Back to England. Leigh, clouds, sick dreams. England in July a hell on earth.
The journey was terrible as well; from the moment we left Spetsai, there was no real freedom. During the day there was always Anna, during the night R to think of. The journey had no reality for me, nothing has any reality for me, except in connection with E. Everything revolves around her presence or absence and her mood. We kept on getting desperate, not out of temper with ourselves, but with the situation, the constant nervous strain.
The last days on Spetsai passed feverishly, in the brilliant heat, with E and I escaping away on our own for almost all of every day. How R, to the very end, seemed not to understand what was going on astounds me. We would mislead him, pass off absences of three or four hours as if they were nothing. He would wait for us, have meals without us, never see us except two or three times a day. And even when we were together, there was such a silent, tense atmosphere that he must have realized how desperately bored E and I were.
E and I spent all our time talking, talking about ourselves, our pasts, our lives. Making love, intimate, ignoring time. Ignoring time right until the very end, until the last hour, when it suddenly towered beside us, a shadow become giant.
We left Spetsai in a rush, leaving the packing until too late. The gardener, the photographer, anybody who came near us, like vultures, eager for all the remains from our packing feast. Bottles, old papers, clothes in rags, cardboard boxes, anything they took. A last meal at Savanta’s, a few goodbyes. I felt indifferent, oblivious to all the usual parting sentiments. Love destroys landscapes; people are stronger than places. The long, last journey into Athens – E and I finding it impossible to be alone, impossible to be normal. Anna always around us, and R always watching us. Often, so often, I feel a bitchiness in her attitude to R and Anna. She gets petulant with them, snarls, sulks; no one could really be less a bitch than E. In any case, it makes me realize how terrible her position is for her to become like that.
She’s loved a good deal, been loved; got into messes, had complicated affaires. R was a kind of frontier (into marriage, a brilliant man older and at first sight maturer than herself, someone on whom she could lean, find sanctuary, and forget the Bohemian past) she willingly crossed. She thought (she says) that she had finished with romance, sentiment about love. She was happy and unhappy with R. She soon found out that he was a lot less mature and easy to live with than she had at first imagined. They had quarrels and gay times; Anna, since Roy wanted a child. (Less through Catholicism, I should imagine, than a need to keep Elizabeth anchored.) Then we met; romance flooded in over the austerity of these years; all R’s faults, his violent extremes of opinion, his drunkenness, his irresponsibility, avalanched down. I was tender, understanding, romantic with her, and it all came out, all the inside of her marriage. A terrible betrayal, between intelligent people; even if she was reconciled to R I should feel always that their marriage was false, hollow, a tree still standing, but once cut through …
She has been foul to Roy, I suppose, by any conventional standards. At the end, when we always sat together, always touching, never smiling except at each other, with R opposite or close, the situation was out of this century. I felt like an impudent young lover seducing the young wife before the old cuckold’s very eyes. We had – all three of us – lost perspective: no doubt R still pretended to himself that our closeness was no more than a friendship; and we were so helplessly involved we could not stay apart.
Calais cold, a green, rough sea. E and I on deck together, in a corner, with spray flying past and the ship rolling. A stilted, bitter last moment of intimacy. I tried to say how much she meant to me, how much I wanted her. She was silent, inarticulate, unable to make any decision. Cried, and I could not comfort her, as R might come on us at any moment. The boat was full of English holiday-makers, rich and poor, nouveaux riches and blasé, Boy Scout and Chanel No. 5. But all the same, types, as easy to class as bits of mass-made machinery. We both felt a deep revulsion for everything English, all England. The greyness, drabness, raininess, uniformity of it all. Dover, a quick run through the Customs, R as gay as a lark. He loves England, and loved, plainly, the thought of our close separation.
E and I side by side again to London. R opposite, quizzical, throwing me minute triumphant glances (significantly, he made no suggestions about our meeting in the future); and a shrewd, very English, very cosmopolitan, very polite Englishman of middle age who sized up the situation at a glance. The dull greenness of everything, the cheap brick suburbs; London. Anna began to cry, and the journey ended in a terrible atmosphere of stress. She wouldn’t stop crying, screamed every time her leg was touched; we had planned to have a last drink, but that was plainly impossible. We got a taxi to the nearest hospital, and there I last saw E, sitting in a bare waiting-room, clasping the sobbing Anna. She looked up at me, Elizabeth, her eyes infinitely sad and remote. I kissed her quickly and went. It was not a final parting. But it seemed then to constitute a frontier.
A cold, black journey to Leigh, and home. How I have slipped into the native in so short a time. It is as if I had never left. I say nothing about Greece, they tell me of all the minor things that have happened to a thousand people I have never heard of, and have no interest in.
I feel inhibited, hopeless, a boy again. No job, no money, no will. The weather cold, grey, raining. The same prison in the same prison-town. I suffocate, think of running away with E, spending all I have on one fine holiday. I must, first, get my two books to the agent;fn1 then, live in London; there, handle the E affair. That is, find a job, find money, and take her.
Life here is fatal; I have described it a thousand times before, in the same words. My home is my hell.
Love, a wonderful aid to self-analysis; it makes one think. And love is the undressing of the soul. One has to explain oneself and explain the loved one. An intimate sincerity. E has a slowness, yet an intuition, which make her fascinating to know. Because she understands, and she chooses, the truth in what is said. She is weak, capricious, liable to fall, but only occasionally. She is the most balanced feminine woman I have met. Cool, elegant, collected in public; warm, passionate, playful in private. Sensitive, classless. I still cannot believe that she has fallen in love with me.
I told her one day that I thought she had a weakness. She had a great well of affection in her, which overflowed at intervals. She would always find new objects to love, and each would be better, more worthy of love, than the last. She was climbing the rungs of a ladder. I said I thought I might be able to make myself the last rung; at any rate, I should like to try to do that. I wonder if, after three years, she might not move on from me. Her moods change so; once she slips, she has no purchase. I should be eternally jealous of her absences, and distraught if she left me. But that could not stand in the way of the present intense love I feel. She has no faults, and I no qualms.
31 July
A day in London. Unending rain, and E. We met at the zoo, in the lion-house, spent all the day together. We got wet in the zoo, drank a lot in the evening, were deeply penetrated by one another. R knows the situation. Anna is ill in hospital, and he rang up E when she was visiting her. I was waiting outside. He demanded to see us. E stalled, and we spent an evening under the shadow of her home-going. I was afraid he might get violent.
I still haven’t quite realized the mess we have got into. It has blown up so quickly, out of a clear sky, that I haven’t properly taken stock.
E and R are completely estranged, no more want to live together. I and E are so swept away by romantic love that I mistrust what my heart says – that she is as near the ideal woman as I shall find. One month is not enough to recover from the initial glamour; we are both still spellbound. True, from the beginning, I found her socially, as somebody else’s wife, an ideal partner. Now, I hesitate, though less than with any other woman I have known. She hasn’t the breeding, the culture, the articulateness I thought I must have. To compensate for that she has intuition, sincerity, looks and grace. I fear her weak will, or rather spasmodic will – the lack of endurance.
And none of us has any money; I have the most. R must resent that violently; almost as much as he resents the fact that it is me, of all people, his diametric temperamental and psychological opposite, who has taken E. There is Anna. Both E (who admits it) and R are totally unsuited to be parents. They are largely children themselves, morally. Adult in everything except that most important respect. And I am exactly opposite, morally adult and socially childish. If they separate, neither of them will want Anna. I would not take E with Anna. I don’t like, don’t want children of my own, let alone anybody else’s. Children, they say, anchor a marriage. If a marriage needs an anchor, it is an imperfect one.
There’s the whole paraphernalia of divorce, the whole battle I shall have to fight with convention. My parents will be shocked.
I have no job; no prospect of anything sound.
A situation to pass through; as always, or still, difficulties like these faintly exhilarate me. And the experiment of life with E is one I would not willingly forego.
The problem of marriage for the intelligently, darkly difficult; sensitive, quick, temperamental, they won’t shut their eyes, sit still. They have to shift, change constantly, examine, question their relationships. The higher the intelligence and sensitivity, the deeper love, and the more perfect the mating must be.
7 August
More complications, more disintegration. Things are beginning to fall in on top of me. R has ordered E out. She cannot talk with him, cannot see Anna, cannot use the flat. She has gone to a friend, the friend whose husband she had an affaire with before she met R. This friend, who tolerated this affaire between her best friend and her husband (and before that E was her brother’s mistress), is now at a crisis in her marriage, as her husband and she have decided to separate.fn2 E and she are in the same state of disintegration. E now has no money, is dependent on me. She came down here – a terrible mistake on my part – alone, and now my parents have become embroiled in the whole thing. That is, I have admitted the separation, but not my own love involvement. I have made out that I am the friend go-between. My mother normally conventional but, extraordinarily, understanding, and my father, for all his reading, violent and conventional.
E came down strictly only for the day, but we deliberately missed the last train, came back home, and spent all the next day, the bank holiday, down in Old Leigh and on the marshes, talking, making love, rather enjoying ourselves among the masses. We went down to Benfleet, had a split and reconciliation in the heart of a thicket on the hill above Benfleet. ‘You’re so scared,’ she said, ‘so bound up in your parents.’ She was right. This is a climax. I must break away from the parent complex, and subconsciously that is probably why I brought her down here, to precipitate a crisis. My parents treated her as a gold-digger: ‘no stability’, ‘out for what she can get’.
But this conception of love and life are so inadequate for highly self-conscious, complex beings like R and E and myself. It is like fuelling resentment for recruits who cannot drill like old soldiers.
27 September
Oxford. Six strange weeks with E, how does one synthesize six weeks? It can’t be done. We must have spent well over half of it in bed. Never up before midday; never anything but out of time.
I must try and remember from the beginning. The beginning was one evening at Fenchurch Street Station. She was late, distraught, and we went into a pub outside. She cried. R had gone round to her friend’s flat, where she was staying, and created a scene. It was the baby, Anna, that was the trouble. Where was she to go when she came out of hospital? R, at first telling E to get out, had changed his mind. Now he wanted a compromise. E to take Anna, and to live on her own, away from him, and away from me. I could only try and clarify the situation a little. E was torn, but determined that she must look after Anna, if nothing else could be found. To make things worse, R had telephoned her parents and told them everything. The only possibility seemed to be that she should go home with Anna for a fortnight, leaving R time to make other arrangements. I was against this; not so much because of a fortnight without her, but because I knew that R would make no attempt to free her. The impasse would be prolonged indefinitely.
We eventually went off in a taxi to Paddington. And driving through a nearby street, we saw an illuminated sign: ‘Acropolis Hotel’. It seemed too good to be true. We stopped the taxi, and I heard the sound of Greek music. We went in and got a room, spoke Greek to the proprietors. We felt as happy as two foreigners finding their fellow-countrymen. It was a sordid little back room looking down the rears of a dozen bleak tenements. We didn’t mind, of course. We were too preoccupied – eager and afraid – with sleeping together. A telephone call to Roy reduced E to tears; then we went back to bed, and managed to find some sanctuary.
The next day I saw Roy, at his request; he was controlled, quiet, familiar, less reserved than I, though I felt no guilt – at any rate, no more guilty than him. We met outside Kensington High Street tube station and walked down to Edwardes Square, to a pub with tables outside, the Scarsdale Arms. I remember that we even talked about the architecture, with unnatural naturalness. R seemed able to forget that I had, only the night before, possessed his wife. I could not; and I despised him for being able to do it.
He did most of the talking – about himself, his guilt, his nature; how he had gone through life hectoring people, indulging his own ego, wrecking every happy situation he had found himself in. In spite of the fact that he talked mainly in Catholic terms, I was reminded of a Communist self-criticism. The criticisms were severe, but there was an unbearable complacency about them. Both Communists and Catholics are the same – they think that confession absolves them of all their sins. R wallowed – it is the mot juste – in self-examination. He talked a lot about E, too. Of her will, of their psychical antipathy; but would go back to the Catholic conception of a marriage in eternity. We drank beer; Roy pints to my half-pints. I offered him some food, but he said he couldn’t eat; implied, somehow, that I was of coarse metal in being able to do so. He told me all about his nausea, his sleeplessness, a naïf request for sympathy that I found both odious and pathetic. I suppose my contempt for him, which grew, was irrational and unjustified; he was really being very civilized and decent. But I should have liked a little more primitive pride. He said that he was going to reform, would never drink heavily again. This was at his third pint; he was quite sober, of course, but talking more and more. Even began to praise me rather mildly; said that after John Liddell,fn3 I was his best friend; how much, under other circumstances, he could have liked me. I suggested that he put Anna into a convent, and he agreed that it would be the best idea. He would go that same afternoon. We parted in the tenderest of atmospheres. I was glad to get back to E and to be able to blow my top a little. And glad, I suppose, to be able to run Roy down. R and I, as if the situation we are in is not enough, are such fundamentally opposed characters that I should feel eternally bound to fight against him and his influence, however we might be placed. E is a kind of ordinary human, a figure in the street, torn between the two of us, the light and the darkness, the black and the white. She is that, I suppose, in the profoundest sense; R and I are both, in widely differing ways – Catholic and Puritan – religious people. I am morally religious; he is metaphysically so. We are both priests struggling for her soul – or really, in the end, for our own.
We met John Liddell, E and I, later that day. Curiosity on both our parts, I think. He appeared neat, a small head and shrewd eyes, reserved. We only talked banalities. I had a feeling that he was rather like me in some ways; wondered if he found R scientifically fascinating as I do, and whether R realized that even here, with his best friend, he might be half a guinea-pig.
I rang up R late that night; he was almost hysterical because the Catholics he had seen had not been able to help him. Or rather they had asked him what seemed to me normal enough questions, but he found that any questions were out of place; charity should be quite blind. He raved on about the Catholic Church – the Mother Superior had referred to Anna as ‘the little one’ and this for some reason had infuriated him. ‘The little one,’ he kept on spitting out, ‘the little one’ – and seemed to forget everything else. As if I was some friend he could pour all his woes out to.
The next day, I rang him up again, and he had completely changed. He was very calm, practical, though still overdramatizing himself, describing his sleeplessness, lack of appetite, incompetence over Anna’s clothes.
‘Do you know what happened this morning?’ he said. ‘I washed her little trousers and socks and put the socks on top of the trousers and all the dye came out. Oh, you’ve no idea, John, how difficult it all is. There’s no way of drying anything.’
‘Isn’t there an electric fire?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I suppose so,’ he said rather petulantly.
He had arranged for Anna to go into an Anglican home. He wanted E to buy some clothes for Anna. We were free to leave London. We went round to see E’s friend Betty, I out of curiosity again, wanting to know all the protagonists. A quiet, shy little woman whom I felt faintly hostile to me. We bought the clothes, I took them round and left them for Roy.
It was good to get away to Oxford; a little strange to be free, absolutely on our own. We had tea in the restaurant car, opposite a general in mufti and an upper-class tart. The one stiff, the other grotesquely affected.
Oxford again. I saw it with affection; a place I know, a place I could live in. We stayed a night at the King’s Arms, then moved out to a room in a suburban house up the Banbury Road. Thence, a week later, to a flat in Warnborough Road.
I went at once to see the Porters, and found them changed. I suppose I had rather deified them abroad, forgotten their faults. They were very kind in the way of hospitality, and so on. But I could not for a time climb (or fall) back into their North Oxford world. It rather shocked Elizabeth, silenced her; offended me. Eileen seemed to have lost her naturalness, to have become malicious, coldly intellectual, a cat. Podge something of a clever bore, with his ridiculous views on certain things – Americans, for instance – and his party attitudes. We met a young composer, John Veale;fn4 an amusing, iconoclastic, anecdotal conversationalist, dominating the talk, and, finally, boring. A vital, very intelligent person, for all that. A bright, calm, metallic wife who reminded me of a wooden ship’s figurehead. They both swore, talked a little more obscenely and frankly than was necessary to show that they were fully emancipated from the conventions. We had a punting-party with them, and other meetings, met a don at Jesus, Jewish, plump and faintly Johnsonian, fond of pronouncements, and his mistress, a shallow, pretty creature indistinguishable from the type North Oxford had made her.
A rather unpleasant world when one plunges into it; cold, and only exhilarating when it is left. Only good by contrast; not good intrinsically. The first impression is of shallowness, glitter, an eighteenth-century love of amusement as an end in itself. Very quick-thinking conversation, full of subtleties, implications. Upmanship all the time; everybody thinks of himself, thinks how to denigrate the good things that other people say. One never bluntly disagrees in North Oxford; one is catty. Everybody is catty, prepared to sacrifice a good deal for a witty remark or an outrageous maliciousness. Conversation here takes the place of bridge elsewhere; it has become as much a game as cards, and people tot up their conversational scores at the end of each evening.
Both E and I were a bit lost in this world. I felt myself both below and above it, both provincial and celestial. E was very silent, reserved. I admired her silence. So many women would have tried to join in on their level, to ape them. I watched anxiously to see if she would resist the temptation, and when she once or twice hesitated, spoke, tried to be clever, I was afraid, partly because I knew the others would sneer, and partly because nothing destroys love – as I found with Gfn5 – so quickly as embarrassment. Although none of these people were snobs, I could also sense that E knew herself not of their class. She hadn’t quite the right accent or quite the slickness – and nowhere near the quickness – of expression. And it seemed to anger her when I sometimes did reply in their key and style.
