole crowd of men, and say in a loud voice: ‘I’ve been to fifty-two countries and never seen one like France.’ Even if he said twenty-two only, it was still outrageous. And again: ‘I found Athens like a little Paris.’ I don’t know why – and this isn’t so isolated a thing as the accosting frustration – I and most Englishmen flinch slightly at such boasts, especially when they are situated at the very beginning of an acquaintance, before familiarity can compensate for the falsely struck notes. I went through a few minutes’ bitter self-examination while all this was going on. I stared at the livid green sea washing against the harbour pillars as we drew away, and found the consolation of a parallel in the frigidity of the colour, as without passion as jade. (Jade is a quite passionless colour. Faint relationship with jaded?) Two elements struggled. I analysed my sexuality and its desuetude, and consoled myself with the thought that my role was that of the artist-observer, inward loquaciousness and outward calm and denial and silence. In many ways I believe this conflict between reality and the artificial dream of my character is better unresolved. That is, if I got to the state where I was not only sexually satisfied, but managed to turn outwards, to ‘extrovert’ the inward loquaciousness by speech and immediate action, I think the happiness inside me would detract from any artistic aims I might be envisaging. I certainly would not see as much.
At Paris, Peter Nurse.fn1 A strange person. Almost as soon as I saw him, in his room at the Ecole Normale, he showed me a copy of Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and read out to me one or two of the juiciest extracts.fn2 He talked of his liberty about women. He could bring anyone he liked in, and keep her till any hour. And practically all the evening he was harping on the same theme. He told me how many times he had copulated with his fiancée each week at Oxford; how he was going to Germany to a girl, with whom he could sleep, for Christmas – he seemed quite unaware of the still – even in 1950 – rather shabby ambiguity of this; how he had once paid a pound to two women in Montmartre to put on a lesbian act – this he described in some detail; how two French contraceptives he had used with his fiancée had broken, and of the fears that had worried them afterwards. And a good many other things. All this to me, whom he doesn’t know very well. I could only think of a handful of reasons: one, that it was a case of frustration trying to talk itself into the longed-for state; two, that he had misjudged me, and thought me as a hard and experienced person in sex who must be rivalled; three, that he was desperately anxious not to appear academic, the young don. I think the last reason is most likely. If it was a genuine and straightforward expression of his mental outlook on sex, he must be a strange scholar. He will be a somewhat unique don at Oxford. Who will perhaps become notorious, but I don’t think celebrated. He is very thorough and intelligent, but not super-thorough nor brilliantly intelligent. More it is a natural ‘flair’ for languages. Oh yes, another possible reason – he has been very ill – possibly his attitude was vaguely devil-may-care, demain nous serons morts. Curiously enough it didn’t absolutely anger me, drive me into a cold temper – as Basil Beeston has once or twice with this much more obviously cock-a-hoop manner – but almost attracted me, and I even managed, without too much distaste, to throw smut back at him. There was something naïve and sincere about it. Admittedly Paris is a terrible aphrodisiac. The odour of cheap tobacco, garlic and expensive scent in the bistro. The suavity and oiliness and richness of the older men, the leaping, swaggering virility of the younger. The unashamed sexuality of the women, with their clothes sense and their sharply anti-utilitarian femininity. The night life. We drank at the meretricious Dupont café. We were stalked by a little blonde, with dark eyes, and slightly corrupt, sophisticated features, her blue dress was cut very low. One could sense her breasts perfectly willing to leap out. She behaved in a flamboyant, excited way, as if she was going on benzedrine. She talked broken English. We sat in a corner and by adroit movements, one with a quite brilliant tactical sense, she contrived to get within a yard of us, and made faces at us, and spoke her loud English. I was profile, and Peter faced her out well enough. One day he will have her. She talked of English cigarettes, which I was smoking, but her only direct remark to us was after she had said (to a young man who had tried to put his arm around her) ‘Je n’aime pas les pédérastes.’ She then said to us: ‘Vous comprenez? Comprenez?’ There was something febrile and shallow about her which made me pity her in a vague way.
When I got back to my hotel, an evil intention made me look on top of the wardrobe. There were three pornographic magazines there. One (French) fulfilled its purpose, but I noted that the flagellant and homosexual passages didn’t stimulate me in the least. Something gained!
2 November
La Toussaint.fn3 To Poitiers. I met my future employerfn4 and felt myself rather reluctantly being affable and complimentary to him. He is breezy and active and impatient, proud of Poitiers, rather excited by me, although I could see he thought me a little slow during the periods when I was observing him from inside. He was very anxious to be kind and do the right thing. And I liked him quite well in spite of the difference in temperament. We met various people, saw the churches, the faculties, the main street, drove out to get a panorama of the town.
It was badly blitzed in the war – a 300-plane raid which took place in 22 minutes. The only raid, but a terrible one. And we, the English, did it. I expressed conventional regrets, but felt absolutely indifferent. I even thought it vaguely amusing. Absurde in the Camus sense.
My room is small, third floor, giving down a steep slope of ugly roofs to the road, the marshalling yard, across to the hillside opposite, loosely stuffed with new and rather crudely unattractive houses. Not a good view, but a view. The room is bare, unattractive except for a magnificent Turkish rug used as a bed-cover and a rather pretty – pretty can be used justly here – pink wallpaper with a floral pattern. I can’t help wondering over the disparity of a perfumed block of naptha in the lavatory – the system, ça va de soi, doesn’t flush properly – and the niggardly bowl and jug of cold water which has to do to wash in. French houses are so illogical in their domestic arrangements.
The landlady, Mme Maleport, is blonde, forty, rather reserved. A hinted oddity by Martin is that she comes of good family, and that her sister lives in rich style around the corner. Yet Mme M is running a couture business. I have seen one quite pretty, one pretty girl, here. I feel I might do worse that way. The place is full of vague possibilities; I can people my empty mirror on the wall with the figures of a dozen unknown and unmaterializable girls and women drinking and making themselves up. This is the best part of an adventure – the start of it. But I mustn’t accept that.
Yesterday, I mentioned to PN that the reason why I wasn’t doing a thesis was that I wanted to write a novel. And then he said, ‘What sort of novel?’, and suddenly I was embarrassed and unnatural. I made some rather silly remark about doing a Kafka theme in a Joyce manner. A very silly remark, in fact. I couldn’t bring myself to be more precise. Till I do, my style and my themes will be full of coynesses and falsities.
The Cité Universitaire restaurant – bright and new, with a gay hunting mural, medieval in scene. The food quite adequate, but always cold. I suppose my stomach will eventually get acclimatized. After five meals I still have not talked to anyone. They all talk so fast and seem so well situated in groups. So that as an odd particle, I don’t know where or how to fit in. These first few days have been an anticlimax. I know no one and Martin has left me alone. A routine of gaps between the meals at the Cité. My impression of Poitiers is of rather a grey, closed town. One feels there is a secret, but it is hidden. Other cities, Paris, Oxford, Edinburgh, Stockholm, Copenhagen, are essentially open. I have seen the English assistante here. She is ugly. The peeling of the dream to the core of reality has begun.
Un cortège civil. A rather delightfully gay little carriage, with an arch of mauve flowers over the embowered coffin. A procession of people in black, but not in the least funereal, talking and chatty; two soldiers – it was the funeral of an ancien militaire – in khaki greatcoats and blue-and-gold képis. Martin whispered to me in rather a shocked manner, ‘Cortège civil! That is not at all usual. There are so many priests, you know.’ But it was all a charming picture, enclosed and dwindling away down the perspective of an old Poitiers street, shuttered with light-grey volets, with Norman blue slate roofs, and the subtly monotonous variety of the plain plaster façades, on one side of the street bright with pink golden afternoon sunlight, on the other in transparent shade. A harmony of greys and blacks and light amber, and blues. In a walk about the town with Martin, I began to feel its charm diffuse me, to permeate gently, like all good, old things. Old things, by their age, can never really strike. If they do, they lose in amiability, because the fact that they strike means that they have something violent and monstrous hidden in their nature.
6 November
Two Germans in the Cité Universitaire. Boursières.fn5 They both spoke excellent French, and were to all appearances perfectly pleasant. The people at the table treated them normally. But it must need courage on their part to play with only just quieted hornets.
7 November
Those sudden and dreadful moments when one stands outside one’s life and despises it. I think the most frightening moments of all. When for a moment one loses one’s grip on self-faith, and sees it fall. It’s like dropping a valuable old glass. Almost instinctively one snatches at it to catch it back. I suddenly thought, What am I doing here in this obscure little French town, wasting a year doing nothing? When I ought to be starting a job in England, fighting, entering the world. I sit like a recluse and am frightened by the world. The only people I have spoken to are the two Germans, and they spoke to me first. I admire one of them his good French, his thoroughness, his eagerness to learn. He seems so anxious to go to lectures on French literature. I don’t want to go to them. I’m not interested any longer in the history of French literature. Now there are only books I want to read. And I don’t really seem to want them. I feel myself slipping, slipping, slipping. With only my hopes of becoming a writer to cling to, and they dwindling as every month goes by, and I still feel afraid to try my luck, and afraid to try it before I am certain of myself.
Why do I waste these best years of my life in this silly little city? With not even enough money to enjoy what there is to enjoy in it. Each day the gap between my dreams and reality, my ambitions and my acts, widens. I live torn between them. I can’t talk to people, because, with them, I am the person of my dreams, and there is no point of contact.
Yet I catch the glass. It doesn’t hit the ground. I think, what is twenty-four? I’m too young to judge. I have the blend – the sensual flesh and the oversensitive mind. Some artistic good is bound to come of it. Some has come. One has to accept the frustration and martyrdom, such as it is.
I saw the English assistante again today. She is not ugly.
Today, when I came back after dining at the Cité I found that the lights in my room had fused, so I went down to the room of Madame. Monsieur is away, en voyage. I knocked boldly. ‘Entrez.’ And I realized a new phase had started. Till now, a knock on the door has been always followed by a scuffle to the door, and I have not been allowed more than a peep. But I was allowed in today for a second. Vision of ironing-boards, cutting-boards, bits of clothes. I had a little idea that I was expected. Madame wore an expensive perfume, and it seemed to me that the fuse wasn’t burnt. But I might be mistaken. In any case, as she was mending the fuse, she suddenly asked me if I liked dancing. Her apprentice-girl has a dance coming soon, and wants to learn English. With deprecations, I submit. Tomorrow we are to be introduced. Plainly I have fallen, or am falling, on my feet. As usual my imagination seized on this and twisted it a hundred ways in ten seconds. That is the trouble. I anticipate all joys before they arrive. Today I am boiling over with the need to create, to express. I feel in control, galloping on a powerful horse, the world. I met Léaud this evening, an interesting Celtic man, a Limousin.fn6 I told him I was writing a novel. I can’t hold it in any longer.
11 November
The introduction to the girl has not come. As usual, I imagined too many miles beyond reality.
A terrible evening, full of the self-reproaches of solitude. Far more psychologically than physically ill. Today I haven’t spoken a word to a soul; I said one or two words at lunch – the minute necessities such as ‘Pass the bread, please’ and ‘Thank you’. This evening I just couldn’t face another silent meal among the thousands of chattering French monkeys. So I walked down to the baker’s on the corner. The streets were wet, I passed a pair of lovers, gay music came out of some of the houses, and there was an air of celebration in the town. Happily the baker’s was still open. My voice nearly broke with emotion at being greeted by the baker and asked what I wanted. I bought six croissants and a bar of chocolate. And I went home. Everyone was out.
13 November
I can see that the work here is going to be pretty tantalizing. It is difficult to be impartial, or effective when there are mixed classes of ugly and beautiful. It is going to be difficult to be charming and interesting. Fortunately beauty is rare. Real beauty seems so far non-existent. But two attractive women, and one brassy, twiggyish type who would do admirably on a dark night.
A new idea for synchronizing my poetry and the novel. A system of footnotes, signs, so that each poem can refer to a point in the story – can elucidate that point, but not be necessary at all in the novel. A kind of optional gloss, commentary. This could integrate literature in a new way. It is wrong to divide the genres off arbitrarily.
17 November
Lectures here are rather ridiculous. I talk in a loud, slow voice and write names on the board. They don’t seem to understand at all. Unless I laugh at my own jokes, I get no following.
During the babel of lunch-hour it was announced that we should all stand for a minute in memory of students killed in the war. I was surprised at so much silence and solemnity so soon present. The French are volatile, but they can go black as quickly as they become colourful. Outside there was a babel of voices waiting for the second séance, which spoilt the effect, but even so.
I met an American student here and have him in for a few drinks.fn7 He is ex-Harvard, very slow-speaking, serious, keeps on talking about intellectuals and intellectual life, and culture. Tells me several times that he is gauche and ignorant. Plainly an immensely thorough and painstaking person, being, I think, just a little overconsciously the American in Europe. James would have loved him. So full of plans – he intends visiting the Near East, Greece, Italy and Sicily for Christmas, a week’s opera at Vienna, a quite fabulous person. Such richness and freedom made me sneer at him, especially when I soon saw that his aesthetic desires were far beyond his capacity. The very slowness and imperfection of his expression revealed his physical inability to feel the brief instantaneous impact of real beauty. He talked of learning about art, as if learning was the key to feeling. In music he seemed more fulfilled, yet he spoke of Beethoven’s 11th. But that was his only fault, though a grave one. To be fair to him, the age and beauty and multifarious subtleties of Europe must be stunning, especially since his nature is slow and hesitant. He reminded me of a smooth, round ready-made ball. Although he wasn’t boastful, he said that ‘I did pretty well at Harvard’. He said it exactly as if it was the polite due, but nothing to brag about. It was what most Englishmen would like to have said, but not said. The complete roundness of the American; no cavities, indentations; and no protuberances. The perfection of the middle way. Speaking with him I felt both individually and racially more mature. Life isn’t factory-made, nor only in a printed book with lavish photographs.
25 November
Dance, given by a Brigitte Ruel. Mme Ruel, cold, soignée. M. Ruel, successful businessman, slim, exactly debonair. It lasted 7–3 in the morning. I was bored and ill at ease the whole time. I dance so badly that it was impossible to keep any partner for more than two dances. And then there was nothing to talk about. More and more I am becoming reluctant to talk trivia. I can’t be bothered to fill all the vague gaps in the disinterest. I bore people because they all bore me. There were only one or two girls there whom I thought attractive. I am beginning to see that either I shall be poor and lucky and marry the sympathetic genius who will understand me – she will have to be a genius to penetrate all the wrappings, or I shall be rich and able to buy attractions. Sensual women here are physically beautiful. I despair of ever finding the perfect match. She would have to be so complex, so complex.
The dance was held in a drawing-room. About twenty couples. But it was all dislocated, schoolgirlish, without real warmth.
I stood apart. Several couples came past, stared at me, smiled faintly, and I would hear the word ‘Anglais’, which didn’t worry me much. I felt dry and aloof and dully frustrated.
I stood apart. Tangos, paso dobles, jazz. Sometimes I shuffled round. My partners were polite or bored or frightened. I have to talk when I’m dancing to distract from the clumsiness of my steps.
I came back through the rain, having had to fight a battle with an inferiority complex. All I have against it is the vague faith in my future greatness. I feel so flat and dry now that I can’t even write well. I drank a lot, but water off a duck’s back. For a time I was warm. By 1 o’clock I was stone sober again. I feel as if I have been watching a great many chances go by, as if a great hope has gone for ever, as if my character has stiffened, can no longer be altered. I am forced for ever to stand outside, watching, watching, and never joining in, never finding the consolation I seek. I stood apart. I think of K.fn8 I didn’t love her. She loved me for a short time. That’s the rub of it. I will never meet anyone I don’t stand outside. No one will ever make me surrender my position and enter their heart and body.
I stood, stand, apart. I am finding it increasingly hard to enter even my own body. Every action, every word, is judged by this dreadful, eternal, me. The slightest ‘faux ton’, maladroitness, failure, is noted. The slightest clues of reaction in others are seen. Everybody who speaks to me is dissected, analysed, and closely watched for his response to my positive actions. There are two egos in me: the one, emotional, love-starved, unattractive, taciturn; the other, cold, cynical, aloof, constantly detracting.
26 November
Sunday. Bach recital in the Cathedral. Cold and dank. The Grand Orgue was completely successful in destroying all the joy in Bach. Thundering and growling and rampaging, as delicate and clear as an elephant playing a spinet.
1 December
Heavy night with Charles. I let up on myself, and the big smack came at once. Dear God, always waiting. We played billiards, drank beer in the Café de la Paix, and then, not feeling tired, went round to a smart little café in a backstreet, and drank whisky till 6 in the morning. I just slipped gently down the slope, and spent from 6.30 till 12 in the morning being repeatedly sick. I don’t think I’ve ever had worse bouts of retching. In between I sincerely wondered whether life was worth going on with. Sitting on the floor with a bucket between one’s knees, one has one’s doubts. About everything. Slept fitfully from 12 till 5.30. Having successfully managed to stumble to the telephone and cancel the day’s engagements. From then on gradually slip back into the stream of life. At 5.30 I even feebly smiled, and carefully noted the time.
I don’t think I shall drink as much as that again for a long time. My stomach is allergic to alcohol. What the head desires, the heart refuses.
Flicking about on the wireless. Queer, disjointed fragments of sound, of music, jingoistic, impersonal, personal, full of moods, nostalgie. Nightclubs, soft flowers, soft lights. Piano music, space in a great room. Spanish music, pungent, bitter. Polyglot languages, atmospherics, fadings, half-heard things. Things which repel and a flick of the finger destroys for ever. Things which do not interest, equally dismissed. And here I feel I’m missing life equally. Only hearing it through a wireless. I spend too much time doing nothing, waiting, sitting, drinking coffee, playing billiards. Being bored. When I can’t write. Slowly the great me is slipping. I shall never be a truly great writer. The effort necessary behind a production which satisifes. I have to write everything ten times, and still it isn’t right. And this being at Poitiers is a profound waste of time. A drab, sleepy old town which is out of the current. Stagnant. I can’t find anyone here that I really can approach. More and more I feel alone. Odd people have meant something. The Podges above all. Guy, Basil, Roger. I have lost them all. And none of them ever knew me. But with the Podges I felt happiest. A multiple feeling – all this is futile, but it needn’t be futile, but it is futile. A kind of ghastly ping-pong match between two lethargic protagonists within myself.
Terribly depressing effect of the international news. War seems close, universal chaos, an absolute deadlock, where every man wants one thing and the force of nature wants another. And it’s the other which is conquering. This slow trundling impact of two vast organisms sliding downhill against each other. The inevitable crash at the very bottom. Sickness everywhere. For the first time a crisis is beginning to have a personal effect on me. There seems to be so much pain and cruelty and stupidity and pointlessness. I knew that before, but never saw it directly, never felt it as a direct impact. I want to write and can’t write. I waste my time in the Café de la Paix, because I must mix with my fellow-men and rediscover a little faith. I crave for laughter and forgetfulness with them. It is a craving. With this new awareness I couldn’t stay alone. So I play billiards and drink coffee and make jokes, and watch time pass as if it was valueless.
8 December
Charles and I went round to the bar again at midnight, but with the determination not to get drunk. Later when we went home, I had a most strange ornithological experience. It was three in the morning, the town absolutely silent and deserted and under a slight dank mist. A few street lights. Suddenly I became aware of countless thin voices, the unmistakable whistle of redwings. Everywhere. In the sky. On the roofs of the houses. A curious cry they have; a very thin, high-pitched, glistening whistle; an inbreath; there is a definite tenuous, glistening quality about them. I kept on thinking of the adjective ‘glistening’. Like a sudden small gleam of old silver in a dark room. Strange, remote, beautiful sounds. Then, as I stood in the middle of the square of the préfecture, there came the unmistakable whistle of a cock wigeon, and an abrupt thrill shot through me. Hardly anything in art, nothing in nature, except possibly a woodlark, could have given me such an immediate excitement and joy. The effect of hearing that wild, romantic whistle in the middle of a grey, silent, inland city, was like an electric shock. So absolutely unexpected, and so full of special meaning for me; that I, of all the 60,000 people here, should have heard them. I stood for half an hour in the square. It was very cold and very still. In all that time, not a car, not a soul passed. And gradually realization dawned. The sky was full. I would have given anything to have known exactly what was there; to see daylight come as suddenly as if it had been switched on. I heard green plovers time after time, a golden plover flew around the square, as if lost, and so low that I almost felt I could see it. Redwings everywhere. Then sensual cries I did not recognize. Continual thin squeaks and vague rustlings. Then a vast rushing, such as only a really big team of wigeon make. They must have been comparatively low. For some reason a huge migration rush must have been going on, and I had stumbled across it. Why at Poitiers nobody knows. I went to my room. It was about 3.30. I opened my window. An immediate inrush of redwing whistles. Green plovers. I stared out over the railway marshalling yards. Suddenly out over the railway was a sudden inrush of wigeon whistles, as if they had recognized the still-lighted station. A little later, more whistles. In the end I became frozen and went to bed.
I felt profoundly that I was a link between two worlds. That I, standing on my balcony and listening to the wigeon whistling, belonged to a wilder, more mysterious world than anyone else in this whole city.
And I felt sad and frustrated that it was immeasurable, that I could never transmute the intensity and the magic of such an experience. It is magic only because I have spent so much time bird watching and hunting wigeon.
A very wonderful experience, vastly heightened by its absolute unexpectedness. All today I looked up in the sky, but saw nothing.
Mozart concert: local players. Not particularly enjoyable. A curiously built conductor in tails, a tall man who seemed broader round the hips than across the shoulders. From the back he looked exactly like a cockroach. The pianist in the concerto was exactly like a guineapig. He seemed worried all the time, frightened. Every time he finished playing, he looked up with immense relief, as if he had just finished some violent physical exercize. Much more memorable as a guineapig-and-cockroach, than as a Mozart, concert.
Can’t write. I want to, but never seem to have the time. But if I don’t find the time now – with only seven hours’ work a week – I never will. At long last I’m near the edge of the waterfall. I must get The Revolt finished by next summer.
17 December
A longish period of creative constipation. It was a mistake ever to come to this town. The life is dead. There are interesting people, but they take so long to get to know. The social instincts of the provinces are almost non-existent. A lack of spontaneity. A closing-up like a sea-anemone. And then there’s my impossible ego, which is itself like a sea-anemone, only flowering in solitude, shrinking and disappearing when touched. I don’t know why everybody bores me so intensely. Only occasionally am I not bored. If I try and make conversation, I am usually driven out of myself in two sentences. A person talks, but my real ego is gone. I listen to the others talking, and marvel at how they can accept the boredom, and keep on talking because they feel they ought to be talking. The most desperately boring are the French people. Not only can I not understand the nuances of their wit, but even if I do, I have to admit that it is insipid. The most terrible are the girls in my conversation classes. If I meet them elsewhere they look sheepishly at me, and I ignore them. Increasingly now, if I dislike a person, I ignore them. Or sometimes when I know them, I ignore them out of perversity. CG has become friendly with a girl, Ginette – not unintelligent, not unpretty – who I could have approached, but didn’t. And now, because he is getting into her (very much like a punter to geese), I feel jealous. And I can hardly speak to him. And twice today I have stood by her – once she deliberately hurried to be at the door at the same time as me – and twice have cut her dead. It annoys them that I hardly ever shake hands. I feel like cutting away.
