My two aims in poetry.
1. To find a way through to the heart.
2. To put pressure on words.
As regards the first: the direct appeal is no go. The approach is by some other, more devious route. Analogy with climbing. The direct routes to Mont Blanc have all been climbed endless times; so the glory now (it is said) is in the indirect routes, the routes in themselves, not the peak. This feeling (that all the peaks are conquered) is common in all the modern arts; whence the preoccupation with technique, with the manner in which a poetic problem is climbed, not the problem itself. That is, the subject is now a field for exercise and exhibition. Analogy between the natural gymnastic powers of primitive man, Tarzan-man, and the life and aims of the gymnasium gymnast.
By ‘heart’, I mean all that is not such work – pitch and gymnasium work. I mean all in which the subject is at least as important as treatment. That is, the meaning is as important as the words in which it is expressed. La pensée vaut le style.
The devious route must lead to the peak, not only to itself.
As regards the second: a technical device. To break up metre by suppressing function words. A kind of jumping-two-instead-of-one effect. Or shunting trucks. Words jolting other words violently forward.
We went to a party in Hampstead Garden Suburb last night. Richard and Jean Taylor. A roomful of bright and fairly successful young people. I didn’t want to go, as the Taylors are close friends of the Hendrys, who, sure enough, were there.
Stilted conversation – I could think of nothing to say. I don’t want to know such people (as the Hendrys) because of the waste of time the knowing them requires. Eliz thinks I am unsocial in this, but it was she who insisted that we should break off relationships before. As for the (to me) soft impeachment of being unsocial, I couldn’t deny it. Such parties, and the prospects of evenings with couples like the Hendrys (the latest films, plays, books – the deadly servile dullness of such talk), they bore me stiff. I pump people in such circumstances, if there’s anything to pump out; with people one knows very well there’s nothing left to pump. So there’s no more than a void. Once every six months is enough to see most people. And a very few, more often.
10 January
Ronnie Payne. We haven’t seen them for years. Quieter. Lonely people, like ourselves; only they seem fiercer, unhappier about it.
He had some good stories, as usual. One about The Times correspondent in Paris, a Giles. Very snobbishly proud that his wife was Lady Kitty. Some Frenchman asked him to a reception. ‘And bring Mrs Giles.’
‘Well, actually she isn’t Mrs Giles …’
‘Never mind, never mind, bring her along anyhow!’
24 January
Will in wordcraft gets one nowhere.
30 January
Waking up in the middle of the night. The very thin old moon supporting the bright ashen grey dead moon. A sort of voyeur impression. Seeing the moon naked for the first time.
8 February
Kamin. A Tanganyika Gujerati. She failed a shorthand test (by two words – nothing) this morning. During the lunch-hour she slashed the back of her hand repeatedly with a razor-blade. Why? ‘It gives me relief,’ she said, ‘I’ve often done it before.’ Sure enough, I saw scars on her inner arm when she turned her wrists round for me to look. Hysteria? Masochism? She sat quietly smiling, politely deprecating all the fuss. I felt it was something very Oriental. Not for Europeans to understand.
The Common Market. The peculiar assumption (on both sides) that the matter can be decided only on economic grounds. As if to adduce historical, cultural, emotional, or internationalist arguments is mere sentimentality. It seems to me that the economic is the least important aspect; and that the politicians’ failure to see this justifies the contempt one feels for them. I want to be European, not Commonwealth-British.fn1
Antonioni, La Notte.fn2 Another very good film, misunderstood by the critics, it seems. This one is pure Racine: stylized ‘noble’ characters exhibiting a kind of geometric psychology, all predestined in true Jansenist style, and acting out their fates mathematically. The décor is contemporary, but I can’t see any real application. Antonioni makes certain general statements about the human condition and human relationships, just as Racine does. I can’t imagine that one is meant to be moved; catharsis is impossible. The right reaction is one of keen intellectual pleasure – ‘pure’ intellectual pleasure, ‘pure’ in the sense that we talk of ‘pure’ mathematics.
We have lately reknotted our relationship with Jennifer Ardagh. She has separated from the egregious John. A nicely ice-cool woman, with a sort of impatience with the cliché expression and the cliché thought, and indeed with her own cliché blue-stocking oversensitivity and shyness. We had coffee with her the other day – dull and stilted, but the evening produced a fine monster, a Mrs Bolton-Smith, an earnest muscular Christian of forty or so. Dressed in a black dress, vicar’s dowdy wife style, her hair done the hausfrau way, no make-up, hard grey eyes glinting behind spectacles. Full of girlishry, spinning her necklace round, gurgling and giggling at her own jokes. One of the new Christians, eager to mildly shock, to be ‘young’. Throwing words like ‘egghead’ and ‘beatnik’ around; then dragging one back to her faith, always rubbing one’s nose in it (I said the public schools killed Christianity and she rose, naïve trout, with a great splash). Rugby, she said, gave the boys a simply splendid Christian spirit, the real thing – good works, good works, good works. When Jennifer told a story about her little boy – they were in a Catholic church and he said ‘I don’t think God lives here’ – the B-S crowed, crowed, and cried, ‘Sucks to the Pope!’
Of Gainsborough’s masterpiece at Kenwood: ‘I simply adore her. She’s such a minx! A real minx! Every fold of her dress is erotic! Such a minx.’
But her best expression was ‘You either have Lord, or you don’t.’
17 February
Being in exile from the now. I’ve been in bed with a cold. Reading Swift and Fielding. So every conformation of shadow and sunlight (especially) becomes eighteenth century. I mean I hear things and see things and I seem to see and hear them through eighteenth-century eyes and ears. The effort is to live in the now, not in the then.
TV adverts. A phrase I noticed: coffee-pot fresh.
It was pronounced – ‘coffeepotfresh’. This is the new use in English, bound to spread and spread. The packaging and concentrating of the key words in a statement (the phrase was advertising powdered coffee, fitly enough). I suppose it comes from Joyce and the experiments of the 1920s, via Time magazine, although of course the tendency to agglutinate is as old as the language. I foresee a dim future for a lot of the old structure words (pressure of time, pressure of space).
‘Today the weather is as cold as can be’ = today’s coldscanbe weather.
Coolorchardrecalling reckless love
Poetry hasn’t exploited it yet.
The cut-throat cleverness of young intellectuals today; terrified of not seeming clever. The public isn’t with them, except inasmuch (perhaps a pretty heavy exception) as the critics lead the unthinking. But since it is young intellectuals (and intellectuals of all ages always want to seem young) that command the field in the newspaper and magazine offices, the intellectual cleverness gets as much space as it wants. I think it is a phenomenon, a compensation, of non-creativeness. So we let deaf men choose our music.
28 February
Two poems. One about Devon – Ipplepen. Going to the Charlesmouths’ one day, and walking with Hazel Charlesmouth – with a girl – to see some cyclamen blooming. I think the first I had ever seen growing ‘wild’. This memory came up when we were talking about Ipplepen down at Leigh. A recurrence of forgotten things; the box-bush outside Mr Petrie’s door; the date carved over the door at Dornafield farm; and the cyclamen incident. I can’t remember what Hazel C looked like (I had no sex feeling for her); or what the house looked like. Only a very dim memory of walking with a faceless, nameless girl to see these wild cyclamen and being delighted with them.