But other people did not impinge much on our isolation. We were together always, all the time, had frequent, and for me, insanely ridiculous quarrels which we resolved immediately in delightful hours of remorseful self-analysis. Our life was Bohemian in the extreme; we had no clock, lived by desires; slept, ate, made love when we wanted. Took no exercise, went to parks, cinemas, read papers, argued, kissed, wrote letters. I applied for various jobs, without any interest in getting them, since I had enough money to last another month or two without working. I am quite feckless about the future; so certain that I shall never want to do anything but write, that whatever work I take up other than that will be purgatory. Neither E nor I have any time-sense, any morality about routines and conventions. On the whole, for me, a very happy time; a complex happiness; sex, of course; she never tires me that way, never ceases, by simply being present, to seduce me; companionship, being totally absorbed and absorbing somebody else; intention, being two against the world; domesticity – there was little of that, but I would never like much of it – having meals, washing up, seeing her clean things – not often, she’s no housewife; an eventual fault, probably; and feeling that I was re-educating her, gradually pulling her out of the quagmire of religiose immorality and metaphysical nonsense R had dragged her into. Trying to make her control herself, control her moods, her black angers, her sulkiness, a little; very exciting, seeing her rebel against new views of things, yet feeling the seed settle in her. A slow, cautious, mental digestion; the only peasant thing about her. Most rare virtue in her case; she would be intolerable if she was quick-witted.
We were both weary of conversation about the future; she not being able to decide about R and Anna, treasuring a little, I thought, her dilemma, pleased to have something I could not touch. I did no writing, and that upset me. She was restless on her own, distracted me too much. And we had quarrels. Never about our real selves, or our predicament, or our past actions with regard to one another; always about literary, artistic things. She would get so bitter and involved that I was at first amused and later, usually, as irritated as she was. There was a violent argument on Australia – whether it would ever produce a significant corpus of art or realism in the theatre. Then, when I asked her a sarcastic question (‘Have you ever heard of Strindberg?’), she lost her temper and hit me hard across the ear, a quite extraordinary thing. Once involved in a literary argument, she loses all sense of proportion. At times she seemed to hate me so violently that I felt as if she didn’t live in my world at all. The difficulty is that she is so inarticulate, and really, for all her intuition and innate taste, and all her belated attempts to educate herself, ignorant. She would get furious with me when I started to give names and talk -isms; but the fury was really with herself and her lack of articulation. Very often what she was saying was right – at any rate, a perfectly legitimate point of view. But she would hold it so exclusively against me, so vehemently, that I would deliberately misunderstand (than which nothing was more liable to make things worse) and mislead her. I must seem to her no more than a dry prig at such times. But I suppose only a literature graduate would maintain that his views on literature should carry more weight than a mere layman’s – or lay woman’s.
So it was that, partly; her resistance to that gap in learning between us, that educational abyss which irks her. And when she argued, like a woman, she would always become personal. And she had a whole host of adjectives – ‘ridiculous’, ‘stupid’, ‘suburban’, ‘middle-class’, ‘public-school’, ‘slick’ – which were all ‘I hate you’ expressions, aimed to hurt, especially the latter four. She talked of being classless, and annoyed me by her presumption; I had not the heart – or the courage – to tell her that at times she did seem to me still classed, inasmuch as she was inhibited by her working-class origins with the ‘classless’ middle class like the Veales and the Porters. How I tried to explain to her another time that in being so violently ‘classless’, she was still, in fact, influenced by the working class, since hate is a connection as much as love. It irritates her that I still adhere to certain things in the middle class, certain conventions. But I could not persuade her that that is a stage only reached after the complete ‘classless’ revolt.
Our quarrels, too, came partly from our love of quarrel. Do moderns have to quarrel, struggle, to be happy? Is the battle of the sexes the spice of original life? Certainly, I could predict our quarrels. Several days of happiness, and then we would clash, fiercely, over some absurd artistic point. There would be words, hurt silences, reconciliations always initiated by me (since I was never really involved in the things we were arguing about, and regarded the whole business as a psychological sickness which had to be cured as quickly as possible), the tears, tender embracings, which I am sure we both loved. E had her catharsis, I had my superiority complex.
We were so much in love, so much of the time, that these quarrels seemed quite normal to me. At other times I got angry with her for being indecisive about the future – what she would do in it; her feelings about R and Anna. And there were other strains; mere physical things, changes of mood, irritations. But love was dominant, and when we were gay and happy, we were often enough perfectly so.
F arguing, hectoring, talking above everyone else. Strange views, Victorian views, Huxleyan, a kind of out-dated Protestant free-thinker.fn6 Reform the creed, modernize the Church, and so on. Talkers should beware; they never hear other people’s views, give themselves no chance to develop, alienate everybody around them. The art of talking well is listening well. My father says things like ‘now we’re descending to personalities’ – as if any argument between people was not a question of personalities. Increasingly I find quarrels difficult to accept at face value. With F I see an inferiority complex having its say. I see a different truth from the one under discussion, the argument in perspective.
What a distance separates me from 1946. I found an old diary today. The entries are so naïf and puerile that they frighten me. For instance: ‘Dec 27th – Go to Uncle Sfn7 at Rochford all day. Pretty shambolic. Dec 28th – Go shooting – no luck. Dec 29th – Travel to Pompey for demob. Dec 30th – Meet Dobby. Get demobbed. Rotten journey back.’ As inarticulate as a dummy.
The glorious life. ‘Jan 9. March across Dartmoor – bloody awful wind and rain. Wet up to waist. Get in and try and light fires in rain. Jan 10. Chokka. Compass march at night – come back to Thurlestone at 3. Get torn off a strip in inspection – extra parade.’ My insufficiency as an officer cadet was my only redeeming feature.fn8
‘Jan 15. Milling at night.fn9 I get a bit knocked about.’ Diabolic practice. ‘Jan 16. Officers’ piss-up at Grizzle Club. I keep sober, but most others tight.’
Art. ‘Jan 21. Keys of the Kingdom – good flick.’
‘May 25th. Go to Abbotsbury with Bob P (Paine) – get a chewing-off from a swanherd.’
Shall I ever overcome my past? That, and at twenty.
We met again in London, at Paddington, and had a taut little reunion, full of the difficulties of getting to know someone all over again. Strange how one can think constantly of a person, yet find them changed in even a week. We went to a hotel in Bayswater, rediscovered the bodily past, the excitement of love. There was never a less boring woman physically; the change from ugly into beautiful is always done with a magical swiftness. A stroke of a hair-brush, a minute change in position, in dress. She has that constant concern about her own appearance which is foul in a plain woman and delicious in a beauty; an unending coquetry.
We had a terrible time in London; first of all, trying to find a flat. An endless search, agencies, shop-windows, telephone calls, tubes, snatched meals, tired evenings, a gathering hopelessness. London – always covered in mist, dirty, foul-aired, so gigantic and heartless – appalled me. The isolation of the individual in it terrifies me. We went to two agencies who gave us lists of flats in return for a deposit. But none of them suited us; E got worn out, neurotic, and quarrelled, rightly I see now, with my lack of discrimination. But in me, a countryman, an addict of light, of open space, London excites a claustrophobia, a sense of not being able to see, which made me prepared to accept any room as a sanctuary. Money also was running short. I had no job. And over us was hanging Roy. Roy, uneasy conscience dogging our footsteps, the accuser, Roy, somebody we might bump into in any street. We moved out to Belsize Park, hated that area, and Hampstead. In the end we moved back to Notting Hill Gate, to a little room we had looked at the first day, and then rejected. At least it was central, reasonably snug, and in London snugness is essential to keep out the grey, cold, milling exterior, and quiet. Nor was it suburban. Oh the horror of the London suburbs. I hate London; hate being poor in London. One can be poor in Paris, Edinburgh, other cities; but not in London.
We had happier moments, but not many. A Sunday afternoon on Hampstead Heath, grass and an impression of country, strolling bourgeois by the ponds, a copper and blue tinge in the distance. Some good films.
But all the time we felt that we were being dogged by fate. We could not settle down, regard anything as permanent. Lived rather desperately from day to day. Roy got on to us – ringing up a flat agency where we had left our address. Anna, it seemed, was very ill; she had become a baby again, receded psychologically back to the beginning. E must go back to look after her. Days of being torn. I saw R once; he didn’t like it, was pugnacious, wilful, emanated – for me – evil. I argued with E. At times not certain whether it was not all a release for me; at any rate from the present unease and London, if not definitively from E. I made up my mind several times to go, yet quailed whenever the possibility neared reality. Argued, as I felt, violently against Roy and his dark, Victorian way of life. E told me much of his view of her, what he willed her to be – matronly, a home-former, a mother. And he hated her lightness (‘frivolity’), her youth. He is a thoroughly Victorian non-conformist character in many ways. Old-fashioned about sex and morals; yet as lax as an old rope about money and drink. A hatred of frivolity; yet a capacity for neurotic excitement. A dark, stern sense of duty; yet no personal responsibility. And an egocentric of staggering dimensions. E was wrong, perhaps, to leave her child at that point, when it was still in hospital. But it was Roy who forced her into the decision (that is, put his own problem before the child’s – which he has done throughout), Roy who refused to compromise, refused to let her take Anna north. Roy who put Anna into a home, did not see her enough, and finally came back to E demanding that she should take Anna and accusing her of cruelty. Really what E did was to walk out on two sick children.
E saw Roy two or three times, hesitated. He issued an ultimatum – either she should take Anna, or he would get a divorce. He said at the same time that he wasn’t using Anna as a lever. Yet he had kept her in the house for weeks just in order to be able to present E with her. Elizabeth was torn between the two extremes – all for me one time, all for Anna the next. We had a terrible few days. And then she seemed, a little despairingly under her air of gaiety, to have finally chosen me. R was going to take Anna north to his sister’s the next day. Early the next morning the phone rang. Her friend Betty, full of Anna, how ill she was, how changed. ‘It’s like the child herself speaking,’ said E. She rang up R, who was on the point of leaving for Euston Station. Went to see him, agreed to take Anna to her home that afternoon.
It all happened so swiftly, terribly, as if on a stage. If that phone call had not come – and I felt it was timed, a part of the plan. If Roy had not been so unscrupulous, so determined to get E back at any cost.
We met for a last lunch, had a fuss with the landlady. Drank two gins and walked out in the park, to the round pond. Fallen leaves, smouldering bonfires, winter coats, a pale sun. We were too grey and shocked to become emotional, had not had time to readjust ourselves. I suddenly realized that I did not want to part with her, that it would be a disaster. A taxi, tears – there had been tears for days, though – a last touch, and I got out at Baker Street, while she went on to Euston. A long, empty journey home to despair.
I had little time to wallow in it. The next morning I was off to Ashridge for an interview.fn10 A post as tutor was vacant there. I was lucky in a way. At least it kept my mind off Elizabeth a little. A preliminary interview with a business potentate in London. A tall, suave commanding tycoon with a grey silk tie, a large cigar and a red carnation in his black coat. He was bluff and awkward with me, I was independent back. As I didn’t care much about a post in a Tory institution, I said I was a socialist and a non-Christian. He didn’t seem to like me much; I disliked him also.
Down to Ashridge with another candidate. A mock Gothic monster in a lovely park. The décor like something out of Citizen Kane – vast baronial halls, Venetian ceilings, battlements. I hated it. But the gardens and parks were superb, stirred all the countryman in me. The interviewing was informal; a tall, clever, dumb, uncertain young man, Peter Sutcliffe, who is going; an earnest, Scoutmastery Senior Tutor, John Cross; an old, bluff economist with dark, judging eyes, L. H. Sutton. And the Admiral, Sir Roger Boyd.fn11 I liked him. A small, wiry, charming but steely man. There were girls running about, from the finishing school. Small flocks of industrialists. Everyone with labels in their lapels. I didn’t like that. But there were the grounds.
The Admiral offered me the job with a story about how the Chairman of the Far East Committee in the House of Commons was also a director of the most crooked trading firm in China.
I don’t know what to do now. I must have a job and this, apart from Ashridge being a remote island, and the whole situation (my being disassociated from the organization I work in) similar to that at Spetsai, is not badly paid and gives me free time. But it means that I cannot have E any more.
I didn’t want the job; probably that’s why I got it, I looked sincere. Marines, cricket (the Lady B is a Marine daughter, the Admiral a keen cricketer), a Public Schoolboy, gentleman, and so on, all that helped me.
In London again, I worked all the afternoon in the Nat. Hist. Museum, lost myself there – and couldn’t deny a glow of pleasure at the thought of the job I’d landed. Any fish being a catch if one is starving.
2 November
A frenetic daily correspondance between E and me; longer letters, and on a high sincere level for the most part. She is the woman who has an inner bitch to contend with; she commits sacrifices as if they were crimes, and indulges her desires in exactly the same way. Her guilty conscience extends over a vast field; and she cannot plunge one way or the other without some kind of agony. She is, in fact, someone who needs leading, forcing, as she half realizes herself, but subtly; Roy forced her and slowly she rose up against him. I could, no doubt, if I had any money to launch the project, carry her off. She is unhappy at Birmingham and R has done nothing to help; he sent her no money, and no advice, and arranged no alternative accommodation.
But money is the root of all evil; and all good. I have none left now. As it is, I shall go to Ashridge penniless. In other words, I must go to Ashridge. I was never so careless about a post. For me it is yet another step in the widening gap between what I want to do and what I have to do. A place to exist in, no more.
It is a single post; there would be no hope of E and I being together there; even if there was, she hasn’t the sense of humour, the resilience, the ability to compromise, to be amused by the place and the institution. So, short of a deus ex machina, we are condemned. She by her guilt, I by my poverty; our love, if it survives, will have as much self-confidence as love should ever have. Or will it be exhausted by the battle?
Tomorrow I know the agony; we meet for a day at Birmingham.
5 November
Return from Birmingham. Another sad, anxious, desperate meeting. A dull, vast city, teeming with uniform bustle. I hated it. The ugliest of cities, and the people not one thing or the other; more northern than southern, but most of all a middle mediocrity, a Brummy limbo.
E looked old, hag-ridden, exhausted nervously. For the first time I fully realized what the home background was. Her father an irrational man of violent words and tempers; a drunkard; a man with a sense of failure; with some sparks of a better man extinguished in him (but not forgotten) by drudgery. Her mother a tired, will-less mouse of a woman, with no courage, no fibre, no backbone left in her. Both of them obsessed by the financial aspect – E being a burden on them. (R has been able to send her only £2.) Having to live, the parents, E, the sister, Anna in one single living-room. There was enormous difficulty for E in leaving Anna for the day to be with me; the child’s grandmother said she didn’t want to look after her, couldn’t. E had to fight to get her to do it. She spent the night with me, sordidly, feverishly, in a hotel. Left early and came back at noon, to say that they had said nothing, had received her at breakfast in a terrible silence, and that she knew she would have to go through a terrible scene when she finally went back. The day was passed in the shadow of that; we went to the matinée at a theatre, saw a competent production of Pygmalion, then wandered hopelessly about the dark streets of central Birmingham for an hour, and drank a little until eight, when I caught a train to Oxford.
The situation has paralysed her; I try and force her to make a clean break with the past, but she is haunted by Anna, her duty. She hates R increasingly, yet cannot send Anna back to him when she knows that he will not look after her.
9 November
To Ashridge today. I feel exhilarated by the idea of it; not one tenth as nervous as new jobs normally make me. Why? Processes of age. But I feel much more assured now than I used to – dangerous, Ashridge may teach me. Partly E – to have got her, such an affaire, inevitably flatters the self-esteem in me. Pumps out the male. And to have all but finished the Greek book, that also. And a new philosophy – existentialist – which has been forming in me since I went to Greece – and which I can only now begin to sense as clearly active in me. One carries concepts about for years sometimes before they finally take effect – as friends may one day fall in love. This formulation has been helped by a book – Existentialism from Within, by E. L. Allen.fn12 Lucid, though Christian viewpoint. Reading it, so much of what I have been thinking recently became coherent; especially the de Beauvoir/Camus view of man conquering the absurdity of his condition. All their conclusions I had already arrived at independently.fn13
16 November
Already a week at Ashridge; four days doing nothing, then a course for three days. I have fluctuated between boredom, distaste and excitement. The great mock-Gothic pile, the lawns, shrubberies, the pre-fab where I live, the isolation from towns. I feel myself changing outwardly, reverting to type. Being the public schoolboy and officer; I hate it, but have to be it.
I have also forgotten what it was like to be thrown before the crowd, to have to speak to large audiences, act, behave, think before them. All the time here one is playing a part, being something one is not, like a liberal in a Communist country. Here I am more like a Communist in a Tory county. Or to be precise, an existentialist in a faintly conservative community. I see that they have little idea of what I am really like.
John Cross is my largest companion. An exact fit for the job here – sexless, full of bonhomie and sense of duty, earnest in some things, cynical in others. Naïf, yet knowledgeable. Bespectacled, shy, yet full, when needed, of a cheery Butlin-camper’s joie de vivre. Leading the dance, making people laugh, cheering them up and on. A man who has found his place and career. I don’t think much of him, yet I like him. A certain oldgirlishness which never becomes obtrusive, a conventional sort of naughtiness (swearing and getting excited on two ciders and a gin and orange), which is only the reverse of oldgirlishness.