20 December
Solitary. I have been feeling solitary for several days now. All my American friends here are going away, have gone away. The shops are gay, the streets full of people shopping, and I have only the prospect of Christmas alone. I am bad at solitude. But I console myself that the experience will be good for me. Life as an instrument for literary creation is nonsense, but I have to believe it is reason. I say too many cruel things when I’m with people. It hurts them, and they don’t understand or like me.
The Americans are very depressed and slightly frightened about the international situation.fn9 Elsewhere the people seem ignorant and apathetic. The French have caved in. They don’t care any longer what happens elsewhere, as long as it doesn’t happen here. The war is so close now that it can’t be ignored. One reason I don’t write is that it seems useless. Not only would everything change, but everything would be destroyed. There’s nothing like war for making things old-fashioned, giving new visions. And I feel poor. Today is very cold, and my overcoat – the one I got at demobilization – is not thick enough to keep out the cold. I have only one pair of brown shoes. My money dwindles, and I can’t afford new clothes. My poverty is only very comparative. Millions and millions are really poor, piteous, suffering. I just have dreams, and have been educated above reality. Never quite managed to bridge my gap. No merger.
But all this, I believe – it is my only faith – is temporary. One day my prince will come. Therefore my situation, even if it was far worse than it is, could never be extreme. It is only after years and years of trying that one can say, ‘Failure!’ Then I shall be on the extreme edge.
I walk down a foggy road, expecting a turning to a new road, a new life, world. Only when my legs begin to give under me, and the road drives on without turning. Only then.
21 December
‘My Kingdom for a Corkscrew’. New type of short story. Written in one evening, 8–1. I could hardly keep awake at the end, but it is better to do it all together like that, without a break. I had felt it in me all day. I thought it was going to be a long-short story, but it was this instead. About 4,000 words.
22 December
I was asked to a party given for an engineering student who had just finished his examinations here. I didn’t know him very well, nor any of the people who were with him. I got asked via some American friends, and therefore I was on the fringe. For a long time I felt external, unwanted. We sat round a long table and drank wine and champagne and ate galettes and cakes and tangerines, and smoked a lot. The evening was very slow to warm, but finally it became quite convivial. Mainly because of a strange girl. She was Spanish, with a chignon, rather pretty with dark skin, very dark eyes, and negroid but not coarse lips. A deep, mysterious person. Her forte was fortune-telling by cards. Her stage-sense, and her mixture of seriousness and taquineries were perfect. You could see that everyone was a little frightened by her. They blushed and trembled slightly, and tried to make jokes. Undoubtedly, she was a skilful reader of physiognomy. It is not the cards, but the face. She rather frightened me, because her analysis of my character was penetrating. She said I was ‘de bonne coeur, de très bonne coeur, mais infianciable’. That I often had periods of depression. ‘Vous avez souvent le cafard.’ That in matters of love, I was ‘indifférent’. ‘Vous avez beaucoup souffert.’ ‘Votre moral est bas.’ Then, ‘Vous marierez une dame de très bonne situation, une dame d’un certain âge. Elle sera riche, très riche.’ ‘Vous êtes très honnête, très droit.’ All of that was – except for the marriage, which is possible enough – true. I said nothing, and was very impressed. I am sure she had seen it all in my expression.
She interested me very much indeed, both as a woman and as a tireuse de cartes. I think I could do card-fortunes as well. It is only a question of intuition and observation, and the art of generalization.
It is a pleasure, because one can say what one likes of people – and people like being limelighted – behind the pretext of seeing it in the cards. One can believe in the cards to a certain point, assign them fixed values, and always use them – that is for entertainment, to most people. But the major part is psychoanalysis, both rational and intuitive.
After having been silent all the evening, I managed to establish a certain position by – at the time – witty remarks.
Because the cards advertised ‘… une dame de très bonne situation,’ ‘Une princesse?’
‘Vous voulez un mariage avec la princesse Margarète?’
Very casually, ‘J’y pense.’
‘Une dame d’un certain âge.’
‘Ah. Pour avoir une jeune femme, quelle carte faut-il choisir?’
‘La dame de coeur.’
Regretfully, ‘Mais je ne la savais pas.’
All these got big laughs.
Three things I forgot to mention about the fortune-telling. ‘Vous n’avez pas une grande volonté.’ That was the only thing I rather doubted. ‘Vous êtes très doux, très, très doux.’ And then she said ‘Voulez-vous demander une question?’ One asks the question to oneself, chooses four cards, and then she says ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. I asked, ‘Shall I be a great writer?’ and she said, ‘No.’ Then she said, ‘Vous pensiez que j’allais dire “oui”, n’est-ce pas? Vous étiez presque certain.’ She was absolutely right.
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve. I was frightened of being alone, and did things which I normally wouldn’t have done. Fortunately there were some others also alone. The practice in France is to have the great celebration after midnight mass. A young man with a sense of fellowship invited us all to the Cercle Catholique. I didn’t know where it was, and spent rather a desperate half-hour walking round Poitiers to try and find it. I looked it up in the telephone directory and it said Boulevard Jeanne d’Arc. And that turned out to be a desolate back street, which had been badly bombed. It was dark, full of rubble and ruined houses. A few cars passed. I felt completely solitary, the feeling magnified by the day. After about ten minutes searching a man appeared who knew where the Cercle was.
When I got there, I found a group in a kind of monastery waiting-room. Hard chairs, holly, a noticeboard, a table, a crucifix on the wall. Sitting around the table was a very mixed bag. Two or three French, a Catholic priest, myself, several Iranians, Syrians, Iraqis, a Turk, and a negro whom everyone called ‘Ivory Coast’. There was wine – one glass each, tea without milk, and a slice of cake. And singing. From 9 to 11.30 we spent in singing. I enjoyed it. It was an astounding mixture. One of the Iranians, a champion wrestler, sang in a husky monotone, impassively, with slight smile and a rasp in his voice. An Iranian sang brilliantly in Arabic, very attractive rhythmic tunes which were apparently scandalous, because all his compatriots roared with laughter when he sang and when he tried to explain in French what the words meant. There was one marvellous little thing about a gazelle which had been wounded in love but which tottered gaily through a forest. All the time the young organizer was singing in-between, in Spanish, Basque, French, Czech, Polish. He had a very good voice and was happy to sing. I was clamoured at. So I told a joke, which only the French understood, and even they looked as if they had heard it before. In the end I sang English songs with the young organizer, and a French girl sang a song in Bearnais dialect. The père sang a sentimental song, very well. Then at 11.30 it was time for mass.
I and the young organizer led the Middle East colonies to the Cathedral. But the service there wasn’t very striking. The bishop was elsewhere. So we filed out. It was bitterly cold. I noticed how the cantor’s breath steamed in the air as he sang. We ran, laughing and jostling passers-by, as far as Notre-Dame la Grande. That was packed out, but the service seemed no better. We were squashed into a corner and saw very little of what went on. It was like having a bad seat at the opera. The singing (and organ) was bad.
Home at 2 o’clock. Having killed the fated hours without too much pain and self-degradation. One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
Christmas Day
A very cold, grey day. No wind, a complete greyness everywhere, including my own heart. I got up at eleven, dressed and shaved, read two letters from home. A letter and a card. The card was from Basil B. I thought I had lost him. This was the only Christmas aspect of the day. Then at 12.15 to the little backstreet café where we sat; shredded celery and cold beetroot, a raw thin steak, mashed potatoes, seven dried figs, a glass of water. Everyone there was slightly depressed and sad, even though to most of them – the Middle Easterns – Christmas means nothing. I only felt a kind of numb depression. Faintly sad, and rather cynical. After twenty years’ unshaken belief in the glorious climax of this day, it is difficult to accept it as an ordinary twenty-four hours. As I write I can see a train at the station. It has just drawn in. Hardly anyone descends. Otherwise it is a train at a station, any day of the year. After this gay Christmas dinner, I drank coffee with two Germans in the deserted Café de la Paix. A few people crossed the Place d’Armes outside, but not many. It was the time when everyone was having dinner, en famille. All there felt very strongly a sense of being ostracized, of being outside the town, though in the centre of it. The Germans attacked the inhospitality of a town which could allow twenty foreign students to be on their own at Christmas. ‘At home, people would compete for the honour of inviting them to the Christmas festivities.’ I wonder. A small provincial town is a closed circle anywhere. Poitiers is not in any sense an enterprising, lively town. It drifts in and rests on its laurels. Dust-covered leaves. But we were all bitter. Perhaps not entirely without justification.
On the other hand all this is not absolutely without light. I get a certain bitter joy – and it is a perverse pleasure – out of being alone, on the outside. There is a pleasure in being unhappy, outside. And it is the only way to ‘know thyself’.
I knew good would come out of the lion’s carcass, honey out of being solitary. I wrote what is, I think, the best poem I have ever written. It came vaguely out of a water-colour painting I did a few days ago. A red flower beside a lonely road in a desolate winter landscape. It is roughly on the human condition, and its misery, and the artist’s consolation. I think I shall call it, ‘That the one wild rose should grow’ after one of the lines.
Someone asked me out to supper tonight, but I refused. Why, I honestly don’t know. I suppose I didn’t want to seem alone, unasked anywhere. Partly that and partly the perverse pleasure of being alone.
27–30 December
L’Aiguillon-sur-Mer. A little fishing-village of one-storey houses set in a vast bare landscape of unhedged fields, marshes, ditches and dykes, and sea. The people small, tense and vital, but very reserved. Dark Celtic-looking people, cruel and critical, with weather-tanned faces.
It was snowy weather; we left Poitiers at 7.30, arrived at L’Aiguillon about one o’clock. A long cold journey, first of all, cramped up in a little van. We stopped at Fontenay-le-Comte to buy ‘permis de chasse’ for La Vendée. In England you walk into a Post Office and buy your gun-licence; here you have to struggle through a series of unrelated formalities.
We got to L’Aiguillon. A comfortable, warm hotel, good food. We had oysters at lunch. I had never tasted them before. Hitherto I have always pretended that they didn’t agree with me, because to be twenty-four and not tasted an oyster seems distressingly green. I liked them immensely, and they agreed excellently with me. We had other shellfish, and mussels, which I didn’t like so well. Then there was a ray cooked au beurre noir – a butter sauce with a caramel flavour. The ray is slightly glutinous, but good. Then grey mullet in plain butter sauce, quite as good as trout, and fried dabs.
The first evening I shot a pochard drake, and that was all, except for one or two small birds. The gun was a sixteen-bore, and didn’t suit me at all. Apart from anything else, it is cruel. Firing at long ranges, you wound more than you kill. But the French have no idea of ranges and shot-power.
We went out each morning and evening for the flight. At least there were thousands of duck about. The very first morning we shot geese, white-fronts, very high but making a magnificent gabble as they flew over many hundreds of feet up. We saw plenty of them there, and never got near a shot. I wasn’t sorry. If I ever kill one, I’d rather do it with my own gun. But everything was wild and unapproachable.
We went out in a small boat and killed waders. Including two avocets. What incredibly lovely, gracious things they are! One of the most elegant creatures of creation. Even in the one pert line of their upturned beak there is a sophisticated elegance almost unequalled in any other bird.
I refused to fire at them, and I wished the others hadn’t. To see them flapping feebly in the water, in the mud, was seeing so much beauty thrown down the drain. More and more I feel the terrible symbolism, the blood complex, of hunting. Chernot, the professional fowler, held a wounded curlew, letting it cry, so that others might be attracted, and I suddenly felt furiously angry with him for being so insanely cruel. But such a feeling expends itself at once. One can’t fight the multiplicity of the world. And the joy and the agony lie in the same reality.
The others wouldn’t kill what they shot. They seemed to me to enjoy holding birds in their hands and watching them still kick. Undoubtedly as a race they (the French) are more cruel. And when you magnify a small thing like that from an individual to a whole nation, it shows a great streak of cruelty. The English love of sportsmanship, for all its conventional and snob aspects, is fundamentally a hate of cruelty. Most Englishmen kill as quickly as they can.
We had two trips out to sea in a boat. I got very, very cold, and didn’t enjoy it very much.
I enjoyed the flights. It is such an extraordinary experience, hearing hundreds of wings surging along in the darkness, the whistling and gurglings of wigeon, the quacking of mallard, curlew, geese. The strained senses, waiting for the hurtling shapes.
At the very end I stalked two shelduck and shot one. It was badly wounded and fell on to a little spit of land. I regretted it. It couldn’t be found, although we all searched for it. It was a miracle to know how it escaped. But it did. To misery.
I got a little tired of talking French all the time. None of the others knew any English, so that I felt isolated from them. I can express myself easily now, and even start to think in French, but I can’t be humorous and fantastic as in English. The French haven’t the baroque sense of fantasy.
At the end I developed a heavy cold. Punishment and justice. But I enjoyed the four days immensely. What I remember above all is the oysters and the thousands of duck in the flights, and the high passing of the year.
Wildfowling fever. I can think of nothing but wildfowling. I spent all today writing a long letter to BBfn10 about the trip to L’Aiguillon. Living each incident again. I begin to see increasingly in it a kind of symbolism. It is a kind of poetry and at the same time a most desperately exciting sport.
1 Jan. The start of the New Year. A kind of milestone. I wonder what the country will look like at the next. Whether I shall fall by the way en route.
Writing all the time. I cannot deny that the short-story medium suits me. Creation is a period of complete happiness. Everything disappears in the present world except the pen or the typewriter, the things on the table, and I am standing at a doorway between two rooms, the one dark, the other full of light, and fascinating conversation, and fascinating people. And the miracle is – in all objectivity – how they do actually live and talk in other ways from those which one had planned. And sometimes they get excited, and I am left behind, so that I can’t remember all that they have said, and feel disappointed when I have to sit and try and remember.
Passing a lorry with bright headlights one night. As it flashed past, dazzling me, leaving me in darkness, I thought, at the very moment when it passed, that I might be dead, that it might have crashed into me, and I walking in on death. Corollary. I have lived long enough. From now onwards, it is expressing life in better and better fashion; and not finding it.
Destroying old manuscripts. A sad, difficult and necessary task. Usually the themes were all right, but the treatment terrible. One, a ghost story of a shape in black at the window, another of a man who seduced a girl in a wood but left her at the vital point, one worth remembering.
Sunday 7 January
Sitting about in a café most of the day. People bore me profoundly and desperately. There is one girl (G) who is beginning to interest me fractionally.fn11 She attacks me all the time, and I attack her, and we’re not bored while we’re doing it.
Thoughts on a book about population.
That statistics and economic intentions bore me. I am not interested in whether the birth-rate is declining or not, and it does not worry me that the author of the book should deem it serious. All I know is that I should like to have a wife and family, but financially and psychologically it is impossible. It doesn’t worry me very much that the race is disappearing. In any case it’s nice to think of a very small world, sparsely populated. Either a world where man had completely dominated the machine, a world of spacious, organized comfort, or a return to congenial pastoral simplicity – self-support. Either would be preferable to the present sardine-tin fantasy. The secret of life is the pursuit of pleasure, which lies in beauty. And beauty is always simplicity, even in the face of apparent complexity. Great art is having an impeccable sense of space. Bare details, silences, only mysterious, sweet syntheses. Room.
Feel ill, and spend whole evening playing dice with Ginette and Phil. Ginette, dark, vivacious in a not too gleaming way. With fine dark malicious eyes. We are always attacking each other. She treats with a certain mock respect our student–lecturer relationship. Philip, tall and ginger-haired and quiet and thoroughly reliable. Quietly intelligent. He will almost obviously become a good University professor. I taught them liar’s dice. We played till midnight, and I won fifteen francs, or fourpence. It is good to be together for an evening – to be together in the deep sense, shutting out the outside world.
14 January
Sewing a tear in my mackintosh. It is beginning to fall to pieces. I don’t like darning. It is like undressing an ugly woman. Revealing poverty.
I have made a tacit arrangement with my alter ego (artist) not to write for a week. To take a week’s holday from my ambitions. And I have done nothing but a minor poem. But it gives me an uneasy conscience, and I feel as if I am stabbling myself in the back.
A new hat. A nylon American-style imperméable, light khaki. It cost thirty shillings, which was more than I could afford, but I got easily that amount of pleasure from it in the first night (yesterday) when it rained hard, and I went out with Pat and J and Phil and my head was dry and I was highly conscious of wearing a smart new hat. And pleased about it.
Weekend with André Brosset at Thouars.fn12 He is a strange person, massive and strong, rather taciturn, but amiable, with a Rabelaisian sense of humour and flashes of eccentricity. He reminds me rather of a badger. Superficially rather slow and heavy. But he is – besides being an excellent naturalist – a widely read person, knowledgeable on art, a fair painter, and a much wiser and shrewder person than he seems.
The family is of peasant-smallholder origin, the salt of the earth. The mother massive, dignified, with shrewd, kind eyes. The father blunt, bluff, shrewd. They are all shrewd, even the small girls. A vast family – nine or ten; all rather of the same heavy build. Living in a middle-sized house, dilapidated, untidy, dirty.
The family is rich, has got on greatly in the world, workshop to big factory. The house is full of oddments – good spinning-wheels and old furniture, expensive curios, crucifixes (whence the big family!), what-nots, souvenirs, an extraordinary mixture. Another son who is a speleologist had recently found a Neolithic earthenware pot practically intact. A fine, solid, simple shape. Very suitable for the Brosset family. A very finely shaped object. I handled it, and realized that it was several thousand years old, and I believe it is the first time I have handled such an ancient thing. I was moved.
The food was excellent, rich and plentiful, and no shortage of wine. We had a huge Sunday dinner – a vast meal with several wines to drink, and a dozen to table. I ate too much and felt very good, full of bien-être. We discussed politics and I had a vicious belief that I was making a good impression, and there was plenty of bonhomie. There’s more reason than one for drinking wine at Communion. It’s a pity it’s only a sip there.
The same day we went to Aigenton, a village near them, to try and catch a polecat – by trapping. We stayed with A’s grandparents. A very old couple – nearly ninety – in an old, tumble-down cottage. The old lady is very fine, with quick, humorous eyes of extreme simplicity in a wrinkled, time-worn face. She wore a black dress and a kind of white-lace headdress. Her husband of the same height as she, with the same gentle and humorous expression – a kind of simple twinkle in their eyes. He had a fine white moustache with upstanding bristles. They made a very fine old couple, the perfect Darby and Joan. After we had set the traps for the polecat we had supper with them. They said little, supped their soup, and twinkled quietly at us.
We visited the traps for the polecats early next morning, after having discussed literature and art into the night (A and I) and generally explored each other’s character. The first trap was empty. The second had a tame cat gone wild in it, which took some killing. It wasn’t dead when we left it. A heavy, fat animal. A pretended to be annoyed, but I think he was secretly pleased to have taken something at least.
Then back to Poitiers, across the wide, flat plains of Poitou, in a very lovely mood. The day was windy, with rugged clouds, and great stretches of bright blue sky. The countryside full of colour, brilliant and soft and washed with the night’s rain. It was as if Corot and Constable and Sisley had co-operated to turn out a perfect landscape. (Curious how early Corot is always windless, Constable always with a soft breeze). Sisley, blue skies. Constable, softness and light. Corot, clarity, clear forms. The Poitiers plain is full of little valleys, rivers, small villages, old bridges, mills, lines of bare poplars.
17 January
Distractions of this time. I want to paint more than I want to write, which is serious. Because I could never get much further than the style of pastiche, and it is only a side-lane from what must be the main road of my development. The only consolation is that one comes back out of the side-lanes always a little wiser.
And then I am drifting vaguely into love (G), as usual with a meridional beauty. She is one of the few pretty girls here; with black hair, a finely shaped mouth, brilliant red in a pale face. I can’t describe the meridional Greek-Latin complexion – there is a kind of opaqueness; it is rather like very pale amber, or alabaster. And her eyes are large, dark brown, with very white whites, and very expressive. Her figure is a little too heavy, but only very slightly so. She is not very beautiful, but she is more than quite pretty. Above all, she is interesting. Intelligent, and our intelligences go well together, always mocking and teasing, but knowing when to drop the masks. The only difficulties are that I have no jeune premier charm. And physically I can’t hold a candle to the most plain of film stars. And also she is an entomologist, and collects moths, and as long as I am the principal or one of the principal moths, I don’t mind. But after that … But she is alive, which makes her almost unique in Poitiers.
19 January
Interview with a Jesuit father. I was approached to see whether I would speak English with the boys. I said, no, not every week, but doing it once, I wouldn’t mind. A meeting was arranged at the famous Collège St Joseph. It is a building with a small insignificant front, and vast buildings hidden behind. Very Jesuit. We passed through a number of corridors, sad and dreary, up some stairs to the corridor of the fathers. A long gloomy passage of closed doors, with rows of tall cupboards in-between.
The French student who accompanied me knocked on a door, and we went into a long dark room devoid of all life and comfort. Dusty and dirty and disused. A vast bookshelf of books with dull backs. A table littered with papers. A stove in the middle of the room, with ashes on the floor around it. Disorder everywhere. An atmosphere of must. In a kind of alcove was an unmade bed, and pyjamas, pale blue-striped.
The père offered me cigarettes, French or English. I was surprised that he should smoke. His ashtray was a mound of stub-ends. He smoked his cigarette to the last possible moment, like a peasant, holding it pinched in his thumb and fingernail.
We entered into negotiations. Before I knew where I was I was talking for an hour a week, and had my head in the snare of another. But I jumped back, and started haggling over the first hour. I have six hours of work only a week at the Faculty, but didn’t want a free day blotched by this additional effort. Then came the question of payment. He said that the college was poor, etc, and after a lot of preliminaries, it came to the point where he offered me a free lunch each week, in return for my services. I didn’t think much of this, and it must have been a little obvious. But I accepted, not very graciously.
The père was a small, thin man with glasses, wearing a shabby habit, nervous and shrewd. His eyes and his glasses were the only things alive in the room. His bargaining was hard, and I didn’t quite like the sense of a cunning transaction, the lever on my good nature, when a simple appeal would have been better. The very fact that payment was the last detail discussed struck me as being a stroke of diplomacy, and religiously cunning.
But on the way home I thought that I was perhaps being mean. At least teaching boys English is some sort of aid to international comprehension. Yet I can’t accept the fact that I am only an atom and should do an atom’s work. I feel my powers lay on me greater, deeper social duties. That spending two hours a week talking English to the boys of an obscure provincial Jesuit college won’t satisfy me. I want to influence thousands of people, not dozens. Teaching is only a thing to fall back on, the cushion. A cushion of mediocre ideals for the common man. But I think I will do the two hours. I shall hate it, but it is something for the dim cause. Perhaps it is poetic that it should be in a Jesuit college.
English club. A long speech by Martin. His reference to the necessity for ‘rubbing shoulders’ drew a big double entendre laugh because we all know what sort of a man he is. Chasseur de jupons. He always takes girl students by the arm.
Sequel of Jesuit affaire … Martin was shocked that I had entered into negotiations with them. The systems never mix. Evidently I have my good excuse. All my good intentions will slip – one must admit, unmanned – down the drain.
The necessity of holding aloof from the mundane literary life. It must be very assiduously avoided. To be a critic, to always be reading and examining other people’s creations, destroys one’s own impulses. One drains away all one’s resources in a kind of eunuch pleasure (not eunuch. I can’t think of the exact word. It’s terrible when that happens. Illicit? artificial? Something like that). It’s lying sleeping every night with the woman you love without touching her. And then one day when you move close and want to take her, you are impotent. A fresh approach, an approach from outside, is impossible.