The other poem, about will-lessness. A characteristic (of me) refusal to do at the right time what must be done. The symbolism I’ve used is of lying in bed. But in fact I rarely lie in bed awake. I get up. My usual will-lessness is attached to things like marking; also to my writing and the revising of it. I won’t do it when I should; I do a dozen trivial things rather than do it. I often explain this so: ‘I am not in the mood for writing. The muse (or the mythical future perfect novel) demands that I don’t write.’ I get a sort of perverse satisfaction out of not doing what I myself want to do; saving it up, perhaps – and all the Freudian anal connotations. It also seems to me to be a device to prove myself free. All that is determined (that must be done, like marking) is against freedom; and that all-determined includes the things one determines for oneself (that one wants to do), so that even the most noble and moral of these latter personal determinations (i.e. not just the sensual and selfish desires) are tyrants of the ‘free self’. Thus I often experience a wanting-to-do-yet-not-doing state that I relate to constipation, but in fact it is not analogous, since there is no physical obstacle to not doing. Constipation is wanting-to-do-but-unable-to-do. Of course a cynic would sneer at all this explanation of sheer idleness. I think I would like to be free of the state; on the other hand, it is the I I live with. If I get pressure into poems and words sometimes, it is because of this state. It seems to me an unpleasant state, often quite incomprehensible in the way it can prevent me from doing anything serious for days on end; but my poems would probably defend it, if they had a spokesman, as a state of latency, a very necessary winter.
2 March
A certain kind of car horn: even on a cold winter’s morning it suggests hot summer evenings.
9 March
I’ve half got Eliz into a job at St G’s. As appointments secretary, for two and a half months in the summer. While I was discussing it with JWL, he had a call from his estate agent. They were discussing some property deal. ‘I’ll make a direct approach,’ says JWL, ‘by a roundabout political way.’ Not meant to be funny. He meant he’d get an MP friend to speak to the Ministry concerned.
Naghari, a Persian student. She has an interesting idea about the staleness of all literary imagery, all imagery, and how the space age has come to refresh the symbol-starved mind.
The new axis will be out-space/earth. The man-besieged situation. Taking the place of the heaven/hell one – the man torn. We are all isolates, attacked or in danger of attack from things unknown, beyond all control.
So there is threat, and danger; and a flow of fresh feelings and images. Linguistically, I liked the American hour-by-hour commentary on the Glenn flight. The new words: ‘I am go, the capsule is go.’ ‘Countdown.’ ‘Retros.’fn3
Adverbs I use in talking far too often: absolutely, completely, utterly, absurdly, fantastically, incredibly. Also their adjectives. They are fairly common among exasperated (with the human condition) intellectuals today. We have to express our judgements in satirical terms. We even cartoon our opinions. Perhaps it’s the central will-lessness, the inability to act (either we don’t, though we could, or we don’t because we know we can’t, however hard we act, affect), which makes this use of ‘violent’, extreme adverbs and adjectives so ubiquitous. And self-irritating.
Volcano. A fascinating film or subject that makes any film of it fascinating. Pieces of lava being ejected like human cannonballs; a peculiarly graceful deceleration, rallentando, pause and acceleration down to earth again. The torn fragments like great cherry-red rags against the smoke and the pale blue sky. Like fire-dolphins leaping. Magma the molten mass that becomes lava. Lapithae – the rain of small stones.
16 March
Pat Brown. A secretarial ‘tutor’ at St G’s. Last year she cut herself slightly on a Gestetner. Her hand got worse and worse. She began to wear her arm in a sling. She bravely pooh-poohed any idea of suing the college. The finger would have to be amputated, then the hand. She waited and waited, one specialist said it would get better, another feared the worst. Everyone was very sympathetic. She was in pain. There was no hope. The arm would have to come off. She could no longer work (she had bravely carried on doing little jobs).
And now she’s in a mental home. There was never anything wrong with her at all. But she could never type as well as a typing teacher should.
21 March
Ayout. An Egyptian girl. She came into my office this afternoon, having been absent all day. In a black headscarf. She stood by the wall and just said, ‘Mon père est mort.’ Apparently he had died this same morning, at dawn, driving between Alexandria and Cairo. Smacked into another car. I made her sit down at the other desk and we talked about her family and her father. I like her, dangerous to like pretty nubile girls, but she has intelligence, a certain uprightness. I had her in earlier this term to warn her not to let herself be picked up by strange men in the Finchley Road clubs; and I liked then the way she shrugged the whole business off – as petty and absurd. She’s the sort of Egyptian that one finds in Orwell’s books; very highly civilized. She’s begun to write well, with a fair eye and a certain agreeable bitterness of tone. The situation was explained this afternoon. Nasser has it in for her family; her father is the last adult male of his line (though there’s a ten-year-old brother in Beirut); her mother is a Turk, very retiring, easy prey for the Egyptians; they are Christians, were once very rich, still have money abroad; her fiancé is a young millionaire, in prison for life; she has written begging for his freedom, to Nasser, who’s told her he will never be released; her mother can’t leave Egypt, because then all her family will suffer. It’s a ‘poor little rich girl’ situation, of course. But watching her talk in her rapid Alexandrian French, one did sense tragedy – the day’s real, intense and terrible Greek tragedy superimposed on a deeper, rich tragedy. ‘Je savais qu’il allait mourir.’ The accident might have been staged, a political murder. But beyond that, a deeper fatality. The death of a caste.
I asked silly questions. Impossible to communicate sympathy in such circumstances. One says the tritest things. There were silences and she didn’t go away, she sat twitching her scarf round her white, shocked face. I think she despises other women, she wanted to be with a man a while. In the end, when she left, she kept on saying, ‘Vous êtes charmant, vous êtes très gentil.’ A sexuality comes from death, a rapprochement; a feeling of nakedness, of isolation, of cold. Gilbert and Sewell were cynical; they both said it was probably a hoax, and if I didn’t despise them both, I’d have to be angry. Eliz, too, saw only the unpleasant side, the coarsest end-product – the sexiness. It needs an ugly word.
For me it was one of the ‘loaded’, pregnant incidents that can’t be explained. I mean, essentially poetic, or metaphysical. The beauty of death and death in time, an incident at dawn in Egypt stabbing through an afternoon in Hampstead. The remoteness of this girl’s life and her tragic face (she is normally gay, a deliberate clown). Death is beautiful, time is beautiful, and the girl was for an hour beautiful. A sudden intensity. Like a flow of words. A syncopation. Death has nothing to do with it, nor has whatever ‘sex’ was implicit. But her standing there saying, ‘Mon père est mort.’
24 March
Reading back through old diaries. Fantastic outbursts of priggishness, of vanity, of expectations. The temptation is to suppress such blemishes. But that defeats the diary. This is, and always will be, what one was. I’m glad I’ve kept it for so long. Since 1948. I’m sorry I spent so much time on recording thoughts and ideas and views of ideas, and so little on people and events.
The nostalgie de soi – the impossible desire to go back in oneself, and to re-experience the past. I don’t mean so that one can act differently. That is not a nostalgia, but a physical impossibility. But to recreate the past – by an effort of will, of concentrated recall, by going back to the places again, to see what lost memories surge up. The winter dead branches, and the miracle of buds.
‘La grande definite, en tout, c’est d’oublier.’ Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit.
The Ayout business. Such experiences are to me intensely aesthetic. Only very secondarily emotionally or sexually affective.
Leavis/Snow. I am all for Leavis. I thought his attack on Snow one of the justest and most massive slams at a plaster-of-paris genius since the last century.fn4 Perhaps Snow himself is not to blame. But his reputation is absurd. He can’t begin to write dialogue, or create scenes, or convincing intelligent people. Between Leavis’s passionate contempt for the second-rate and Snow’s cardboard eminence it is absurd to hesitate. Significant that all the second-raters in the literary world, the ‘distinguished’ critics and telepundits, have come twinklefoot and duck-arsed to screech their horror at Leavis.fn5 These are the real two cultures – the true, and the second-rate.