Laurence Sutton, the Director of Education, a large, saturnine man of sixty or so; one of the numerous drags on progress.
The Admiral, small, alert, like a small, bright bird, but with a deep voice, very assured, commanding, a penetrating, examining sort of presence; too much authority, which makes me unable to stand up to him, to be any other than my old self to him. A junior officer. With E behind me, I can now meet men on superior terms. I don’t feel in any sense sexually their inferior, and not – in many cases – merely their equals; their betters. I now have to find an equivalent to E in life – a series of books, successes of some kind. I can’t bank my way through with no credit in the celebrity bank.
Admiral’s wife, a vast Britannia woman, brick-faced, eighteen stone and six feet tall, looming and lurching about like an ocean-going liner about to dock. The dinosaur, I call her; a huge body and a tiny brain. Quite incredibly stupid; the daughter of several generations of Marines, which might easily explain that.
Capt Gordon, one-armed, bluff, old-boy-ing all the time, like a squirrel, timid but anxious to please, assertive but hastily withdrawing.
Hazel, one of the girls’ tutors. Very English, pretty, lissom, well-built, exuding sex vitality although she ignores it – God, how sexless Englishwomen try to be – and quick, excitable, gurgly in her conversation. A touch of the Girl Guide and the hockey forward mixed with the sophistication of an Oxford graduate. A sort of problem I should like to solve; I think that it is the Englishwoman’s great charm; she has the basic physical beauty, and she has to be thawed, released, emancipated. This girl represents a sort of splendid physical machine one wants to set in motion.
Many of the girls here are like that – so pretty, and so frozen; so dulled by the stiflingly narrow conventions in which they are brought up. They are easy-speaking now, in 1953, about sex; but the basic denial is still there.
23 November
The E situation seems at last somewhere near resolution. A few days ago she wrote a sharp letter to R, who had previously written her a stupid loving-Victorian-husband sort of letter, about her returning to the path of duty and her old self. Now he says that he has been ‘humiliated’ enough and wishes for a divorce immediately. He wants custody of Anna.
He said he would come at once (to Birmingham) to take her. But then, in a later telegram, that his sister won’t have the child, so nothing can be done. A typical violent decision, withdrawn almost as soon as it is made. He accuses me of ‘spinelessness’, because I have not ‘offered’ to take Anna. But all along he has been quite categorical that Anna must remain with him; that he would never let Elizabeth have the child if she was living with me. He is so wild, confused, incomprehensible.
I went up to Oxford, stayed with the Porters. Then E, in black, beautiful to me, silent, balanced; happier, I thought. We had only a few hours together, a tense, excited embrace under a little bridge on the canal by the station – very close, how close we stand at times. Can love have any other test of worth? The closeness and despair one feels, the sexual twinship in suffering. I wished we could have spent the night together. E belongs, touches, in my inner self. She has reality there; does not pretend to respect the outer, convention-tyrannized self that dogs me. I am quite sure I want to live with her, quite sure we belong to each other, and that I must let nothing stand in our way. Certainly nothing like my job in this insipid institution.
From a review (Sunday Times, 22 Nov 53) by Raymond Mortimer: ‘Belief in sin is more advantageous to the novelist, I think, than belief merely in right and wrong … Catholicism makes a particular appeal to the imaginative writer, because it renders every act potentially momentous, and fraught with consequences that may be eternal.’
Existentialism.
The girls here. I am beginning to get to know some of them. Rather like the boys at Spetsai, charming, spoilt, and as often as not the children of broken marriages. Some of them are quite exceptionally pretty – Nordic blondes; an exuberant, noisy Greek; a very rich, dark and voluptuous little Persian. All types of conventional English beauty. But how much better the foreign girls dress; how much more girls, how much more allied to love, they are. They wear sex, gallantly, with so much ease.
28 November
The mess gets daily messier. R has now decided that E must keep Anna. That he has no more responsibility towards her. The divorce letter, though, seems to have been no more than a violent bluff. Both E and R are at complete loggerheads, and plainly neither of them want the responsibility of the child. I cannot afford to take it on. E cannot both look after the child and earn her own living. The impasse seems absolute. I have got to the stage where I wonder whether the whole thing is worth going on with. It needs an act of courage on somebody’s part. E to renounce Anna altogether, or I to leave this job, find a better-paid one, and take on E and Anna (but that needs more than courage – a great deal of good fortune). R to take Anna, but his spite and egocentricity are more than a match for his paternity and his Catholicism. The key to the whole situation is money. If any one of us had it, then all our troubles would be solved. Money, root of so many goods and evils.
Also here, I am constantly tested sexually – aware of the damnable masculine promiscuity that makes man ashamed of himself every time a new pretty woman passes. That Marcel thought has such relevance here – marriage as an act, the creation of fidelity.fn14
20 December
Leigh. First period at Ashridge finished. The engine was beginning to wobble; end of term cannot have come too soon. One so easily slips, when one welcomes experience. It was a South African girl, very smooth, snobbish, sharp; pert, quick, intelligent – comparatively, at Ashridge. Smart, compact, small and with a full, tempting body. Carrying herself well, always well-dressed: aloof, not enthusiastic about Ashridge. With dark, very dark, indigo-washed grey eyes, alive, penetrating, expressive, in a sophisticated, plump little very pretty face. And the most perfect complexion I have ever wanted to touch. Very much an untouchable; a rich man’s daughter, knowing all the social and sexual answers. Very tempting; and I let myself be tempted, as she did, in return. Nothing was declared; but eyes said a lot, and we seemed always to meet, so often to be together. To be sitting together; untangled; and not bored. She quite supplanted E. All thoughts, dreams around her; letters to E a duty. All the joy-miseries of young love – inability to concentrate, to work, loss of appetite, consciousness of foolishness; in a closed community like Ashridge, a liaison is bound to be noticed, almost before it is aware of itself.
We, and two other girls, went one evening to Little Gaddesden to hear a young guitarist, Julian Bream, play exquisitely in the Elizabethan manor house.fn15 An old carved mantelpiece, panelling, the soft lute and guitar, a handful of musical people. Then a walk home; I held one girl by the arm and Sally by the hand. A small, cold, unmoving hand; unmoving, but it made no attempt at withdrawal. Only in the last few days were things too tense – we lost control. Became unnatural. I don’t know how we shall get through the next few months. She goes back in April.
Two moral problems. One, I have definitely resolved, in myself, not to have E if it means taking Anna. That quite apart from the economic difficulties; something physical, animal, in me revolts against that. But I know that I am wrong. The only virtue is in deciding now; to have made any other decision would have been as honest as a bankrupt’s cheque. Two, the spectre of promiscuity, coming to haunt the nice rationalist erections of fidelity; I love E, I will be faithful to her. But I am parted from E, and Sally appears. And all’s in chaos. I know myself promiscuous, incapable of a separated fidelity; even living conjugally, I doubt, now. How much of this is existentialist will?
Ashridge, place, life, I like. The country-house life, maids, visitors; the seventy girls, rich and happy, an integral part of the architecture, like fountains in Spain; the staff cynicism and the student enthusiasm; the absence of haste, city things. The routine, the formalities. A weird out-of-date organism, a stranded whale, gracious and amusing to live in. A healthy amount of absurdity and eccentricity.
I enjoy it.
A day and night in London with E. She’s now living with Anna in a fine Regency house in Edwardes Square. A madhouse, run by a beautiful, fey Irishwoman with grey hair and an exquisitely noble, almost supremely beautiful face; who’s a congenital liar, and has a weakness for living in a charitable mess, surrounded by mothers, children, poets and unpaid bills. A little mad Irish world in the middle of London. So dirty, carnal, friendly, neurotic; no one quite sure where tomorrow will come from; enjoying and rueing.
E goes out to work each day, nine till six, behind the perfumery counter of a store. The child is looked after in the mad Irish house. Poor E. She has all the trouble of Anna, the expense – Roy is broke again; there is a lectureship at Swansea which he is hoping to obtain. But E did not think that he would finally take it, even though it is worth £1,000 a year.
She accused me of being bored by the whole situation. It is true; I am tired of it. At the same time, I am conscious of being altogether self-centred in my actions. I ought to be paying E something. She has barely enough for the necessities of life. Seems not to eat. But she is tough, resilient, resourceful in the miserable circumstances of London.
Worse than that, I am guilty about Anna. I watched her today, and she stared back in a strange hostile way; yet I could not find the least pity for the child. She was a fact, an abstract something, within the normal bounds of human obligations, to be pushed aside. I cannot disregard her; yet I cannot consider her.
I want a free relationship with E, where we could travel, live together, in fidelity – matrimony I care not one damn about. I am so conscious of a deep central instability, not in any particular bad sense – an inner fluidity, thirst for liberty, especially in movement. I have no wish for money, but enough to live simply, and to travel humbly; not the intolerable burden of a ménage, an economic vampire of a situation where all power of movement was lost. All of which is against the logical ethical course of action.
29 December
Thankful that Christmas is past. A depressing season. In material terms, plenty to drink and eat at Leigh; but I feel so much a fish out of water in the suburban world of little girls, uncles, aunts and Christmas trees that I become coldly ascetic. Eat little, and control the intoxicating process. Feel mean to my parents; ungrateful, remote, a sulky enigma.
To London on Boxing Day, and E. Two delicious nights in a room overlooking Edwardes Square. Then trouble, poverty-ridden days; apart we can be thrifty, together we are lost. Spend what little we have wildly. She has no job, no money; I have two pounds in the bank, and no pay till the end of January. I need new clothes, and must pay for the Greek book to be typed out. She’s absolutely bound by Anna; the prospect, if one dares to lift one’s eyes from the present, is grey, bleak, midwinter in all ways. We day-dream about the South, voyages, journeys, sojourns in the sun.
On Christmas Eve E went out on a nightclub crawl with her old lover, Betty’s brother, Alan. She ended up, as she put it, in his bed. He tried to make love to her; she said she didn’t even allow him to kiss her. I was disgusted, furious, jealous, unable to trust her at all to begin with; though I later sensed her love for me. But she has that fundamental instability, that lack of control at the moment of crisis (rather than a continual fecklessness), which makes me wonder whether I should not drop her and have done.
The child haunts me, too. I detest it. It is an ‘it’, not a ‘she’. It moans, cries, whines, loses its temper; is thoroughly spoilt by its parents and its past. It needs a year under a strict nanny, an old-fashioned regularity of routine, cleanliness, order. Not the present chaos of a mad rooming-house. But I cannot accept responsibility for it. It has the ugly egocentric face of R already; will be wild, spoilt, a mess all its life. We exchange hostile stares when we meet. I make no move to put it at ease.
And E – at times she is beautiful to me, poised, warm, so easy to be with; sensual, casual, undemanding yet affectionate. But at others, ugly, vulgar, her past self. A kind of cheap shopgirl that rises in her, and clashes with me. Her face becomes lined, a shade prostitutional; lived too much, too hard. Though she can seem young, with her fine figure, so very young, at other times. And there is the fact, the practical facts, of what she has done. Worked miserably in a shop, supported the child, carved out a niche in London for herself and the child. And London is like granite for the poor and provincial. She is half heroine, purely contemporary heroine; and that queer core of truth in her, her rarest possession. That drives her on, would drive her on endlessly; and would always make me regret her.
6 January 1954
A miserable day; darkness flooded the interior. Doubt about my writing; a deep, all-pervading doubt. The agonizingly slow progress I make towards coherence and grace; the constant misuse, semantic and euphonic, of words. The effort to achieve something more than platitudes seems wasted, in vain. I am fatally chained to my past, and to this Leigh environment which formed me, directly and indirectly. I have no ease, no aptitude for writing. It is almost always an act of will. I know the Greek book is not good enough. And E, who has read a little of it, agrees; it needs rewriting. I can’t bear to think what that involves. Meanwhile E is living through hell in London, jobless and moneyless. Yesterday she went and sold her only overcoat and her wedding-ring – had £3 for them. She is living on the fringe of existence, and I feel totally guilty because I do not help her. I have my grandfather’s ring which I could sell; I know it is ridiculous to feel sentimental about such baubles; indeed I don’t. But I am afraid of hurting my father’s feelings if I sell it. In short, it is still my feelings that count above her misery.
21 January
Back at Ashridge. E and I had a night in a hotel near Euston, twelve hours’ peace before we plunged back into the turmoil, the tense, grey life to which we seem eternally condemned. She lives so near the fringe of breakdown, so constantly without money, food, hope, that I can only marvel at her resilience. The shortage of money is really acute now. She never has enough to pay her rent on time; and lives on bare necessities. Yet, together, we don’t economize; we seem incapable of it. A pound on lunch and a cinema, when by a cheaper choice we could have had them for half the price. We are in harmony now at any rate; live in and for each other; a completely satisfying relationship, and closer to love than anything else I have experienced – a mature, desperate love, a love that seems the only sane, healthy, comforting thing in an absurd, sick and desolate environment. All we can do is cling, and hope. Hope.
Ashridge is the same, the time away four days, not weeks. Already, in less than twenty-four hours, I never left. Sally is back, still forward, watching for me, and I for her, more certain than ever though I am of E – and how slim, mature, sincere she seems beside the over-glamorized remembrance, now plump reality, of Sally. Sally is back, and I have the same flirtatious feel towards her. Badminton. She played with the Admiral, and Diana opposite me. Coffee afterwards; and then she sat waiting for me to join her. Which I did not; but the effort it needed to come away was considerable. True morality is the most arduous of virtues. The struggle of ‘free’ will against all that is determined; something that is creative, but as hard to create, continuously, as poetry.
29 January
Another desperate night and a day with E in London. A bitterly cold spell, which intensifies the misery. Her situation is now wholly absurd; she has been told by Sybil that she must leave 35 Edwardes Square as she does not pay her rent. She has been dismissed from the social survey job. She has no money. R will take Anna and find a nurse – he has a fairly good job again at the moment – and E has to fend for herself. But she has promised to find R a flat. So spends her days flat-hunting when she knows she will be out on the pavement from Saturday onwards. As usual, the strain of living on the brink of a precipice made us love fully, happily, warmly. But the despair increases externally. She is still controlled by R in many ways; lost by his accusations and Christian terminology. She says she is not, but I feel it.
We went to see a Dufy exhibition at the Tate; and the first person we saw there was Sally. It was embarrassing, a risk I ought not to have taken. I said something quickly to Sally and passed the other way. E seemed suddenly mature; she thought Sally was ugly. I for a time did not tell her like it was, but the deception made me shiver, a strange, intense cold penetrated me; so I told her. The exhibition was gay; Dufy walks on a high thin ridge; only fractional differences cause his falling – his fine balancing aloft. His failures are abysmal, and his successes clever and pleasing.
Sally now haunts me, seems to waylay me wherever I go at Ashridge. She half-seriously proposes to spend her twenty-first birthday inheritance on a drive from Tangiers to Johannesburg; and asks me to come. It flatters me to have her at my feet; bores also, of course, and at times, in this strict palace of the proprieties, frustrates and embarrasses. Not that she now appears as anything but a moment’s faute de mieux diversion in the absence of the reality of E.
3 February
A difficult time; here I divagate, distract myself with trivialities, avoid issues, deceive myself that I develop in silence. The Greek book has lost impetus. I love E, but only when I am with her. I am tempted by Sally, and enjoy refusing, at each new opportunity, the temptation. Such abstraction has an ominous parallel with the teasing foreplay of copulation; I am not gulled by it. E is now living fully apart from R and Anna. A divorce will presumably follow, and my situation here will be dubious. The only consolation is that I do not feel quite so dissociated from Ashridge. I can see more virtues in it, a slight raison for its être, and I can better control my criticism of it. The problem of fidelity continues to absorb me. It is not only Sally – she excites me by her now quite obvious desire to be kissed – but other girls. One especially, another South African, the grave, enigmatic, moody Sanchia. A statuesque face, and a self-dramatizing power which is remarkable; a silent girl, shy, but deep. Able to entertain; a mime, a dry wit, very cool, sane, balanced, yet able to be her age as well as strangely mature. She wears always a strange South African scent, sweet yet elusive, some exotic flower. Is not easily tangible, understandable. Sally and I sat in front of the fire last night while she told us ghost stories which she invented on the spur of the moment. Telling them in her rich young voice, acting the parts, staring into the fire. I suddenly felt an incommunicable sense of love and respect for her. A beautiful, and so obviously an intelligent and cultured young woman; an enigma-woman, the da Vinci breed, the kore smile. But above all, what E lacks, a virgin freshness, a something not yet moulded. The beauty of a snow-white page waiting to be written on.
9 February
A strange time; I feel suspended. A sharp exchange of letters between E and me. I sent her cruel letters of advice; she angry woman’s answers. A growing tenderness between Sally and me, an inability to remain apart. Now we touch hands, touch, have looks, overt subterfuges. We have been for two gay, shy, absurdly youthful walks; I feel much younger. E is older than me, in some ways so much older. And Sally is like spring, a soft, smooth, plump spring with dark eyes and a firm young body. At times she is very pretty, vital, so warm; and we move very close, tense with the delicious danger of contact. It is the best period of love, the constant walking in danger, the not-quite-certainty of everything, the looks that plumb and lose their nerve, the touches that taper with awkward silences. It is not the childish awkwardness of calf-loving adolescents, it is an eighteenth-century love of the nuances of galantine. We both enjoy the indecision, the flirtation. Sooner or later, an explosion will take place. We shall kiss; but I want that to happen not soon, perhaps not till the very end.