25 January
Ill. And I have an all-night dance ahead. Bal des Lettres. I don’t know what the illness is. Whether it’s love, or hunger, or too much medicine, or influenza, or lack of sleep, or dysentery. Whatever it is, it’s nasty.
Bal des Lettres – a noisy student affair, with a good Latin American band. I filled myself up with pills, took three cognacs and put on my best blue suit, and went. With Ginette and Pat and Phil. All the evening I groaned about having to dance, but once there I enjoyed it as much as anyone. I danced with Ginette practically all the time, and we developed a kind of sexual cuddle-step which we employed for all rhythms. It was hampered by the number of my pupils present, who fixed me with a beady eye if they saw me too close to Ginette’s hand. Dancing with her I was completely happy, because we have both a sharp sense of rhythm, and she is not afraid to cling tight.
We left just after three, all four of us together. There was a cold mist over the deserted town. We split and I took G home, but when we were there, I suggested we walked further. Because I wanted to kiss her and hadn’t got the courage at that point. But she had been rubbing my fingers ever since we left the dance-hall. We wandered through several streets, empty and dark, and became closer and closer and still didn’t touch mouths. Finally down a dark street I caught her and kissed her and all went well. At first she said, ‘But why?’ We kissed for a long time. She asked me several times whether it was premeditated or not. And then said, ‘Bizarre. C’est bizarre.’ We walked back home kissing and playing through the deserted streets. She has fine eyes and a nice mouth, and a beautifully soft complexion. A very interesting face. She kept on biting my hand.
I came home at five to write this, feeling gay and happy.
I’m not deeply in love with her. She has some faults. But for Poitiers very few.
28 January
It is a strange thing how even being in love cannot satisfy. There is always another field beyond the hedge. She came to my room today before supper and after supper, and I turned on the wireless and left the lights off, and we lay on my narrow bed and kissed. Sometimes her face is very serious, as if something terrible is happening. Her face is as broad and wide as it is possible to be without being ugly. The sweetest moments are when she stops teasing. We mentally fight each other, all the time. But there are moments when she relaxes, and I feel myself psychologically as well as physically succumbed against. When we are in public, we have our secret, and are deliberately cold and monosyllabic to each other, and we enjoy this acting immensely. I look at her and analyse her physical faults. In profile she is often extremely pretty. In full face, nearly ugly by flashes. And yet even when I feel surfeited with kissing her, with holding her, there is an unanalysed something which I can’t seize. It is a soul of sorts, a more than the mere sum of. A kind of tender realization, a link. Because mentally I can’t criticize her. She is intelligent, quick, ‘fine’. Gallic. And our minds go together. So that underneath all the physical maladjustments, there is a steady current flowing between us. More sympathy than love. I think that the perfect love would be at the point where no mental criticism is possible.
There is a kind of undertow in ordinary life. I can’t eat with any enjoyment. I can’t write or read. With me, the intensity of experience destroys all hope of creation. I must have the calm after the storm, as today. We had lunch together and drank coffee in the Café de la Paix. Then walked through several streets aimlessly but happily, although it was a grey, cold Sunday. And parted, with the delicious reluctance of a voluntary abstention.
With G. We went after dinner to the Café de la Paix, with the others. There were about ten there, three Americans, a Canadian, two dreadful English girls, one or two French people. The talk was desultory, the atmosphere heavy. I was bored stiff. The English girl opposite to me horrifies me. She is plump and mousy and conventional. She can’t believe I’m as evil as I’m painted. If I describe myself to her as publicly disinterested and academically irresponsible, she only smiles in an embarrassed way, and disbelieves me. Of course, she is right to disbelieve me, but – in spite of her being pejoratively conventional – such behaviour shows an ignorance of the elementary conventions of conversation. It is terrible how the English girls here lack finesse – part of it is the accursed tradition of games and fair play. Good conversation consists of smiling dishonestly and nuances of hypocrisy, gossip, maliciousness and scabrous details. A continual teasing and attacking. That is how Ginette and I talk; only very rarely are we serious. She says, ‘Je ne fais jamais des compliments en publique.’ That is a secret to success. But the wretched dowdy English plough steadily and lumpishly through their cliché subjects and cliché phrases.
Ginette seemed crushed by it all, and suddenly got up and left. I followed her, although I hesitated. She said she needed fresh air. She was cold, upset.
We wandered through the streets of Poitiers. She gave me her hand and gradually we warmed, and started to laugh and snatch kisses as we walked. It was like a flower opening out after a frosty dawn, in new sunshine. We climbed the hill out of Poitiers on the road to St Benoit. Looked back at Poitiers, on its slope studded with lights. Then we were in the real country, bare and deserted, on a long road between bare trees. We kept on kissing, and playing. It was very cold, with a sharp wind and a nasty damp mist. Yet we were like children, ridiculously happy. She told me of some past affaire of hers, and I talked of mine. Of Kaja, and of another I invented. We walked back to Poitiers in a kind of golden lassitude, through the damp dark night. It was a mood impossible to recapture. Something of a miracle. The oldest miracle, yet none of those others in the café could have effected it so strangely and profoundly. I wrote a poem about it, but failed.
But writing this, I have an exciting idea for a short novel.
30 January
After we had finished work, we came back to my room and lay in each other’s arms. I had two feelings – one, that the first hot tenderness and thrill of having her was already disappearing. She keeps on saying, ‘Nous nous embrassons trop,’ and she is right. Surfeit breeds disgust. But the other feeling is a kind of compensatory and more pervading warmth; of intimacy and companionship; a very faint premarital taste of domestic comfort.
At first the feeling of disgust was strongest. Not disgust so much as disinterest, or the first promptings of disinterest. But then later when we were walking together down to the student restaurant, I suddenly saw her in a new, more extended way. She asked me what I was thinking about, and I couldn’t explain, except that my conception of her was transforming, so that when I thought I had seized her, it was only the shadow of my own amorous desire. Yet I realized dimly that the body causing the shadow was close at hand. And would always be close at hand, just as I would be only clutching the shadow always. Two people, however intimate, only know each other’s shadows.
I wondered about marrying her. Our love isn’t a ‘grand amour’. At the moment it’s no more than a strong sympathy. But it seems admirably mutual, although I fear the moment at which I might discover that she loves me because I am one of her professors and a member of the country whose language she studies. I wonder if it would be possible to love anyone purely, without the adulteration of their attractive qualities. I doubt it. Love must rest on something. I think of G as she would think of her, of her uglinesses, her faults, of her distance from the vague ideals which I have had. That is the problem; to swallow, to bridge the gap between one’s ideals and reality. My ideas are – or to me seem – not wholly fantastic. They are based on the possible projection of my literary talent into a famous future, where my wife would be similarly beautiful, famous, intelligent. Not G. But should I take what reality offers? At some point there is always a place where one must accept the necessity of return. The peak is like Everest, unreachable. Once the slope towards one’s ideals has conquered, one must descend the best one can. And that might be G. In literature the great climbers are Mallarmé and Flaubert – they are the Irvines and Mallorys of the highest endeavour. How the use of such metaphors dates. In a hundred years, ‘Irvines and Mallorys’ will need a footnote).fn13
31 January
First strain. (I examine all these things clinically. I believe I always would, with any woman). She eats at a different table from mine as a rule, and left before me. I thought she had gone away home without waiting. But she was in the Café de la Paix. Meanwhile I had invited another girl to have coffee. An intelligent girl, of good family, with a round unusual face, and magnificent thick black eyebrows. We sat near G, at the next table, ostensibly with her, but she was hideously dark and sullen, as only a meridional can be black. I talked in English with Moira, the girl with eyebrows, but G wouldn’t join in, and I left without her. I think she was rather more upset than I was.
A meeting (via Dominique and André) with a mad Marquis – the Marquis d’Abadie. He is a ripe-looking man of sixty with a heavy, pompous face, which needs a wig, but which has a mane of white-grey hair instead. He is a rich aristo of old family, notorious in the district. His three interests in life are collecting birds, especially their droppings, dirty stories, and publicity signs. A curious mixture of petty schoolboyishness and gestures in the grande manière. His diary is full of little notes about his collection of bats, like a boy boasting of his birds’ eggs. He was well dressed – he is rich. His lips are thick, fleshy, and his general expression vaguely decadent and unhealthy. We met in the Café de la Paix, and he told us dirty stories in a loud voice, interminably, with the mechanical impetuosity of the extrovert who dandles the scabrous. Several of them were anti-English; he wanted to bait me. They were all disgusting. ‘An Englishman wanted to bathe. So he went in naked. But two pretty girls came and sat near his clothes. He was in a desperate fix. He didn’t know whether to cover his front or his behind. But in the end he saw a way. He caught a large jelly-fish and clapped it over his loins, and then left the sea, walking sideways past the girls. One of them turned to the other and said: “Look at that man! What a charming dream he must have had!”’ That was one of the less disgusting ones. The Marquis came to Poitiers because his mistress lives here. He has had a good number, apparently. He described his present concubine as ‘délicieuse; elle est si charmante à ma femme et mes enfants.’ He invited us to meet him on Thursday, at his château.
First strain clearly established. I waited for her after dinner. We went up the lighted way, which was a kind of symbol. We were silent and awkward. She was, I think, playing a part, although she may have felt genuinely cut. I had gone down to dinner in a particularly happy mood, however, and it was now my turn to suffer. I started to try and thaw her, but with great unsuccess. I was unnatural and a little hurt and angry. I said I was sorry for the café incident. She said she couldn’t see that there was anything to be sorry about, and that of course I could do strictly what I liked about other girls. It was a cliché atmosphere of dissatisfaction. She looked at my face as if it disgusted her, and sang to herself in the way people sing when they want to appear untense. I became too solicitous in my attempt at touching her. And even started to chase her psychologically. But she was adamant. I thought she was probably half acting, half serious. I was very interested in the curious perversity of our attitude. The way it is when two things won’t fit, and they keep on touching and drawing apart and jamming together with ever more strength. It could easily be made into a definitive break.
But the course of true love, etc … Consolations are that I think she suffered as much as I did and probably more, because of the recording machine in me which is prepared to accept pain in order to gain experience and variety of information. I like to think of her crying on her bed. There is a not unpleasant sadism in the situation. A mixture of masochism and sadism – deliberate estrangement, the expectation of reconciliation.
We shook hands coldly and she said, ‘Till Monday, then.’ That is five days. I’m going away tomorrow, and she on Friday, home. That was an ominous note. I think she was glad of the abstention. She is frightened of the way things are going.
Writing this, it still hurts. A not undelicious unhappiness.
I write too much. It is a kind of self-abuse.
I saw G at lunch, but not to speak to. She looked extremely serious and unhappy, and I was pleased to walk out early with Dominique and André. Our eyes met once. Hers were desperately unconcerned. We did not smile. Desperately was the right word.
I left lunch early with D and A because we were invited to go to the château of the Marquis d’Abadie. It is Chercorat, near Magnac-Laval, about 80–90 kilometres away. We set off in high spirits in D’s car, a prewar Opal of very imperfect condition. One of the front tyres had a large hole in it. However, after twenty-five or so kilometres, it was one of the rear tyres that blew. We were miles from anywhere, and changed it with an even more dilapidated roue de secours. This got us to the nearest garage, at Lhommaize, where the repairs were done by a German mechanic. He was still at work at two o’clock, when we had our rendezvous at the château of d’Abadie. Eventually we set off. En route, something flew up against the windscreen. D said he thought it was broken glass on the road. We went gaily on. When we got to the château, we found one of the headlights had fallen off. I started laughing, and had to find an excuse to cover up my mirth. Finally, coming back, we found the rear light wasn’t working, and stopped at the same garage in Lhommaize. The mechanic tried to mend it, but all he succeeded in doing was putting his spanner through the glass and smashing it. Jour néfaste!
But the journey there was very fine, through pleasant countryside, cold but sunny, rather like a crisp, autumn day. The trees all seemed russet, the sky was Sisley blue, and the distant stretches of plain and forest seemed pink and Antwerp blue. The tone was Augustan, golden. The villages were colourful, old, with flat, méridionel roofs. Near Chercorat we passed through pleasant wooded valleys, blue and fresh in spite of the bare trees. The Marquis received us. His château is a smallish country house, rather in ruins outside, but well enough kept up in the interior. We were shown his collections. Thousands of birds, eggs, fossils, reptiles. They bored me very quickly. The only living thing there was a pleasant little brindled cocker spaniel bitch. Nothing will persuade me that, except for the scientist-born, collecting is not a sign of an inferior and insensitive intelligence. By the engravings and pictures which he had I could see that he hadn’t good taste. A person of good taste – paradox as this may seem – could not be a collector of living things. He also showed us his collection of dirty stories. Some six or seven hundred, neatly indexed, with cross-references. And a pornographic Mémoires d’une petite comtesse which he was writing.
He also gave us copies of some of his works. Pamphlets on bird ornithology, on district legends, and so on. Au fond, he is provincial, a minor man of regional scientific letters.
We took tea with the Marquise. They are both unconventional, and very similar to the county type in England. We drank tea in an elegant dining-room, and then, because we looked hungry, she rang for a loaf and an old jampot of brawn, which we hacked up and munched. She apparently took a liking for me, because after a quarter of an hour she asked me to come and stay with them for several days at Easter, and talk English to her daughters. According to D they are very pretty. I expressed incredulity and amazement and gratitude. I think it was just a whim. On verra. The Marquis talked openly of his mistress before his wife – une petite amie – but he took André aside to fix a rendezvous with her for the Saturday. And he gave D a letter to take to her. I think he is not unpleased that the situation is so well known.
At home. And not without thoughts of G. But already that is less painful. Strain repaired. At lunch she came to me and asked me how yesterday was. I felt delightfully the conqueror, although I did not exact hard conditions. I had intended to be cold to her, but that was impossible. We had coffee together, and our eyes told us we had forgiven each other. Then we went to the museum. We were the only people there, and found a little bedroom where we kissed. It was a bedroom exhibiting period peasant furniture. We kept on kissing and holding hands round the rooms. The feeling of bien-être was wonderful for both us us. A relief. She had to catch a train home afterwards, but the glow remained. I painted all day. One bad big painting, which I shall destroy, although it took four hours. And then a better small one in the evening – one hour.
4 February
G back. She came to my room before dinner. We were both tired, and made love in a kind of delicious stupor. I kissed the whole length of her arms. She is quick to reject my intimacy beyond a certain point, yet the repulsion is reluctant. Already I feel that we have reached the limits of the vanity of kisses which can be created without real intimacy. I can’t stop criticizing her entirely. I feel her provinciality from time to time. Yet when I left her after dinner – we both had work – it was with an ache at not being able to spend the evening with her. Sometimes I find it difficult to talk with her. Especially in public. Daylight destroys fantasy. And as she says, we lack mutual insomnia. We have no base. Even now, we trace back each stage in the development of our love, as if it was ancient history.
I wander about giving titles to works – perhaps in many ways, it is more honest to quite simply number them; as musical opus. I think I shall do that. By dates, years. 1950 A, B, C. With poetry there is more excuse for titles. They are an inherent part of the creation. Sometimes.
Madness. It started to rain after dinner. I was with G. But I wanted to be with her, and suggested we walked. In pouring rain. I had already a bronchial cold. By the end I was coughing and had a pain in my chest. It was ridiculous to have done it. But I was happy. If I had enough money, I don’t know. I might. So many problems would be solved. Walking through the wet streets with her, I feel intensely together, shared and sharing. And yet she says that she never knows whether I am sincere or not. That is my fault. I never know myself even. And now I shall be ill. She showed me an amusing problem:
Five houses, on the banks of a river. The only link is by D, a ferry. E is a girl, engaged to A. B loves her, but without being loved in return. C is an old man. D operates the ferry. One day E decides that she must see A at once, for an urgent reason. She goes to D, who is not there, and so passes to C. She asks him his advice. He says that the river is in flood, and dangerous, and so advises her to stay at home. But she finds D and asks him to take her across. He looks at the swollen river, and says, all right, but only on condition that you give me all that you have on you. She agrees. He ferries her across, safely, but leaves her completely naked, without a stitch of clothing. E goes to A’s house. But he is not at home. At a loss, she seeks shelter with B. B relishes her, and asks her to sit down with him. He offers her no clothes, but does not touch her. A comes to see B, finds his fiancée naked with another man, and furious, breaks off the engagement.
In what order do you respect these people? Who are the most admirable? The answer is the value of the symbols – A = morality and conventionality; B = sense of adventure; C = reason; D = materialism; E = love. My choice was EBCDA.
It is a test of character in a way. Obviously it needs elaborating.
12 February
With G to a play in the Jesuit college theatre. A matinée, and unremittingly mediocre. Musset’s Caprice and Anouilh’s Antigone. It was absolutely without distinction. More interesting were two small boys in front of us, very much in love with one another. They put each other’s arms over each other’s shoulders, and I saw one of them kiss the other’s ear. Perhaps they were ten, not more. Innocent and fraternal. Then back home with G. We are falling heavily. Now, when we are together, we feel a kind of languour and softness coming over us, a dark sympathy which blots out the rest of world. We say of each other that we are completely ‘abruti’. It is more expressive than any English term. It is the resurgence of the animal. Not pejorative. A stupor, coma of closeness, when we both surrender. She said that I had dropped the mask. It is true. My only thought was of each second of being with her, like the period between lying down in bed and going to sleep.
Later we went dancing, at the student centre. All the dances there are in more or less darkness, drowsy, sensual. We danced together all the time, hugged close. I was very tired, and had a headache but, rocking along with her in plastic unison, I felt myself disembodied. Or rather re-embodied. For once, the full conquest of the body.
This is evil, retrograde. The domination of the future by the past. The couples dancing seemed drugged. Kissing, clutched tight. G and I left in a kind of intense mist of love, and wandered through the cold streets, serious, as if we felt ourselves falling literally, and forlorn at the position. Yet always falling further.
If I had any money, I would be thinking of marriage with her. Happily, I have no money.
I collapsed into bed at 2.30 and slept like a log till 1.45. And still feel tired.
I spend all the evening correcting a prose for G. She has to hand it in to Léaud, and wants it to be a good one. It is dishonest and valueless for her. I am indifferent, morally. It is flagrant cheating, but if she wants illegal help from me, she can have it. Tomorrow I shall be going through it with Léaud, and shall have to pretend that I haven’t seen it before.
13 February
Curious and amusing incident. I was lunching with G, next to the window. Looking out, I suddenly saw a green and yellow parrot fly around the corner of a wall twenty yards away. I exclaimed, ‘Good God, a parrot.’ G laughed and refused to believe me. It was one of those terrible situations where one is certain and yet cannot convince. When one is the only witness. And then suddenly a woman came round the corner, carrying the parrot in her hand. I crowed with joy. Someone else sitting at the other end of the table said, ‘Oh, didn’t you know, they keep a parrot in the kitchen, below.’ Il faut croire.
Graham Greene, The Man Within. A fantastically bad book. A pair to E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread. Romantic and full of bad writing. Conventionally turbid and turgid. The hero is a cad with a golden heart, the period uneasily historical. So many faults of motivation and style encourage me. The only significant trait is the disgust with the body which still continues. Of shabby priesthood. Otherwise it is astonishingly old-fashioned and novelettish. But at least he got it written. By this age of mine.fn14 And I am still a century off being satisfied.
15 February
Behindhand with this. I jot things down in order to expand them at leisure. Comes leisure, and I can’t find the jottings; which makes me furious.
Book-marking. I have been marking Greene’s Man Within and now Faulkner’s Sanctuary. It is very enjoyable to be able to analyse and dissect, and keep highly responsive. And one learns what the pitfalls and the cunning tricks. G is full of the former, F of the latter. Some people scream against marking a book. That’s only because they are incapable of knowing a work of art when they see one. Or because they are afraid to give themselves away by their comments. No one would think of marking an expensive and beautiful edition.
G. Several times lately she has shocked me by her bad taste. I wonder if I could ever meet anyone who didn’t shock me that way sooner or later. I don’t like it when she speaks in English; her accent is affected, with superfluity of h’s and drawled syllables. At other times I feel intensely in love with her. Already we are reaching something of the domestic bliss stage. The first glamour has worn off. The next stage is in bed. She is too virtuous for that, I am frightened of entanglement. I don’t believe she is my intended. I like it when she is lying in my arms and I tickle her. She squirms and succumbs and I find myself much stronger than her. That sounds naïf. The emotion is simple. In many ways I wouldn’t mind her as a wife; at least she would fulfil all her functions adequately, and leave me time to create, create, create.
17 February
Dominique and the Marquis. He went with him and his mistress to Thouars, to help collect bats for d’Abadie’s collection. Afterwards they had a meal in a restaurant there. It appears the M was disgusting. According to D, he took his mistress’s leg and put it on the table, and proceeded to fiddle under her skirt, to the horror of the waiter. And the Marquis described how he had been shaving in his bathroom and his daughter had entered and undressed before him preparatory to having a bath; how she was well-made and pretty, and he was embarrassed by her. These stories come from D, an unreliable source, but they ring true. A corpulent and decadent old man, wasting his life, amoral, hedonist, unhealthy.
Reading a French book on l’art anglais, it strikes me that I have learnt all about France in England, and now vice versa. Objectivity increases interest and love. I like the sense of isolation in France, of mild exile.
G’s bad taste. I am finical about it. But when she talks in English with an affected accent, it makes me furious. That anything I could love could be so ugly. She started talking like that as we left the AG tonight. I walked on in silence and she felt that I was angry. That way she is sensitive. Later we were alone and she begged and begged me to tell her what it was. After some not unpleasant hesitation, I told her why. In many ways I am prepared to experiment with her because I could stand a separation. More and more I see faults in her. Provincial faults, and I am a snob to see them. But one can’t love where one doesn’t respect. She was very subdued about my criticism, and then affectionate. It cleared the air, I suppose. I drank two beers, and we became warmer. ‘In her weaknesses lies her strength.’ I suppose that applies even to faults. At least G has the intelligence of her faults, as one has the courage of one’s conviction. Tonight she did all the chasing, complimenting me on my new haircut, my pullover, my looks. In the end, when we walked for a few minutes around the streets before going to our respective beds, I kissed her a little. I do believe someone is in love with me. Was, at any rate, for this one evening. I felt objective.
12.15. Immense, sharp squall. I thought the window was going to break in, and the house collapse.
21 February
Ginette. Warmer and warmer. Yesterday I slowly started to caress the skin below her neck, and finally achieved her breasts. Her face was intensely serious, but she was more than willing. When we make love she looks sad and I laugh. Women take it all so desperately earnestly. But now I have to think. Obviously from here, from her bare breasts, I can see the last slope. And this is the gate where comes the great decision. If only it didn’t entail so many complications. With me it is the flesh. My spirit is hardly there at all. I feel cynical and immoral about her, because I don’t love her profoundly. All I want is the gratification of my own body – a main part of that gratitude is of course the mutual aspect of it. La Rochefoucauld.fn15 One gives pleasure for the pleasure of giving. If I caress her nipples it is because I can join in her sexual pleasure. It is strange that skin is almost the only thing from which we can derive great tactile enjoyment. I love the soft plasticity of her skin, the unblemished, faintly perfumed quality of it. Soft round depths.