I broke a mirror in my office at St Godric’s (to be exact, it ‘broke all of itself’, suddenly electing to slip off a filing cabinet). Seven years’ bad luck. The bad luck started very genially, as the backing of the mirror turned out to be a charming Baxter print of a mid-Victorian pin-up girl.
30 March
With Podge. He took away the first fifty pages of The Collector to read in Oxford recently. He thinks it ‘up to standard’, ‘publishable’, but wouldn’t say any more. It annoys me a little, as he was the one who insisted that he should take it away and read it. Plainly his silence means, ‘It is bad, but I’m not going to say so.’ I feel he doesn’t like to think of me as doing something well. To think differently than him.
Yesterday was one of his impenetrable days – what Eliz calls his ‘hedge’ high around him. He is on the Snow side of the Leavis/Snow battle; said he couldn’t finish Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender; found L’Avventura very ordinary. It is almost (with someone so intelligent) as if he is being obtuse to test me out. A sort of perverse hatred of sentimentality in him – a hatred of success, from the highest and most actual and distant (from his own life) to the not even actual and highly improbable (my own venture with The Collector). So there is a sourness in him sometimes that at other times is astringency, logical positivism, etc. He won’t take the work of anyone he knows (John Veale,fn6 Elizabeth Mavor)fn7 seriously; he insists that one takes it for granted that their only motive is to make money. ‘There’s money in it,’ he says, as if no one around him is ever going to get away with talk about art, or love of life, or philosophical feeling.
For several years now I have felt, in this way, older to him, a feeling that he is only half a human being. An admirable half, but with his further side forever in darkness. It must be linked with his marriage – a premature killing-off of all tenderness, all sex, all sentiment (in the eighteenth-century and good sense of the word).
The Collector is being typed out. The confidence I feel in it is inexplicable. Eliz doesn’t like it, Podge apparently doesn’t, I can’t imagine any publishers, readers or, if it gets so far, contemporary critics, liking it. And yet I feel it is complete, it says what I want to say. Details are wrong, could be improved, no doubt, but it’s like a poem. I know the backbone is right.
The Giant Snakes, Pope. An interesting book. Snakes copulate for hours, sometimes a day at a time. They sense by heat.
A nice story about what to do when attacked by a python. You lie flat, with your arms and legs together, so that you are swallowable. Do not allow snake to get head under you (for the hug). In the end he will give up and begin to swallow you, starting at the feet. Keep absolutely still, otherwise he still may start constricting. When he has reached your knees, sit up, take your knife out, and quietly slit his distended jaw.
And spend the rest of your life in an asylum.
6 April
The impossibility of writing poetry except when I am alone. It is the aimlessness of other people that is so irritating, the feeling that they have to kill that same time one is making love to. Waiting for it to be time to go to bed, or something. And in the poem there is no time; and at the making of it, no time. I need a vacuum of no-time around me. I don’t care if Eliz is here, in another room. I don’t care how much noise there is outside. As long as it’s not music, I can’t stand music and poetry.
The idea that the poetic world (Parnassus) is remote from the ordinary, quite wrong. It is simply a step sideways, a second away. Because one goes weeks without a poem, one forgets it. I deduce this mainly from the speed with which one leaves the poetic world – in the time it takes to look up from a poem and say something trite or silly. Coming to, and leaving Parnassus are instantaneous actions.
8 April
Watts, The Way of Zen. An intelligent man, a good book.fn8 I think I have, and Europe has, laughed at Zen too long. Again and again in this book I read statements and prescriptions I arrived at in The Aristos years ago; the need to get to the ‘now’, and so on. In fact, I am, inasmuch as I have any religion, far more Zen than Christian. My indifference to good and evil, my feeling that it is impossible to say that evil always breeds evil, and good, good – all that is Zen. Sometimes the similarity of ideas has been so great that it is as if I opened another man’s book and read the same poem by him that I had written. Déjà vu, in fact.
Zen is unbeatable as a recipe for living. The point is whether we are here for living, or not. Zen has nothing to say about the being-dead, our duty to make ourselves into useful post-mortals (or the rare few, immortals). That is, in European terms, our ‘duty’ to the world in and to which we shall be totally dead. (I say ‘totally dead’ – pleonasm. But of course I’m not talking about life-after-death or any rubbish like that.)
Practically everyone we know is actively in conversation against the H-bomb.fn9 I am totally indifferent to the whole problem. First of all (at a simple realpolitik level) Britain’s foregoing of the bomb and sending the Americans away will not alter the probabilities of survival of Britain in a world nuclear war. It is even arguable that it lessens those probabilities – by simplifying the issues, setting the USA and USSR even more starkly against each other, and offering (even more invitingly than at present) a battleground that will save the two great protagonists from having to see their own homelands laid waste.
I am indifferent, socially, because so many people enjoy opposing the H-bomb. In my terms, they counter-oppose it. That is, opposing it exercises their personal desire of opposition; and one doesn’t wish the end of what one desires. In ordinary terms, it is an OK attitude among soi-disant liberals.
I am indifferent, metaphysically or philosophically, because the consequences of evil are often good. In Zen terms, because the evil is the good.
I am indifferent, on a personal level, because even if I did oppose it, I should not agree that the present is the best method of opposing for myself.
9 April
The film on volcanoes. Only today did I see why I liked it so much, and the word ‘magma’. Every good poem is a volcanic eruption, a bursting-out of the magma in the mind. I don’t mean the ‘white-hot inspiration’ non-poets like to imagine; but that overcoming, that piercing, of the hard crust of normality, banal outwardness, incohate and chaotic words. The breaking through of any poem.
Verse is an act of will, a boring down to get magma; a poem is the magma bursting or flowing or oozing or seeping from below. You can say, perhaps, where the volcano is likely to come; the area in which new volcanoes are likely to come. But to time them is impossible. And the distribution area is probably a false analogy; the poem-volcano may come anywhere in the globe.
13–15 April
Terrible weekend at Leigh. Very cold, in spite of the date. Inane talk, wasted hours. Pure maya;fn10 an endless meaningless cascade of grey little facts.
Oliver Twist – a nasty book. It shows up Dickens for what he is, a brilliant and magnificent second-rater. The gilt wears off, just as it wears off Victorian plates, far more quickly than off the genuine article (i.e. Jane Austen). I see that the Quarterly Review for 1837, after fearing the worst for Pickwick Papers, thinks Oliver Twist will raise Dickens’s stock; just as one would expect. It’s a book for the age – Rose, Harry Maylie, Mrs Maylie and Oliver are artistically vile creatures. The only good characters are ‘bad’ ones. Then there is the bourgeois snobbism and the anti-semitism.
Great writers create lovable good characters – good ‘good’ characters.
22 April
E went out today, Easter Sunday, with her mother and sister. They are here for the holiday. They drive us mad. Mother can’t be hated; she ‘means well’, with all the good and all the irritated impotence the phrase contains.