Poor E, in misery in London, lost, broke, homeless; I can do nothing about her. I still feel the deep, almost indestructible relationship that binds us; Sally does not seem so much hostile to it as complementary. She is the immediate superficial woman, E the remote real one; and distance is all. It is ignoble, hedonist; but I find Sally quite irresistible, and E, at the moment, dispensable.
12 February
To London to see E for the first time in ten days; ten terrible days for her; when she most needed me, and I stayed at Ashridge; wrote hard prig letters; dallied with Sally. Now she lives in a sort of brothel-cum-rooming house in a once respectable easy Victorian street in old-fashioned Bayswater;fn16 she wasn’t there when I arrived, and there was no message. I waited for an hour, full of longing for her; and eventually discovered that she was working in the City. When I met her, at 5.30, she was cold, distant at first; but in her room, by firelight, we went to bed, and spent the night in a complete harmony. A curious unworldly passion that invades us; anyone outside us must think me a callous prig and her an immoral neurotic. That is what we are, in society, socially; but to each other, we are perfect sanctuary. There is nothing logical in our love; it ought to have died long ago, been defiled, but it burns on with a clear brilliance and purity.
Yet Sally is in my veins now; when I came back to Ashridge, I found her not an anticlimax, but as tempting as before. She is a little strange, doubtful after my absence; but the arrow still sticks. E has been chased by Tex (Betty’s husband), whom at one time she loved – has kissed him, got drunk with him. He wants her to go and live with him, another of the moths round the candle of her. I felt – perhaps because of Sally, but oddly – no jealousy.
I am getting into trouble here; or perhaps it is a guilty conscience. Sally has been warned she is ‘putting me in an awkward position’. The high-ups seem to watch me with a muted suspicion. The Admiral seems almost afraid to speak to me, a situation which I find as intolerable as he does. It has only just occurred to me that he might be not frightened of me but of his inability to understand me. That is the trouble with cultivating a mask; it only works on stage; mingling with the audience, day in, day out, it must be seen for what it is. And with the Admiral especially, I use the mask; but very often, when I am not talking directly to him, even though he may be present, I drop it.
Partly it is that this job is so ridiculously undemanding; an office-boy could do it. I have no teaching; no responsibility; no duties other than the most trivial. But no work does not make Jack a bright boy. He vegetates, rusticates, ruins himself.
22 February
The next stop on the road to hell; another lump of plaster off the façade; another failure; I have succumbed to the temptations of Sally. I have not yet by a long chalk drunk; and all the time I am falling, falling; and occasionally I strike a rock on the way down, in case I should forget I was falling. Not that I feel myself in love with her, as I was and am with E. This is a more animal attraction, a desire to feel her firm fine breasts, to kiss and caress her. In a sense, since she is one of the prettiest girls here, to conquer her. A mere Casanova affaire. Already I know that she cannot kiss one fraction as well as E. That she is on the brink of plumpness; at the moment she is superb, the best figure among all those shapely young things, but in the moment lies the ghost, the too substantial likelihood of the future. And her mind, though South African, not cliché- and convention-ridden, is far from mature; mostly superficial. And her pale face, without cosmetics, falls from grace into plain plumpness. Her eyes are dark blue, Antwerp blue, very alive, her finest feature.
We walked out to the end of the Golden Valley gateway,fn17 a dank, grey Sunday and sat and kissed in the middle of a tangle of undergrowth. And again today, in the badminton court. But the war is on; our moves are watched, the world is against us.
I am guilty, very guilty, towards E. But I know Sally is returning to South Africa in six weeks’ time. I suppose I now believe in suffering; call it experience, and enjoy it. There are so many parallels between love and religion; the religious world is a parody of the sex world. And if I ever became religious, then it would be, I believe, a kind of complex sexual sublimation. Now, in sex, I am the sinning Catholic; for I believe in love, la création de la fidélité, as I believe in nothing else. And I believe in E as the personification of that belief. Yet I sin, and I still believe. I still love E, yet I amuse myself with Sally, and it is not altogether amusement. She, like me, like everybody, has her mask, and the lifting of that mask is one of the transient experiences in existence, moments which redeem the mass of time, the monotony of isolation. Just to rest closely against another person, to kiss them softly, to see them soften, is worth all the risk of offending society.
I suppose one is only half capable of loving two women at the same time. Yet at the moment I feel no sense of torment, no violent necessity to choose between them. I feel guilt, of course; but guilt, in this age, has become almost a pleasure and a normality.
26 February
Two nights in London with E. In a way I had feared them, and my own powers of deceit. But I did not foresee the obvious result. How greatly the contact with Sally would enhance E; I have never found her so mature, natural, and lovable. She represents the almost perfect woman, so warm and so complete, so complex after the shallow twenty-year-old sophistication of Sally that within ten minutes of seeing E again I did not know how I could have been so ridiculous as to have fallen for Sally. Sooner or later I shall have to tell E. Till then, till Sally goes home to South Africa, I must play the bigamist. Sally, when I came back, was so happy to see me, and so pretty, that I found the transference of interest and affection from the one to the other surprisingly, dismayingly, easy. They are so entirely different, and what I feel for them is so entirely different, that I do not feel anything incompatible in the situation.
Perhaps it is that I’m hunting the woman archetype, and have found it in E, yet have to make sure that it is really there. I suppose I might one day lose E because of this, or some similar escapade. Yet she is the one woman I have known whom I cannot imagine losing. She is more woman than any other woman; and her sexuality, her warmth, her beauty, are of the sort that do not stale. While about with Sally I am tired of her tight little mouth, her plump body, and her small bright voice that cannot drop its public tone and accent. E is a fulfilled personality, comparatively; ‘individuated’, in Jungian terms. While Sally is a type, a product of her past and her environment.
Also Sally has the few qualities that E lacks; a certain foreignness, and a youth and freshness. A simplicity and an upper-classness. Physically, superb breasts, skin, smallness. But such things are only tiny defects in the greatness of E.
I am reading a lot of psychology at the moment; Jung mainly. Vitally important knowledge.
1 March
Life fluctuates on its descending way; a series of misses, failed attempts at perfection; a growing awareness of the gap between imagination and reality. Life is based on so many unrealities at the moment. It is like standing on moving stones; none of them give a firm foothold. Life here is an appalling waste of time, a long day in a vacuum. I grow increasingly dissociated from the institution; have even a hunger for responsibility, labour, which is not natural to me. I have not even now the sense of faith with E. I love her as much, perhaps more, but she seems to me to recede each time I betray her. It is not a very serious betrayal; already I look forward to the time when Sally will have disappeared. Now we go for walks, and embrace in the undergrowth, like country lovers. Her prettiness, her softness, are mildly exciting, enough to distract me from any more serious work. In a way I feel women, or perhaps promiscuity, are a sickness I have to work out of my system; and then at last I shall be able to approach E and love her as I should. I have guilt, a need of guilt, a need of expiation. I almost wish, sometimes, that I could be caught out here, and dismissed with ignominy. That Ashridge was past.
Another night in London with E. The pretence this time was less easy; rather, the enjoyment less acute. I hate to have to betray her. Several times she accused me of kissing someone else, Sally; it must have been some strange intuition that made her do it. But the laughing denial – its very insincerity so plausibly teasing – wiped out the suspicion with frightening ease. It is not difficult to deceive, even when the protagonists are as close as we two are. What we could not conceal is an insincerity in our love for each other; but an insincerity in our life is so easy to hide. There is something so free and tender and companionable in E; something deeply understandable and understanding, in the field of personal relationships. An intuitive genius for truth, for what rings true. To a far lesser extent, it is in Sally. But here she seems a seeker after truth; she hates the humbug of Ashridge. Like me, she overcondemns, slashes too wide. Our cynicism is cheaply produced; but at least we have flashes of vision, a feeling of truth, some kind of sincerity, in all this surrounding hypocrisy. I find in her a dilute version of what exists powerfully in E – integrity, sincerity, hate of the persona.
Meanwhile I go on, dissociated, playing two games, and tired of both.
20 March
Five days in London. With E. Happy ones mainly, in spite of our extreme poverty. One dreadful evening, when we had to drag across London to Kensington to fetch a coat from Betty at 35 Edwardes Square. She needed it to appear presentable at some interview. Betty did not want to lend the coat, and I did not want to traipse across London. Whereupon E suddenly broke down, and I as suddenly realized the narrow division between the stability and the despair. Life is very tough for her, very much a struggle, especially financially. At times I feel that I have been outrageously callous towards her; yet I still feel that the distinction of our love is partly due to the fact that I have always made it clear to her that I am not able to support her – and more important still, that that inability doesn’t worry me. So our love has remained less complex, purer in motive, since there is no guilt, and no gratitude, to confuse the true relationship between us.
I came back to Ashridge and Sally. Once again the transition from the deep reality of E to the amusing pastime of Sally came with an ease almost disgusting. I think it is easy because in my own terms I am not betraying either; they are totally different, extremes in almost every way, and the relationships I have with them is totally different. I want to go on with E; and I shall be glad when Sally goes yet I’m not bored with Sally in any way. It is an affaire that has its own special poetry. Yet I fear an atrophy of my powers of moral judgement. And I get a smug young man’s kick out of having two women both so interested in me. But the experience is bound to have a bad taste. One day I shall have to spit it out and tell E. The difficulty would be to ever make her see the innocence of the betrayal. All it has done, in fact, is to make me more than ever certain that I love her, and need her. Whereas a thousand Sally’s could not add up to the smallest necessity.
I went to see Paul Scott of Pearn, Pollinger & Higham’s about my books.fn18 His opinion encouraged me. He seemed to think that I would one day be published. A tired, smooth, vague, judging man. I must polish off the Greek book now.
Ashridge has helped me to understand one of my defects. More and more I realize that my memory is my weakest fault. I can remember, at will, so little. Memory is an indispensable tool in many jobs – lecturing, for instance. But it is the salvation for the poet-writer. Therefore I no longer try and pretend that I have a memory.
23 March
Sanchia Humphries. I spent a whole evening alone with her today, talking in that intimate, understanding way which is the surest sign of growing affection. Such a strange creature, so young-old, a kore, a moody, mysterious yet firmly moral creature. A girl one could never approach lightly, nor lightly leave. A deep lake after Sally’s rippling shallow stream. Sally bores me now, increasingly. The whole relationship with her is artificial, physically conventional, finally futile. Sanchia told me more about herself in one evening than Sally in all our intimate moments. Conversation with Sally is never more than a conventional groan about the present, about Ashridge, about the subterfuges we have to employ. We have been so successful that the spirit of danger no longer tickles our palates much. Sanchia has a confused but profound stock of imaginative ideas. She has no cultural pretensions; yet has a quick and completely female intuition. Is shy; yet an accomplished actress. Above all, is straight, straight as a wild young shoot. Her home life in Johannesburg is unsatisfactory; an indulgent father, a mother Irish, neurotic and absorbed in dog-breeding – an unhappy marriage. A violent, gifted older sister, an adopted brother. A house with a long, dark corridor and rooms on either side. The mother and sister squabble, to the point of attempted murder. Sanchia was often beaten, and finally was ordered away to England to regain some stability. How much of all this is truth, strangely, I cannot tell. She lies, jokingly, so immaculately well that – ‘Wolf!’ – one never quite knows how much to believe her. But even that ambiguity I find attractive.
A growing discontent with my position here. There is a continual subconscious battle of the personalities between myself and the dreadful Boyds. He has lost his charm for me; I see him now as a spoilt old man, sharp as a fox on his own behalf. His marriage with the vulgar monstrosity of Lady B has caused him, one, to have, as a Catholic, to discipline himself to bear the cross of a bad marriage – whence comes his fierce insistence on the established order, though he likes to break it in little ways himself. Two, he has a kind of thirst for missed happiness which leads him to indulge himself now, and resent any kind of competition. Between them they exert a fearsome power of boredom. They cut short arguments with personal and irrelevant anecdotes. They are almost brutally snobbish. And the only consolation is that I have a small, happy feeling that they begin to perceive my contempt for them.
The real trouble, though, is deeper than the Boyds, infuriating though they are. I am incapable of working under anybody at all. I was born a hopeless insubordinate. I can’t really see any hope (chance) of happiness until I write purely for myself. God, how I hate the tyranny of hierarchies; of being a component, and never a whole.
29 March
I have to a certain extent been caught in my own trap here. The persona has been so elaborate yet so artificial that subconsciously people must realize that it is a mask, even if they cannot analyse it. After all, why should I still hide what I truly am? Instead of trying to conceal my real self completely, I ought to reveal it as much as is compatible with this environment. Deceiving the world is too much a luxury, too objective. I suppose in me it is caused by my long-standing shyness about literary ambition – further back than that, a fear of the parent-figure. The Victorian virtues were instilled in me, despite the decadent, disintegrating environment of the ’30s and ’40s. I have my father’s subconscious respect for authority – it is deeply ingrained in me, that subservience, and deeply hated. I am a matrist self in a patrist pattern. It was easy to escape, in the physical sense, all the complex personal and social aspects of the parent-figure past; but far more difficult to treat that past naturally. I suffered too much both in it and escaping from it. I hate it disproportionately. I cannot really forgive my parents for stamping me so violently in their pattern; and I cannot forgive myself for having allowed my unforgiveness to turn sour in ingratitude and mockery of them. They no longer frighten me; I suppress, consciously, my guilt towards them. But it is them and the fear of disobeying their way of life that have made me so overuse the mask, and hesitate, always, to drop it.
31 March
Another life-year. I got through the day without being wished one single happy return. I no longer make resolutions on this day, no longer think of it as a milestone. Time goes faster now, and I am sure of nothing; but more able to be content with little.
But this evening I was sad that E had not telephoned. She was out when I rang through, and I felt hurt, lonely. But I had only the moment before been in the crypt with Sally. A betrayer has no rights. Sally and I meet now always in the morning, when all the world’s in chapel. Walk a little way; spring – green, juvenile, sappy – is here; grey and powder-yellow catkins against a bright blue sky; daffodils, the first chiffchaffs, cawing of rooks, warmth of sunshine, dew, sparkle and the murmur of lawnmowers. The year’s turned. We went up out on the heath the other afternoon, found a glade in the gorse and lay there, yet the mood is autumnal; dry-eyed, affectionate, controlled. We part so soon, and Africa is far, so far. This morning she wore her slate-grey suit, with a slit skirt and a plunging bosom; her white, clear, smooth skin. She was so poised, graceful, perfectly proportioned that I suddenly felt proud to have known her.
In the evenings, after dinner, we go in the crypt, and kiss and walk up and down, and talk. We walk in a certain way, very close, arms entwined, and kiss in the shadows of the old columns. A strange place to sport with Amaryllis, yet not unpiquant. I feel sorry she is going, as if I were losing a pet dog. And she has had an immense value for me, because Ashridge has in many ways crushed me, tried to dwarf me, ignored me. Infuriated and tyrannized me, and she has been the secret consolation, the card up my sleeve. Through her I have satisfied many inclinations to revenge.
The latest teacup typhoon is over lesson-reading. The Admiral is constantly criticizing both my reading and my choice. So I have refused to read any more. This morning he told John Cross that everyone must read from the Passion from now on. John is furious at being dictated to, Harry Gordon angry at the Admiral’s interference. General brouhaha. How we waste our emotions in England.
6 April
A last night with Sally. We went up to the Bridgewater Arms, drank a little, and planned a midnight sortie. It was dangerous, unnecessary, but I have got tired of the conventions, the hideous, blind obeying that smothers life at Ashridge. The rules, one must break the rules once in a while; we both planned and approached the whole thing with a pleasurable excitement. At midnight she slipped out of a ground-floor window and we went over to a back room of the Lime Walk, delighted, bubbling over with it. Children, shameful, cocksure, crowing against the adult universe. We undressed and went to bed, caressed, kissed, lay a long time, murmured, slept, and did not make love. It reminded me of some scene from Casanova or Defoe; certainly there is a special pleasure in sailing so close to the wind. Being naked, having all liberties but the last. She has such a firm, full, splendid little body. It was the experience for a last encounter. In retrospect it will appear shameful; but now it is still warm, exciting, a rose in the night. Grey crowing of rooks in the first light; a pallid, sleepless day; and I now en route for E.
20 April
Ashridge without the girls is existence without thought – possible, but unpleasant. A faint poignant absence of Sally. A determined effort to finish the Greek book; an anxiety about the future. I have said I shall leave in September, but where I will go then, I have no idea. I want time to write, and money to support E. Irreconcilables. I have just given my first lecture here, a considerable improvement on my Poitiers experiences. A test to mark progress by; I convinced rather than bored, surprised rather than disgusted.
Now three weeks’ holiday in Hampstead.
10 May
Past. How short three weeks are, how unrewarding time can be. Full weeks once, now already empty husks, forgotten spaces.