And yet it is not only the body. I feel a sense of relationship, of connectedness with the world, which I can dimly remember from the time of Kaja. I am not deluded. The world is completely indifferent and time rolls on, but none the less the refuge of affection and sympathy is a beautiful myth. All the more poignant because it is a myth. I wrote a poem the other day explaining how for one moment I refused to believe that the myth was not reality. For a vague moment I almost did deceive myself.
How ridiculously arbitrary time is. When I think of half an hour with her and half an hour waiting for a train. What nonsense to think that the half an hour is any link at all. Time is an obscure example of man’s innate puritanism. The more complicated and inhibited he becomes, the more time-conscious.
26 February
A terrible day. G came to me for all the afternoon. I did a very bad aquarelle of her. Of course we kissed and made love. Later I undressed her to the waist. Her breasts are large and firm. She kept on groaning – ‘Je t’en prie’, ‘laisse-moi’, ‘pas plus’ – but at the same time clung and beseeched. A warm, strong body. I became very excited. It is a kind of sensual indulgence which we are both unable to resist. Somehow I am never fully identified with it. I keep on standing back, and seeing her extended body and her closed eyes, and thinking of her only as an instrument, not as another human being. When she tries to tell me how serious it all is for her, I feel that she is lying, because of my own feelings. But also I begin to feel a sense of guilt. That I am making her jump in where I can swim and where she will be drowned. The heavy somnolent solemnity of her eyes and visage, watching mine between kisses.
The terrible part of the day was afterwards, when we went to the AG for dinner. I found that I was in great pain, the pit of the stomach. I had promised to go with G to the weekly dance. But I felt very ill. I went home alone and lay on my bed, my knees drawn up – that way I got some relief – and smoked. And reflected. I don’t know what the trouble is. Perhaps too much caressing and too little real satisfaction. Or stomach trouble, dysentery, appendicitis. I don’t know. It doesn’t much matter. All that struck me was the speed with which my happiness was knocked out of my hand. A kind of ironically divine coincidence. For some time now I have been aware of pain in my genitals. I know it is because G and I are too intimate, yet not intimate to the point of satisfaction. I know I am a hypochondriac, yet it seems to me that the pain is incontrovertible. I seemed destined to waste my time and suffer. And I hate all this self-pitying.
I went to meet G, later, at 10. Dominique was with her. I refused to go and dance. So we all three went and sat in a café, and were miserable. G and I morose and silent. I not in pain, but uncomfortable – D insisted on talking and reminiscing. Silence frightens him. Then sadly we went home. I to write this.
Now I think appendicitis. So I write. One never knows. It might be the last. That doesn’t worry me. Death is quite immaterial, and it is at least absolute in all this damned jungle of relativity and isolated phenomena.
At least one gets an enhanced view of the value of each episode. Convinced of relativity, things become more separate, more distinct. And now, with the pain stirring dully away inside me, I feel almost crushed that I can remember her standing in the middle of this same room, her underclothes around her waist, and her breasts stretched taut. A kind of erotic relief from the present; a certainty to put against all the vague threats of the immediate and distant future. She has given me that, for which I am sincerely grateful. The hell of it is that I must repay her true love by insincerity. And yet sometimes I wonder. I feel closer to her than to anyone else I have ever known. Even Kaja.
Until tomorrow, silence here.
Tomorrow. How exaggerated all that seems. I still feel ill, but in a dull, disengaged sort of way. In a kind of interregnum, yearning and not unhappy at being unhappy. But yesterday did seem terrible at that time. Because of the excessive physical indulgence, a kind of bright red flower on the grey deceptive stem of my last year or two’s celibate life; and because of the simultaneous pain, and all the misty phantasmagorias which follow it like vultures. Mainly it is a purely physiological concern about my sexual condition, combined with the impossibility of really testing it. For, in spite of all, I cannot be immoral. Yet. My morality is inherited. It takes some time to know really one’s inherited characteristics. Once known, they are conquered. They may still exist, but they can always be executed. To know oneself is to pass judgement on one’s ancestors.
28 February
G and I have coffee sometimes with Marie-Thérèse Cochard, a slim little slip of a girl, fresh-faced, with a bad scar on her forehead, and rather mischievous, very faintly neurotic eyes. Like all very small and pretty women, fragile and doll-like; she is sharp and intelligent, with a rather fine, resonant voice, and nervous hands.
We sat in a café and giggled and discussed seriously for a long time. They wouldn’t believe me when I said that platonic love was only a kind of foreplay, titillation, a playing with fire. I wonder how many true platonic love affairs there have been; where neither side has wished more intimacy, had erotic daydreams, been at times miserable at the discord of mind without body. Platonic love is like the moment before sitting down to a good meal, the mingling of hunger and expectation. But it can’t exist there always. Some time starvation sets in, and the food gets cold. G liked this simile. She is always using the word astuce; sentimental and sexual ambiguities please her.
Then they agreed with me that some foreigners can be nearer to one than one’s own countrymen or women. The obvious example for me is Ginette. Even though there is the language trouble, that is nothing besides the general communication problem. With G I feel the same, I can say almost anything I like; and know that I shall be understood in the deeper sense, once the words have been comprehended. There is always that tradition in the French, the delight in minute analysis of the sentiments, in speaking of oneself, and speaking in the frankest, but not the loudest, terms. With so many Englishwomen I feel out of touch. Constance Farrer is practically the only one with whom I felt at home, and she was curiously enough almost inarticulate, a brooding rather than an active sympathy.
I went back with G, after we had taken M-T home, to another café, and we went on talking, of ourselves. She said that I was always attempting to isolate myself. That even when she felt intimate with me, there was something which escaped. I suppose she senses my cruel objectivity to all experience, even though I try and conceal it from her. She said that with some people one felt immediately that they bared their souls. But to me that only means that they do not usually know themselves. I don’t ‘give’ myself because I am so bewildered at my own complexity, at all the depths I know exist yet have not sounded. That sounds immodest. But all I want to say is that my self-analytical apparatus (perhaps over-encouraged by this diary) is sufficiently perceptive for me to be aware of my own vast and labyrinthine personality. I can’t explain it, and I have a hate and fear of anyone else trying to do so. All my life I shall resist outside interference, simply because of my own uncertainty. It is a paradoxical attitude, a proud humility. Perhaps self-knowledge is the only infinite, and its non-achievement the only absolute. It seems to worry and fascinate G, as if I was always hiding myself from her. But I hate moral undressing. It is much more fundamentally embarrassing than the physical taking off of clothes. None the less, even to explain all this to G was a kind of revelation, a stripping off. It is in such revelations that intelligent people enjoy their intellectual life most; and intelligent people are where you find them. Intelligence and sympathy are the most cosmopolitan of qualities, and cosmopolitanism one of the great stairs to an upper storey of humanity. Brotherhood of the mind and spirit, and damn the racial blood.
So we talked, softly buried in ourselves. Skirted marriage. I said I would never be unfaithful without telling my wife first. A dangerous remark, when the recipient might possibly become that unlucky person. I am beginning to feel a real need and tenderness for G. Sometimes I see her in flashes of ugliness, squat and Jewish-looking, with her rather vulgar vehemence and affectations in speaking with others (but never with me), and her meridional accent. At other times she seems melting with a sweet romantic softness, soul sympathetic and body desirable. And I am not sure that all really beautiful things have not that variable nature, in a sense reflecting one’s own self.
A happy evening, made vaguely, dully poignant for me by a slight but constant ache in my prostate. There is a cog loose in the sexual machinery. Damn the body.
1 March
An ice-cold day of brilliant sunshine, clear as glass, a mountain day; and the town teeming with people, cars parked everywhere, country-people in their dark suits, Sunday best; all because it is la foire de la mi-carême.fn16 Faintly I resented this intrusion into my town of all these people, all this movement, and talking, jostling crowds down each street, the cafés full. Also it was like a summer day, except for the heat. And I hate summer. For me it means hay fever and dysentery and discomfort, listlessness, a continual battle with the body. The winter is my season. I like the world to be dark after dinner. And G today kept on saying: ‘How lovely it is, how summer-like; how I love summer.’ For the first times the cafés had outside tables. And I felt a vague stirring, resentment in my heart and stomach.
2 March
G. This weekend she spends at home. I miss her. There is an ache, a grey prospect. Curiously at 10 to 6 – her train was at 6 – I looked out of the window, and there far below, to the left, she was crossing the rainy station-yard. I can only see a small part of it, and it seemed to me a more than coincidence that I should go to the window at the beginning of just the right ten seconds. She passed out of sight, and I felt sad. And happy to have someone to be sad about.
5 March
Style. One of my great faults is my changing style. Revising the Andorran story, I can sense the constant changes, a series of pastiches. I have tried to level it out. Even so, the shadows of DHL and James flit through the background. Now, Faulkner also. But I am beginning to wonder whether it is such a fault, whether a ubiquitous style is necessarily good. In a series of incidents, it is not always the same style that presents them best. Each event has its unique style, its best presentation. I don’t see what is wrong with writing in a variety of different styles. Some things are best treated by Joyce, others by Greene. To each sequence his own expression. I feel this more strongly in art. Particularly over a painting I have just done. A desert landscape, low foothills, a distant, vague city. Vast clouds looming diagonally. All that more or less realistically. Then in the foreground two cubist figures, in black and white and carmine, posturing. I can’t see any dissonance. The picture has faults, but not on the count of homogeneity.
G. She has been away for three days. She came to my room. We lay on the bed, kissed. Were happy. Went to dinner. Then suddenly she became silent, sulky, completely withdrawn. I tried to draw her out, without success. I thought, and said so, that she was acting to herself; that she had had a movement of sadness, and allowed it to run all through her, with a not uncommon masochism. I explained it by saying that she had stumbled, and then let herself fall. She replied, ‘I never act to myself.’ But everyone does, though perhaps not to the extent I do. I was sure she was acting. But suddenly she produced a tear. And her eyes were red. Acting to that point made me change my mind. I believed her and even felt embarrassed by such an intensity. She would not tell me why all this mute suffering happened, except that she had felt terrifyingly alone. Alone for ever. This seemed to me self-dramatization, still does. But there is the evidence of the tears. We walked to her home, and she wanted, or pretended to want, to leave me. But I persuaded her to come with me, to walk. It was a sharp, moonless, brilliantly clear night. We went down to the bombed quarter of Poitiers, walked in the ruins, stood beside the train-tracks. There’s romance in night trains, I said. Walked along the river. Saw a rat run along the road in front of us. Stopped on a wide bridge and looked at the stars, and the dark, silent water. The town seemed deserted. The night crisp, scintillating, almost laughing at the dull world below. As if all the sky was mysteriously alive. I pointed out Orion, the Dragon, the Dog. And Orion’s sword, although I said that it was his penis.
And she said, ‘Who thought of that?’
‘The ancients.’
‘The ancient English,’ she answered.
Nearer than she knew, because I had only just noticed it, and invented the ancestry. But I can’t be the first to have noticed it. It’s much more likely than the sword. We crossed back over a footbridge into the town, stood there silently a long time, her head buried in my overcoat, close, mute. A kind of gentle unassailable dumbness. There was a grey trail of mist, and tall black poplars. We were lost in a sort of unison, deep, satisfying, yet poignant. Always the current of time, the passing. Walked on. Hung together again against a fence, in shadow, lost, touching. In all ways except our own, ridiculous. Two people embracing on a cold night in a deserted sidestreet. Yet you go into sanctuary where you find it.
10 March
Redwings. A still, warm night, low cloud. A curiously eerie sound, that thin shimmering whistle. Everywhere I go I seem to hear it. Tonight I was almost frightened by it, as if it was something supernatural, demonic, stalking me. At night it is the awareness of another universe, birds flying in the darkness, invisible. With redwings it is above all the cry, so thin and forlorn and remote, unattached. The cry is more important than the bird. In fact the bird ceases to exist. A stream of faint whistles. There seemed to be a good many this time. I think some were resting on the house-tops. No northerly movement perceptible. Two reasons for night flying: safer – no hawks, men; and town lights? I don’t see why birds shouldn’t have a memory like human beings.
11 March
Several days’ depression. Futility of this year here. Virtually I have written nothing, and I am going stale. The old amoebic colitis trouble is coming back: liver pains, terrible constipation, prostate trouble, blushing, psychological malaise – the mind is tragically dependent on the body, for better and for worse. I seem to get all the worse. I should be looking for a job, for next year. But I haven’t done anything about it. I want to swim, yet I stand shivering on the edge. Everyone in the university here goes away for Easter, but I can’t afford it. And when people say, ‘I don’t know how you can stay at Poitiers all the time,’ I am not anxious to say, ‘But I can’t afford to go away.’ I’m not really embarrassed about poverty. But I find it difficult to live on thirty thousand a month here. Especially as my landlords ridiculously overcharge me. My bill averages 5,000 fr. a month. That, for a small room and no running water, is much above the normal price – about 2,000. They (the Malaperts) are smug, crepuscular people whom I dislike and despise. They feel it, perhaps. I am the cow to be milked dry. Madame has been ill, but I refused to buy her flowers. God damn the Malaperts in all the Poitiers. And I drift from day to day, doing nothing. Painting stupid little pictures, making love to G, doing the minimum preparation for my university work, and unable to write. I have half a dozen things half finished. I reread them, and feel depressed. They are all invariably mediocre.
And I can’t still accept the terrible fact that I am only a mediocre person. Yet I know it. And daren’t acknowledge it. For several days I have had an absolute certainty about that. I have no will, no burning necessity to write. After a few pages I get tired, bored with myself. And there is the split between painting and writing. I spend hours fiddling with water-colours when I ought to be writing.
I don’t know. I’m wasting my life. No money, no ambition.
13 March
G. More and more we are together. Now we have ceased to tease each other, except very softly. Alone, there comes an immediate warmth, an ‘euphorie’. And more and more I feel lost without her, because our affection is the only thing in which I can any longer believe. Even in myself I have no longer faith. Only in this liaison established is there reason. Physically I criticize her. That way I cannot blind myself. She is warm, nubile; but not beautiful. And I see her growing old quickly, fat, with the Jewish, Mediterranean strain coming out in her. I see her in all sorts of conditions – whenever they entail ‘chic’, she disappoints me. She has all the D. H. Lawrence qualities, heart and soul and heat, humanity, intelligence and simplicity when it is needed, the qualities of peasant stock, but no aristocratic traits. And aesthetically I need a little aristocracy, a little carriage, fine-bred beauty. Socially it would hurt me to marry a peasant, but at least I would be ashamed of being hurt. (Theoretically I damn all class differences. There are only three classes: the sages, both wise and intelligent, sincere, and simple and cultured; the intelligentsia, intelligent and cultured; and the non-intelligentsia, stupid and simple (even though vicious) and uncultivated. A question of heredity and opportunity. That there can be any class distinction other than by intelligence seems to me a fundamental fault in any civilization. Plato’s is the only Utopia.) I think it would do me good to marry G just for this one reason. That I should then limit myself, and achieve a certain humility which is lacking at the moment. Shed some of my aristocratic dream-projections. For example, I have day-dreamed of seducing Princess Margaret. I suppose many men must have done that. For unattached men she must be an obvious evasion out of solitary reality. That is an extreme example of the tendency. To imagine a future in the most aristocratic (aesthetically and socially and artistically) of worlds. In G I would have a certain platform, a ledge reached. From there I could start new explorations.
All this gives me melancholy. My poverty puts her right out of reach, for a year at any rate. And I can’t face an engagement. A long, protracted cooling off, hundreds of miles apart. And I am afraid of not being certain. That G is really the one and only. And she also virtually the first. But now I feel that my life is a running the wrong way against the nap, and that with G all would be magically smooth. No. But what I feel, intuitively, irrationally – it is wanting to live with someone, to share myself. I am getting too heavy to support my own weight. Education, in the broadest sense. The vast multiple universe drawing out the individual as he grows up becomes a succubus. One of the reasons people marry at the first quarter-century is that in that span they begin to feel the crushing multiplicity of the world’s reflection in themselves, and they feel they have to shed it. They can’t face the world any longer alone. A little, I feel that, now. And G, with her sympathy and warmth, is an oasis. That she is French means nothing. I am an artist, and owe more to and respect France as much as my own country. We understand each other deeply in any case. And there is the intrigue. The other day we talked of sleeping together. I admitted I wanted her. But she refused to give. ‘Pour moi c’est une chose si serieuse. Je ne le pourrais pas.’ And I felt almost relieved, although I want her. We caress too much. But there are so many complications, and I admire her virtue. Because it is not conventionality. We discuss everything. But a respect for the sentiment of love, which is essential in the good human. For love and libertinism are not the most profound solutions. To oppose them is not purely sentimental. I say that, knowing I have not the will myself to resist being a libertine, if opportunity arose. I would sleep with G tomorrow if she offered herself. But I admire her refusal more than I could have welcomed her acceptance. Nor is it a question of marriage. Marriage is only a legal convenience. As metaphysical religion, with strict religious sense, it is nonsense; as ridiculous as baptism or confirmation. But there is a truth in the religious symbolism. Do not commit adultery, the closed circle. Once again a willed and voluntary respect for the sentiment of love. There are two ways of finding love; by making experiments, having the maximum amount of affaires and finally settling on the most piquant and promising. But any such liaison risks a new transformation. An experimental attitude to love. The other way is to refuse to give until the day when one gives absolutely. Then one gives not only the gift, but all the previous abstentions. In a way it is much more daring than being immoral. Immorality no longer has a panache, and this is putting all one’s eggs in one basket.
This respect for the sentiment of love is entirely lacking in many people. It is modern, slick, almost normal, to sleep together when the affaire is where G and I are. Hundreds of girls are picked up each night in dance-halls and copulated with afterwards. But it is copulation, animal, a function, uninhibited but weak-willed. To abstain is inhibited, but willed, in our case. Much more will than inhibition. The respect for an animal sentiment is a form of self-control. If any attack is to be successfully launched on cynicism (which in our absurd and purely relative worlds is the natural, spontaneous and therefore, in 1951, prevalent reaction), it must be from the truth of this respect for love. A belief that out of love can come more than pure physical enjoyment. But the only real – though poignantly temporary – sanctuary. The one true hope.
All this is ex cathedra. For me, personally, artificial. I haven’t the moralist’s backbone. But I can try and push the practice some way toward the preaching.
An old man, walking painfully, hobbling, on two sticks, with a stained, drooping white walrus moustache, a frayed black coat. A very old, decrepit man, crossing the rain-wet road outside the Café de la Paix. And we inside, two, young, rubbing our thighs in secret, side by side – drinking our after-lunch coffee.
16 March
G. We separated today for a fortnight. It will be a sort of test. Lately I have been in one long fit of depression, rolling below the waves like a porpoise, poking up occasionally in gay and comic anti-climactical moods, but most of the time sick. She pulled me out of it, gave me something to believe in. Increasingly I have been pouring myself out to her, a rather self-dramatized representation, but in the main sincere. The incredible relief of a confession. I have tried to explain my solitude, the abysm between myself and my parents.
The University restaurant closes today. There was a notice: ‘Student tickets not accepted anywhere else.’ For me that means a serious financial problem, as I shall have to buy cheap meals elsewhere. I certainly shan’t be able to go away. I have only 10,000 francs until next payday, and at the very cheapest, 5,000 of that will be lost on meals. Economy, economy.
Last night I wrote a little story about the Café de la Comédie. Very short and bare. I shall make it Opus 1, purely in order to keep a track on things.
17 March
A Saturday. Terrible sense of loneliness, mainly by anticipation. I ate a supper of two hard-boiled eggs, 50 grams of paté, and a hunk of bread (69 francs in all) and a cup of cocoa. I have nowhere to go in the town. A dreadful thirst for company. Yet often when I am with people, I wish I could be alone. And I can’t settle down to work, to write.
The concept of humidity in tragedy. It is almost in the nature of tragedy to be damp, vegetal, lush, morbid, brooding. That’s what the Greeks have uniquely. A parched, sun-dried tragedy, without water, where the only liquid, the only mobile element, is blood.
T. S. Eliot. How infuriatingly irrefutable all his opinions are. He is a kind of touchstone for all creation. He is, in style, the logical conclusion to Flaubert and Mallarmé. But yet he has never dared to step off his own pinnacle on to that of the great men of genius. He has never given his heart. In literature he will always be the cold phenomenon of stone. Perhaps a kind of Malherbe for the failure.fn17
21 March
After lunch today, the grey clouds disappeared, and the sun came out in a bright blue sky. To the east – there was a faint easterly breeze – appeared gigantic cirrus formations, very high and mysterious, like rippling towers, or a many-fingered hand groping across a whole half of the sky. The day was fresh, but the sun very warm; a delicious combination. So I went for a walk. To rediscover the country. Along the valley of the Boivre to the grottes de la Norée. It is a quiet, but not uninhabited, little combe. Today it was all green and sparkling with water, because the Boivre was in flood and had spilled over the meadows. The road was along the bottom of the valley, which is criss-crossed with alders and poplars.
I started at three, and by five, when I was home, exhausted after five miles’ walking, the clouds had spread intermittently in long streaks all over the sky. A vast, classical, washed appearance. I met women and children with branches of violets, cowslips, celandines. Along the river clumps of kingcups. Celandines are a perfect example of nature being artistic rather than natural. They burst open with a kind of minor joie de vivre. Soleils d’or. The perfect marginal emblem for the pattern of spring. Simplicity and bon goût.
I felt vividly aware of everything, full of sympathy, happy. To be artist and naturalist is the perfect blend. The one supplies the deficiencies of the other, and together they augment the pleasure.
It was really nature’s day. But an old peasant-woman with a huge sack, bending, tearing up the spring grass with her hands, and stuffing it inside. It reminded me of the pathetic sight of people in tiny suburban gardens cutting their little patches of lawn with scissors. One gets a sense of poverty in passing French houses which is unknown in England, and they still do work which seems the work of the extreme poor. There is still a kind of ancien régime hovel-and-scrape atmosphere about the average French country village. Almost a feudal serfdom. None of the sturdy, honest, cleanliness of the English, with the puritan self-respect and prosperous illusion of independence. A more charming aspect of the villages here is their Roman past – the flat meridional roofs, and the sienna and ochre semicircular tiles. These roofs have a kind of ruddy, massive heat inherent in them. A faint tinge of the Orient, which strikes a faintly exotic contrast in the fresh green countryside, more Norman or English than Mediterranean.
For me those two hours in the country were a kind of escape from exile. I was born in a town, have lived most of my life in towns, yet. Just yet. The strange thing is that I don’t have to get out of the towns very often. Just once in a while I feel bottled up, and I explode out into the country. And then I always realize that I am returning home, because I am among living things that I know. When I hear a blackcap in the vallée de la Boivre,fn18 it is the same blackcap that I heard one morning nine or ten years ago, in a holly-bush, when I was riding, near Marldon in South Devon. All the times I have ever heard blackcaps are like the times I have ever met one friend. And so for all species of all living things, except humans. Where we can distinguish individuality, we are more generally alone among strangers, although more particularly happy when among friends. For me a walk in the country is a walk among old friends.
That seems sentimental. Naïf, pastoral. An eighteenth-century pantheism. But I feel it very strongly, and very strongly that it is one of the sentiments which is not false, in any age. Nor is it irrelevant.
Food. I eat at the Chandron d’Or, a little restaurant in a sidestreet here. For 150 francs one eats quite well; if I have a ‘demie de blanc’ I think I am eating well.