When they went out I watched a girl on a roof opposite, across the back gardens of Church Row. It was the first good day this year, peerless English blue sky, cloudless, light warm airs, green buds, pink sparks of almond blossom, buoyant birds. The girl was on a roof with a man who kept on photographing her, endlessly. I couldn’t make out if he was her father or not; incestuous thoughts, if he was. I watched them through a telescope, and I could see she was a very pretty girl, Irish-looking, red-gold hair and green eyes, mischievous, quick, teasing, sulky, all a bit put on, as if she knew she was being watched by more than one man. A sort of amateur film starlet – or perhaps a real one. There was a hard-faced duenna, a bright blonde of forty or so, who didn’t give them a look as they waltzed round the roof, the girl taking up a hundred poses a minute. She was wearing a very pretty bright green and blue Italian sun-dress and a carmine straw hat. Ravishingly pretty, on the dirty roof, and the man like an ox with his light-meter and Rolliflex. She broke into an Indian dance at one point – quite expertly, she must have lived in India – and then it became the twist. Then she coquettishly turned and took her bra off from underneath her dress and draped herself round chimney pots. It is curious, watching people through a telescope. Like watching birds. It is as if one has never seen the wild (unrestrained, I don’t mean wild = excited) face before. She was utterly absorbed in her own prettiness, this girl; kept on holding out her bare arms and hands to look at them, posing, even when the ox-man was not watching. Later she took off her dress and lay in a bikini; stood up for a moment, her long hair round her shoulders, for all the world like a Botticelli Venus or Primavera. She had just that small-breasted wide-hipped slim-round beauty; and then some pregnant shyness. That impression they give of being poised, in swiftest passage, between the angelic and the sexual. To begin with, my motives were perhaps bad – just a mere idle curiosity, the pleasure I always have in looking at things (and people are in this context simply the most interesting things, and pretty girls visually the most interesting people), but slowly I realized it was an intensely beautiful experience, just as the one with Ayout (21st March). One has such a load of conventions, of guilt objects and actions, in one that it takes time to disentangle the motives. The English gentleman says, ‘This is caddish, watching a girl in the sun through a telescope’; the psychologist says, ‘This is voyeurism, this shows maladjustment’. But (the truth of this is again and again in the Zen book I have been reading) the beauty of the event is quite separate from the motives of the observer. The aesthetic justification is in practice not so immoral as it seems. To be a voyeur all the time (granting the premise) could never be justified aesthetically. The Zen argument is simply that: never try to categorize events, never search any one category. Giving is remaining sensitive to events.
In European terms this was a Primavera experience. It is grey and cold again today – Easter Monday – and to look on that roof, so dull, so banal, under the cotton-grey sky! Of course the event was miraculous, intensely poetic, seedlike, with the vividness of those rare occasions when ordinary life and time modulate into art – into forms that the greatest art strives for. That is the event. What observers of me would say (and we judge all the actions of such third persons) is irrelevant.
This experience made me brilliantly, feverishly happy. It made me still happy when the others came back. Deeply happy to have E; because such experiences cannot help being suspect if one is lonely. The experiences of a solitary are always tainted with onanism. One can only own (in both senses of the word) them out of an emotionally still centre – that is, certainly of love. Of course I don’t deny the sexuality of such experiences; but the thing I see now is that because such visions are sexual in form they need not be hidden away. There is nothing shameful in them. To maintain that there is is to say that it is shameful to find certain aspects (i.e. the ritual, or the architecture) of religion beautiful because one does not believe in the dogma.
Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit. A remarkable book. I put it with Malraux’s La Condition humaine and Camus’s La Peste. Hundreds of sons, this book. A whole American tradition – the Lost Generation through to the Beat writers. Sartre’s novels. The sharp, sour impotence – it reminds me of Candide. And La Rochefoucauld.fn11
4 May
The Collector has been typed out. Eliz has taken it to an agent. James Kinross, of Anthony Sheil Ltd.
It cost £21, the typing.
Now I work on A Journey to Athens.
At Bath.fn12 Everyone seemed to be having a holiday this year; it’s part of the New Rich World. One deserves two holidays a year.
Bath is a shock after London – a great soft slow city, rich-seeming and civilized. One accepts the fallacy that outside London there is only the desert. The truth is, of course, that some provincial styles are as good living styles as the capital’s. Only the capital is contemporary. I kept on feeling at Bath that the people were smug, insular, but that is a by-product of the good provincial style. Everything is a little old-fashioned; hostile to the capital; self-consciously Bathian, or whatever.
We went by train – into sunshine. I have never travelled from Paddington without this happening. I expect it to happen. Somewhere beyond Reading the sun always comes out.
We came back to London by bus. Rather a long journey, hideous after Reading. London begins at Slough. And London seems twisted, blackened, too crowded after Bath. Too dense.
I kept on saying I would like to live at Bath when I was there, but it seems to me enervating in two ways. Climatewise: we wanted to sleep all the time. And culturewise: one lives in the past there. Too much softness and wetness; not enough cold, dry, black.
Like Aix-en-Provence: a perfect place, to live out of life.
14 May
Eliz working at St G’s.
15 May
A letter from Mr Kinross.
Dear Mr Fowles,
THE COLLECTOR
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity of reading this novel.
I find it extraordinarily promising, in a spine-chilling sort of way, and I should like to congratulate you on an extremely well accomplished feat of characterization throughout the first half.
I am not entirely satisfied that the construction is quite right, since the book is so sharply divided into two related but totally different points of view. I have a feeling that this sharp division rather tends to detract from the overall building up into a sustained climax, but even so, this is a highly promising effort, which deserves much praise.
Is there any chance of your coming to see me, because I would much appreciate having a word with you before deciding whether to send it out?
If you were a full-time novelist, I would probably make a series of suggestions which might result in a sort of inter-cutting of experiences, or even possibly a transference of the second half of the book into a new first part. On the other hand, I can well appreciate that such heavy work would probably appal you, and in any case, one never knows whether changes like this may not have disastrous results, once an author starts tinkering about with the structure of a book.
Do come and see me, in any case, I should very much like to meet you.
Yours sincerely,
James Kinross
Director and Literary Managerfn13
18 May
I went to see Mr Kinross, a large man in a very light-windowed opulent attic office in Grafton Street. It was like a bit of psychotherapy; so many compliments that I couldn’t help smiling with pleasure – and at the absurdity of it. Kinross is liberal with intensifiers, a sort of amiable old Etonian elephant, sea-lion. Impossible to tell what lies under all the talk, the praise, the vagueness – whether shrewdness or unplumbed depths of blah. I honestly don’t know. Probably the first. I quite liked him. I liked it when he said, ‘Stephen Spender, I loathe the bastard.’ For his smugness, it seems.
Bulwer-Lytton,fn14 Pelham (1828). A terribly bad picaresque novel, full of improbabilities and slick generalizations and French flu and everything else in the literary dustbin. Yet it keeps one reading. It has life, a sort of rapid springing narrative rhythm. Like a not very good American film; its pace saves it. Like an Amis novel. Kingsley Amis is the Bulwer-Lytton of our age.
21 May
Dear Mr Fowles,
THE COLLECTOR
Many thanks for your letter of the 20th May.
You can rest assured that your book (which is going to Cape today) is travelling under your new pseudonym.fn15
I was certainly delighted to meet you, and very much look forward to seeing the other work we discussed. By all means let us have a second copy of THE COLLECTOR. There might be film possibilities.
Yours sincerely,
James Kinross
Director and Literary Manager
24 May
Denys Sharrocks is back from Laos. Unchanged, even a little younger. I am glad to see him, but you forget old friends’ faults in their absence. His acting a part always, or almost always; one can’t ever get to the centre of him. He tells funny stories about Laos and Karachi, all the accents carefully and well mimicked. Flees into his stock self very swiftly – the northerner, the suspector-of-the-south; and the worsted-by-life. And there’s a sort of not very credible virility he puts on – the drinker, womanizer, the untameable-eternal-man sort of thing. You can’t get him to be serious about himself; or about anything except books. Both he and Monica have this vile and dreadful post-war habit (it started with ITMA,fn16 though no doubt it could be heard in the very first green room) of killing the serious or the sincere by striking into funny accents. It’s the convenient modern way of covering up, one, stupidity, two, shallowness of heart. If you get intellectually or emotionally out of your depth, start putting on a funny voice, drag everything back to the silliest level.