At Hampstead, the quiet life, alone in the flat. Mostly a period of deep, satisfying love; quarrels, nags, bitterness, but a deep firm undercurrent of natural love. It is certainly not that I feel certain of E; but that I feel certain that we love each other as simply and as absolutely as our natures are capable. The physical base is solid, the spiritual structure is much more firm than we consciously feel. At times we hate each other; but the swiftness and eagerness of our reconciliations – the very absorption we show in our quarrels, our inability to grow bored with each other’s faults – are proof of our closeness. We are hypersensitive to each other’s words; we know what are tests, what are truths, what are tricks, what are sins.
I came back to Ashridge today drugged, still in E’s world, her close, warm, intensely real, sincere world of individual pleasures, constant probing experiences, constant sincerity in personal relationships. The intimate, soft world of love – from that into the conventional, public, old-fashioned standard of society here, a society day, lifeless, soulless, formalized away from nature, as lonely as the skinny white body of a monk, unreal, a blasphemy against real life. How they live in society, the English; even in private, they live publicly, like good little social units, not like themselves, individual human beings. One second of E’s world is worth a thousand years of Ashridge. In her world one is sincere and at rest with oneself; in this, one lies continually to one’s beliefs and inclinations. I find it agony to humour the platitudes, nauseating to condone the errors. I am useless here.
Yet a gay blue flood of myosotis flooding down a bank; birdsong; the country has charms.
12 May
Warm days, the sky like blue wool, stifling the earth; at night, remote, faint airs from the south; perfumes, ghosts; a great white cloud of waxen magnolia flames in moonlight, so oriental, so romantically beautiful, yet smelling of horse-piss. I had just rung E and felt lonely. She is seeing R every day, and I am jealous. I daily expect the end of the affaire. She said one day, ‘Why do you worry? You’re getting the best of me.’ I suppose it is true. Before she must have been too meretriciously sulky, too young, to have pleased me; and she will soon be too old, too worn to have even initially attracted me. Though she has infinite resources of attraction; but never more so than at her present point of maturity.
14 May
Twenty-four hours with E; at times I feel our liaison is a tragedy; our love grows, and inexorably a sense of hopelessness, primarily financial. I feel so completely uncertain about the future. At least I know I want to remain, at any cost, with E. But I cannot reconcile myself to a career, to the futile effort of work that a career demands. I have a bitter hatred now of organizations; I cannot obey, no longer tolerate any but my own discipline. I want, in spite of a growing self-dissatisfaction, to write. I never seem to have any time here to write; it is impossible to concentrate. The Greek book, finally with the agents, bores me. It is not the book I wanted it to be, and what work remains to be done with it disgusts me. But how intensely now I love E, and miss her when I am away. She is the one sane person in a hostile world. Once I could take jobs blithely, as evil necessities. Reality, the world of my own will and desires, has made former compromises increasingly difficult to stomach. It is E’s fever; the terrible search for truth that drives one out of all static situations, that makes one a kind of psychological wandering Jew, eternally restless, dissatisfied.
But the affection between us, the deep warmth, the heat, love, passion – that is the truth, and all the rest is lies and irrelevance.
R has again found a good job; lives with a French household. I can hardly believe that E will not go back to him soon, that our present love is not so intense because she senses – probably subconsciously – the inevitable parting. Is it guilt in her? I feel stupidly jealous of R. It is the fault of our own intimacy; when two people go so far into each other as we have done, the rest of the outside world is ash-grey and cold, hideously grey and cold. Separation is a kind of fate worse than death.
E is all sympathy, and no control. She feels everything, ignores nothing. Yet there is a vast silent gap between her vision and her expression. She has a fear of the world that is almost childish.
Women are the missing half of male intelligence. They are like spectacles, they improve our inevitably – because we are sexed – shortsighted vision. And the reverse is true. A woman is the ideal companion, merely from this point of view of comprehension of the universe. But the company of males is redundant; it either presents an inferior version of one’s own view; or improves upon it. In both cases it is insufferable.
15 May
Report from Pearn, P & H on the Greek book – unfavourable. A shock, one hopes too much against hope. I still cannot accept the essential fact about my literary ambitions – that I did not exist, in the literary sense, until I was twenty-one, and even then I had several years of errors and pitfalls to experience. One tends to compare onself with coevals. But I must learn to forgo that pleasure; for many years it will be too bitter. Debit side – ‘a series of chapters, rather than a book, with a sprinkling of pleasant but not very original comments’.
‘Only narrowly avoids making all the obvious remarks.’
‘A procession of places, irrelevant meals and chance encounters.’
Of my prose – ‘it lacks the power of compelling unresisting attention … usually fluent and quite clear in meaning, but he goes no further than that in matters which require a much more sensitive instrument of description to make them valuable.’
Finally – ‘too messy a book to find a publisher’. Credit – on the school – ‘his book immediately improves in flavour, individuality and confidence’ … because I became ‘more than an intelligent tourist … part of the landscape’.
‘I am very worried about being unfair to him because he is so close to writing a good book; but I am sure he lacks that touch of magic which would have brought real life and sparkle to his fervent admiration for beauty, his feeling for the past, his sense of the drama in strange places. All these things are obvious and admirable in him, but they do not cohere into a pattern of recreation sufficiently fresh and stimulating to offer serious pleasure.’
I need to ‘force a design on, discipline material that might well be saleable’.
A fair report; it hits all my premonitions on their heads. And I am less despairing than I could have expected. I don’t know why I harboured the little delusion that I might deceive experts with my inadequacies.
Sanchia Humphries. She hits a right phrase occasionally. Why she likes Africa: ‘Because of the air – it’s air nobody else has ever breathed.’ That’s what’s wrong with English air. Too much exhaled.
3 June
Ten days with E in Hampstead. Coming back to Ashridge was like returning from a long voyage. We seemed in a way to have run, in that short time, the whole length of an affaire. From Monday to Saturday it was love and lust and adolescence all the time; a perfectly happy period, in complete harmony. But on Saturday we spent the whole night in one of our dreadful hopeless quarrels – she sunk into a kind of vicious despair from which she cannot be moved. Any normal attempts at comfort infuriate her; everything reasonable becomes a cliché – as it no doubt is, absolutely. This time she was racked by the total hopelessness of all relationships; the lack of faith, the lack of hope in our own especially. She went to sleep at dawn, which infuriated me; and slept till one o’clock. We achieved a partial reconciliation at teatime. But for the next four days we were out of touch, tired, exhausted with each other, still in love, but seeing love as a tyranny, not as a consolation.
Partly it all came because she started work again – after a month’s absence – on the Monday. And for her, with her total inability to economize, the emotional impact of work drives out all other feelings. It makes her very nearly impossible to live with. But I felt myself, for all the crises of nerves, the hate, the deliberate, sadistic way in which she attacks me, unmistakably in love with her. She has the pure, essence of woman in her, and for that I am prepared to tolerate her lack of social grace, her lack of diplomacy, her harsh criticisms of me and my work (I wrote a short story about the quarrel which she tore to shreds), her inarticulateness, her childish hate of feeling intellectually inferior, her laziness, her lethargy. She is one of those rare people with whom life could never be quite ordinary. She is hypercritical of every single thing, thought and being that crosses her path. Which needs a courage and an effort I often do not possess. She was out late one night, seeing Roy, who now is working in London. I got in a temper with her because I was afraid she might not come back. Drunk too much ouzo. All fears, until the bell rang and I became all resentment. How love loves to hate. The pleasure of having a good reason for feeling hurt.
She often accuses me, in what I write, of using a Woman’s Own style. By which she means sentimentality, triviality, banality, the cheap poignancy and hackneyed language of the women’s magazine stories. I know that by the standards and tastes of the age that is true. This is an austere, severe, black age in serious art, as a reaction against the ubiquitous insincerity and conventionality of commercial art. Unless a thing is tragic, wry, perverted, bizarre, it is not contemporary. Optimism, happy endings, even ambiguous endings, are out of date.
One might make it one’s task to resuscitate happiness, normality, sentiment in the best sense, the poignancy of noble emotions fighting ignoble drives, but to avoid the Rubenesque. A happiness of the sun, not of artificial lamps.
I want to tell the story like a kind of tragic strip. To try and write well without the glossy brilliance of technique that the literary magazines demand. Simplicitas.
9 June
I have, this last week, been writing poems again, the first for some months. I do not know what mechanism triggers the poetic state of mind. Why it happens that the mind starts thinking again rhythmically, in images, metaphors, why certain aspects, truths, words should present themselves in the form of potential poems.
I find it difficult to write ‘modern’ poetry; the poetry of violently contradictory elements. Such poetry was perhaps necessary at first to express the bewildering complexity of the New Knowledge. But it soon becomes a mere concentration of extremes, a futile shaking of the kaleidoscope, in which the occurrence of patterns of merit is partly fortuitous. Where the poet is insincere, using his obscure images to cover up his own poverty of true invention.
It seems to me that these are the two great legacies of what we call ‘modern poetry’ – poetry written between 1908, say, and 1954 – one, the power of the violent metaphor or simile to express a universal; two, the use of pastiche, of which T. S. Eliot is the great genius. Pastiche raised to a virtue, an honourable poetic metaphor. To be fully conscious of all the adumbrations.
I personally am swinging away from a poetry of mood, of atmosphere, descriptive poetry. I am looking for a poetry of truths, of emotions. And expressed in a simpler, less violent language. Leaning more towards naïveté and archaism than complexity and contemporaneity.
I write love poems sometimes. But it only occurred to me the other day that they are not presentable. It is not that I am technically in the least ashamed of them. But it is impossible to publicize highly charged emotion now. I could not do it, even with E.
13 June
I am once again getting entangled in a maze of projects. When I should drop everything and rewrite the Greek book.
A difficult time with E. I am in a way jealous of R, whom she now sees frequently. He is being very successful architecturally; earning plenty of money, and doing competition designs. He has just won a big one. I feel increasingly dependent on her love. And she needs me less and less; and admits that Anna haunts her, that she is as much in love with Anna as anything else at the moment.
14 June
Two splended letters from her. Sometimes she writes near genius. So full of sane, warm, classical love. There can never be another like her.
Chesterfield’s clever joke about copulation – effort considerable, position ridiculous and the expense damnable.fn19 I hate it, hate it altogether, Lawrentian hate. The urbane mind about sex. A petty compensating of the worst order.
21 June
Five days with E. Affection, passion, love. And hopelessness. But impossibility of separation; and on the whole, happiness in the moment. I hardly belong to Ashridge. Most of me with E and a lot of me concerned about the uncertain future.
I must find work in London. I must write. I must get published. Nothing but musts, such work ahead. I live too much in the present.
23 June
Watching a display of dancing given by children at the Little Gaddesden village primary school. They did English folk dances. It was a bright blue day, fleecy clouds, green grass. The dances sprightly, pastoral, a sad lonely ghost. I had a sudden whiff of sorrow for the past. England my England, England’s mysterious deep ghost, sprightly, green; I see it in the shade of the great beeches. Very rarely. One day I must catch it in Robin Hood, the remotest and perhaps profoundest of my projects.fn20
An odd day; odd days. I suddenly find myself indifferent to E. For months now I have been oblivious to other women – ever since Sally left in fact. But now, bang, I find myself suddently tormented by other women, by a mushrooming polygamous urge to love. Two possibilities – the charming, subtle, enigmatic Sanchia and a rather stupid but exceedingly pretty girl called May McNeil. This latter has conquered an American, which irritates me. She has a sylph figure and a traditionally exciting past. I feel some response from her. I made my interest in her quite clear. And was then horrified to find her so stupid, and myself being duped by the body again. But she has a body difficult to ignore or forget.
Sanchia I walked with all the afternoon and evening. A white face under black hair, a red bud of a mouth under her ridiculously retroussé nose. A sky-blue mackintosh with brass bobbles. A fairy-like, fantasizing, childish, sage, charming, infinitely charming person. She lacks passion, it is true (or appears to lack it), and she still has a schoolgirlishness which exacts discords still. But such a wife; and there exists (or rather the potentialities exist) between us an accord of unusual natures, a harmony.
A fierce wind all day, absurd for June. Blue skies and white towers, pluming branches. We wandered through the woods, had a pleasant tea at LG. ‘The sky’s a jewel,’ she said, ‘and the clouds are claws and the afternoon’s lovely because everything else is so pewtery.’ How apt ‘pewtery’ was – how, at first incongruous, it seemed accurate; the incongruous charm of midsummer England. Pleasant, English, only superficially banal.
1 July
A little enchanted by Sanchia. Some of it is deliberate on her part; a kind of revenge for her sex. She thinks me, I suppose, dangerous; and if I don’t see her nowadays, I miss her. I walk about in a permanent state of electricity; pent-up till she appears, and then a current goes coursing out and around her. I am quite sure that sentiment must have its own microwaves. And she is one of those rare people whom I suspect of having a receiving set. Also what I feel for her is marital; I haven’t felt it for anyone else. It may be something in my own age; now is perhaps the time when I would in any case be looking for marital attachments. But I feel that it is perhaps something more subtle; what I look for in a woman is mystery. G had none, which is why I fell so swiftly out of love with her. E has, but no fantasy. Sanchia looks as if she might have an enduring mystery. The wish to marry is in proportion to the belief in the depth of mystery in the woman married. Some such formula.
‘Curio’; she used it of herself, the bad angle on her rarity. Accusing me of treating her as one. And I suppose it was an opportunity, which I only rather ambiguously took, of protesting what I really feel for her. I had asked her to go for a walk, and she came; a cool, grey night with high swathes of vapour veiling the stars. We walked down a long deserted ride in the afterglow, talked, talked all the time. That tender self-revealing talk of the uncertainty in love, hints, ambiguities, laughter, seriousness; I am beginning to feel seriously appalled at the thought of losing her presence. I can’t suppose that she has anything more than interest or liking for me. Physically she is very unapproachable, virginal, armoured. One might almost suspect frigidity, a physical failing, if her voice didn’t have moments of warmth; and little movements of her body. I think perhaps it is sheer inexperience; though she would never be the animal-woman. A charm which attracts me as I grow older. And she has, as she says, great self-pride, a great need for sanctuary in herself; she has to withdraw constantly. And that also, recognizing, I find charming. If only I could be loved by her – act out the part, and start a new life. Absurd, but that also is her charm; she is what I no longer deserve to know. Innocent intelligence, virginity, a whole unadulterated bud. As if in my cult of love I needed something fresh and gleaming to worship; an infantile drive? Something untarnished.
We didn’t once touch, not even fingertips. And she’ll pass me today in the corridor as if we were almost strangers, as if it was two other people who walked so slowly, closely down the beech-rides, in the night, and stared at Mars, and between the branches to the south. I pointed out Cygnus, flying gigantically south-west. She couldn’t see it. ‘I can see shapes everywhere,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t cheat,’ I answered. ‘You must only use the agreed constellations.’ And I suddenly saw the sky as a kaleidoscope for her, infinitely deep and changing, as it really was, incoherent beautiful chaos and, for me, a man’s set of arbitrary patterns; man and woman views. That is her – all woman.
5 July
Four days with E. I was as near as can be to leaving her. For I felt, when I first saw her, for the first time, no love; only a prospect of boredom. She is much too sensitive for me to be able to hide such a change. And she seemed so lonely, so hopeless that in the end I was resigned to her again. Pity has broken into our love; it will fester, I think. I wrote her a letter on Sunday – when she went to meet R and A – to say that I wanted to leave her; but it became increasingly hedged in with reservations. She came back late and a little drunk, attempting pathetically to be cynical; finally crying, terribly, in great loneliness. But she had already realized that I was touched by someone at Ashridge – even that it was Sanchia. And Roy asked her abruptly whether she wanted a divorce, and then told her he was in love with someone else, a model. So that she was forsaken everywhere; and it was impossible to give her such a letter, leave her in distress at such a moment.
It wasn’t a very good letter; nothing short of a long novel would suffice, so complicated are motives in our sort of world. I could justify myself on conventional moral grounds (leaving her), but that would be too intolerably sanctimonious. The main reasons are simple – S (perhaps because she, not being touched, remains idealized) represents not so much a counter-attraction to E as a proof of my own instability; my own longings for a more formal, more fantastic relationship than the ‘total’ love which E and I pursue – it is not enough that we can behave naturally as naked animals, and naked souls, in each other’s presence. I remember having a talk about this with Sanchia. I said it was the only possible relationship between two intelligent people. But she disliked the idea. ‘I must have something hidden,’ she said, one must allow the other certain secrets. Which is precisely what E and I cannot do – such a sincerity and transparency is unusual in its way. But exhausting; and all of life without one’s love gets squeezed out in the process. There’s no time for anything but the relationship.
I want to write. I never have time to write these days; I need solitude, celibacy, in order to indulge the process of self-love that writing is. I would love a year free of all female contact.
And there is guilt; the guilt between E and me for what we have done to R and A. It haunts our lives, it is waiting around each corner, at the end of each day, and it irritates me now like the carrying of an unnecessary weight during a mountain climb, like a tweed coat on a hot day.
There is all that; and still my very considerable love for E. For there’s no one like her, no woman I could imagine more complex in her moods, more purely and widely woman.