22 March
How alone I feel, once again. In this town I know no one. A few people to say ‘Bon jour’ to, and to pass on. There is no one here I can go out to meet. No one to invite me to their homes. All I have found here is Ginette. The trouble is my coldness. All the preliminary stages of friendship bore me. Unless I can get close to people I am lost; frozen and bored. I hate it when I have to think of something to say, to be amusing, to smile. The only person with whom I know how to be insincere is myself. And then I bore people by my own account. Tant pis. Poitiers is a town full of the living dead, in any case.
Writing the ‘Unit One’ play till two in the morning. About 7,000 words today – the whole of a first draft of Act II. Exhausted. The idea came on the 15th – I have not wasted time, for once. Full of ideas, I’m full, for it. But I have learned not to be too happy too soon. A two-act play. Now complete. Now for a related prologue which I have sketched out.
Easter Sunday, 25 March
A cold, windy day. I cycled out to Ligugé, to hear Vespers in the ancient church.fn19 A very big congregation, a mixture of sightseers and villagers. I like the rather casual atmosphere of all Catholic services; the way people talk and not to each other, and watch – rather than take part in – the proceedings. They are less submissive than a Protestant congregation.
As it was Easter, the monks came in procession from the monastery. A white brother with the mitre, two other brothers, the abbot, enormous and full of a pompous dignity – very impressive – with two monks holding his train, the officiants in gold and white, and the train of black fathers. Many of them were very tall. As they passed slowly by, they gave a strange impression of mystery and power. Many of them have cultivated expressions; the expression of a man of the world d’un certain âge. Yet the tonsure and habit reduces them all to the same age, the same purpose. One of them especially, a tall, stout man of sixty, had exactly the appearance of a rich businessman, or a general. The service was long, full of their complicated ritual and plain chant. The abbot had a strange throttled voice, as if he was singing from the bottom of a great bottle up into the narrow, remote neck of his pursed mouth.
They filed out in all their full ceremonial robes, the abbot in his mitre, holding his crosier, stopping and blessing people, most of all children, and giving his ring to be kissed. A very magnificent figure with a heavy jowl and eyes of great weight, iron-grey. The very image of the power temporal and celestial personified in one person. It’s not often that I have the sensation of being completely crushed by another personality.
31 March
My twenty-fifth birthday. I meant to write a lot here. But the OUDSfn20 have arrived from Oxford, a lot of fuss, and I haven’t had time to do anything. These special days lose their specialness if one is alone. It needs two to create a myth, even that of the quarter-century.
This last month I have started to write a new form of poetry. Very sparse, taut, old words, phrases, precise, correct, with occasional very small bursts of rhyme and music. Mallarmé was right about the vast importance of spacing, the salience. Economy and salience. Now I must find a suitable prose style. Voltaire, Swift. In painting I am going the same way, against prolixity, gamuts of colour. All this is a weeding-out of the inherent sentiment, the fat, the padding, in me.
1 April
G. How soon I can forget her. In a fortnight I can almost forget to need her. I feel very little excitement at her coming back. I like the being unattached, solitary, unhappy but ambitious. I don’t believe I could be capable of marital fidelity with G. Today I met a very pretty girl, the daughter of one of the biggest bank managers here. Curiously enough she has made me think a lot of G, and always unfavourably. She sent me a birthday card on the 31st – kind of her. But what a terrible card. Silly without being silly enough to be amusing. Yet if she had the looks of the banker’s daughter, I believe I could forgive her anything. Beauty covets beaucoup. At the most cynical, a reserve tank.
The OUDS. I had to take some of them out to lunch. How they bored me – the bright young things of Oxford. Still bright, still young. An odious little grammar-school boy, David Thomson, posturing, bespectacled, puky. In describing a production he used the word ‘Helpmann-esque’ three times, tilting back on his chair, and glancing sideways to see if it had registered. A tall, fat girl, inclined to wobble with laughter, full of slang, actor’s shop. A Jew, young and strong and smooth. Out of environments I have quitted. They seemed appreciably behind. Tony Richardson, the producer here, is tall and nervous and excitable, rather like an overgrown child in many ways. Not artificial. A weak mouth and face, but intelligent, attractive eyes.fn21 Simon Lee, a slim, energetic, but rather feather-brained régisseur. I like him. Rather quick-silvery, temperamental, changeable, naïf and childish, enthusiastic. He seems to know a lot of people. Talks all the time. Somehow I don’t altogether trust him. Engaging, not viciously dishonest, but untrustworthy by lack of concentration.
The electrician’s mate is a scruffy young man, always dirty and badly dressed. Exceedingly uncouth, always talking electricity and lighting technique. A mouth with prominent teeth and lips, like a rabbit’s. I was rather surprised to learn that he was Lord Roseberry’s second son. Viscount Primrose. He has an expensive new car here, in which he transported all the electrical gear from England. But anybody so outrageously reacted from his rank would be difficult to imagine.
I went with them to another theatre – in the Jesuit college – to try and find a dimmer for their lights. We arrived in the middle of a Passion Play. While we were arguing backstage, Jesus Christ came off and was presented as such. We were busy arguing and only nodded at him, whence some divine disfavour. He went off in his wig and his nightgown in a huff.
Afterwards, made chase after the dimmer, trying to find the director of the theatre at Poitiers. I went to about twelve different addresses and at length ran him to ground in the Garde du Commerce. No dimmer. But his name, Brémont, and the French for dimmer, la rhéostat, are surely graven for eternity on my heart.
3 April
Windfall. After being confined to Poitiers for financial reasons during the holidays, I found that my pay-check today had jumped 7,000. And later, that I was owed a retrospective 28,000 for the last few months. What jubilance a little money gives. I immediately bought the Poésies complètes of Valéry.
Also I went to see about my future (as if the future was a thing to go and see about). As always, my saleability is reduced to nothing after a few practical questions. All I have is good French. But at this bureau at least, the man, Marion, was pleasant and sympathetic. Not like the efficient and impatient John Tanner of Oxford. You can’t kick people about like a football. Marion promised to introduce me to a grand commerçant de vins. I now see myself agent for a cognac firm. I wouldn’t mind that. OUDS still here. The things they want. A living parrot, two pairs of midwife’s forceps, a wicker fruit-basket. In many ways I enjoy seeing them for this short time. It is a kind of re-entry into the idiom of another existence. Continually saying the unusual and the outrageous. Among the non-Oxfordians that seems affected. With them one ‘knows the form’.
The OUDS play Webster’s Duchess of Malfi in the medieval Palais de Justice. Very spectacular – the robes against the stone, the darkness of movement. An obscure, morbid play. Some of it is melodrama, but the language is always more elevated. The production was rather precocious, ebullient, almost too clever. But it is much better than the normal professional touring company in France. I thought that Ferdinand, Hugh Rickson, and the Cardinal, Nigel Davenport, were the most accomplished.
6 April
G. A curious effect of the Oxford visit has been to put her in perspective. All her provincialisms. Now I dislike her for the very things which pleased me – lack of elegance, the black humour of the meridional, Provençal accent. What irritates me is her constant petty jealousy about other girls. Allusions to them, and the most acrid criticism when she thinks I don’t mind. She wants us to be boxed away from the rest of the world. The me-or-them attitude. I can’t stand that, and her lack of urbanity. Physically she begins to disinterest me. Rather, I feel cloyed, stifled. And she dresses badly.
We spent the whole of one evening walking about the backstreets arguing. I was bored and cold and in the end started alternately soothing and provoking her. Her attitude was one of anger at having to follow me. ‘If you think you can leave me (i.e., for a day when the OUDS were here) and then have me follow you again just when you want’ … and so on, ad infinitum, ludicrously. It seemed to me all such a waste of time, childish, nagging and bickering about nothings.
Part of the secret of sympathy is to know when to drop the mask. We both wear a mask of irony, and we never let it fall at the same time. The art of timing is essential in marriage. To know when to undress, morally and physically. It is an art G lacks altogether. She expects to be chased in her black moods, all the way. If only she could get the idea of so far, but not all the way. One reaches a point where the chase ceases to be worthwhile. And where cajoling won’t get the gun off its rack.
12 April
Feeling of guilt at my work here. To one of the lectures I am meant to give this term, no one came. I have only a handful of people at the conversation groups. In spite of my cynicism I feel ostracized, slighted. It annoyed me that Léaud had to advertise my lectures as his own. I am much too ego-centred to be a good educator.
15 April
A tour of some Loire châteaux. A lovely spring day, warm and fresh at the same time, without clouds. The charabanc was full of foreign students, mostly English girls, Americans. G came with me. The English girls sang almost without stop from the moment we left to the moment we came home.
I don’t like tourism. My appetite for beauty is like that for food; it soon gets blunted. Perhaps that is why I can’t do sustained creative work. Also the blunted appetite acts as a splendid selection committee. By the time we got to Azay, only the very best was good enough to make me look twice. In that I find an argument for creating against my disinclination, but I am not sure that the analogy is constant.
That night a cavalcade. All the town en gala. A procession of many bands, normally of boys and appallingly bad, with various tableaux, mummers. Poor in quality, but rich in spirit. Poitiers is so bare of entertainment that people are almost pathetically willing to laugh and clap at the most amateurish of antics.
Later with G, on one of our nocturnal walks. We dived down a dark deserted alley, and started to caress and clutch. The other day she let me caress all of her legs and eventually all of her. She kept on repeating, ‘Tu n’as pas le droit,’ but she was unable to resist. In the dark alley I lifted her skirt and started to caress her again. That is something animal, a reversion, which I can’t prevent. A complete contrast from my normal life, all my education, from being a gentleman or an Englishman. Later, in the bright moonlight, leaning on a wall beside the river, we talked for an hour or more about ourselves, skirting marriage. We have come to the crossroads. Either we drift apart or we sleep together. Spring and the full moon and our bodies torture us. A nightingale sun in the distance. I would sleep with her if she gave me the chance. But I don’t want to forge a bond which would be unbreakable. Sleeping together is bound to create fears, obligations. About a wife I am ambitious. And yet sometimes G seems perfect. A bed-partner and a comrade and French, and with whom I can discuss anything. I think that if I had the money I should marry her, and dispense with my ambitions. For they are only temporal, of the flesh, and at some point I must settle on those of immortality.
2 May
G. Things are getting impossible. We alternate between fits of intimate tenderness and physical desire, and periods of tension, disgust and bad temper. All yesterday we were together, happy, warm. She had tea with me, we lay on the bed together, read some of my Disjoints from Collioure.fn22 Afterwards we went to the cinema, to see an Ophüls film. We walked home in the pouring rain. The drops spattering on the umbrella, her arm on mine, close, warm. A day with a kind of soft glow.
Then at lunch, she suddenly got up and left, and afterwards she wasn’t in either of the usual cafés.
This time it was all my fault. At table I spoke all the time with Philip, and suddenly she stood up and left. I’d been brusque, and she’d asked about my morning, and I didn’t ask about hers. And then I gave a book I’d promised her to another person. For me one of the proofs of intimacy is that you can be silent, that you can seem to be elsewhere, talking with other people, but the fact that you are side by side is enough, and you know that everything else is exterior.
I was wrong about the book. I ought to have followed her quickly out, but I was slow to react. Or rather slow to analyse my own guilt.
Then there is the French. It is so difficult being delicate, when each phrase has to be planned, constructed.
It makes me feel miserable. There is a sort of joy in it, though. A dryness.
I am an egoist. She says I only love her, caress her, for my own pleasure. That is almost true. I feel no external devotion. Yet I don’t know if this La Rochefoucauld cynicism is real or relative.fn23 Do other people analyse themselves like me, harshly?
Even the harshness of my cynicism and self-nihilism is a sort of affectation.
Always my aesthetic sense troubles me. It intrudes and dominates all departments of my thought, my dreams, my actions. G isn’t beautiful enough. I am worth more than that. She doesn’t like music. Has little knowledge of art. Doesn’t dress well. Is temperamental, assertive (She says ‘Ce qu’il te faut, c’est une caniche.’ That’s true. Because I’ve been so unloved, I want to be truly loved, even my faults). She refuses to accept the inferior role of woman. She argues the toss. The wise woman doesn’t give a damn about the toss. She knows it doesn’t really matter.
But she’s pleasant, solid, warm, affectionate, stable; vulgarity almost becomes a virtue in her. She’d be a pillar.
But can I accept the chains? There is also the question of cutting one’s losses. But I can afford to wait.
Even if I wanted to, I have no money, no position, no hope except nebulous.
What she hates is the way I change from private hot to public cold. For me the public is something to guard against. When I find privacy, I treat it as such and do what I like. She never believed Englishmen could be so warm in their caresses. To her it must seem like a kind of dishonesty, this duality. A hypocrisy.
But for me it is more natural to be cold in public than warm in private. That is the fault of my temperament and upbringing.
Added to that, I have an artificial sense of time. Everything seems relative to me. I can be warm with her one day, and cold the next, because that is in the true nature of the occasions. They seem to me unrelated, no proof or guarantee of anything past and present in themselves. I am not so concerned with the general tendencies. I tend to live second by second, or buried in the past.
I know I can’t expect other people not to be hurt or disconcerted. Some days I speak to people, others I walk past them without looking at them. I can’t understand why, myself, except that it seems more natural and more sincere. Perhaps it’s more lazy. Too lazy to make the pretence.
I’m not prepared invariably to oil the ball-bearings. There isn’t much oil in me. I hate giving myself. It’s having a stiff spike, a high opinion of myself, supported on the constantly rendered props of my day-dreams. Yet when I humble myself like that, I admit the effort of humiliation. There is no end to my self-pride. It is very sensitive, easily wounded, easily discouraged, but there is no end to it.
I suppose it is something to be aware of.
I keep on having periods now when I can’t write. And I have a desire to throw it all up, to go and carve out a financial career, become rich if I can, and taste all the arts. To spend the rest of my life being a factor, instead of trying to create new tastes. The truth is, I am tired of being the future artist.
I am beginning to live in a marital state of mind. I spend a very great deal of my time trying to decide whether I want to marry G or not. I don’t know if it is a problem which should be decided in my subjective states of affection – when we are close, surrounded by loneliness – or in my objective coolness. At a dance last night I couldn’t help thinking how many more girls were prettier than her. Partly that is staleness, a reaction. But with how many of them could I achieve anywhere near as interesting a state of mental intimacy – camaraderie?
I had my haircut today. Seeing my face in a barber’s mirror always has the same effect on me. I get an inferiority complex about my looks. I seem heavy and stolid and very ugly. And I think I’m lucky to have her at all. If we married, it would be an April marriage – showers and bursts of sunshine. As long as the showers wouldn’t develop into a constant storm.
Preoccupied with new thoughts about my creation – I want to begin with a more or less fixed general attitude.
It seems to me Kafka and Camus mark a boundary. They have cut through to the bone, laid bare the one truth. The absurdity and hopelessness of things. The end of immortality. Whatever we do is only temporary. The only sort of ‘afterlife’ that could exist is on the time-space level – a repetition of the life in which we seem conscious. In fact even after death we can’t escape from the limitations of the life we seem to have lived.
With this lack of hope, accepting the wretchedness of the position, all we can do is to try and make things less wretched. That comes under the term ‘espoir’.
In other words we choose ‘art for the Weltanschauung’s sake’ – it is evident that the world and life are philosophically futile. The point is established.
Now, art to amuse, and art to relieve. That is in the realm of the fantastic and the romantic, the beautiful, the strange.
But each of these new ‘espoir’ creations is an apostrophe – i.e. ‘the world is futile, but …’ In other attempts no effort at denying the full horror. Torches in a black cave. The cave is not dismissible. It exists behind and beyond all torches.
12 May
Wasting my time here. I ought to be writing frantically. But instead, it is spasmodically. I have virtually no pupils; not more than a dozen a week except at the one big lecture.
Whirling with ideas and themes, but never getting anything done.
I spent four hours one evening sitting under a wall by the river, where there is a small park, making love to G. She let me caress all her body. All rather wild, feverish, pointless. On the damp, cold grass, with the trains rattling over the nearby railway bridge, and the new moon sinking out of sight. We discussed marriage at the end, after midnight, cramped and exhausted and frozen.
I shall never have any money. If I leave G for a month, I shall have the desire to marry her. If only writing was just a matter of work, routine. If I don’t want to write, I can’t. If I force myself, I only have to destroy what is written.
I shall have to get a job school-teaching, and hope for the best. But expecting the worse.
At twenty-five I have created nothing that I can venture to publish. All of it is derivative, or faulty in technique or conception. I don’t know what I want to be. Nor can I be individual, reconcile all the diverse ambitions that I feel. And the tide is creeping, inexorably. Soon I shall have no money, and shall be forced to find work. Everything I create I move away from, often in the very moment of creation. It is illogical that I should have such an unshakeable optimism about the future.
How slowly experience moves. To have to wait so long to be moulded.
19 May
Sometimes my ideals turn round and bite me. After dinner G and I went down to Poitiers Plage, a riverside biergarten, hired a rowing-skiff, went down the river. She wore an ugly pair of openwork shoes, which clacked as she walked. But the river was peaceful, green, slow, running through fresh gardens. A still, blue evening, fresh and lush. We sat in the biergarten afterwards. It was cool, dark, with a full moon rising, and we the only people there. Then we went to Blossac park, where there is a fair. Hundreds of people, trade stands. All that crushed me, and her terrible streetwalker’s shoes. There was an open-air revue, third-rate local artists, people standing and gaping, mediocrity surrounding mediocrity.
As we left, I saw the full moon caught in the top of a tree; and started to feel desperate, frustrated, determined to sulk. All the shabby stalls – the illuminations and the waste paper and the spent air of the fair, the shoddiness. Her shoddy shoes. Poor girl, not her fault.
And then I bought nougat I didn’t want at an outrageous price at a flashy stall. Avarice came into it. We clacked home under a clear indigo sky, moon-washed, with bright stars in the gaps between the houses.
She started to ask me what was wrong. I can’t stand it. And when she takes my arm, just at that wrong moment. And the clack-clack-clack. And all I want to do is to stand on an immense hill, miles from any city, get out there among the stars, away and away and away. Anything away from the present.
G had to suffer. When I think that they clack because she puts iron tips on the heels to economize in leather.
Afterwards she said, ‘It’s just like a poet, an attitude. Artificial.’
But that only adds to my external mute fury. Of course it’s artificial. I have no rational reason to dislike her shoes.
This was an aesthetic disgust with my situation here. It came almost as abruptly as an attack of nausea.
The lid rattling on the kettle.
June
Lunch at the Jesuit college.
The lector read his piece at a fantastic rate, spurting at the end into meaninglessness. I was shocked by the immediate laughter and outbreak of conversation. He himself smiled as he came down from the lectern. It was Friday, and so fish. But strawberries, and two sorts of wine.
I was shocked to see the boys smoking. And the easy way they talked to the fathers.
Two of the fathers joking together like schoolboys.
It is an enormous building, with a charming park beside the river.
All the time I am there, I am conscious of being prejudiced against them; all the anti-Catholic nonsense of a Protestant upbringing; and I feel like an explorer, daring and rewarded, to be among them. Even though I know I am being what I despise – excessively English.
Robert Bresson, Journal d’un curé de campagne.fn24 A remarkable film. Quite inordinately gloomy. Not a magnificent despair, but a study in depression. No gaiety, no relief, very slow developments, with many things only half said. Kafka, Pascal and the early Russian cinema. The profoundly miserable face of the young priest is unforgettable – but the way it is played, one can’t help wondering if it isn’t miserabilism and masochism that keeps him (and many martyrs) going. Such complete and all-pervading seriousness and agony is not natural. People could not imaginably be so penetrated with dolour. This is an extreme case, a psychological misfit. The treatment is of a high order, without being very original in anything except the silences on the soundtrack. I don’t think I have ever seen people leave a cinema so silently. Essentially a Catholic film.
The film was introduced by a Dominican father, who gave a kind of pulpit commentary. In the style so dear to the culture of the French provinces, interminably and conventionally describing what is already known and evident. But he looked magnificent in his cream-white robes against a sage-green curtain. There were murmurs, yawns, but on the whole people listened to him. Poitiers is one of the few towns where that can still happen.
G and I are continually falling out nowadays, under the shadow of the inevitable separation in a fortnight’s time.
The other day I explained that I did not think I was capable of completely loving any woman, but I could love several as I now love G. I could indeed love some women more than her. But never completely. The reason I gave was that I loved myself, above all my future, uncreated self, too much ever to be able to give myself completely. I explained egoism was not a quality I enjoyed having; it’s not easy to be uniquely one thing, when I can imagine most of the other things.
With G I love her sufficiently to marry her tomorrow, if I had the money. But I shan’t have the money for several years. In that interval she can become petrified for me, and I can meet another with whom I find and reach the requisite warmth and sympathy. I know that this impossibility of complete love in me means that I depend on time. I couldn’t love G absent. The only possibility is that in two years’ time I am still alone, and she is still alone, and we could begin again where we left off.
The strongest part of me is the part I never divulge; a mixture of the ego of my ambitions and my best capability, ruthlessly determined to achieve its own fulfilment. The device, ‘Forget the past and achieve the future.’ I ought never to marry, but I shall.
Two days ago she kept on crying. She said, ‘There’s nothing to be done about it, I love you more than you love me.’ I didn’t pretend that that wasn’t so, although I explained that the fault in me was inherent, general, and not particular, and love is one of the things where the will plays no part. A willed, insincere love in inviting ruin between two sensitive people like ourselves. Artificiality shows up at once. We have Geiger counters, tap the wheels continually.
She said, ‘It makes me almost believe in God. It’s the exact reverse of Paris.’ (She had become unofficially engaged with a young law student, but broke it off – from her side.) ‘I never understood till now what he suffered.’
I felt guilty, unhappy, tried to console her. But even in that I was only eighty per cent involved. In any contact with the external world, I am only partly involved. And the highest that part can be is around the level I am with G. Always the rest of me withholds and watches.
Schizophrenia. Or priggishness of an esoteric kind?
8 June
G. My profound hypocrisy with her. Psychologically I play her like a tired ball, experimenting, risking, showing off. Because now I am beginning to plan and formulate a nouvelle about her, or around her, I treat her more as the character in the novel than as her real self. The novel necessitates a ‘sad’ end – an end of separation, that is, which presents no sadness to me (sadness is a romantic hypocrisy) – and so I prepare and indulge in melancholy for our departure. She ought to blow me up with dynamite. I feel myself a monster, because now, when we are together, we are no longer (for me) real, but characters in an unwritten novel. I am beginning to realize that I have become faintly detached from real life, in my efforts to observe it objectively, to solve it. I don’t believe I wish to regain terra firma; and the drift in this sea of complex self-analysis is away from the terrestrial contact, the sincere and unquestioning, the blindly giving relationship with my fellow-man or woman.
She says, ‘I wish I had never met you. If only I had known all the suffering I should have.’ I answered every experience is valuable. She: ‘But what is the point, when it all ends in the néant, this irrevocable separation?’ You can deny the point of life, and defend suicide, by the same reasoning. The néant will come. It is what one can do in the waiting which counts.
But I understand the vast difference between us. Continuing the metaphor above, she is still on land, in experience, suffering or joyous. I suffer and enjoy as well, but also I am at sea, can see the suffering and joy, the passing show.
I said to her, ‘You must try and forget me. But I don’t need to forget you. For me you will be past experience.’ What I meant was that the artistic, seaborne me was outside terrestrial suffering. This duality, schizophrenia, is a sort of benediction. I have, and she has not, grace. In as much as one can be romantic and proud about such things, it is the exalted privilege of the poet-artist. The seer.