These are only very minor blemishes in Denys, who remains, we still feel, a charming and essentially gentle drifter through life. He remains sensitive; and in the small things of life, a brilliant diplomat. With him, I admit that; it seems a virtue worth having. Even his funny-voice stuff is perhaps tact: not alienating Monica.
We’ve decided we can’t really stand Monica. Eliz calls her hatchet-faced. With Denys she becomes irritatingly girlish. Keeps on squawking, sounding spoilt, heavily kittenish. She resents us, and the sort of talk we have. Her culture is thin, so she hates culture. One feels vinegar in her, determination to suffer, to make herself and her vinegar heeded. A kind of pig, really. Deeply selfish.
Britten, Requiem. This is the greatest thing in British art since 1922. (The Waste Land and Ulysses.)
All that is has survived. (What doesn’t survive never speaks. I mean that the world we live in is largely a survived world and all our arts are created by survivors.)
3 June
I’ve been rereading An Island and Greece for the first time since 1955.fn17 Terrible, a great deal of it. The priggishness, the belletrist style, the wild improbabilities in the fiction part and the dialogue. It failed, one, because it is neither fish nor fowl (nor Fowles) – the lapses from travelogue into fiction are ridiculous; two, it was an attempt to stuff everything into one small bag. In many ways I’ve been living on those two years ever since (and I don’t mean this in the living on one’s success sense) – it was an incredibly rich meal. I haven’t digested it yet. To have tried to do it so fast was ridiculous.
11 June
Francis Bacon at the Tate. A curious case of vision, of world-view, triumphing over everything. He’s plainly not a good painterly painter by any standard. Nothing neat about him. You feel he scuffs and smears and stabs and sabres until something is hit off; and that he destroys a lot is very credible. The misfires must be many. What he has, brilliantly, is the ability to leave out and the ability to site the centre (fulcrum) of the picture. His ‘vision’ is the horror of humanity and the horror of the flesh. The emptiness of man; the bestiality of man; the beastliness of flesh. Two naked men wrestling on a bed; and the carcass-crucifixion. I think (unless he changes style) his reputation will sink. There’s too much expressionistic (Germany of the thirties) decadence in his attitude. The gratuitous seeking of the perverse; the split-open stomach. I mean, he is a witness, not a maker. A Goya who never did anything but the etchings.
19 June
Michael Sharrocks. The little boys in his primary school (Christchurch Hill) have split into two rival gangs. They spend all their free time fighting.
‘Don’t you play games?’
‘We fight. Only girls play games.’
Any boy who doesn’t join a gang is repeatedly beaten up and bullied. Michael doesn’t like either gang, but thinks he might join one ‘for a few days’. Talk of microcosms!
Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving. ‘Like Zola’ says the blurb. But all these provincial novels are the very antithesis of Zola in all but the attention to realistic detail. Zola is dispassionate, his characters are seen, not felt. Barstow is a sentimentalist; that is, like Sillitoe and Braine, he creates a hero who can be liked through all his faults. I don’t much like this typically contemporary business of the love affaire between the writer and his hero – something narcissistic, but the last person to approve would be Zola.
3 July
We’ve spent a weekend in Oxford with Podge. Eileen’s away in France, with the Tolkiens. Taking us when we arrived for a ridiculously expensive and bad meal in a chi-chi Italian restaurant. Going to the Ashmolean. The beautifully haunting Palmers. Then (Saturday afternoon) punting up to the Victoria.fn18 With a friend of Podge, a pretty, shade too eager woman in her thirties. Like all the Oxford people, too brittle. If one takes them at their own valuation they make one feel bovine, dull; at one’s own valuation, they are paper butterflies, the fragile cases of sea-urchins. Beautiful, but dead. We went out to Garsington later to meet Elizabethfn19 and Haro Hodson, the Observer vignettist. In a cottage, once the annexe of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s house, across the lane. And as the eager E. Mavor talked about Lady Ottie, I couldn’t help thinking of Lawrence and his loathing of Oxbridge. Later she said, of a book, ‘But if it’s amusing – that’s all one can ask, isn’t it?’ And that sums them up. Their test is amusingness. And they have a sharp small hatred of seriousness; though they like to make it clear that they ‘feel’. A miserable and pitiable lot, really. Podge eggs them on, seems to agree with them, and yet manages to remain separate; or at least to keep his Oxford eccentricities and his humanity apart. Haro Hodson is a namby-pamby little man; feline, purring and clawed in turn. His wife has that breathy enthusiasm, that earnest bending forward, that determination to express herself, to be equal to men, and a woman: not sexually attractive at all, these graduate and graduated women. They impose. Even, as with E. Mavor, the ideas seem all right in most ways.
An evening at Jean Simpson’s house. Podge playing the piano, tunes of the twenties. A down-under physicist, not amused; shy, hating it. The silliness; and being silly himself, in calf love with J. Simpson.
Driving to Studholme Priory, a mournful hotel. Four aimless elderly guests wandering over the lawns, weird lonely drifters. We sat on the back lawn having tea, laughing; served by a crucified (at having to do it) ex-colonel. Disapprobation from guests, proprietors, lawn, house, trees, the lot. This hotel had the very special flavour of fallen old houses. We laughed, but the air is tragic; the sulphur of the fall. Then on to a small stately home to see the garden. A lovely view east across England, the green, blue hills, yellow charlock fields, single elms, delicate slices of English colour under the evening June sky. The owner (John Thomson, Woodperry House) took some kind of liking to us, showed us round. A pretty house of the 1720s, still very baroque, with modillioned cornices; fine porcelain in every room. ‘I’m thinking of restoring the arcade. What d’you think?’ Curiously like Michael Farrer – that Mitford touch. I’m reading Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels. Her remark that her parents would have been amazed if anyone had called them snobbish. For them snobbishness was a distinctively middle-class index, a bourgeois thing. ‘They never looked down on people; they simply looked straight ahead.’ This man had that; charming to us, to his cowman, to everyone; and somehow, as it always was with Michael Farrer, the gulf is more there than if he was the most outrageous snob. You can’t despise such people, as you can snobs. They are cased in their unassailable rightness. Their own-ness.
4 July
Dear Mr Fowles,
THE COLLECTOR
I am sure you will be delighted to hear the long period of waiting has been worthwhile.
Tom Maschler tells me that Cape would like to take THE COLLECTOR. The actual terms are: an advance of £150 against Royalties of 10% to 3500, 12½ from 3500 to 7000, and 15% from 7000 to 15,000. Since Cape is worried about the libraries taking this book, I have had to allow them a 10% interest in any possible stage or film rights, but under the circumstances, this is fair enough, since in return, they guarantee to give the book extensive publicity. Normally, we don’t encourage publishers to take this stand, but the circumstances are rather exceptional with fiction taking such a beating these days.
I have accepted these terms, because I think it very much to your advantage to become a Cape author. They have an exceptional list, and it is quite a distinction to score right away with a first-class publisher.
Would you telephone me tomorrow, when I can tell you a little more? Tom Maschler would like to meet you, and discuss the book. I think you will like him.
Congratulations! I am sure this news will come as a literary shot in the arm.