10 July
Another nocturnal walk with S. She was in a different mood, buoyant, light, girlish, and I was tense, tired, depressed. It was very dark, the sky full of drizzle; heavy, low clouds and dark masses of trees. We walked and talked, and occasionally I touched her, to steady her, or to show her an easier path. It was very dark, and I had a hundred opportunities to kiss her. But she, of all women (and supposing I was thinking of her in hunter/prey terms), needs careful stalking, delicate playing. She would be so easy to shock. Indeed, I felt like shocking her, just to see what she would do; and also out of a more noble impulse, to check the disease, to so shock her that the affaire would end. But then again, I decided that I didn’t want to shock her; not only for the sake of the chase, but because she has put so much trust in me.
We didn’t get back to Ashridge till one o’clock, and the front door was locked. And as we were standing there, a car suddenly swept round the bend and we were caught like escaping prisoners in its glare. I flinched back against the wall, but the car drove straight towards us and stopped outside the front door. I walked away hastily, guiltily, in the full glare of the headlights, furious, frightened, caught with my trousers down. By the grace of Venus, they were three of the American girls late back from London. I heard them talking about me and giggling. ‘He sure is an immoral character, that John,’ said one of them. It seems amusing now, but terrifying at the time. Absurd, how the social taboos, so artificial, so primitive, can at such movements catch one off balance and assume a sudden looming reality.
I held her hand for odd seconds; a very warm hand.
What Sanchia has and E has not – poetic fantasy.
12 July
Another mad, absurd walk with Sanchia till one in the morning; and this time I felt quite surely that she wanted to be held – not so much kissed, she’s too shy, altogether too virginal. A schoolgirl in love, though so oddly mature in many other ways.
I feel sad when I’m with her; sad about E, sad about myself, least sad for Sanchia. I feel free of E in a sense, lightened, released into the liberty of my own world again. That love was too intense to live with. I am still light and tender with E, but it is a kind of tapering off of love, a thinning out, a rarifaction into nothing. What I now find attractive is the thought of two years’ solitude – or a year’s – with Sanchia as a remote Beatrice to prevent the desert from being absolute. Nine years between us, it’s too much for any serious marriage.
But I held her hand a little last night and when we parted, kissed the side of her head; and tweaked her hair once. I have a different sentiment for her, something more conventional than what I feel for E or G. E is an equal striving to be a superior, too close, too like for life together to be possible. One can’t exist all one’s life in a tension. S is distant, junior, not an equal because she does not combat ideas; perhaps it is because there is no class bond between E and me – no will to lubricate our relationship. We have to clash because we have no common bonds, no common system of conventions.
As for Sally, I wish I might never hear from her again.
14 July
Night with E. I forget what a strange, beautiful creature she is. We made love very well; no simulation of passion needed. And I know all the pleasures Sanchia could never give me. She would never have what E has, a trained, passionate body. Making love requires a certain animal lack of humour – Sanchia has too much fantasy, feyness, whimsicality. But I also thought often of her, of the special rare pleasures one might gain from her presence. And she also is infinitely educable; and very true, like E. They both have a weak stomach for deception – perhaps that is why I attract them.
E and I now sense the end of the affaire – a little sad and desperate, ominous silences. A hopelessness.
But the distinction of beauty; E is unique in her looks; the perfect modern well-formed beauty; a fierce, proud face. But ageing …
16 July
Back from London, and E. And at last the question of parting is broached; and everything is in a flux again. I missed her at a cinema, and we were tense against each other all the way home; then made love, well and warmly. And afterwards I started to talk about separation; we talked all night. Indefinite decisions; a clinging on her part; I was dry and cool and remote, classically sad, frozen. But on the way back to Ashridge despair began to thaw out; I left her standing in the middle of the room, weeping. Intolerable, the thought of never seeing her again; moment of loss, moment of truth. Back at Ashridge a glimpse of Sanchia during lunch, excitement. But she went away for the weekend afterwards. I wrote a letter to E telling her of Sanchia and all the complexities of the affaire. Taut because Sanchia is away till Sunday, taut because E is so beautiful, lovable – she even attained nobility last night – and I love her, taut because Sanchia leaves England in a fortnight, taut because I have half-rejected E from my life, sick of women, sex, my religious conception of love, and oh so tired.
The night before I was out with Sanchia again in brilliant moonlight and a clear sky. It was cold, a heavy dew. We walked and something seemed lost; we walked too far apart, talked too trivially; and I touched her outwardly. A week ago I could have said ‘I love you’ easily; now it seems impossible. We sat on a gate and a badger came right below us, a very bizarre incident, ambling round our feet and suddenly lumbering off. I want to kiss her because she is so unkissable; no physical desire, she doesn’t excite, except by her feyness.
And I’m a little afraid of her; some of the girls caught her slipping out one night, and asked her where she was going; and she just said, ‘Walking with John.’ No subterfuge.
J. Cross said she talked with him till 12.15 last night; I was jealous to hear it. Then consoled; she may have been waiting for me.
24 July
Bitter-sweet days with S. Our walks become more tense and awkward; not only the effort of suppression; she was teased by all the others. So two nights ago she said she wouldn’t come out again, because it was getting too difficult. I kissed her, on the mouth, once. And went away the next night to E, and loved her very much. So tall, so warm, so experienced, a pebble smoothed by the sea. But the two places, the two women, don’t live in the same world. I came back, and Sanchia gave me a poem, immature, faulty, but peculiarly personal. A serious poem, ambiguous.
E wrote a very good letter about discipline the other day – about the capacity for two loves and its control. But what I feel for them both is so absurd/unrelated; and equally irresistible. Though I am so dishonest now that even the superego must be contaminated. A hedonist, a satyr of the emotions.
25 July
A talking all night with Sanchia; till four in the morning. We talked about ourselves clinically, sitting in armchairs on opposite sides of the room; it was an empty, resonant room and we could not clearly hear what each other was saying; a dreamlike, desultory effect. She talked of loyalty; there is a boy in Africa, an unofficial engagement. And I talked of my love for her, flippant and serious by patches. I am possessed by her now. She is an enchantress, in the vast sense; more than a touch of the sea about her. Can’t bear to lose her, see her go, leave my life. Perhaps it is this imminent and apparently eternal disappearance that makes her so precious so suddenly; for the last few days, I am lost in her. It is one way one touches the human condition, the essence of it; with G and Sally I was loved more than I loved, and when we parted, I could adopt a kind of gay attitude of relief; but Sanchia, like Monique, touches the unattainable. With them both I sense all kinds of worlds I can never achieve; they love me less than I love them.
And there is E – when I woke up this morning, I wanted to do nothing except phone her. Urgently, just to hear her voice; reality; not dreams, idealizations, classical myths. An equal love.
Darkness in the future, all kinds of unresolved problems; letters to and from Sanchia; whether to see her in London; no work; no writing; no money; but a sense of living.
Beginning of a novel – ‘I committed suicide today.’
26 July
More talking with Sanchia; her face is a kaleidoscope, a procession of women, a constantly changing series of expressions. Most people seem, by their faces, to live in an almost dead calm; Sanchia in a teasing, gay, sad continual breeze. April’s child.
All her family history; her fears, her feelings; a great platonic affection between us. She said, of her young man in Jo’burg, yesterday, ‘I’ve got to go back to him, and I’ve given my mind to somebody else.’
Victims at last; we sat half the night in a sofa in one of the lounges, closer and warmer. Until in the end I kissed her, and she cried; then laughed, and told me I was only the second man she had ever kissed. Something of the nightmare in it; the late hours and the sleeplessness, the sleepiness, the near separation. She was suddenly small and dependent, so very small, and I felt old and paternal; a flow of warmth, of relief from tension.
And so free from guilt; innocent.
Today she walks about in a magenta dress; laughs at me, looks coy, acts; talks of other things and brings in inconsequential remarks in her typical way. Produces the play, the person most in demand here.
I’ve drafted yet another letter of farewell to E and this time I must send it.
I day-dream this: a separation from E, a growing sureness of love between S and me until I can get her to marry me. She goes to Denmark, then home to SA. Somewhere I earn money and go and get her.
I’ve never wanted to marry anyone so much before.
28 July
Fin de jeu. The building like a furniture depository, a morgue, a closed museum; echoing voices in a great silence. That is the disadvantage of great buildings – they need great length of tenure, a constancy of inmates. People who know each other and each other’s past and future, not a constantly shifting population; soil for flowers to grow in, not sand blown over desert rock. Always autumn in a house like this, a school, a cottage – a scurry of leaves, an October road.
And Sanchia; the last few days have been such a neurotic time – the play, sleeplessness, my guilt, her guilt, our love, the way we have deceived everyone. We went out again last night after the play, which was a flop – except for her brief entrances – in a sea-green dress, very blue jade, a deep harmonious colour for her black hair and her white face and her red mouth. Elegant, very abrupt, elusive.
Caught her afterwards; she walked down to the beech-ride and swung on the see-saw tree – a tree with a low springy bough. And after a while I kissed her again, and we walked back, sad, gay, very tired, and kissed. A small mouth, but warm. And she sat on my lap in the badminton court and kissed very passionately – heat inside, as I knew there must be; so small, so dependent. Then suddenly stood up and walked away. She came and sat with me for a while this morning in our sitting-room, 34. Cool, aloof, white; non-committal. But I believe that love is a communication; what one feels is there in the other person to be awakened. She hides much; and I have had enough of open love.
And love her now. The future’s grey, grey; the chances of our ever having a life together are infinitesimal. But that small distant light seems better than all the open dazzle of E. Poor E; she is disintegrating again, or rather life disintegrates around her. She let the flat before making certain of a place to move to; the problem of Anna again is alive. R wants to send her away to his sister’s; E wants to take her and look after her. Broken phone calls from me to her; the great separation is coming. It’s in the air like thunder; I long for rain; solitude to grow green in.
S left a rose on my desk today. I didn’t find it till she’d gone. A dead rosebud slashed in half, as if by scissors. And a piece of paper underneath, with the one ‘John!’ scrawled on it. Typical of her; ambiguous, mystifying, delightful.
Nipped in the bud? That would be her sense of humour.
Two long talks with E on the phone. I must see her once more; then no more. A long letter to Sanchia, also. Duplicity; but the letter to S was sincere, and the phone calls duty. Not that I still don’t have love, and anguish at the thought of its ending, for E. But what I feel for S goes so deep; perhaps because it is straight, and what I have felt for E has had, in the nature of circumstances, to be crooked. Or does it go deep because I wish to be gone deep into? How much of a love is self-centred? Not an external influence, but a void inside that demands to be, a yearning for even further interpenetration? A female thing; a man in me loves E, and a complete bisexuality (psychological) in me loves S.
How much of my writing here this last year has concerned women and my relations to them; too long a desert, too lush an oasis.
How poor a picture of the age this diary would give a historian of the future; I put down none of the public anxieties – the H-bomb, the Indo-Chinese trouble, the Egyptian trouble, all the rest.fn21 None even of my own troubles, outside the field of love. Existentialism misapplied.
Absurd, human situation; I go and see E; and on all trivial levels – what I now feel are trivial; familiarity breeds triviality – it was so easy, so happy. To be affectionate, to have a meal, to drink wine, to make love, to talk.
But S always in the background; and when I returned to Ashridge, a letter from her; an odd, young, atrociously spelt ‘desultory’ letter. But it bit deep in me; and I lived through the weekend expecting another on Monday. There was none, and I’ve lived through the day as miserably as I was expectantly happy yesterday. Itching to ring her up, to go and see her, anything to see her. A fever; I can’t prevent it, only reduce it. Already I have written four letters to her one. Ridiculous; but the beginning of all difficult enterprises are ridiculous.
Tormented by her.
Too much torment even for guilt. Phèdre.
Yesterday, my lecture on existentialism; plenty of bouquets for it. Except from the Admiral, who has kept a stony silence. So eager, so effusive people are, starved of philosophy – so that if one talks of their souls, their morals, their beings, they are happy. I gave a grossly over-simplified view of the subject; but at least it may make some of them think for a few seconds.
9 August
Clarification of situation; perhaps I was right to hang on, not to make any violent decisions. On Friday I met E for lunch, and then on to the zoo to meet Sanchia. A miserable time on the whole; dissonances, the worst in each of us. The zoo was crowded, the weather wet, our nerves frayed. She wanted it to be a gay last evening together; I was to take her to a ‘low dive’, to ‘amuse’ her. And I revolted; I didn’t want to do anything but talk. I had a horror of meeting E. We sat and drank in a little pub off Piccadilly for a while – there was a storm, sheets of rain, lightning. She in blue, in her light blue mackintosh with its absurd hat. What has she? Not E’s easy animal beauty. No good looks; if I analyse her face, she is plain. But unforgettable; because I have never seen any one even remotely like her?
In the end we went to a cinema, and after a while I took her hand, and it was feverishly warm and responsive. So odd, how she keeps so aloof for almost all the time, and then the heat seeps out like steam through a leaking pipe. Coffee and sandwiches in a café, a walking-round, hand in hand, of Leicester Square. Then I said, ‘Shall we meet again?’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And I was sad and relieved. A last sight of her on a departing tube, shot into darkness as if out of time, a white face and black hair and a splash of pale blue into oblivion.
Home to Leigh. It was two in the morning when I arrived; the exhausted sky arched clear, star-wracked; curlew feeding out on the mud-flats. Cold air, not a light anywhere, the whole town dead. And I was intolerably sad.
It is a kind of raw nerve which certain women flick – a more sentimental susceptibility? – but it seems to me to flood light over existence. Sanchia, the unobtainable; all the links that bound me to the South, E; the mundane mess. Time passing, youth gone, clutching hands out of the maelstrom. A great sad sore view of life, a sorrow, a sob; there is all that, the romanticization of the impossible. A convenient symbol to hang frustrations around; a lancing of all the pustulous boil of the imagined but unrealizable.
All that – at Aix, and with Monique – but this time love also for the object. If I had had the money, I would have married her; tried. Did, in fact, during the thunderstorm, nearly propose.
And E. I saw her next day, spent it in Hampstead with her; and the next. The same tired routine of cinema and pubs; with its comforts, of course. Absolute ease of companionship, no physical inhibitions, a kind of twinness about us. And her body remains infinitely attractive. But in public she is so – not smart, not elegant, not chic. A little tired, dragging, Bohemian; gamin. Urchin charm; which at times becomes embarassing. I sense now why R wanted to make a ‘matron’ of her – not only his Victorianism. I, too, want desperately to spruce her up; her slow individual tempo saps all one’s energy. And her face is drawn, old at times; lacking, for all its beauty, the qualities of S. Gravity, aloofness, those candid eyes, that unpredictability of expression which captivates me. And a certain prolixity, vulgarity in E; in Sanchia, a reserve, a careful choice. It may be merely the difference between a primary school and Roedean – education and the lack of it. E says that I am a snob. But there is something in accent, in carriage, in habits; an economy, an order, where E is all confusion and exasperation.
But she has courage, E. And she persists in loving me, even though I don’t deserve her respect, let alone her love. Calls herself, so accurately, a ‘faithful mistress’.
Curious how now I have become a woman-charmer, who never thought of myself as handsome at all, or attractive. E says it is because I have vitality, a ‘strong’ character. I can see that I have more intelligence, much more sensitivity with regard to women than most Englishmen – but ‘strength of character’? I look for the truth, but I don’t act by it. I have deceived both S and E abominably about each other. I lie to my parents. I am too lazy – or too much in love with ruin, the experience of ruin? – to look after my future. And yet I feel, for all that, a slow thickening, maturing, always at work; nothing to be smug about.
Of course, to be – in the best sense – English: objective, unemotional, sane, balanced and physically vital. I have a little of both qualities – Mediterranean being and an Oxford head; that would account for some of it.
I wrote a letter to S today, about how I loved her; humbling myself in a way. I have never made the first declaration before; and I think Sanchia is the first woman I have seduced rather more than been seduced by. Always the drugger, never the drugged.
12 August
No letter from S; and I feel cooled, relieved. In London yesterday I was afraid, not anxious, that I might meet her. And the acute pain, poignancy, of leaving, separation, has already ludicrously diminished.
13 August
I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf – something precious, feminine in her writing; not a great defect, except to me. But the other day, the one following the day I left Sanchia, and I was feeling battered, mentally exhausted, I picked up Mrs Dalloway and suddenly found myself completely absorbed.
One has to be relaxed, washed out, completely open to appreciate the stream-of-consciousness school. I don’t know whether one could will oneself into that state – whether it wouldn’t always have to be fortuitous, externally produced.
Southend, where before I’ve always been irritated. A cool stream, not a confused ornamental backwater, a lily pond.
And then there was Mrs Dalloway, reminding me so much of S. And Peter Walsh, me.fn22
31 August
A pure blue day, clear and exuberant; not a cloud. The first this summer. I spent ten days with E. Now she is living in a little cottage at the end of a large garden of a house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue.fn23 The usual life – despair alternating with periods of happiness, love and hate and remorse.
We seemed to end on a happy note; I had to come back to Ashridge for a last time, a Saturday. She rode on the bus as far as Watford; there seemed to be a great sure depth of warmth between us. Then suddenly three days later, a letter. She has had an unpleasant affair with some man she asked in for a coffee; that infuriates me. Her tartishness; the other night I made her walk ahead of me in the street, and no less than three lots of men spoke to her in one minute. Something meretricious, promiscuous in her. She has cut her hair short, which makes her as attractive as she has been for a long time, and I get pride out of her attraction for other men; but fury at her stupidity. On top of this she has been sacked once again from her job. A hopeless misfit; no hope of her ever settling down at work. I despair at such times; she has the nostalgie de la boue, she plunges into messes as if they were magnets to her. Sanchia seems almost forgotten, past. Only here, of course, are there continual twinges, cuts of pain.