Difference between an artist and a non-artist. For the latter human beings and their relationships are sharply defined, positive, one-dimensional. For me they are full of transparencies and opacities, hypocrisies, mysteries. All this complicated by the sensitivity of my own reflecting apparatus, and its multiple reactions; its capacity for inviting hypotheses, for transposing into the artistic and fictitious world.
15 June
G. She never asks for anything; conversely always has to be wheedled. Her parents are anti-clerical, and she was never baptized even. I believe prayer is a valuable habit to form in a child. The habit of asking. Absolute independence would drive charity out of the world. Most of the softest moments are moments of giving, and to give one has to ask and be asked. B. W. Brealey resembles her in this; but it is a quality more proper to a man.
The other day she was almost bitterly sarcastic when I said I called the Jesuit priests ‘Father’. It only seems polite to me. I don’t believe in the army, but I should address an officer by his rank. The respect due to parallel worlds.
Today she questioned whether there was any point in our writing to each other when we parted. I said it seemed more natural. She answered, ‘Your letters are always so elaborate, récherchées. You write as if there had never been anything between us.’ That is true. I hate subjective emotion on paper, especially shared paper. My parents made me believe that all emotion is bad taste. And my education. But they were right. Except that they went too far. Emotion exists and must be let out. But in private (here), or objectively, or transiently. In everyday unrecorded contacts. It is not a thing to read, to transmit by letter.
But the real reason is her bitterness about the parting. Increasingly she is bitter, critical of me. She said, ‘What is the use of writing when we are parting for ever?’ I answered, ‘To soften the death.’ She cynically affects a sharp cut; but I think she will change her mind.
She: ‘I don’t see any point in writing.’ I: ‘In that case, although I am quite willing to write, I will wait for a letter from you.’ She (emphatically): ‘I never write first.’ Feminine cul-de-sac.
17 June
Last day with G. For the first time in some weeks we were ‘together’. All the afternoon in my room, a sandwich in a café, and then a stroll to Blossac. There we sat under a heavy grey sky, mute. There seemed nothing to say. I tried to make out that it was not definitive. She told me not to be hypocritical. I had to be frank; I think there is only a faint possibility that we shall meet again. I was pervaded with a soft not unpleasant melancholy. I look forward to liberty. The solitude will follow.
Later, we went to the Sully nightclub. Then down to the little park by the river. Home. I didn’t know what to say when we said goodnight. In that situation ‘never again’ was not conceivable. I think I laughed. It seems impossible that the torture could be broken.
Separation as imaginable as death.
End of an epoch.
Written 2.30 in the morning. I suddenly regret not having taken her, kept her, married her.
I have a train to catch in three hours’ time. En route for Brittany. It’s when I come back that the hell will come.
5 o’clock. Heavy rain. Grey limbo. Partition.
Brittany.
A long journey up, many changes, undistinguished country. And I had terrible hay fever, was tired, still stunned by the separation.
Also appalled by a meanness which I perpetrated yesterday. I felt that I had to give her a present. But I left it until the last moment, undecided. Just before the shops closed on Saturday I bought the Confessions of Rousseau in an exquisite edition. That night, before going to bed, I read some extracts, was magnetized. The next day I kept on putting off the presentation until there came a time when I knew that I was not going to make it. Partly it was because I knew she was not going to give me anything; I found an opportunity to look in her bag and make sure of that; and therefore I was afraid of making her conscious of deficiency. And I knew she had no money. Such sensitivity is probably ridiculous. I think we were both the same, not wishing to give and not receive, not from any bare or selfish reason, but because of the tender and mysterious embarrassment which pervades all last moments.
One day I hope I shall find out.
I think of G almost continually. Every pleasurable moment, I imagine it shared; every woman I compare to her. With the English the result is terrible.
Objectivity with the family. We met with the utmost lack of demonstration, as if I had just been away for a night, instead of eight months. All the convention is trivial, mundane, quotidien.
I have a hatred of saying what I do not sincerely. Speaking to destroy silence is a vandalism beyond my powers of self-control. What the English lack is the spirit of exaggeration, of ‘astuces’, teasing, attacking, being ironic.
Mont St Michel. Maggot-struck. Completely spoilt by the commerce of souvenirs, of money-grabbing merchants. I was furious at the prices. F has a Panglossian attitude to everything; determined to make the best. He found everything cheap, fine quality. Driven into opposition, and by nature, I criticized everything. But there were times when I curse the objectivity, the eternal attitude of criticism. When I should like to simulate the enthusiasm, the insincere pleasure. But the moment I start acting, I criticize that, and shame myself into silence.
Mont St M is best from a distance, like Carcasonne. The magic diminishes as one approaches. The Abbey is still wonderful, especially the cloisters, and the Gothic interiors.
But all those people trailing round after the guide, what does it mean to them? I think nothing. A name to be ticked off. As for architectural periods, the spirit of an age even in its architecture …
The evening platitudes in the hotel drawing-room … stifling … and the sad, weary downfall of the English middle-class stress. What they all speak is common ground – rationing, dogs, children, illnesses. All departures away from common ground dwindle into silence. The cause is probably insularity, being driven in on each other. The belief in the master race, dear to, and unconfessed by, every Englishman.
Immense desire to sink back into French, tease and be shocking with G. Turning over a plate, seeing ‘Limoges’, knowing what a pang is.fn25
The impossibility of our family unit. Where people are not certain whether Hazel and I are brother and sister, or father and daughter. They live on her level.
F talking in a loud voice one night. ‘I wrote some short stories last winter.’ I was profoundly embarrassed, doubly so when Hazel asked, ‘What did you call them?’ and some other people near by smiled.
Return to Poitiers, a grey, wet, cold morning. The room, memories, a sad little letter from her.
J’attends mes parents Dimanche, et je suis presque contente de quitter Poitiers, j’ai veçu quelques journées horribles; n’avoir rien à faire, et surtout n’avoir envie de ne rien faire; rester impossible à l’A.G. sous les regards ironiques ou apitoyés, éviter les endroits où nous allions parce que tout en’y parle de toi; bref, me sentir dans le plus total isolement, tout cela n’est pas très drôle.fn26
The wireless was set where it had been the last day we had been together. There was a packet of books I had left.
For once I feel miserably in want of something.
Thinking of the nature of the final speech I would write for a tragedy of Socrates, I started to cry. Without formulating the words, or even the thoughts. But of the intensity and poignancy of them.
6 July
Sudden violent faintness in my room. I nearly fell to the ground. A Jesuit father was there, arranging for me to take examinations with his pupils. I had to push him almost out of the room, and then collapsed on a chair. He must have thought me extraordinary; strange how animals seek solitude for their sickness. Three hours afterward I still feel faint, fuzzy, with a growing pain in my back, which means either jaundice or a chill.
I have never fainted in my life; but I have never been so near to doing so as I was this afternoon. I missed dinner. Now I am beginning to start a fever. It gave me a sharp shock, because so unexpected. Just as I am highly sensitive to life, so am I to death. In a few minutes I was plunged in an acute and black depression. My imagination foresaw all sorts of possibilities, a sudden death, a long one, hospital, funerals, my parents coming from England, Ginette. And over all the bitter feeling that I had not fulfilled anything; not only not, but nowhere near it.
I cannot see a photograph of myself and imagine myself not there to see it. The fear of death condenses the past. I remember the moment when I left all that seemed to be expected from a head of a school, a Marine officer, and started to hack my way out, sideways, to heights I couldn’t then see for the jungle. All the false tracks, mistakes, naïvetés, discoveries, resolutions – where I still am, but also beginning to see the heights. I must have disappointed my father terribly. What he wants is a good job, security, a future; and all I want are chimeras.
This year I have grown. Solitude – in exile geographically and socially – is essential for me. Everyone does in Rome what the Romans do, and I should be contaminated. People ask me what I do here now that the university is finished. I say ‘read’, or occasionally ‘write’. And I know what they think – that slow, aloof person is too stolid to have any hope as an artist. But I am proud of what I am. The pmassive attitude is the only attitude today.fn27
I had planned to meet Ginette at Bellac next Wednesday,fn28 and now I know the irony of all anticipation. Always before journeys which are important, I am ill. But this time it is different. I shall be ill on Wednesday. On Friday she goes away on holiday, and there will be no more chances. Thank God for her. If one can inspire love in only one person, it is consolation. Consolation which I need, since my parents have left me, long ago.
All this week I have been thinking of Spitsbergen.fn29 It has been hot, dry here. I have thought of birds, flowers, summer in snow. Above all, solitude. I have constantly imagined myself going there, living a life of pure solitude and happiness. I need a place with a magnificent desolation, out of this world. A presentiment of something which, now, frightens me.
If I died. I think of all the arrangements. I should like all my books to go to Ginette. They are all I have. Souvenirs to the few friends who remain – even they seem remote. Perhaps something would be dragged out of all the papers, projects; I can hardly write, think, drugged with sleep.
8 July
Restored, a little shaken, and weak, to life. The doctor diagnoses a mild sunstroke. Rousseau – Je puis bien dire que je ne commençais de vivre que quand je me regardais comme un homme mort.fn30 Confessions, p. 225. He had far more reason than I have to think himself dead. Although an increased awareness, inclusiveness, means an increased awareness of death.
10 July
I went to Bellac to meet Ginette. Two hours across the gentle, wooded Poitou and Limousin country, in hot July sunshine, to a sleepy town on the crown of a large hill, and far away, a blue ripple of hills like Dartmoor, the Monts de Blond, attractively and atmospherically distant over a rumpled carpet of wooded hills in between.
The pleasure of seeing her again was great. Affectionately, I call her sometimes ‘une caniche’; and the pleasure I had was a magnified version of the pleasure one has of seeing a pet dog, the reassurance that one can still command a unique esteem. I do not see that I should despise a doglike affection because I am incapable of it myself, too méfiant. In point of fact, I would like to achieve it.
An interminable journey back home in a train omnibus. In my carriage was a woman of fifty or sixty, in mourning-dress. She kept on nervously hitching up her dress and revealing her knee. If she hadn’t been so old and so ugly, I should have said she was making advances. But I believe it was because she was wearing black nylons for the first time, and she hadn’t got over the novelty.
11 July
Tour de France. It came through Poitiers today, a caravan of lorries, jeeps, motorcycles two or three hours long. Almost every product was advertised. The whole town turned out to watch. The cyclists were almost an anti-climax when they came. In a brilliant, febrile flurry, all in one minute or two. Bright-coloured jerseys and shimmering wheels. People clapped but there was very little cheering.
20 August
Yesterday, a Sunday, I returned from a fortnight’s holiday in Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol and Bavaria. I went expecting to be disappointed, and was completely enchanted. Yesterday evening was like the abrupt cessation of a music in which I had been completely lost, and I felt sadder about a separation than I have felt for many years. Only two occasions equal it. When I was very young, and fell in love with a girl in Norfolk. I was thirteen or fourteen, and can still remember sitting in my bedroom at 63 Fillebrooke Avenue with an intolerable – because it seemed at that age irrational and inexpressible – melancholy in my heart. When I left Aix-en-Provence, and sat all night in the train from Marseilles to Paris aching with the movement away.fn31 I wrote a poem which at least was sincere, if otherwise bad. In that case it was a kind of multiple love which was broken – a love for Provence, for the South and all its physical and psychological implications, and a vague love for all the girls with whom I had inexpertly flirted – they had remained simply camarades. But in my imagination a tender kind of camarade, and they were unusually beautiful. In both cases the conditions were the same – a new landscape, an unfulfilled and vague sexual love, a brief, harshly terminated period.
A kind of corporate, inclusive love. All the others in the group were from Thouars or Poitou; most of them had known each other from childhood. They were more like a family than a group of young people. The average age must have been about nineteen; I was one of the oldest there. Psychologically I was, or could be, younger. Before I went, the only person I knew was André Brosset. He was the very antithesis of the general spirit of the group. The freshness and the gaiety, the simplicity and the sentimentality, the spontaneity. From time to time there was a kind of sparkling surge which lifted us all into a kind of momentarily eternal youth. There was always the shadow of time, the movement of the charabanc. But that only stressed one of the great truths – that all which is eternal lacks poignancy. As a holiday, the conditions were variable, there was bad weather, bad camping conditions, faults in the organization. In retrospect they seem only a series of minor obstacles immediately conquered by the exuberant happiness and homogeneity of the group.
Life in a charabanc is like the life in a ship. You are inescapably together, a body of individuals. A kind of vehicle for psychological analysis, a magnifying-glass. All the faults and the virtues, the charms and the uglinesses, are enlarged, revealed. Whether the mixture is good or bad, you are in the mixture, and partake of it. The mixture here was like a grapy wine, fresh and heady.
The group was divided (by the jeunes) into vieux and jeunes. All the freshness and the enchantment lay with the latter. Monique Baudouin, the youngest and most exuberant, with a strange rhythm of bubbling dynamism, flashes of enfant terrible and a Betty Hutton, and completely collapsed repose; a voice like alcohol, hoarse, husky, continually breaking; a genius for singing in discords, for the deliberate gaffe, for the timing of her bricks and bons mots; dark, alive eyes, a mischievous smile, pigtails tied in string, a round, tanned face, round-cheeked, beaming, faintly Red Indian, but essentially Latin. French. On the brink of womanhood, and beneath all the fun, she had a kind of provincial innocent simplicity which I found very charming. I think she was probably the most intelligent girl there. She had a way of pretending to be shocked by gauloiseries which was more subtly gaulois than the gauloiserie itself. Saying ‘Dégoûtant personnage’ several times when someone was telling stories, and pretending to block her ears. Her love of rich cakes; to see her eating a cream cake was the image of all carnal desire. A special kind of shyly excited, tremulous smile, half delight and half fear, when she had said something exceptionally terrible. Perhaps the most attractive variety of woman, the wit and the tomboy, but always the woman. I can’t imagine anyone resisting for long that raucous, uninhibited voice, jumping from tenderness to burlesque, from discord to harmony, soprano to contralto, but always vigorously individual. And all that in a schoolgirl. The result of a freer, more generous, more carnal, perhaps more decadent society than that of England. In a way Monique represents a large part of what foreigners love in France.
The others were less striking, but all with the unexpected grace and freshness. Titi, la sylphide camuse, supple, athletic, modern, in pale-blue, three-quarters-length canvas trousers. With a wide indulgent mouth, and the strange pug-nose. Nanni Baraton, with a Mater Dolorosa face, dark eyes, and a kind of inner melancholy; rather silent and aloof, with a kind of studied grace when she danced; magnificent black hair, reaching down her back, tied with red ribbon; a way of casting her eyes down in modesty. A beautiful figure, small waist, wide hips, full breasts and a large head. But in an old-fashioned way; not the narrow, sophisticated beauty of today. Armèle, faintly Jewish, very soft and gentle and peaceful, quietly eating cakes and listening to the others. She was engaged to Nanni’s brother, Jean-Paul. Brigitte, fille du peuple, exuberant, but faintly coarse, and with already blousy good looks. Faintly tired, a perpetual air of the morning after. Françoise Brosset, sharp, intelligent, a shrew. Françoise de Bordeaux, plump and blonde, with a strident meridional accent which convulsed everyone every time she spoke. A tubby, kind face, always smiling, faintly tomboy, full of life. Her Nordic appearance and her accent were violently incongruous. Jacqueline, who ran all her words together in a kind of lazy current, with short black curly hair, a faintly porcine face (not ugly), and black trousers. Josette, a poule in embryo, pert, sharp-breasted, trim and continually occupied with her toilette, with her effect. Very young, but already sophisticated in a shallow, superficial way; the demi-mondaine in miniature; a kind of sulky, libidinous quality. I can be bought, but only at a price: corrupt. Yvette, her pretty, anaemic friend, faint, pale, dainty, weak, without intelligence or will, an ephemeral clinger.
The older girls were less attractive – Claudine ‘Coco’ Baraton, with heavy eyes and the rather weary look of a bloodhound, but full of energy, small and very strong. She was in a sense the foster-mother of the jeunes, their choir-mistress and maîtresse de ballet. Colette, a faded blonde with sad face, always singing, plunged in the community, wherever there was life, conversation. A kind of leech, trying to destroy some sadness of her own life. Probably because she had missed love. She was perhaps twenty-eight years old, and sucked the youth of les jeunes. Apparently she was very beautiful when she was young. But she lacked femininity, was a kind of Nordic lesbian woman lost in a climate of normal love. Generous, anxious to help, to give, to join in – a sort of spiritual Girl Guide, and I, like most individualists, hate that spirit. Marinette, ugly, with more money than the others. Marie Challet, without sex. Ginette Poinot, a silent, shy girl, with a beautiful mouth, elegantly curved, and strange transparent grey eyes – a look of faint reproach, of incomprehension, as if she was vaguely expecting to be hurt. Madeleine Narvelle, the parfaite femme d’intérieur – for whom men are things to be fed and tended; as if all life was cooking meals in a doll’s house.
The men. Michel Godichet and Jean-Paul Baraton, two students from Paris, uninteresting to me because they were pleasant and normal. They and André’s brother, Paul, belonged to the jeunes. Paul was a kind of favorite spaniel, lazy but lovable, and caressed by everyone. He had a way of looking sorry which would have got him out of any trouble. I envied him his lack of inhibition, his ease. When I think of my own solitude at that age, I realize how much I lost in having no brother, no sister, no fixed home town, no society in which I was known, no ‘set’. Jacques, un jeune egoiste imberbe.
Les vieux. Jean-Claude Jouteau, a small thin person with a thin moustache, a talent for imitation, and a certain wit. He was the jester of the group, something of a courtier, prepared to be cruel in order to be amusing. He was dishonest in his personal relationships. He always said something calculated to please the person to whom he was talking, a kind of ubiquitous hypocrisy. If things went wrong, he always expressed a kind of public indignation, a generous objectivity. I should say Jouteau was impotent; there was something stunted in him. Un renard de La Fontaine, engaging but untrustworthy. Tinard, a tall, ascetic person with a Chinese face, and a large hooked nose. An eccentric, but with something of a cultivated eccentricity. He kept on wandering off on his own, disappearing. Rather a precious way of talking; his conversation proceeded by boutades, outrageous statements and ingenious justification. I felt his mind was a kind of complicated labyrinth without much exterior meaning. Laffont, the ass of the group. Without a sense of humour, and with an impossible desire to brag, to be the man of the moment, the experienced campaigner. A kind of amateur Don Juan, caressing the girls whenever he got a chance. He pretended to be an experienced voyager, read the map, gave instructions, advice, ordered people about. The kind of bully who deceives no one. I felt sorry for him; he had a hernia. He kept on twitching his nose sideways, screwing up his mouth, a kind of nervous tic. And he wrote hundreds of postcards, for a reason only too easy to guess. He told us that his mother had given him a list to send, and I can see plainly that his faults are inherited. Coarse and ostentatious. Richard, the sergeant-major of the group; somebody who has never been fully demobilized. In spirit he was a Scotch puritan; an invalid, yet hard, painstaking, finding a pleasure in the difficulties of life. He insisted on a strict schedule, on camping out, on cooking his own meals, on the unpleasant aspect of each situation. A kind of pessimist for pleasure. Hollow-cheeked, dour. Not without a sense of humour, but of the military kind, shouting phrases of German, being wrily ferocious. A deliberate, schoolmasterly way of talking. Slow and suspicious. The only reason that he didn’t show his dislike for me was that the good non-commissioned officer doesn’t have favourites. He was angry that some of us had minor affaires de coeur. Apart from language, I am French and he is peculiarly English. Paul Challet, with whom I shared a tent for most of the trip. I recognized the type at once, the first-class commando. Medium height, honest eyes, simplicity, a sense of humour, unlimited endurance, an ability to live on the edge of existence. He is a speleologist, and for that one must possess a peculiar kind of courage and nervous force. He was naïve, not very cultured, possessed more common-sense than intelligence. I suspect that he must lack imagination. A lack of imagination seems to me an essential quality in a speleologist. He described to me a passage a kilometre below ground where the cave was so narrow that he had been able to move only three yards every fifteen minutes, centimetre by centimetre. The thought of doing that makes me almost sick with horror. And the knowledge that if one loses one’s light, death is virtually certain in a labyrinth of subterranean corridors. He spoke of the magic of finding fantastic caves which no man had ever seen before. Of stalagmites, stalactites, waterfalls; but all that doesn’t seem to me a sufficient recompense. There was about Challet a kind of animal hardness and self-sufficiency, and that automatically precludes sensitivity. None the less, a very likeable, dependable person, the ideal expedition member.
The two chauffeurs, Max and Marco. Marco (Marc Girard) was a kind of clown, brittle and tireless, like a marionette. A fine driver, full of care and concentration; but when he was not driving, full of laughter, continual clowning, an Ariel to the Prospero of André. With large eyes, and well-marked eyebrows, a mobile mouth, and the gestures of the clown. He had a genius for getting things cheap; a kind of engaging dishonesty. Very much the type of the fighter pilot. A mixture of skill and irresponsibility, of risk and authority. I didn’t altogether like him. In a way he is a product of the mechanical age, a cavalier of the machine. I hate machines and their slickness. He had an affair with Josette, and an aristocratic and snobbish remnant in me deplores the fact that a driver can flirt with a passenger. Sometimes he seemed to me to go out of his way to be popular and generous. Perhaps I class that as a fault only because I am incapable of doing it myself. He did a great deal outside his contract to make the trip go well.
André (le Président as he was called) reminds me above all of a bear; of a badger. A massive, reserved creature, sagacious, tolerant, but very well able to maul. A month younger than me, he has already the air of a vieux tigre, heavy, brooding, rumbling. He has the head of a Lloyd-George, a Clemençeau, an Einstein, a Schweitzer – square, ponderous, with a strong jaw and a tight but expressive mouth, heavy eyebrows. Massive, slightly bowed shoulders. The authority he had over the group was astounding. Whenever he spoke he was listened to in silence. He had a talent for public speaking which surprised me, and power of admonition which would be hard to equal. An immensely difficult person to know. Sometimes he refuses to speak. His interest in natural history and the arts corresponds with my own specialities. His taste is shrewder, but not so catholic as mine. And I feel myself far more cosmopolitan, whereas he is rooted strongly in his native lair, although in a sense living in a different world from his brothers and friends. In a way he must seem a freak at Thouars, very little understood. A natural leader, just as Richard’s a natural NCO. I should think his career is politics or philosophy. I think he resembles me in being a dreamer, a drifter. He vegetates. But I find him an impressive, individual character, of an equal stature to mine. I often wish to impress him, which is very rare with me. And if I felt a sentiment of guilt with Ginette, it was because of him.
Ginette Poinot. I had a bizarre affaire with her. She was between the jeunes and the vieilles, a curiously aloof, inscrutable little person, with an enigmatic and slightly ironic smile. She hardly ever spoke. A trim figure, and a pale freckled face, too narrow to be beautiful, but not without charm. She was probably the best-dressed girl there, perhaps because it was the first time she had been camping. It was also the first time she had been abroad, and the first time, I believe, that she had ever left her parents. For some reason she always kept close to me. The others, exuberant and noisy, seemed to frighten and disgust her. She was very timid and inexperienced, and completely without intellect, culture and coquetry. A very pale and remote person. Yet she was warm enough when her reserve broke down. But still she didn’t speak. In spite of spending so much time with her, I really knew nothing about her, except that her parents were strict and that Thouars bored her. She sold furniture in her father’s shop. We slid slowly into a kind of temporary love. I don’t think anyone had ever kissed her seriously before, and she was stunned by the surprise a little, of having accepted a foreigner, and in such a short time.