Yours sincerely,
James Kinross
Director and Literary Manager
One doesn’t quite believe it when it comes. Not that I haven’t kept a belief in the book. But I’ve had no belief in the agency and publishing world.
6 July
I’ve been to see Tom Maschler, of Cape. An intelligent, frank, tall Jew – all frankness, where Kinross isn’t. Less charm, but more truth, one feels. He seems to think Kinross a bit stupid (‘He obviously hasn’t understood the book’), but as he says, one can’t ask more of an agent than to ‘place’ a first novel first go. Maschler seems fairly optimistic – it should get published in America, he thinks it stands a chance of getting filmed, and even staged. But he was grim about the fiction situation in general. Apparently 1,500 copies is a very good sale for a first novel nowadays. Malcolm Lowry’s book, recently rave-reviwed by Toynbee, has sold only 1,800 copies in a month.fn20 Murdoch’s novels, which sell about 10,000 copies, are the bestsellers today, and then only because she is the OK suburban woman’s novelist – not too hard to understand, and looks good on the coffee-table.
As with all these publishing people, I felt both stupid and wise with Maschler. A feeling that all he really wants is a tough, hard, glossy end-product – something that will sell, that will be in vogue. A good shrewd judge of what will sell today; but I wouldn’t back him to pick what will be read in 2062.
8 July
Dear Mr Maschler,
THE COLLECTOR
Revision. Here is the altered version. I have cut the girl’s diary into the monster’s narrative at p. 163, when she is just clearly beginning to be very ill. I have rewritten pages 397–401, which were formerly in the present tense; so all his narration is now in the past, though I have added ‘today’ to the last sentence, to make it clear that the coda brings us up to ‘now’. I have also cut about a page out of the first thirteen, as you suggested, and the flow-in certainly seems smoother.
Pseudonym. I’ve thought this over, and decided definitely to use my own name. Come what may.
Commas. You mentioned that the book would be vetted for wrong punctuation and so on. This worries me a little, as I have calculated all the deliberate errors in sections 1, 3 and 4 fairly carefully, and the sub-standard punctuation goes along with the sub-standard everything else. In the girl’s section, 2, I have deliberately avoided using semi-colons.
Film Possibilities. I don’t know how serious you were about showing the manuscript to Karel Reisz.fn21 But I do have a couple of pages of ideas for turning it into a film jotted down, and I’d willingly let you have them if they might help. They would probably do the opposite!
Why I wrote it. I think I gave you the wrong impression – that all this came from a newspaper incident of some years agofn22 (there was a similar case in the North of England last year, by the way). But the whole idea of the-woman-in-the-dungeon has interested me since I saw Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle,fn23 which was before the air-raid shelter case. In any case I had the wine before the bottle – I don’t get this Bluebeard bottle and then think up things to put into it.
What I’m trying to say is that for me this side of the novel is unimportant. For some time I’d been looking for a theme that would allow me to do these things:
1. present a character who was inarticulate and nasty, as opposed to the ‘good’ inarticulate hero, who seems to be top dog in post-war fiction and whose inarticulateness is presented as a kind of crowning glory.
2. present a character who is articulate and intelligent – the kind of young person I try to make Miranda Grey – and who is quite clearly a better person because she has had a better education.
3. attack the money-minus-morality society (the affluent, the acquisitive) we have lived in since 1951.
Finally, I know French literature rather better than English, and almost all the novelists, historical and modern, I admire most are French (though Jane Austen would top my list). I feel more influenced by writers like Gide and Camus, and even Laclos, than by any English writers.
11 July
Dear John Fowles,
Many thanks for your letter of 8th July and for making the changes so quickly. At a glance, it looks as though you have done the trick.
I am glad you have decided to use your own name for, as you know, I am very optimistic regarding the chances of THE COLLECTOR and also your future work. I think you might have regretted a pseudonym.
Regarding the editorial work, I really do not think you have anything to worry about. In the first place, our Editor is highly sensitive and, in the second place, it is your book and I can promise you that we will not make any changes of which you do not approve. It is obvious to me that you work in a very careful and intentional way but it may, nevertheless, be possible to make an odd improvement. That is all we are concerned with.
Of course, I am serious about showing the manuscript to Karel Reisz, so please let me have your couple of pages.
May I take this opportunity of saying, again, that I am extremely pleased that we shall be publishing THE COLLECTOR and very much look forward to working with you in the future.
Yours sincerely,
Tom Maschler
Dear Mr Fowles
THE COLLECTOR
Thank you so much for your letter of the 13th July. I think it is excellent that Maschler should show the manuscript to Karel Reisz. Should he arouse interest, so much the better. Meantime, we have a copy out with 20th Century Fox.
I thought you would like to know that Capes are now drawing up the contract. They offered half the advance on signature, and half on publication, but I have chiselled them down to £100 on signature, and £50 on publication.
Of course, this is more or less the usual thing, but I have the strongest feeling that you could probably use a large drink to celebrate the occasion, so I pushed hard as a result!
With all best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
James Kinross
Director and Literary Manager
14 July
Down at Leigh. The usual nightmare – no communication. They will not let me grow up. And their world shrivels – terrible how it grows smaller and smaller, and deader and deader; like a museum no one ever visits. When I told F about The Collector, he seemed to feel nothing but worry and gloom. I must ‘get a good lawyer’; would it affect my job? Was it wise? Terrible again – all his petit bourgeois fears came tumbling out – not one word of congratulation or pleasure of any sort. I said I didn’t want M to know yet. She’d only blab the news all round Leigh, and get it garbled in the process. He seemed delighted to be able to change the subject, and made no further reference to it through the weekend.
How much nearer I feel to the Roman poets (I was reading Tibullus at Leigh) than to the people around me. It frightens me, the small-mindedness of this present world (that is, my feeling of remoteness from it). My parents, the creatures I work with; even D and M. We went with them last night to Wapping and the Grapes. Monica at her awful provincial-actress worst, when almost everything she says grates shrilly on our tiredness. She will use accents, silly accents, badly done; wrongly timed, everything. A sort of clawing-down of every situation, as if she’s trying to stop a sheet bellying up and blowing away.
I think it’s all symptomatic of a general overwhelmedness; people can’t face the world any more on their own two feet. There are too many experts, too many brains trusts, panels, personalities, artists; a whole host of interpreters and ‘successful’ people who want to be listened to and looked up to. So the ordinary man and woman can’t see the world any more for the terrible smog of interpretations and opinions foisted on them by their society. All small people now are frightened to advance any opinion about anything outside the superficialities of their daily lives. They get resentful if other small people (such as myself) try to be serious or offer opinions. Only people who have appeared on the TV may offer opinions. And the rest of us must live in the silliest part of our silly nows, and hate each non-conformer.
21 July
We hope to go to Rome for five weeks – through a friend of Jean Bromley at St G’s. We’ve let D and M in on it, partly because of their car, partly because Denys is Denys. We’ve seen him twice since the Wapping fiasco; and liked him so much both times. His quietness and unpretentiousness; he’s always his age, by himself. We think he’s failed to ‘teach’ (educate) M. He talked about ‘making something of his life’ the other evening; an aura of failure that irritates me sometimes – it makes me want to shake him by the shoulders – but sometimes it has a genuine sadness. A kind of elegiacity about him.
The Italian holiday seems fixed up. Denys and Monica; even the Porters. Everybody anxious of us. It’s been a jumpy, neurotic July. I can’t sleep, can’t concentrate. I signed the The Collector contract today. But I can’t write.