The intense femininity of E – her absolute lack of self-control. It makes her, in the present, difficult to have; and in the future, terrifying to undertake.
4 September
Storms with E. A broken phone call; all to pieces. A wrecked personality; torn; self-lacerating. Now because R won’t allow her to see Anna; and she is furiously jealous that he is having an affaire with some other woman. I try and retain her soul; but she is destined to tragedy, will always plunge into the agony. Something Greek about her; Phaedra, a Woman of Troy; a terrifying and fascinating quality. I don’t know what it is, what in other women I should call neurosis, lack of control, and dismiss; but grand in her.
Some lovely weather; blue, serene days. Rooks caw and pigeons purr as if it was spring; somnolent September; hunter’s moon and evening mist. I leave Ashridge in two days; an autumnal regret for this lovely heart of England. Incomparably green and gracious. Because nothing dangerous inhabits it; because it is fertile, contained, aged, cultivated, familiar, at peace; and, above all, because it is so very lovely. Not like Greece, flashing out its supreme beauty every day of the year; but only perhaps once or twice a season, like all true feminine beauty. One could have a love affaire with Greece, but marry no one else but England.
Kicking myself out of comfort again; I don’t know how long I can go on doing it. Only a madman would throw up this job, objectively.fn24 With all its amenities, and England so green about it. One could vegetate quite serenely, cultivate one’s garden. If I wasn’t always reaching for a higher rung on my own peculiar ladder.
5 September
How relative things are; I read what I wrote in July, and it is written by a total stranger. I wanted absolutely to marry S then; and now I am amused by the idea. We have an absurd notion of the continuity of our emotions and desires; most appear quite incapable of learning how temporary, of the present, they are. I think it is an inability to analyse; they cannot detect the reality from its mark. A desire is like a rotting apple – the skin rots last. It goes bad from the core, the heart outwards. I think this awareness of the instability of desire and emotion accounts for my power of independence; also for my cynicism; and what some have been kind enough to call my integrity, or maturity. Because at the moment I desire an emotion, I realize them far more than those who do not see them as transient, fugitive things; I love more intensely. And because I do not pretend that they continue very long.
This means that to will their continuance – the existentialist decision against nature, chaos – is doubly hard.
This explains the violent conflicts in my relationship with E – a kind of rhythmic magnetic attraction and repulsion. It is not that at the beginning of a period of repulsion I have to will against an endless desert; I merely have to wait for the pendulum, the rhythm, to operate. I can be sure of the recurrent periods of deep attraction. And that is the kind of certainty (as in writing poetry) that sustains in the drought.
14 September
Torn, lacerating days; it might be a childbirth, and it seems almost certain to be a death agony. E has just left to see R in Bayswater; I sit in the cottage flat and know that I was never nearer to losing her. I left Ashridge in a calm whimper and came here. I have, I suppose, become so used to E that the possibility of her leaving me was hardly credible. But it has happened, as the result of the S affaire in no small part. And the damming-up of all her will to expiate; her feeling of loss with regard to Anna; and the fact also that Roy is now well off, with a good job, and she has been living for too long on the fringe of poverty. The whole change was triggered by this affaire of R’s with another woman; she had no certainty of me, and to see her child and R also detach themselves from her was too much.
I wasn’t fully aware of what was going on; and took it all lightly on the whole. Until one evening she went to see R and returned in tears, saying she’d promised to go back. That was on Thursday. All that night and the next day was tears, tears, tears; an agony of remorse. She didn’t know what had happened, as if she had gone mad.
I suddenly felt the bottom of the world falling out, and made her stay on for at least the weekend. She rang up Roy on Friday; he wanted to go to Abingdon for the weekend, and so two farewell weekends were agreed upon. We argued and argued all that weekend; I felt I was fighting for her soul; in a losing battle, since the odds were so heavy. Every time I thought of living without her, of going to the cinema, of walking down streets, of having meals without her, I felt so sick and frightened that I used any, any argument to try and persuade her to stay. And I have at last realized how profound my love for her had and has gone. And, for all her faults – and perhaps because of them – I can love her as I have never been able to love before. There are doubts; there is the eternal other mistress, freedom and time to write; there is the financial situation – I can hardly afford to keep myself till the next job starts, let alone her; there is the sense of guilt – doubt that anything could ever compensate her for the loss of Anna or even Roy; there is the obscure adolescent worry that she is not idealizable, not the wife-image; there is a doubt of my own (far more than of her) power of fidelity; there is even the feeling that if she returns to R, the situation will be cleared, not only now, but also to make way for a total return; there is a feeling that the real crux is almost religious – between R and me – and therefore false. There’s all that; and the passionate physical love; and the fear of solitude, the need for a companion; and the knowledge that all her truths, her needs, her whims are so like mine – the brother-and-sisterliness in us; all personal, self-centred things, insufficient reasons, in such an issue, to give me any right to keep her.
(One hour since she left; she must be with him now. I feel relieved that the hour has gone. If she is coming back, she comes back sooner now; but that ‘if’, that ‘if’. A great fear of her not coming back this one last time.)
There are those doubts. I could not not have them, but a new certainty overrides them that I want E for life. And I wrote a letter to R saying that I was now fully prepared to marry E and he need have no worries on that score. And I asked her to marry me as well, a dozen times.
Above all, she is in my and I in her veins. We both recognize the extraordinary vitality of our love, which has kept her waiting for me (the irony, that now I’ve come, it’s too late; and to have come, of all places, to Hampstead) through thick and so much thin; the quite intolerable longing we have for each other at all such moments of parting; the profound depths we have touched in each other; and the complete harmony of our everyday relationship. It is a kind of Tristan and Iseult love; incorruptible, but condemned.fn25 I do not think we could not love each other, ever. We might forget, betray, on many superficial levels, but not the deep-running current between us; we could never interrupt that. And now, to cut that off in midstream, at its height, is to court disaster. One cannot extinguish such a fire; you can damp it for a while, but the flames will flash up at the first small chance.
R has a power over E that bewilders me. She constantly remarks on his ugliness, his selfishness, his brutality; yet they fascinate her. Tonight, just before she went, she said, ‘Roy’s got a curse on me. He humiliates me, and I let him do it. I can lie awake all night hating him, and it’s no good. All I do is destroy something in myself.’ I tell her certain views are false, that she believes them only because R has told her that they are true; and she agrees, but I can see them still there in her eyes. It is true; she is under his curse, and I believe in the end that he will destroy her.
Or another way of seeing it; two English intellectuals, would-be writers, an island. One runs off with wife of another. They live together, more or less together, for a year; then part. As if in a literary history; a newspaper report. Other people, not us. Never us.
17 September
A decision at last, the truth of the situation; that she and Roy are incompatible, and no amount of moralizing about marriage, no amount of remorse about Anna, could have led to any success. They are both dominated in a sense by concepts, which blind them to facts. E has only recently been able to accept the truth that Anna is perfectly happy without her; and that her sense of ‘guilt’ about Anna is largely a reluctance to lose her – natural enough, but an impossibly slender basis for a reconciliation with Roy.
I’d arrived, waiting for her, at a state of nervous exhaustion and apprehension which revealed the truth of the matter to me. That it might be difficult to keep her, but it was intolerable to lose her. By the time she got back from Bayswater, on the last tube, I had decided that the worst had happened. Great flood of relief when she finally came, sense of release.
Afterwards, of course, trepidations, financial and temporary; not for any aspect of our relationship, our love. She doesn’t fit in anywhere socially, but that is precisely her charm, outside society. She has no sense of time, but nor have I when I can afford to ignore it. She is as variable as April, but uniformity bores. No fault without a compensation, and I am not being Panglossian. Our life has to be integrated somehow into society now. That won’t be easy. But I have confidence – too much – in my powers of persuasion; I think I can make her, not what I like, but more in my mould. There are several important reconstructions to be carried out in her character; in mine also, of course.
I have to make the existentialist decision now. To choose, and to fight for the choice. Above all, to concentrate; to write; to tame the flesh and force the mind. One has to discover one’s true natural self; and then one has to work out an appropriate approach for it to society; the best way to fit it in. Which I have not yet – this latter – dared to undertake.
22 September
Now it is poverty; no time to be poor, when winter looms close ahead. I have the grasshopper complex: the indolent, futile, good-time, time-frittering grasshopper in the land of arts; worst of all, a thinking grasshopper, knowing the condition to which it is condemned. Normality, for E and I, seems a mirage; it is always just outside our grasp. I have to carry on a sort of semi-criminal existence in this one-person flat; we daren’t let it be known that two people live here. That would be the final disaster, to be out in the streets at this juncture. There is difficulty in finding E a job, partly because of her sensitivity, partly because of her lack of drive; we sap each other’s energy in some strange way, with regard to the exterior world. I have such a desire to write at the moment, also; yet she is too unsettled to allow me to withdraw. We had a violent quarrel one night which was precisely to do with this; because I had been ‘preoccupied’ all day, which was true. She felt relegated to the ‘whore-housekeeper’ role. Our old fault of living much too close together; but she needs a man, of course, far more than most women, knows her dependence and hates it.
She has also this odd inability to deal with time; she looks at a clock-face always as if she hates it. Unfortunately it contaminates me, largely because it is sane and civilized. E calls it ‘being too anxious to get on to the next minute to enjoy the present one’; which is perfect, in any other situation but this.
25 September
Going home, really to borrow money. Except that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. A great gulf now separates us, since I will not talk of E to them, though they seem to have guessed of the nature of things. I don’t know if it is honest to say that it is for them that I keep so sensitive; not wanting them to worry or to suspect all sorts of wrong motives and emotions. Or whether it is not that I don’t want to confess my departure from their straight and narrow path, don’t want to be bothered by their advice or their reproach. Pride. And also the difficulty of explaining the fact to them, since they could not comprehend the subtleties of modern morality.
E called it the worst kind of pride when I said that I refused money – F actually offered to give me a cheque if I needed it. It is pride in part. But also I know their capacity for worry, to say nothing of all in the past that I shall never repay them for; not being anything like what they wished me to be.
There was another quarrel when I got back to Hampstead, since E had read all that’s here in my absence; I read a lot out the other day, but she accused me of having ‘edited’ it. Which was a little, but not so much as she made out, true. The usual hostility, despair, cynicisms, sarcasms, analyses; her disillusionment, disenchantment, ‘hollow’ of love for me. I was angry at leaving this about; a knife in a nursery. But confident that my love could carry her anger at all the deceptions and her corresponding doubt; quite sure of her, too, that what she was saying was irrelevant to what she felt. I think a truce with personal relationships here; leave them alone for a while; a matter of necessity.
27 September
Blue; lovely blue imperial omphalos; London today; the river keeping its heart clean, running, changing, cleaning, and the buildings like lines of jetsam along the banks; as exciting, as full of possibilities, as tidelines after a storm; healthy, though so many dead things are washed up; beautiful old thriving London, sea salt, hearts of salt, not oak, and the soot and the seagulls. It was the last day of freedom, freedom from work; the new job tomorrow. I met E at Charing Cross, auspiciously in sunlight; she had just got a job. In her sober black dress, and white-black checkerboard shirt. We caught a riverboat from Westminster pier to Greenwich. A revelatory view of London, an apple cut in half; a new foreign wonderland, a trip up the Amazon, quite unexpected; and shaming, that I had not done it before.
13 October
Life in Hampstead. The secretarial college is a seedy, mediocre institution. Two or three Victorian houses; at least with no pretentions; the mere cramming of 16–18-year-old girls who are not intelligent enough to aim higher than a secretarial career. The staff are female, loquacious, a mixture of failures and mice. The atmosphere perfectly uneducational; a pale ghost of a ‘common-room’ (staff-room, it is called). Factory, office atmosphere; all the teaching is strictly practical. The director is a pale, plump young man who is a town councillor and who goes to Tory conferences.fn26 The virtual power is in the hands of the secretary, a somewhat blowsy, powerful kind of woman who is easy to play. I teach small classes of foreign girls – temperamental Greeks, noisy, lively French, silent, aloof Icelanders, and a mixture of all the other nations, never the English girls. Hate the job; mais il faut vivre.
E goes out to work at Gamage’s, selling little lead Knights of the Round Table. The MGM film is the centre motif of their Christmas toy department. Long hours, little money.
A day-to-day life, the major unit a week; one cannot think beyond a week. Friday is the climax, payday; we live from paypacket to paypacket. There are various urgent needs; an overcoat for E, a new coat for me; and to satisfy them is as much as we are capable of at the moment.
An additional trouble is that this little cottage flat is for one person, and I have to live a semi-criminal existence in it; fugitive from justice. I have to try and pretend that I am not here when E is out; not go outside, not even stand at the window. A dog’s life.
Though Hampstead has its consolations; and when E and I are happy, we usually contrive to be very simply and purely happy; and we know, or I know, that what lies between us is infinitely worth suffering for.
20 October
Time in a swift, dangerous flow; too urgent for writing, here or anywhere else; urgent, but not exciting; urgent and monotonous the life of the city-dweller; and if that was not enough, the effort of ‘living in sin’. I feel perfectly settled in E – though even as I write, she is missing and I presume with R – settled in myself, at peace as regards love. My only anxieties are whether she will stay with me and whether she will last out the long, difficult road that must mean; the sheer physical – to say nothing of the psychological – hardship of being a shop assistant at Gamage’s. No doubts now that we represent for each other, as regards attraction, the almost perfect partner. We have that, and a multitude of obstacles – both in jobs we hate, poor even then; and she is tormented by guilt still. We are trying to find a better flat, something more spacious than one small room and a single bed. Meanwhile I continue to live here like an escaped prisoner. Cheap flats, in Hampstead, are as rare as swallows in winter.
18 November
There are two kinds of writer: those who have genius for some genre, Molière, Racine, Dostoevsky, Mansfield; and others who have merely a universal mind and find the written word their best means of expression, Gide, Goethe, D. H. Lawrence; mind-writers and genre-writers. And I’m a mind-writer; all the genres interest me. I feel master of none, yet at home in all. And why not present all one’s work – if one is a mind-writer (much more occupied with ideas than with words) – as it comes out; in years, or periods of time; short stories, fragments of plays, poems, essays, notes, criticisms, journals; the aim being a portrait of the total living artist, not a classified museum. Let the neurologists do the sorting.
Katherine Mansfield (Alpers).fn27 One of E’s idols; and a little one of mine. So much of the Mansfield–Murry story, especially the first three years, like the life that E and I have lived and lead; the mattresses on the floor, the continual camping-out, the hunt for the ‘perfect’ (i.e. cheap, airy, light, snug, spacious – non-existent) flat. The stress and strain between the sensitive female and the cerebral male. KM was articulate, of course, but one can’t live near to E and dismiss her silence; the mind bubbles, ferments; but it’s a long way below ground.fn28
22 November
Denys S has decided to go to Indonesia, plus wife, plus child. Foolish, the current picaresque, the restlessness, the need for change; all part of the great post-war emancipation of the individual; energy-washing.
23 November
Femininity of Mansfield; descriptions, reactions, moods, relationships – a world without social or moral values and didacticism; the woman describing the man’s world – clinically, really, if ‘clinical’ hadn’t such antiseptic, scientific, cold connotations. More of the future than the man’s view; Woolf is the same. Joyce, James, must have had large anima. It is the man who must have a team; and the female who watches the match. Personal moral? Feminization of my literary sensibility.
25 November
Why does Plato’s account of the death of Socrates always, always, make me cry? All the four gospels leave me cold and indifferent. It is an outrage that Jesus of Nazareth gets so much devotion, still; a monument of human stupidity, a symptom of their psychological imbalance.
Three plays. The Death of Socrates; The Death of Christ; The Life of Robin Hood.
E. Xanthippe!fn29
29 November
Weekend at Oxford, with the Porters. I felt far removed from Oxford, a little disturbed by its muddled grace and its brilliance. But it is a hollow town. The University seems young, offensively callous. On Sunday morning, little groups of earnest young men in dark suits and college scarves – the scarf seems sadly ubiquitous now, though the uniform can surely never be a symbol of freedom of thought – hymn books in hand. An oppressive air of religiosity everywhere, everywhere; and an absurd sign in a shop – ‘Buy Dad an Xmas present here’ – which tells sufficient about the change in character these last few years.
Dichotomy with the donnish North Oxford world – all cerebrality, scepticism or intellectual Catholicism. The Tolkiens, Faith and Christopher, came around for coffee and discussion; clouds of perfumed talk; style and amusement value; poses, dialectics. A French form of conversation, continental, elegant, though always leaping off into typically British elaborate absurdities. A deliberate misuse of the discoveries of logical positivism; they play on the treachery of words.