Perhaps I was at fault. I liked her, was puzzled by her, enjoyed going out with her, kissing her, but I could not stay long beside someone so without conversation. I felt proud at having collected rather a rare flower, at having beaten the other men at the most important of games. When we held hands in the car, I crowed inside like a cock, and laughed at the way the other vieilles incredulously watched us out of the corner of their eyes. The young people were more natural about it.
3 August
We joined the charabanc at Poitiers. A grey, uninteresting day. A girl grinning a welcome at me out of the back of the coach: later I was to know it was Brigitte. I felt out of place in all the noise and the singing and the excitement; and I was surprised by the girls, who were prettier than I expected, and more numerous. We camped at a place not far from Nevers beside a canal. It was cold and damp. André made a speech, which was disciplinary and witty at the same time. I was surprised that he had the talent for that sort of thing; there was a kind of general introduction, each one of us stood up in turn, and all the torches were trained like a spotlight. I hate that sort of public attention. They insisted that I pronounce my name. ‘John Fowles,’ I said. ‘John Fowles,’ they repeated, and went on repeating with a kind of mock sanctity and prolongation of the syllables. All through the voyage it would come back from time to time, and one of the girls would start chanting it, Monique later confessing that she had not slept a wink all night thinking about it. They sang a chorale under the faint stars. There were fireflies in the grass. I kept close to Tinard. We were both a little intimidated by the ebullience of the others. The chorale in the night was like a fountain of fresh water. Eating sardines by torchlight.
I did not sleep much. I had not got used to sleeping under canvas, and in a sleeping-bag; but it was the only night of insomnia I had.
4 August
We travelled all day to the Swiss frontier into country increasingly mountainous and interesting. Into the Jura, forest and rain and moist, deep valleys and mountains out of sight.
I began to notice Ginette Poinot, she was wearing a black ski-suit with green trouser turn-ups, which accentuated the slimness of her figure and her pointed breasts. She was monopolized by Richard, but I could see that he bored her with his earnestness. The Alps appeared in the sunset in the distance, the snow on their upper peaks orange and pink, afire. A splendid ending to the day, which had been rather dull otherwise.
5 August
Geneva in the morning. I shaved in a mountain torrent, and remembered Norway, the Marines, all the past times I had shaved in cold water and in the open air. It is inconvenient, but not without pleasure.
Geneva reminded me rather of Stockholm and Copenhagen, clean and open and sparkling. Swans in the water and gulls in the air, bright gardens and the people strolling in brilliant sunshine. In the distance the dark green barrier of the Jura. We walked out on the mole to the great fountain, a solid white column like a giant obelisk;fn32 the sheets of spray and the rainbows. The cigarette-shops.
We lunched at a little town on the shores of Lac Leman, with Mont Blanc in the distance. Later, Chillon, Montreux, Lausanne. It is all very beautiful, but I dislike the crowds and the element of tourism, and regret the complete and savage isolation of the N. Norwegian fjords. We camped a little before Neuchâtel, in a disagreeable organized camp. In the evening we strolled to a little nearby town with a floodlit castle gateway. Ginette and I separated from the others and she told me a little about herself, nervously.
In the morning, Berne. A town of arcades and coloured statues. We climbed the cathedral tower and admired the distant mountains. The cathedral was ugly. The Swiss and the Swedes have no taste. The transition from Switzerland to Austria accentuates this. There is more architectural beauty in a town like Hall than in the whole of Switzerland. The Lac de Thun, Interlaken. A vulgar town, cosmopolitan, in a magnificent setting. We camped at Brienz. The mountains were steeper, more Norwegian. In Brienz we found a wood-carving shop, full of souvenirs and statuettes, yet there was nothing beautiful there. Some things that must have been exceptionally difficult to carve; but beauty isn’t difficulty.
7 August
I swam in the early morning. It was cold and I didn’t enjoy it. It is a purely conventional pleasure; if you swim in the morning, you must enjoy it. We saw Lucerne under a sullen sky. Alpine swifts round the tower of the wooden bridge. We camped near the Lac de Zug. It was a wet, drizzling evening, with grebes and coots calling in the reeds. Paul and I pitched our tent away from the others. We had dinner all together in a gasthaus. The girls sang, danced, Nanni played the piano, someone brought us wine. When we got back to the camp, the girls went on singing in the rain: indefatigable harmony.
8 August
Zurich in dull weather. We had lunch in a railway buffet. Saucisse de Saint Gaul, white and tasteless. We travelled into Austria, the mountains under cloud, in intermittent rain, yet the car kept happy. Somebody always seemed ready to sing. The little cliques began to sort themselves out, people began to mix, to thaw; a kind of spontaneity, a lack of stiffness, altogether French and so un-English. We wanted to sleep at Feldkirch, but there was no accommodation. At last we found that, in the ballroom of a mountain village. The men slept on stage, behind the curtain, the girls in the auditorium. A flood of jokes. We had supper, there was a German who sang in a romantic high-pitched tenor: ‘Der Tannenbaum’, ‘Die Forelle’, and ‘Lili Marlene’. After supper he – with some friends – and the girls sang alternately. He spoke English a little and a distinct atmosphere of entente cordiale grew between us all. At the end he gave me a highly emotional message to translate into French. I think he was a little disappointed that I only muttered a few syllables; but music says more than words.
Going to bed under a shower of giggles and gallantries. ‘Les Gaulois sont sur la scène.’ Jouteau telling Françoise de Bordeaux not to tickle, fooling with the curtain. I was embarrassed by all the lack of inhibition, but underneath all the words the actions are as innocent as an English vicarage teaparty. Gradually I was thawing out under the charm of les jeunes. A kind of second adolescence, baigné dans la jeunesse.
9 August
Arlberg Pass. Cold and wet, but we saw the mountains. On to Innsbruck in the rain. Once again we camped in a ballroom, but this time it was an outdoor one enclosed in glass. A deluge of astuces. It is strange, the difference in French and English table manners. An Englishman always waits until everyone is served before starting; usually chooses the smallest portion; waits to be asked. The French simply take and eat what they want. Above all, none of the fancy knife-and-fork play.
Hall, a charming old eighteenth-century town, rococo and Mozartian, enclosed in the mountains. Rather like the music of Mozart, supreme elegance in a wild, chaotic world. That evening we saw Tyrolean folk-dancing in a local nightclub, danced ourselves. It is time I learned to waltz. I see Richard has a tendre for Ginette. Out of devilment mainly I make her go home before the others, with me.
10 August
In the evening, we went up by téléferique to a refuge on the Patscherkofel Mountain. A noisy meal in a small dining-room; far below, the lights of Innsbruck. I told card fortunes for the first time in my life, and amused people. I gave Monique two lovers after her marriage, Brigitte a career similar to that of Ninon de Lenclos,fn33 and Laffont a few home truths. We slept in a dormitory, all together, not without an overture of giggles.
11 August
The most memorable day of the trip. We climbed to the top of the Patscherkofel. The weather improved rapidly and we began to have splendid views. We descended the mountain on foot in hot sunshine, Claudine setting a furious pace. One of the best mountain days I can remember spending.
12 August
To Innsbruck. It did not impress me very much as a town, although the Maria Theresa Strasse must be one of the world’s most beautiful streets with the background of mountains and the glimpse of the Goldene Dachl at the end.fn34 In the evening we went to a rather artificial dance programme. I walked back to the camp alone with Ginette. The others take our isolation more or less for granted by now.
14 August
Through the North Tyrol to Germany. Deep wooded valleys, small mountains, and in one place a chain of brilliant emerald-green jade lakes. The nose of the boat has turned; a certain melancholy set in. Into Germany. Plainly Germany did not lose the war. Things are expensive but plentiful. We camped on the edge of Lake Constance, at Langenargen. Ginette and I went to a floodlit hotel, and drank on the terrace, looking out over the lake inundated with moonlight falling in strange patterns through the infrequent clouds. Somewhere out on the lake there was a boat playing music. We walked slowly home. I did not touch her, although I could feel the current of sympathy coming strongly out of her silence.
15 August
We remained at Langenargen. In the morning I saw two hobbies hawking for insects over the reeds – incredibly swift, agile creatures, turning and twisting like super-charged kestrels. There were also green and common sandpipers. In the afternoon we went out on the lake across to the Swiss shore. I sat for a time beside Nanni. We paddled our feet in the water. I never felt so clearly the freshness of the girls, a kind of springlike and virginal innocence, yet with all the signs of corrupt womanhood already inherent. Nanni is perhaps the most beautiful girl here; for me, a touch of incest. She resembles my mother as a girl. A softness and shyness, a demureness rare in modern times. Nanni jitterbugs well. The effect is strange – the clipped, convulsive movements and the demure graceful gestures. Her dance is the pavane; yet there was something very attractive in the jitterbugging. When the girls looked out over the lake and sang in a kind of pianissimo, there was something wistful, lost in their eyes, which I wanted desperately to but could not capture. The lake was calm; the German boatman described the height of every mountain and the identities of each hamlet, methodically, like a Baedeker. On the way back I talked with a German businessman, very gemütlich and apologetic about the war. He gave me two cigarettes. But that did not conceal the fact that he was nothing but a fat well-to-do businessman from Stuttgart, who had been little troubled by the war.
Later we went swimming; Ginette and I went out in a canoe, and then on a pedalo, along the quiet shores of the lake. In a bathing-costume I could see that she had rather a remarkable figure, very slim and well-made, a ballerina’s figure. I also learned that she was interested in ballet-dancing and the harpsichord. But she had never heard of Scarlatti, and had never seen a ballet. We went to a dance. There were thirteen girls and I was the only man. It was in a distinctly bourgeois hotel. I had on ragged clothes, but managed to work up enough contempt for the Germans to carry them. But I could not dance to the sort of music they were playing, and passed an embarrassing hour or so surrounded by expectant females. I danced once. I walked back with Ginette under a bright moon. I knew that she was waiting to be kissed and, because of that, abstained.
16 August
Through the Black Forest, which disappointed me, to St Blasien, a quiet town with an ugly and enormous dome on its church. We had a cheerful dinner in a crowded gasthaus. I drew cards again. There is only one principle in telling card fortunes – to be as rude as possible and as outrageous.
I stayed on after the others with Ginette; walked back to the camp with her through the deserted town. We went beside a little church stream, and I kissed her. The moon, the running water, the pine-trees, a slight mist. She was without experience, nervous and excited; little sniffs of laughter, as if she was being contemptuous. I asked her what went on in her head; nothing, she said, it’s empty. I believe that was the truth. She had a timid, frightened look all the time, yet she was having what she wanted. Certainly she was not simply afraid of resisting, because she came back for more. Besides, at the first sign of distaste on her part I should have stopped. Contempt frightens me more than anything else in the world. In the night it was very cold.
17 August
To Lake Titi. We rowed out on the lake, held hands. I suppose the hand-caress is old-fashioned, but it has an infinite and subtle variety for people who are still sensitive enough. Freiburg. A beautiful cathedral, with some of the most magnificent glass I have ever seen. We crossed the Rhine, and everyone was sad to be home, and then suddenly gay. Through Colmar to Munster, where we camped in a kind of park and drank a Bodensee wine which was the driest thing I have ever tasted. Ginette and I went into the town. In a café we found a mechanical wonder, a pianola incorporating a violin: a weird and wonderful machine which played violin sonatas and variations with a kind of continuo of rumbling and obscure machinery. Later we wandered through the moonlit park. She was more natural, warmer, but still inarticulate. Incredibly slim; I could almost encircle her waist with my two hands. She lay against me half asleep, a sort of soft contentment on her face.
18 August
Over the Vosges, a perfect morning. They impress me more than the Black Forest. Travelling all the time. A cassis at Dijon. In the evening we spent an hour at Vézelay: one of the loveliest little towns I have ever seen, a single street leading to the magnificent church.fn35 Extraordinary capitals and tympanum. One capital of St Peter waking up from a dream with swollen eyes, and another person beside him smiling slyly. The power of the nave. It has almost as much uplift as the Gothic. André and I climbed to the tower, a fine view over the Morvan, woods and valleys. A countryside to revisit. We camped at Clamecy. At night was a parade aux flambeaux with the pompiers producing some particularly noisy and discordant music. Everyone happy. A brilliant moon. Ginette and I spent a long time lying under a canal bridge. It was cold and uncomfortable, but neither of us wanted to separate. In a way I saw ourselves cast in the roles of the characters in Laclos. The evil marquis and the innocent Cécile.fn36
19 August
Home. I dozed most of the time, everyone was subdued. I dreaded a sentimental goodbye. I gave Ginette a sprig of heather. A few minutes later she presented me, embarrassed, with a pine-cone. I pressed her hand, and we drove through Poitiers. By an extraordinary chance it started to rain. When we all got out of the charabanc at the station there was a sudden violent shower; we crowded into the hall of the station. They sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Fortunately I met the père préfet of the Jesuit college and did not have to join in. We all shook hands; Monique was crying and one or two of the others. We stood around, not knowing how to part. I stood beside Ginette and whispered, ‘Méfiez-vous des Anglais.’ She smiled faintly. They got in the charabanc. I blew a kiss to Monique. Jouteau and I watched them drive away.
A news vendor behind us said, ‘One of them’s crying.’
Jouteau said, ‘Mon Dieu, ça me coupe la parole.’
We climbed up the steps to the town together. I asked him up for a drink. I stood at the window hoping to see the charabanc climb the hill opposite, but they must have already gone. Jouteau and I discussed the holiday. Then he left, and I was alone again. I became suddenly aware of the lack of friends in my life, the need each one of us has for sympathy. I sat in my chair, and seemed to be still rushing down across France. They had performed a sort of miracle; made me believe I was charming. I knew myself well enough to know that I am anything but that.
The deserted room – I had done most of the packing – was terrible, silent. I did not know how to begin to write. The multiplicity, the concentration of those golden fourteen days seemed to me impossible to reproduce. I was only conscious of my impotence before time; my only consolation, the poignancy of the situation. Now, two days later, they already seem incredibly distant, faded, desiccated remains, absolutely gone. Already I forget, and begin to accept the oblivion. Perhaps it was because they were Catholics; they treat religion gaily, as a pleasure more than a duty. They even laugh about it, and about the national anthem and king and country. We are so stern and unbending about such things. Also their singing and the dancing of the girls – I enjoy the simplicity, the spontaneity of amateur singing, which is good but not perfect. A kind of pleasant roughness, a greenness, in the singing. I felt very sharply my own lack of entertaining ability; I include no party tricks. I want to learn the guitar, I must see about it this winter.
The songs they sang – two I liked especially – ‘La Chanson des Marais’ and ‘Les Mariés de Notre Ville’. Monique singing a burlesque of ‘Froufrou, Froufrou’ with tremendous gusto, carrying us all away. The force in her rolled r’s was enough to make the window-panes tremble. There is a psychological hint in the difference of English and French speech – the force and clarity of French, energetic and extrovert; the slurred, mumbled effect of English, lazy and introvert.
22 August
An attempt to snatch at the time again, catch it before it fades, disappears. All the time I am remembering and realizing that what is past is past. Poitiers is grey, cool, autumnal, empty of life. But there is traffic, the trains in the station, the noises of the workmen building the houses below my room – all that suggests work, duty, the mechanical rhythm of life. I cling desperately to the fourteen golden days. In a sense they simplified me, ironed me out. I am too sophisticated, involved, reticent, cosmopolitan, intellectual. They took me back into an old, more natural self.
Ginette Marcailloux came to spend the day with me. She questioned me about the other Ginette, whom I had vaguely mentioned in a letter. I lied to her, I could not tell the truth. She had come all the way from Limoges to say goodbye. We spent most of the day embracing on my bed. The sun had turned her skin dark brown and she had never seemed prettier to me. We lunched with Philip. A glass of wine made her talk incessantly, which annoyed me. In the afternoon, after some passionate kisses, she asked me if I had nothing to say. Then we went over all the old problems – how much she loved me, wanted to marry me, how much she regretted having met me, the hell of loving someone more than he loves you, and so on. The woman’s interior theatre. I took it all coolly. I believe that she thought she had a chance of forcing my hand, and persuading me to commit myself.
But I have never concealed my intentions to her. I don’t want to marry yet. In any case, in my present financial climate, it is impossible to think about marriage. And the love that conquers all is not for the intellectual. I repeated what I had already said; that I liked her very much and didn’t consider that our separation was a final break; that I still had a vague ideal about marriage which I knew would dissolve sooner or later, and might well leave me only too glad to accept her. Six months of England could make me mad to have her. I said so. ‘Then you only want me if you are unhappy,’ she answered. ‘That’s egotism.’ I said I thought that it was also frankness. One of the great uses of love is to help surmount obstacles. I could marry her and be reasonably happy. She is the person most to my taste whom I have met, but I believe I could be wildly happy.
We said goodbye in the station – a little dryly, apologizing to each other, tenderly cold. I hate separations. The train was a long time waiting. We pressed hands, I waved, turned my back, and yawned. It felt good to be free again, and not obliged to imagine myself a cynical brute.
23 August
Even a fortnight away from writing and I feel the rust in the wheels – stiffness of vocabulary, make-do phrases, a variable gap between the truth in my head and the speech in my pen.
24 August
Last evening in Poitiers. I am glad to leave, to move on, although I have nowhere certain to go. I dread being fixed, in a certain career, enclosed. Yet within a month I shall be that.
This year is a year partly wasted. I’m beginning to realize that I cannot write to publish because I’ve not yet achieved a mature style. I have not written much here. Perhaps the spring is drying.
A dull, depressing city, but France. I am now certain of at least one thing, that I love France. I do not want to go back to England, I want to stay here. I don’t regret being always taken for an Englishman. I haven’t the desire to become French. Perhaps no one can enjoy France like an Englishman: accepted, but with all the background of the opposite pole with which to make comparisons. There is no doubt that the French live more completely than the English. As a human being without race, I cannot help preferring the gusto and the simplicity of the Gallic love for life. France is for individuals, England for good citizens. I hate to leave, but I need a year of exile in Britain. For now I begin to believe that I was born in the wrong country.
29 August
After four or five days back in England, I know which country is mine. I cannot stand the mediocrity and the uniformity, the universal adaptability – which is here. The tired eyes of England. I travelled to London with a sort of numbness in my mind. There were crowds of English holiday-makers returning from Paris and I felt myself violently foreign to them. Leaving France was intolerable, impossible.
My trunk had not arrived at London, so I had to spend a day there. I went to the Festival of Britain.fn37 I arrived early and joined a queue, a vast, orderly line of people. There were two policemen to control several hundred people. I thought of the French, ebullient, individual, undisciplined, needing an army of gendarmes. The queue was along the Thames. It was high tide, beginning to ebb, a grey, cold sky; and the Houses of Parliament looked tired, fussy. Only the strokes of Big Ben consoled me for my own country. The Festival I saw in a morning, skimming through it. All the cleverness and the practicality and the didacticism I found rather repellent.
In the afternoon I walked through Regent’s Park to the Zoo. The Park was silent, as if it were the country, with colourful flower-beds and hordes of sparrows. I had not been to the Zoo for perhaps fifteen years, but it seemed the same. I found the cages and the animals sad, especially the waders and seagulls.
Then home down the dirty, dreary Southend line. A cold wind at Chalkwell station. There were soused mackerel for supper. Everything seemed like a soused mackerel; drab and full of small bones.
My father in a decline, physical and psychological; he breathes a kind of damp, desperate mist over the house, only increased by M’s forced gaiety. He has adopted to an extraordinary degree the view that all is for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. Every aspect of life is judged by its most pessimistic possibilities. He enlarges disadvantages, finds a thousand means of dodging happiness. Now he adopts an air of great age, walking in a bent way, groaning and grunting all the time. If only we knew more exactly the financial situation, but he only speaks of it in vague terms. I should go and see Sassienie.fn38 But this climate saps all will, all spontaneity, and I feel myself already sinking back into the old apathy. When one drags painfully through each day, on a tissue of conventions, silences and hypocrisies. In his case, it was the war. When he came home (from the front and the Occupation) in 1920, the war and the loss of his father induced a nervous crisis – he could not even hold a teacup. In 1923 he was psychoanalysed. And the Freudian explanation was that he had lost his mother at the age of six and had never acclimatized himself to his young step-mother. The millstone of the business, a luxury trade in an age of slumps and restrictions, official or economic, had worn him out. He has a punctiliousness that must make responsibility a torture. And he was brought up in a rich home, lived with well-to-do people, still has friends and connections in a richer stratum of life. He regrets all that and has now an obsession about other people’s riches. I see only one solution possible; that I win a football pool.
Instead of writing applications for jobs, working for the translators’ examination, I do nothing. I cannot imagine myself working in a routine post. I do not care what happens, as long as it is in no way certain. I want to go abroad again, to live in a solitary place, an island, in the snow. To get away. I wasted my time today reading a book on Spitsbergen;fn39 I shall go there as soon as I can. It is not England I hate, but the English civilization.
Henry Miller – talking of a Greek poet, Seferiades – ‘his poems were becoming more and more gem-like, more compact, compressed, scintillating and revelatory.’fn40 I also.
Chekov, The Cherry Orchard. A strange plotless play, without beginning or end. The characters seem mysterious, unreal, but their mood I recognize at once. It is the mood of this town – the ubiquity of futility; the genteel descent into oblivion, where no one is capable of saying what their heart says.
1 September
Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga. A massive piece despite the inferior detail. The outlines are impeccable, the balance exact. Only the style, some of the soliloquies especially, seem to date. I don’t like the whimsical satire. Satire should never be anything but bitter. Of course it is all artificial – the interweaving of the family, the coincidences. It is not only technically necessary – so as to be able to keep disparate characters in view – but desired by the reader – he wants to know how the characters react, intermingle. I suppose it is the most popular novel of the first half of the century. In any case, I can remember it being talked of in the family before the war: a unique literary distinction.
4 September
The family makes an expedition to Canvey Island. To the Lobster Smack, an inn on the sea-wall, facing the shipway and the Kentish coast and the complicated organization of the machinery at Shell Haven.fn41 Silver tanks, cylindrical and linked by girders, smoke, chimneys. We ate lunch on a little mole jutting out from the sea-wall. The day was heavy, very listless, a grey, tired sky. A shoal of porpoises rolled lazily by; there were common terns fishing. We did a long walk back along the sea-wall. Father insisted on coming and about half way was crippled by sciatica. The rest of the walk was done in slow stages, wih a continuo of reproaches, recriminations and groans. Eventually I got a taxi to help him over the last stage. Once we were home he seemed better.
No one hates the country more than my father, yet he insists on doing things which he does not like. Above all he lacks the courage of his pleasures; in fact his main pleasure lies in denying himself pleasure. He almost goes out of his way to suffer.
5 September
A letter from Ginette (Marcailloux). Only now do I know what it is to be without her. Her letter was particularly just and dignified, such a letter as I could never write – from the heart, and I write always from the brain. But she held out her hand, in spite of her reproaches. If I had the money I should go and marry her. The lack of money nags at me; yet I cannot bear the thought of routine work, with only a fortnight’s holiday a year. I must have leisure-time.