31 July (written in Rome)
To Italy, with D and M, in their car. All this holiday was arranged in a rush, in these last two weeks. Seemed always doubtful whether the flat in Rome would finally be available, whether D could come, whether Podge would come. Constant fiddle-faddle of letters and telegrams that lasted until we left. A faint rather silly need to get in touch with Roy in order to let him know we were all going to Rome together. Not that Roy and Judy don’t invite such skewering and needling.
D and M are anti-French and pro-Italian. For charm and general willingness, the Italians have the French licked. And the bourgeois French are vile, only a very short head behind the bourgeois Belgians and the bourgeois Germans, and a good length from the bourgeois English. The Paris Match world is essentially a bourgeois one. For all that, I prefer the French to the Italians, as people, and I think, am almost sure, that I prefer the Spaniards and the Greeks to both (this is, as people). What the Italians seem to me to lack is any stiffness or hardness – backbone. There is a general mollitia; I see the dictionary gives softness-tenderness-flexibility-pliancy-mildness-gentleness-sensibility for it. Plenty of that, at every corner in Italy; and evidence of true backbone not only in the obvious art and history things, but still in the country, in peasant faces. Yet the general feel is mollitia. Great flexibility in handling things like road-building, plumbing gadgetry, anything to do with engineering or design. Great helpfulness to foreigners. No race feeling. A sort of universal urbanity.
It’s not that Italian males don’t look virile and strong – they are as much that as the women are pretty, much more so than the French. But you feel it’s a kind of formal masculinity – if you put masculinity and backbone into them it has to be a sort of platonic operation. You have to read it into them. It doesn’t come out of them, as it does in Spain and Greece, and impress itself.
Pathetic, too, is the way the males isolate themselves from the females in public. This sitting and standing around of the men while the women pass, in pairs or groups, during the passegiata every evening. It seems stagy, contrived, beside the freedom of the sexes in Anglo-Saxonia and Scandinavia, and beside the clawing village women of Andalusia or the absolute suppression of the woman in Greece.
Italy’s a sort of open-arms country – too soft, too easy, for me. This is not to wish that it didn’t exist – it’s an essential part of the European stew. The oil, the fat. But it lacks the sharp taste of the vegetables and the meat.
Into Italy, through Sestrières. Italian words. Horrid, having to visit a country where one speaks less than a little. It reduces the experience to a lark. One’s eyes enter too far ahead of one’s mind. So a lot of giggles in the car.
We stopped at Pinerolo, a dull town. Slept in a hotel with a balcony overlooking a market. Incomprehensible Piedmontese voices at six in the morning. A meal, not understanding half the menu. Alla milanese means schnitzel – rather disappointing comedowns like that.
Italian food is much better than French, at a simple level. Almost everything seems reasonably well cooked and presented. But there is a considerable monotony. All the way down to Rome the restaurants had the same dishes.
In one way a lot of Rome disappoints; I don’t know why, but for me this is Jamesville. The Pincio disappointed because it isn’t the great sloping high terrace I imagined from James; and the Colosseum isn’t the place where Hudson met the Princess Casamassima.fn24 The Colosseum is vile, a gigantic public lavatory by the night smell of it, a central for the young spivs and layabouts of Rome. It is all that is vile in ancient Rome: overbearing, a bully building, a vast baroque torture-chamber. One cannot not think of the human beings and animals that suffered endlessly here – the folly of a civilization devoted to entertainment at all costs, not culture. Killing and pain as amusers. And the hideous vulgarity; the eternal world of the TV spectacular, the detergent-sponsored trash-play, the garish, ostentatious, cheap, shoddy …
St Peter’s, too, is ugly, lying there like a monstrous lobster with its colonnade claws waiting to clutch one into the black maw of the Great Catholic Lie. A feeling of cheat about it; if our headquarters building is as big as this, we must be right. It brings out Dissent like a rash; a strawberry allergy.
13 August
To Tivoli. Very pleasant, the way the mountains rise as soon as one leaves Rome eastwards. Immediately one is past Tivoli, on the Avezzano road, the country becomes beautiful – wild, as it always was, the people peasant-like and poor. Abrupt hills covered in scrub; long pink and pale brown hill-villages on the crests. Both green and barren, this landscape. At Vicovaro we forked left and went up towards Licenza,fn25 a fine wild valley, green with oaks and olives and vines and vegetables, a delicate thin balance between the wild and cultivated. Almost English hedges; hazels and brambles and bryony. Up a winding path of stone, with the spectacular little town of Licenza opposite and stranded on its crest – they seem (as Highet says)fn26 to draw back from the valleys, these Sabine towns. Like spinsters caught by a mouse. An absolute reluctance to descend.
Horace’s Sabine farm – o rus, quando ego te aspiciamfn27 – well, no wonder he wanted to see it so much. As it is now, it sits in a little orchard clearing in a momentarily flat place in the hills, cool, green, silent, a sort of gigantic bower, after the August sledgehammer of Rome. An exquisite bottom-of-the-garden place. Not much to see, building-wise. ‘His’ bedroom, ‘his’ triclinium, the usual optimistic attributions. A charming nymphaeum (in the imagination) – four fountains, flowers, a pillared patio; a fishpond, a piscina. A nice old guide – but precisely what one does not want in such places – showed us round. I could have lingered there all day, just being where Horace was being. And Maecenas and Virgil. One feels Horace very close, in the herbage, and in the situation; in the cicadas and the great tawny and red hornets going into a cloven olive-stem; up the stony path to the fons Bandusiae: a spout of cold water, potabile ma fredissima, the guide said. Saxis cavis makes sense, the water springs from the lip of a tiny moss-covered cirque, some ten feet high, into a little basin of criss-crossed channels, choked with waterplants.fn28 Huge water-thistles, eight feet high. It simply hasn’t changed.
Coming back, a huge soft butter-yellow moon over the luminous dusk-blue mountains; and at Tivoli, and past Tivoli into Rome, an ugly descent into 1962.
The gap between Horace and his servants. Their total inability to understand his verse; they would still have been in the quantity-stress world of Plautus and Ennius and all folk poetry. The weird little master from Rome speaking his strange broken flow of words. The quantity-quality cross-chop must have seemed to them like Webern to a Balham bus-conductor; a madness. So if Horace went to Rome and Tivoli, it must have been to be heard; the same with Martial and Juvenal. Their use of words forced them to frequent the city they loathed.
Roman skies during the last hour of day. All peachskin colours, ambers, lemons, pinkishnesses; with blues, smoke-greys, they sink liquescently through one another. You can forgive the city everything. The scudding bats; and the merciful ponentino.fn29 What Rome would be like without it I can’t imagine. Impossible. So we owe the city to the wind.
16 August
D and M set off today to go back to England. Not too soon, really. One can’t help feeling affection and a pity for Denys, but it’s difficult to keep patience with Monica. We have more or less done so for Denys’s sake, but at times it was touch-and-go.
The basic pattern in Monica is a furious compensation for an inferiority complex; an always ugly determination to state her own point of view and to play down anyone else’s. Her contrariness is almost a conditioned reflex; one is surprised when it doesn’t appear, and she agrees with something that has been said.
Denys, because of all his gentleness that is also weakness, hasn’t done his duty; taught her to be less cantankerous. He sometimes sided with us against her, but always self-excusingly, self-deprecatingly – as if it was a show of independence for our benefit.
Sometimes she would talk and talk, silly clichés, pointlessnesses, and neither E nor I would answer; but Denys always attentive: yes, yes. Yes, love. Feeding her voracious appetite for attention and agreement.