They make me feel lumpish, clumsy, an ox in a rococo salon. And the oxen feel them despicable, frivolous, sad. For they have the tragedy of clowns, harlequins, in a way; impotent, hollow men, who have to clown, to parade their post, their style, to quiet their starring egos. Neither the Tolkiens nor the Porters have a happy relationship; they lack something at the centre, some certainty, some warmth, some peasant depth and simplicity which E and I possess. She sat there silent throughout, half dazzled, half disgusted; which I no longer mind, knowing her stillness does run so deep; and amused by the puzzled looks. She has an apprehension of essentials; they a mastery of superficials – danger of the brain. Plato’s harmony; but their brains are their tyrants, the heart and the loins oppressed.
Parenthood. The Porters do not punish Catherine; everything is carefully explained. A fundamentally Socratic view of intelligence equalling goodness. But I did not like Podge urinating in front of her; and when she clambered on the banisters, with a twelve foot drop below, I found his nonchalant ‘Terribly dangerous, but one has to let them do it’ appalling. One does not endanger or shock one’s child to impress strangers in this house of one’s enlightened views on education. A pervasive egocentricity.
The stagnation of being civilized. The need for action; civilization has almost a pejorative sense, that some main artery has become severed.
The writer wants to include the whole world; all the whole world expects of a writer is some new flavour. Greatness is confused with individuality, ‘vision’ with word-ingenuity. E criticizes a series of short stories I have written recently – contrived, and so on. But the accusation of ‘no distinction of style’ worries me. I don’t like glossy writing – intellectual writing, where everything not pristinely new is a cliché. It’s too easy to think up clever similes and metaphors, much too easy. Partly it’s the new complexity, the fear of committing oneself to truths of any kind, the pathological contemporary fear of seeming naïf. Which means that the ambiguity pays off – or at worst it’s a fair insurance.
But it’s an end to a means – when I’ve time, I’ll dress those stories up. And of course that is the function of the new artist – Picasso-like, to use all the techniques. Master of all, slave of none.
12 December
Nuit blanche, during which we examined everything, said most of the unforgivable things, and decided nothing. As usual it came at the end of a happy day. E’s reiterant theme now is the problem of guidance, purpose – she constantly accuses me of not telling her ‘where I’m going, what’s the point of all this, of what the hell there is to live by.’ Of course, the conditions in which we live are nerve-wracking; this tiny one-room flat, this perpetual lack of money, her work. She accuses me now also of having blighted the relationship (Sally and Sanchia). I can’t do anything there – if she chooses to treat all that as blight, then blight it must be.
But the desire for guidance – that is out of her deepest nature. It is what has driven her from man to man, the belief that somewhere is a perfect state of love, somewhere a perfect husband and lover – a Roy with his authority and his noble concepts of love and marriage and a John with his pagan love and his pleasure – both of us in one. But sooner or later she ends any relationship – either she leaves, or she drives her man mad with the nagging. It’s hopeless to try and explain or argue with her in such moods – whatever one says is twisted. This mothlike predilection for truth, a glowing, pure truth is terrifying – because it can only end in death and suffering. If I thought it would help I would send her back to R. But Roy’s conceptions of human nature are so idealistic, so Catholic, so much dogma and so little actual psychological fact, that a return seems to me to be a sentence of penal servitude – deserved, possibly, but whose only effect would be to add hate to her resentment. Like a hardened criminal, she ‘has it in’ for life.
Her craving for order: I tell her that there is no order, that one can only get it at the expense of reality, that happiness, in an absurd world, is only possible by self-deception or by what consolation can be drawn from seeing more or less in perspective – i.e. that reality is chaos, and our own value a combination of our recognition of that fact and of our attempts to remedy it. But she, of course, wants a faith, an explanation, a panacea.
17 December
Waiting for her; she has gone to Roy’s end-of-term celebrations. I have no right to feel resentful; but I do. It seems to me to be an appalling error, this prolongation, endless, indefinite, between Roy and her. I feel so certain not that their marriage would break a second time but that it would be basically unhappy. And for Roy to wish, and E to consent, that she should pretend she is his wife seems to me to be a masquerade in bad cause. An experiment, she called it. All that is of the twenties. Of course, I am as guilty; but I kept my guilt at a distance. I can excuse her seeing Anna – but to see Roy for a gay evening. How can one lack pride as much as Roy? I find it perverted, suspect illicit pleasure in such a doubtful situation.
I constantly have to accept the possibility of her going; it couldn’t be anything less than terrible. But she threatens me with it so often now that I have prepared a sort of emergency set of emotions. I don’t know how one would get over the temporary violent pain, except by telling oneself that it would not last for ever. The damage would be to my faith in love, in women; if I ever become permanently objective about them, as I so easily might, then love is not possible.
It’s love against society; all the weight of money, convention, peace, order. I am mad to go on struggling.
23 December
Finished the first very rough draft of The Passenger. A whole range of plays. Several short stories also, this last month. But time, time, I never have time to revise them.
24 December
Another Christmas apart for E and me. We go to our homes; after that, all flux and uncertainty. She goes for a fortnight to Harrogate; after that, the effort of finding another job. She understandably dreads it. As time goes on, it appears increasingly improbable that we can go on living together; and as improbable that we shall ever be out of love. What an improvident person I am; my complete lack of earning power; of any real desire to earn. No wonder E longs after R’s £1,000 a year. But perhaps, in some subterranean way, that is a charm, in this financial world, to be feckless.
I have no pay till Jan 8th – and we have about £10 to last us till then – quite impossible.
2 January 1955
Christmas and the old year gone; a dull, sad Christmas at home, stuffing and drinking; all the hypocrisy of a festival without a true heart; at least, the heart concealed; the old pagan midwinter miracle – that is beautiful, the green heart in the black world. But all the Christian farrago, the hideous Christian resurgence. I sat and vegetated, hurt my liver; missed E terribly, and read Shakespeare – an intense pleasure. Especially Measure for Measure, a comedy like a groan, a key work.
5 January
Ten days’ adieu to E – she goes to Harrogate for the Toy Fair. I took her down to Swiss Cottage to meet the car taking her there; eight o’clock on a raw, grey day; black coat and geranium cap, unthawed snow. The man who employs her seems pure at heart; but to see her climb into his luxury car and whisked away up the Finchley Road – my inability to try and earn is a pimp. We have never been more in love than during these few days between Christmas and this departure. Heat in the snow, long drowsy hours in bed, passion in sex, like gloves to each other – and then this, sending her away; any sending away of such love is a prostitution.
Walking back up Fitzjohn’s Avenue, alone; all grey, cold, thawing, slush and dirty snow; massive, dull oblivious houses, hurrying, oblivious passers-by. An endless ascent, straight, lined by black, bare trees, the houses – as the future, without her, must be.
Empty, hollow without E; can’t settle down until I hear from her. The acid test, absence, of the value of love.
A phrase from Hemingway’s To Have and to Have Not. After Harry dies, Marie says: ‘You just go dead inside and everything is easy. You just get dead like most people are most of the time.’ And, ‘Nobody knows the way you feel, because they don’t know what it’s all about that way.’
It’s true; deep love is like a current; has the two values of the word; both sweeps away, isolates – and lights. And that’s how I feel – a broken bulb; fused.
12 January
Sudden telegram from Liz – that she returns tonight, three days before expected. Inrush of anxieties; with her, one is always in the avalanche area. A row with Gee, her employer? A dozen possibilities.
Long letters from her. Very good, many of her letters, and things have seemed to be fairly all right, but how typical of her not to indicate at all what is wrong – or not wrong.
And I was feeling so in love with her. But the trouble always comes, with us, out of the blue skies.
13 January
E came back, and nothing was strange; merely that Gee had decided that there was no more point in her staying in Harrogate. A feeling of warmth, quiet happiness. Two good omens – the day E was due back, a letter offering her a possible job arrived. And now we have found a flat to move into, in the Vale of Health, where Lawrence once lived.fn30 Two top floor rooms in a Victorian row, solid and clean, and fine views. We both feel excited. It was snowing when we went down to see it; branches all white with it, and the world muffled. A drink in a pub near the pond, and a jazz band improbably practising next door.
25 January
Moved, to the top floor of a Victorian house in the Vale of Health. It has views, over the pond at the back; over a little square to the front and up the hill to Jack Straw’s Castle. At night, a deep-sea world up there – eel-buses, unknown fish, winking of orange crossing-beacons. Tracery of black branches against grey skies; the sun hasn’t shone, in any sense, since we arrived. Gulls on the frozen pond; it’s an old, clean but frosty house; two old country-spinster landladies; hopelessly ugly furniture, wallpaper, carpets, lino, which all drown E in misery, quite apart from the – for us – new situation of she having to do the pretending – I not the lover in secret. Many doubts about the future, Anna; the move could not have been more miserable. It was quite devoid of any of the excitement of new rooms to inhabit. At the best E is unadaptable; and this was too much. So we are still half camping out, with only the essentials unpacked, as if this is only a temporary waiting-room. Gypsies.
Of course, I like it – the space, the green, the height over the ground. I don’t think I’d mind even an oubliette, if it had a view.
Cocteau season at the Everyman; a very rococo personage. He has the ambivalent talent of the eighteenth century; touches everything with grace, and infects it with superficiality. Not sincere; a lively brain without a centre. But L’Eternel retour is a very good film; inimitable, and very moving.fn31 But perhaps it is Tristan and Iseult, the love story; in art, a retour can eternally be made to it. And having lived with, living with Iseult in the forest …
E; her paucity of vocabulary; she doesn’t talk about seagulls, but about ‘white things’. She says, ‘A brown pheasant sits in the tree and looks at me.’ And a dream of hers, that she was trying to put shillings, at Mount Grove Cottage, into a gas-meter. How I came to help her, looked at the meter, then at the shillings, and said: ‘It’s not them, Elizabeth. It’s you.’ Comic, or significant?
There were ducks wheeling round the pond this morning; and tufted duck diving; ghost flocks of gulls. And quacking of mallard drakes in the night; owl-cries. This must be the strangest little oasis within the whole of London proper; right that D. H. Lawrence should have lived here.
1 February
Another of the violent stormy periods. We argued all of Friday night. Thursday had been all love, but on Friday morning E came on the letters from Sanchia, turned up forty minutes late for lunch with me, and then everything deteriorated; arguments and tension. She wouldn’t get up the next morning, so I went to ring up Roy and met him for lunch. Six pints of beer for him. We both agreed on all E’s faults; both said we were profoundly in love with her. But whereas I went to meet him prepared to make the great sacrifice, I came away more than ever resolved not to make it. There is something in R so ineffably self-centred that one cannot not oppose him. E says he is a gigantic person, in faults as in virtues; but I cannot believe that any person so muddled and limited in his views will ever be gigantic. Of course, he has a Svengalic fascination for her; and he is in black and white, where the rest are in grey. What he believes and disbelieves, he does absolutely. That in art is permissible – since everything in art is permissible – but in morality, and in personal relationships, one cannot be piebald without being a social and personal menace. All my being revolts against that dichotomy in Roy – that supreme aura of certainty, of his own rightness and everyone else’s wrongness, which is the great psychological spine of Catholicism; and that Nordic impulsiveness, supposed violence, great dark twisted mass of unexamined ego. Men like Roy will not act on self-analysis; they will not relate themselves to the outer world; they will not admit, since to admit is to humble the ego, that there are values outside their philosophy.
R and I argued about physical love – animal lust, as he calls it. He refuses to give it any importance in a personal relationship; and there we parted at complete loggerheads. I came back to Hampstead desperately afraid that E might have gone; but we found ourselves flung together as violently as ever before.
DHL, The White Peacock; the writing is at times as naïf as a schoolboy’s; patches of brilliance, of course. But the miracle – even when the writing is most naïf, the characters seem real. One doesn’t think of the charcters as unreally naïf; they are real characters described naïvely.
Gide, Thesée. A great novel; Gide is the only Theseus – the bluff, iconoclastic, free-thinking.fn32 The unknown, a ritualistic world. The Individual destroying a religious society. Destroyer of religious society. Destroyer of civilization, therefore the most civilized.
7 February
Contact with Gide; I’ve never made it before. Yet feel a great twinness with him, a sympathy, now.
12 February
Miss Skinner, the landlady here; a master of the kind. Anus-dominated; she has a pathological hate of dirt. She has already doubted – justly, of course – whether we were married; called us Bo’emians; and this morning came up and expressed her horror at the mess we lived in. Nine milk-bottles, she said it was one day last week, and the bed unmade all day. It’s true, we live Irish; but not dirty. I felt I ought to get angry; but she was such a perfect specimen of prejudiced ignorance that it almost pleased me to hear her ‘carry on’. ‘You’ve no right to put pictures on the walls,’ she said. ‘I don’t like it. That’ – pointing to a Greek vase-painting copy, with the Minotaur showing a neat penis – ‘filthy I call it.’
‘You’d never find any place like this,’ she said. One could as well explain French irregular verbs to a toad as attempt to justify oneself with such monolithic guardians of public morality.
13 February
Another upheaval, spasm in our life; we decided to leave here. E had an evening with R, with the usual positive-negative effect. All that such meetings achieve is an awareness that she is on a tightrope, a frontier between two hostile countries. We went to see a new flat on Saturday; took it. It’s expensive, but pleasant, and the landpeople are civilized after the ogress above whom we live now. On Sunday, great debate; E said she could never divorce R. But the day ended by our taking tea with the new landpeople and giving notice here. Monday was all loss and disaster; E’s new job, in a basement, depresses her violently; futility, centrelessness, and our poverty, our desperate economy of leaping from payday to payday, with a sense of raging torrent below. Her old questions: Where are we going? What does it all mean? And when I give no answer: You’re hopeless. You’re negative. You don’t help me. Guidance, she craves guidance. Sometimes I feel that any charlatan philosophy, any diversion, as long as it sounded convincing, would satisfy her. But I am clear on the main outlines of this situation: I shall write; that is the essential. I love her, and she loves me. I don’t believe she will ever be happy with R. Therefore she has to accompany me on my destiny. She can’t hesitate much longer; and I can’t go on climbing my mountain with her on my back; by my side, with me, yes, always; but not both her and the mountain. It’s not possible.
22 February
So many ideas for plays in my head – I could write for ten years. And no time, never any time.
Sacrifice: I sometimes feel I could sacrifice E to writing. But I don’t believe that would ever be a simple case of writing seeming more important than the woman; but merely that to sacrifice the woman would consecrate the writing. Which is not morally admissible; any more than I would take aphrodisiacs the better to love.
The new flat (55 Frognal) suits us better. More comforts, privacy, a much pleasanter atmosphere. But things between us still uneasy, unsettled; I can sense in E a boredom, a lack of interest. She is not getting enough out of us; ‘a wider life’, ‘stimulation’, ‘hollow relationship’ – they always come up when we quarrel. Of course, it is basically her own inner emptiness; lack of self-confidence, creativity, a rich imaginitive life. There was never a woman less self-sufficient psychologically. And she is so pathetically ill at ease in any company, because of her lack of education, of savoir faire. She can’t pass off anything, can’t stand up on her own with strangers of our own class and type. She is classless, but without the ability or the audacity of classlessness. She sat in Roy’s shade, which finally drove her out in the sun; but now she hankers to go back. The terms change; his shade was sunshine, and the sun she’s in is cold, is shade.
25 February
I’m typing out a play: The Passenger. The five pages of which E read and hated violently; worthless, cheap, nauseating, she used all her adjectives. I was as shocked as she was; and lived in a sort of unhappy tension all the evening, Denys S being here. I think she may be right – not in the violence of her reaction, but about the cheapness of the writing. Am tormented by doubts – style, any kind of style, eludes me. Am I floundering after the unattainable? And is literature perhaps only a means, not an end, worse still, a cul-de-sac for me? I feel so inarticulate sometimes; as if all this writing, painting, suffering were only a blind groping on my part, where others, so many others, can see. There is all hell for me in such doubts; I can perceive the urge to self-fulfilment, self-discovery, suddenly, not as a raison d’être, but a cancer.
(Later): But a feeling of catharsis; of being pruned; sap rushing out into better shoots. Of the important thing; not the badness, ugliness, of the present foliage, but the force, the blood-pressure of the sap.
17 April
Age; an ominous one, the twenty-ninth birthday. The sands of my twenties slipping out, and still nothing done, nothing solved, no hope of relaxation. I am rewriting the Greek book, and I at last believe that some of it is worth printing. But it lacks polish, it divagates, repeats itself; the mind resists specialization, yet to make oneself heard one must be special. There’s no glory left in mere generality of temperament.
The Turkish job has fallen through. Not that I greatly mind. It is another door closed; I am forced to continue the struggle with myself. And I am certain that that is what matters: self-conquest, self-discovery.
Also E decided, on April 2nd, to go back to R at the end of this month – at the end because he didn’t want to interrupt a holiday in Scotland, and because he said he couldn’t, with his £1,000 a year pittance, afford to take her till next month. So I am reduced to the role of hotel-keeper; I find it all disgusting in a way – on the other hand, E requires that I should not complain. There are occasional outbursts, but I know at heart she is not unhappy. She is living again on the brink of tragedy, and I am, at her going, in love with her. I don’t doubt that she will go to R. She doesn’t love him, but she doesn’t know what love is. I try and dissuade her, of course; but there is too much what she wants. To break up my life, send me raving sad. I believe now that there is, comparatively, a bond between us of the more deep and indestructible kind – a duality, a twinness which makes me dread the thought of any other relationship. That, after this, could only be formal, the shadow of our closeness, our living in and through each other.