Journey to London to take the examination – with three hundred others – for OEEC translators;fn42 but the important thing for me was that I had recurrent bursts of poetic inspiration. That has occurred to me more than once on Chalkwell station. It is well situated to evoke the phenomenon – or perhaps it is the effect of any journey into the unknown. Such moments are immensely consoling; not because of themselves but because in coming they show that there is something extraterrestrial, outside-willing, inspirational, in writing poetry. The very fact that these moments cannot be controlled, induced, is a kind of guarantee of individuality, a confirmation of my own opinion of myself. A mysterious ability to set all the complex but automatic machinery in motion, and produce the fragments of amber. They say every faculty will be artificially bred one day; but the poetry faculty will be the last tamed.
A period of prolonged psychological constipation. I must find work. I sit here day after day waiting for some miracle, my dreams becoming more and more removed from reality.
17 September
Two letters in the same post, from the two Ginettes. That coincidence pleased me enormously.
20 September
Two observations on myself. I lack virility. The essential thing in virility is action; a continual decisiveness, a clear-cut independence of movement. But sensitivity needs a delicate climate; the softer one is, the more sensitivitized one becomes. That part of me, the soft, the tender, the stagnant, is neutral, sexless; there is a parallel with the eunuch. It is only incidentally that I make use of my masculine properties: strength, endurance, independence …
I cannot discuss things here, at home. Every moment I am aware that I am twenty-five and not paying my way; jobless, a burden. I fight shy of discussions, arguments, because that fact seems to me to enter every one of them; to be an unanswerable weapon in my father’s hands. Another might baulk; but I have a great deal of patience for minor discomforts.
The photographs I took on the Tyrol holiday arrived today. The warmth had gone, it was like seeing yesterday’s meal rehashed. Only Monique Baudouin really came through – a gay, mocking, tender vividness, a sincerity of mood, natural grace. An unfadeable personality.
Philately. I have been selecting some things for sale. A curiously pure form of collecting, almost collecting as an abstract, the pure essence. The only interest I find in it is financial, the romantically high sums attached to little bits of badly printed paper. I need the money now I cannot afford to spend anything at all. It is terrible never having a reserve for the dry periods. Poverty is like a friend who amused one once, but I’d like to cast off now. I try the pools. They are worth the stake if only for the dreams, the standing a chance.
Ginette Poinot: she sent me violets and a small rose pressed between the pages of her letter. ‘Je vous écris du jardin, et une rose miniscule se penche vers cette feuille – peut-être a-t-elle reconnu un ami? Je vous l’envoie. Heureuse fleur!’ She writes in a very old-fashioned, conventional style, full of flowery phrases and euphemisms; rather eighteenth century, and faintly charming. I threw the flowers in a waste-paper basket and sent her back a feather from a redshank’s tail.
1 October
Interview with the British Council: a pleasant, cordial atmosphere, where I did at least feel they wanted to help me. Not like the recent cold and rather hostile quarter of an hour at Unilever’s. I spent an hour and a half between various people. The most fascinating vacancy is at a school on a Greek island, Spetsai, south of Athens.fn43 I can hardly dare to imagine myself successful there, yet already I have dreamed all about and around the place. There is another job in Brazil, and a third at Baghdad. I heard this morning that the translator’s job at Paris in the OEEC was no use. I failed the preliminary examination. Besides these there is the British Museum.
To take the Greek job would be madness. It has no future, except lotus-eating. But I know that I should take it at once, if I have the chance.
Election. This is more apathetic than the 1950 one. But now it is a choice between Tory romance and Socialist practicality. The Tories offer nationalism, the Empire, freedom of enterprise and so on; the Socialists increasing uniformity, the death of the ancien régime individual. As a social unit, I shall vote for the Welfare State. I vote for what I think best for society. A Tory world, obviously, would most benefit me; but I am still young and poor enough to vote against my own corruption.fn44
14 October
Pat Fowles (my half-aunt) was married today; I refused to go to the wedding. I dislike weddings, wedding atmosphere, wedding wit in wedding speeches. The Fowles family were apparently annoyed. I dislike family gatherings. Mother spent the whole of the rest of the day going over each detail, what everyone had said, what she had said in reply. Indefatigably trivial, like a placid stream, or a top which needs only an occasional flick to keep spinning.
The new suavity. A kind of disinfected amiability of exposition, peculiar to young intellectuals and dons. Merlin Thomas (my tutor at Oxford) is an example. There are frequent others on the wireless. They strike a balance between being very modern and well-informed, and explaining things, talking in a familiar, careful, colloquial way. Their aim is urbane vulgarization. They speak on a level with the man on the street, never down to him. They never enthuse, or if they do, they always follow with a trite comment, or a light joke, as an anticlimax. That is their self-insurance. They don’t want to sound committed over emotion. Perhaps something to do with logical positivism and the scientific outlook. Something I must avoid. It is better to be cantankerous and committed than charmingly intelligent and non-committal.
20 October
Waiting for the decision of the selection board about the Spetsai job. I cannot bear to hope, yet I have a sort of feeling that I might be successful. It could mar or make me, but only in the one sense (direction). I might go only to stagnate. Here, at home, I am quite shameless about living off my parents. At the moment I am writing fairly regularly. I should have Drag finished by the middle of next month, and a 1951 diary by 1952. But this latter is a much vaster effort. I can write Drag almost at full writing speed, without pauses. In the other I have to deliberate between every sentence.
Making a bookshelf today, I was amused to catch myself thirsty for immortality. I have made it very strong, consciously, so that it will last. It gave me pleasure to be building something which will perhaps outlast me; the wood – from the old wooden mantelpiece recently taken down in the nursery – is heavy oak. And as I write this – in bed – it has just struck me very vividly that someone must have made this bed. It is thirty or forty years old, and all the furniture in the room. That is all furniture is, au fond. Unsigned monuments, perpetuities of absent hands.
1 November
I received a letter this morning to say that they have recommended me for the post at Spetsai. It is exactly a year today from my arrival at Poitiers. I received the news calmly, almost coldly. Not even the news that I was the Son of God would have disturbed me unduly, I believe. I could play poker well; but my heart sings. Yesterday I went to a Civil Service competitive selection board and I think I did well there. There was a job in the dockyard school at Rosyth – virgin territory, inculcating some rudimentary culture into the apprentices. A safe job with a future; or there is the BBC possibility. I ought to stick to that. But I fall for the exotic.
8 November
Webster, The White Devil. A very powerful writer. His poetry affects me very strongly – it has a wild and weird quality, an almost mad talent for fantastic similes and metaphors. A daemonic writer, I think of him with Lautréamont, Hoffman, Poe, Faulkner. Above all, I think, Lautréamont – they both strike me as being deliberately what they are. It is not so much a subconscious morbidity as a deliberate presentation of an exotic world: a vivid imagination in a cool head. There I find myself also, I read Webster like a brother. And there is a lot to be learnt from his prose-poetry mingling. Some characters speak naturally in verse.
In The White Devil it seems to me Flamineo is the key character – Vittoria, Medici, Brachiano are all evil in their ways, but they are less motivated by passions of the body, desire for revenge, the animal instincts. Without Flamineo, the play would be merely a struggle between magnificent animals. Flamineo has his motives of self-advancement, but they are only for the play. He is a Figaro-type character, who has an extra dimension – he lives outside the play as well. The dark, profound cynic, who sees through his own motives even when he obeys them. A complete objectivity means that he is without any absolutes, even of evil. He knows he lives in a world of pure chance. He is a far more profound character than the others – like Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi – and in reading at any rate seems to me to tower over all the other players. He is certainly most of all the mouthpiece for Webster.
The Duchess of Malfi. I think inferior as a play to The White Devil. The Duchess has not the brilliancy, the colour, of Vittoria. And Bosola is not so black and sardonic a masterpiece as Flamineo.
I like a comment of Charles Lamb à propos of Webster’s imitators: ‘Their affrightments are without decorum.’
Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy. This doesn’t stand beside Webster’s dark other world, his ‘black lake’. Already a tinge of the moral and the mundane which drags the violent action down to melodrama. Also his language is not dramatic like Webster’s, and not nearly so picturesque.
The Revenger’s Tragedy. Incomparably better than the foregoing. It is difficult to see how they could come from the same hand. But still not on the level of Webster. Vendice is a fair-sized character, but the others have no depth. Castiza is a hideous prude. One or two cleverly contrived scenes, but the final blood-bath is impossible. Could anyone see this on the stage without laughing?
‘Virginity is paradise locked up.’
12 November
Politics. I have to register a change in my own views, of which I have been for some time perfectly aware, but too lazy to analyse or admit. That is to say, I no longer believe in democracy. That doesn’t mean a shift from socialism. Albert Camus said in a broadcast the other day that one was socialist par simple décence. That seems to me admirably put. If one has any pretensions to being intelligent then one must assume a certain international and moral objectivity. It is plain that very nearly two thirds of the world is living at a low standard, lower than we have here in England. Socialism is their obvious salvation. Free enterprise is an ideal solution – if men were ideal. But we have, if we are frank, to admit they are not. They need controlling. Communism goes to an extreme; socialism is the middle way. The fact that the Tories have got back has made me think. They have got back purely on emotional grounds. People want an economic gamble and the beating drums again. It seems to me that only one in a hundred people are fit to vote in this country; in many countries one in a thousand would be nearer the mark. People here have cast their votes on issues like Abadan and Egypt without any semblance of objective understanding of the pros and cons of those situations.fn45
So many people here vote for themselves or their ways of life. Many intelligent people in the upper layers – the professions, sciences, arts – vote Tory to keep the order going. Plainly no one above or below certain incomes should vote. They will be too biased.
What I dream of is an oligarchy of left-wing intellectuals, who are cold and dispassionate and scientifically philanthropic, who could do something about all the causes of ignorance – the violently partisan press, which en masse is all right; but most people only read one and the same paper day by day. It is easy to be drugged by one point of view. Constant dripping … And then a modern vote is valueless. I know beforehand here that Channon will be elected,fn46 I know he does not in the least represent my views, I shall never speak to him or influence him (the fact that I can is such a minute possibility as not to be worth considering in defence of the system – there are so many practical drawbacks). In my case the MP is a particularly bad one. He never speaks in the House, which is perhaps fortunate as he is a fool, and Southend is as near being a ‘rotten borough’ as it is possible to imagine. I have no say in the government of my society. A one fifty millionth is not enough. All I can do is dream of the city-state.
The more I think, the more I am determined that the need is for a city-state world. Division and re-division, until one can live in a community again: knowing everyone, meeting one’s neighbours frequently, and having a direct say in the government.
Laski, Faith, Reason and Civilization.fn47 A very lucid, impressive book, it seems alive; some memorable phrases. A dangerously clear, well-informed and persuasive mind. I think this would be a book the future will remember, however spasmodically. It half convinces and confirms me. The only trouble is that the USSR does not seem, now, what Laski presumed it to be. The Christians eventually betrayed themselves; and so have the Communists, and much quicker. But his points: the decay of all revealed religions, the undeniable justice of the theoretical communist state, seem to me essentially right. It was an important book for me.
It is a sad fact that this book has been taken out of the public library only twice in eighteen months.
Full of sap for several weeks. I live here, never going out, with all the company of my imagination to keep me amused. I used to have periods of restlessness. But now I believe I could stay forever inside myself.
20 November
Tea with the Nobles.fn48 Platitudes, old meals rehashed. I felt external, uncouth, daemonic, Beethovenish. Hazel (my sister) at the end got down on the rug, and started smoothing the nap with her hand. I wish I could have done the same.
6 December
A letter from Ginette Marcailloux. Short, cold, depressed and depressing. She has not written for some three weeks. For her, all is over, dry bones. It is true our letters are becoming cooler, humdrum; end is inevitable.
The Bible. I chanced to start reading some of the last Old Testament prophets the other day. A revelation of poetry; superb language and imagery. It is a mistake to imagine that the Bible is the same in all languages. The English translation is a work of great genius; it should be to us what Homer was to the Greeks.
Wildfowling at Leigh. At home a heavy raw mist settled over everything. I walked offshore out towards the sea. Gradually the mist thinned, and things became clear. The mud-flats stretched far, still slightly veiled, full of their strange obscure magic. In the distance I saw a fisherman picking up mussels. A wind sprang up and chased all the mist away. And the sky became more beautiful than I can remember seeing it anywhere, on any previous occasion. A clear, luminous green-blue, blue shimmering with green, soft and bright and shining. There were a few wisps of amethyst-like clouds, pink and faintly blue-white. In the west, over Canvey Island, very low, was the sun, extraordinarily magnified and distorted in a massif of clouds on the distant horizon. When it finally sank out of sight these clouds became fire-red and black, but they were small and very far away. The sky appeared paler and greener; now green shimmering with blue. The half-moon began to outshine; and Jupiter near by. It was bitterly cold. I walked right out to the main channel. A trawler with two men aboard, one steering, hunched up with the cold, the other sorting cockle-sieves, ran down from Canvey back against the tide, beating into the little waves. I stood and watched the creeks filling, the wind singing in my gun-barrels. There were curlew and redshank in the distance. Leigh and Westcliff seemed many miles away, wreathed still in mist. Leigh church rose strangely out of it; a clump of poplars stood up like the parapets and towers of a distant castle, of Carcassonne.fn49 Everywhere the sky, in pools, in creeks, above. Like half a transparent duck’s egg. I wounded a curlew, and held it under my foot in a creek to drown it. I watched its death-struggles dispassionately under the divine sky.
I shall leave all the poetry I have written here when I go to Greece. Now I am trying to prune, to cut down. But a poem so rarely seems to me wholly bad. There are always lines, turns, ideas beneath the rubbish. I shall have to leave a lot of ‘ore’ behind; tough material. It would be easy if one was certain of death; one could be ruthless, destroy all but the best. But as it is, I like to have a stock of material.
A letter today from Geoffrey Fletcher in Holland; he is doing well.fn50 Every time a contemporary meets with material success, I am discomforted. Yet with my philosophy of life now, no amount of contemporary, practical fame would satisfy me. Not even the practical administration of the whole world would be enough. My enemy is oblivion; everything else expands from that. My attitude to life; my lack of interest in ordinary people; my interest for the famous; my contempt for contemporary artists; my fear of growing stale, or blunt; my sacrifice of any careerist future I might have had; this miserable dependence on my parents; this withdrawal from society and its kindred comforts.
26 December
There has been little to record these last four or five months; my existence has been virtually monastic. I have felt little of the horror that this place (Leigh-on-Sea) used to inspire in me. I once thought that I was unhappy here because I could imagine myself so vividly in so many other situations; now it seems to me that I am happy – or rather content not to revolt – for exactly the same reason. My imagination is a counterweight, an outlet, which I can control: it is no longer a mere wild universe of the day-dream. To organize one’s imagination is a vital step before creation; to learn to assess its products. Everything new, every new pleasure, new vista, is not necessarily good because it is new.
If I was killed now, there are two or three short stories and some 15–20 poems which might resist time for a little. All the rest is immature, often rubbish.
Greece seemed at first romantic, much to be desired; now, close at hand, ominous and full of pitfalls. A letter from a master already there suggests that conditions may be far worse than I can imagine. It would indeed be rare if I was to find my niche; unless the life is very ideal, I shall certainly stiffen against it, as at Poitiers, and do myself no social good. I shall not find a Ginette again.
I suppose it is a stupid thing to do; to turn one’s back on all the obvious openings. But if one is certain of being a poet (Greek sense) then one can only refuse the safe and the obvious. You cannot expect a cat to jump in the pond; nor a poet into the neutral. I hate waiting on the springboard; packing, buying odds and ends, rushing, foreseeing contingencies, calculating, being in a very all-consuming whirl. I hate movement; I like being in new places.
fn2 Henry Miller’s sexually explicit and autobiographical novel about an American artist’s adventures in Paris was published in France in 1934, but remained banned in Britain and America until the 1960s.
fn3 All Saint’s Day.
fn4 Professor Martin, head of the Faculté des Lettres.
fn5 ‘Grant-holders.’
fn6 Léaud was a fellow teacher at the Faculté des Lettres.
fn7 The American student’s name was Charles Gaisser, a Harvard history graduate, from Oxford, Mississippi.
fn8 i.e. Kaja Juhl, a Danish girl with whom JF had an affair while in the south of France during the late summer of 1948. See introduction here.
fn9 The war in Korea was going very badly. In November 1950 Mao Tse-tung had ordered the massive intervention of Chinese Communist forces on the North Korean side. Overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers, the UN Forces were forced to withdraw to a line well south of Seoul.
fn10 i.e. B. W. Brealey. See introduction here.
fn11 ‘G’ was Ginette Marcailloux, one of the students who attended JF’s lectures.
fn12 A student at Poitiers, Brosset had been on the wildfowling trip to L’Aiguillon and shared JF’s countryside interests. Thouars, a small town to the north of Poitiers, was where several of JF’s students lived.
fn13 This entry was written two years before Sherpa Tenzing and Edmund Hillary successfully conquered Mount Everest. The most famous previous expedition to the mountain had occurred in 1924 when the climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out from their high camp for the summit, but lost their lives in the attempt.
fn14 Set in the early 1800s, The Man Within, Greene’s first novel, told the story of Francis Andrews, who flees a band of smugglers and falls in love with the woman who gives him shelter. It was published in June 1929 when he was twenty-four.
fn15 In his Maximes, François La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) asserted that cases of apparent virtue or selfless feeling generally hid some selfish motive.
fn16 The Mid-Lent Fair.
fn17 François de Malherbe (1555–1628) became official poet to Henry IV, remaining in favour under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. He gained a reputation as a purist who preferred the intellect to the emotions.
fn18 A river valley to the south of Poitiers.
fn19 Ligugé is a small town eight kilometres south of Poitiers. Its sixteenth-century parish church is part of the Abbey of St Martin, which was founded in 361.
fn20 i.e. the Oxford University Drama Society.
fn21 Tony Richardson (1928–1991), then in his last year as President of OUDS, would recall the tour in his memoirs: ‘In the provinces we played huge theatres where I made an introductory speech in French so extravagant and hyperbolic – “Nos coeurs toq-toquent ensemble” – that everyone thought I was drunk.’
fn22 Collioure was a coastal town in the south-west of France that JF visited in the summer of 1948 (see introduction here), and ‘Disjoints’ the word he used to describe his diaries.
fn24 Made in 1950, the film follows the disillusioning experience of an idealistic young priest who leaves the seminary to take up his ministry in an unwelcoming and largely hostile country parish.
fn25 Limoges, about eighty kilometres to the south-east of Poitiers, was Ginette’s home town.
fn26 ‘My parents are coming on Sunday and I’m almost pleased to leave Poitiers. I’ve had some awful days, with nothing to do, and above all with no desire to do anything; finding it impossible to stay at the A.G. under the pitiless, ironic stares, and avoiding the places where we used to go because everyone talks of you; in short, feeling myself to be in the most total isolation. Not funny at all.’
fn27 Reading these words in 1993, JF explained them as follows: ‘Pmassive, both passive and massive, was a rather puerile neologism I used – too much – at this time. I meant suffering, but stoic, firm as a rock in spite of all.’
fn28 The town, which was on the road between Poitiers and Ginette’s home town of Limoges, served as a convenient meeting-place.
fn29 In the summer of 1949 JF joined an expedition organized by the Severn Wildfowl Trust to confirm sightings of the rare Steller’s Eider Duck in the northern Arctic. Spitsbergen is an island archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, which JF often talked about – although did not actually visit – during this ornithological trip (see introduction here). The tales of its exceptional solitude made a deep impression on him.
fn30 ‘I can truly say that I only began to live when I pictured myself as a dead man.’
fn31 JF is recalling the summer of 1948. See introduction here.
fn32 i.e. the ‘Jet d’Eau’, which rises 140 metres into the sky.
fn33 Anne (known as ‘Ninon’) de Lenclos (1620–1705) was famed for her affairs with some of the most distinguished men of her time and presided over a literary salon that included La Fontaine, Racine and Molière.
fn34 Built in the heart of the old city of Innsbruck, the Goldene Dachl (Golden Roof) is a two-storey spectator’s box from which the emperor Maximilian I used to watch court entertainments. Designed by Nikolaus Türing the elder in 1594–6, its eye-catching roof is made up of 2,600 gilded copper shingles.
fn35 A hilltop village of about 500 inhabitants overlooking a Burgundy valley, Vézelay is famous for its Romanesque abbey church, the Basilique Sainte-Madeleine. Containing what were believed to be the remains of St Mary Magdalene, the church remained an important site of Christian pilgrimage until 1280, when it was discovered that the bones belonged to someone else.
fn36 The ‘evil marquis’ is Valmont, who in Choderlos de Laclos’s letter novel Les Liaisons dangereuses accepts the challenge of his accomplice and correspondent Madame de Merteuil to seduce and corrupt an innocent young girl, Cécile de Volanges.
fn37 Intended to lift the spirits of the nation after years of post-war austerity, this nationwide Festival, in which 18 million people took part, was held between May and September 1951. It was, in the words of Herbert Morrison, the minister who oversaw the project, ‘the British showing themselves to themselves – and the world’. In London, the centrepiece was the South Bank Exhibition, with its newly built complex of arts buildings.
fn38 Sassienie was the family’s accountant.
fn40 Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (New Directions, 1941), p.47.
fn42 The OEEC was the Organization for European Economic Co-operation, established in 1948 to co-ordinate efforts for Europe’s recovery under the Marshall Plan.
fn43 The Anargyrios and Korgialeneios College. Established through the bequests of two wealthy expatriate Greek benefactors, the Spetsai-born tobacco baron Sotirios Anargyros (1849–1918) and Marinos Korgialeneios (1830–1910), the school had been modelled on the image of a traditional English public school. It opened in 1927 under the headmastership of an Englishman, Eric Sloman. ‘The best families send their sons there, to train them up as statesmen,’ wrote Lawrence Durrell; ‘the result always seems to be much the same – instead of statesmen, they become politicians, a very different sort of animal.’
fn44 After a long five-week campaign, the General Election took place on 25 October. The Labour government was defeated and the Conservatives, under Churchill, were returned with a seventeen-seat majority.
fn45 Abadan was the centre of the oil industry in Iran. An international crisis occurred when in May 1951 the Persian government nationalized the assets of the British-run Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and expelled its foreign staff. Egypt was disputing the existence of the Canal Zone, a strip of territory flanking the Suez Canal which British troops occupied. In October 1951 Egypt announced its intention to abrogate the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, under which the Canal Zone had been created.
fn46 Leigh-on-Sea was in the constituency of Southend, West. The Conservative MP and diarist Henry “Chips” Channon (1897–1958) had held the seat since 1935. His son, Paul Channon, would succeed him as the constituency’s MP after his death.
fn47 Harold Laski (1893–1950) was Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. In Faith, Reason and Civilization (Victor Gollancz, 1944), he argued that the future of the post-war world lay with the ‘Russian idea’. Just as Christianity had revitalized civilization after the fall of Rome, so the socialist revolution in Russia would bring to the West a new age of progress, based on a more just and rational system of social equality. The book was not well received. George Orwell criticized Laski for turning a blind eye to ‘purges, liquidations, the dictatorship of a minority, suppression of criticism and so forth’.
fn48 E. P. Noble was the headmaster of JF’s preparatory school, Alleyn Court.
fn49 The fortified medieval city of Carcassonne in southern France boasts three kilometres of double ramparts and forty-eight towers.
fn50 Fletcher, who had matriculated in the same year as JF, was a Classics scholar at Queen’s College.