One of her most odious personae is that of the little-girl wife. A peculiar little spoilt whine – I’m hunnngry, I’m ti-ered, I’m hot. It would go on for hours sometimes, interspersed with girlish singing; and – Denys, are you happy; are you happy, Denys? Hallo, Denys (Lancashire accent).
She must have known it was irritating; even Denys began to take corners too fast at times. But just as, when he did corner too fast, her whining and backseat-driving increased, so did her irritating manner increase when we were plainly irritated and unamused. She has a nasty, almost spiteful, determination not to let other people’s disapproval change her ways.
Sudden showy solicitudes for Denys – poor Denys; Denys never thinks of himself. Denys is so kind, he’s absurd.
Her walk – always too quick, as if she knows where she’s going and nothing’s going to stop her. Her wide hips rigid, and with peculiar cutting movements of her arms that make her shoulders pivot and swing. Rather like the way the Wrens used to march in the war. The very antithesis of the way the Italian women walk, or the sort of easy English way E walks. A stagy walk; she doesn’t realize it looks masculine.
One day she method-acted carsickness – all because once before Asti Spumante made her feel sick. We all said you couldn’t judge a wine by one occasion; but she wanted to be right and sick.
Disagreements with me: she always takes me too seriously and I make her click into her mantis position as soon as I speak. I said life was too short to study small cultures – ‘small cultures are as important as big ones’. I said the skaters on a stream reminded me of the human condition – ‘I don’t feel like a skater at all. I know what I’m doing and where I’m going.’ I said ordinary people in the advanced civilizations were more and more stereotyped (moulded by society) – ‘I think ordinary people are good, and they’re all different.’
She loathes, too, ‘being told what to like’. But it isn’t the quite natural distaste of being led in aesthetic matters; it’s a total rejection of any pointing out of what has pleased one. As if all the pleasure in the thing is in having seen it or spotted it first – not in the thing itself. Denys, too, is a bit like this. A prickly provincial fear of being condescended to; but alas, they take the most innocent enthusiasms or wishes to share enjoyment as condescension. Because I said a bottle of Valpolicella (both E and Denys agreeing) was good, she said it was bad, ‘the worst red wine we’ve had’. Both she and Denys fly at food-talk and wine-talk. ‘Thank God I’ve got vulgar tastes,’ said Denys about another wine. ‘All I want is a wine you can drink a lot of.’ This absurd provincial view of all drink as alcohol.
And then the accents: whenever M feels herself getting out of her depth, the dreadful accents. And Denys feeds her there, too.
Denys’s trouble is his really fantastic gentleness – his hopeless respect for life, his inability to kill anything, even a wasp. Driving wildly along a road below Horace’s farm, just because a thin dog followed us a few yards, looking for food. Distraught when a frog I had caught leapt out of my hand into the bowels of the hot engine of the car. It hopped out, unhurt, but he was really distressed by the incident.
The same nervous distress when E was in a temper, and walked off; far more upset than I was. A funny little white frightened-boy look, a snuffling giggle. ‘She’s like a caged lioness,’ he said. ‘You can see her tail lashing.’ Snuffle, snuffle.
This is how Monica has got her iron grip on him; she just puts on her small-hurt-animal face and voice and she has him on his knees, at her mercy. So he is pulled down to her wretched narrow world, with all its provincial inhibitions and pettinesses. He is so weak that he sinks with her.
A terrible octopus-and-swimmer marriage, or so it seems to us; the merciless exploitation of a fault.
I wanted to show them both what I had written about this trip (not this lambasting of them, of course), because the written word forces one to think. I thought it might jerk Denys into writing. And prick her conscience a bit. But I let E talk me out of it – she thought M would ‘just laugh and put on an accent’. I wouldn’t have cared if she had. One can’t be hurt by people for whom one hasn’t the least respect. I would have liked, too, to have shown D the translations of Catullus I’m doing; but we don’t talk about my writing, or about me. I sensed this very strongly these last days; and at times I felt angry – why do we always have to talk about Denys and his past and his view of his past and why he is guilty about this and about that – that sort of childishly egocentric sulkiness. Why does everyone let Denys be bound up in himself in public – why not me?
But then I remember to be ‘sporting’. I’ve won this first set, so to speak, and it’s been a shock – yet another – for Denys and his poor dreams. I know my typing, my early rising and not siesta-ing (he sleeps all the time) were irritating to him. And his talking about himself is his last sanctuary, in a way.
Curious, all that set he comes from – the Southport intellectuals, all so bound up in themselves and their aspirations (their chief enjoyment being to talk about what they want to do and why they haven’t done it; or never did it), and all mother-worshippers as well. Terribly unmale, in any real sense. Like D. H. Lawrence, in that way: virility-conscious (car-driving, drinking a lot), but putting up with a crowd of women who all want stunning slaps across their domineering faces. A deep sexlessness in them, really.
This preoccupation with self comes out in their approach to the outside world – as tourists, they are like people with one-glass heads. A very little, and the nausea of having to look at other people’s clever-nesses (i.e. great art) attacks them. They have to sink back round the café table and analyse what they feel. Anything to avoid having to look at and enjoy other people, other things.
The provincial: one who fears others and otherness. Who can enjoy external objects only to the extent that they serve as mirrors. That is why Denys liked Donatello, and seemed offput by Michelangelo. All a good look at a Michelangelo does is to show a very very small observer (if one’s using the work as a mirror); a provincial to scale.
Totally non-Zen, such an attitude. Hearing the others describe tea-leaves in a cup-bottom as Zen. Their dreadful provincial-European misunderstanding of the word. And I couldn’t say anything because it would be clever old John showing off again. And Denys always has to show he too is cultured – if I say something about Latin poetry he has to say something, too; a compulsive evening up.
He’s always helping ladies over the stile; giving them information about things, cliché views; bits of things he’s read. It’s all wrong. The things themselves matter more. I mean, if you have knowledge about things, you appreciate things-plus-your-knowledge; but that doesn’t mean there’s less pleasure to be got from things-minus-knowledge. It’s exactly the stile: by helping ladies over them, you get them to believe they can’t cross the stile by themselves. A double-edged chivalry, in fact. Turning realities, women, into myths, ladies.
All this is hard on Denys. Because there are many many times when his gentleness, his caution, his hatred of cruelty and violence of any kind, public or private, are fine rare qualities. And of all the people I know, he would be least out of place in a Fra Angelico of the Apostles: he’d loathe to be told it; but he has the makings of a saint. And his tragedy is that he is so, and his situation is one where to be saintlike can only seem a futile waste of an intelligent life.
Sitting next to two young Italians – very handsome young men in uniform – possible officer cadets. Beyond them, four English girls: silly milky faces, primped hair, mouthing words too much – they were suburban Londoners trying to be genteel. One of the Italians got talking with them. Absurd, this contrast between the lithe brown man and the fussy, giggling English typists-on-holiday.
It was a shock to see such white, insipid creatures, afters these sexual, brown, vigorously feminine Italian women. Like sour milk and coffee cream.
A day through ancient Rome. The awful white horror of the Vittorio Emmanuele monument – perhaps the greatest proof existent of the futility of nationalist art?fn30 Behind it, the splendid and serene Piazza di Campidoglio; Michelangelo again, massive yet muscled, perfectly stately and perfectly human.
The view of the Forum and the Palatine and Aventine from the Capitol.
Then the Forum and the Palatine. Rather terrifying, this huge civilization reduced to this park of ruins; the bones of a giant. Here one feels none of the Etruscan nostalgia, no sadness, simply a kind of melancholy awe; it is much more beautiful than I had expected, especially on the Palatine, yet one knows that this is the heart of Rome, and the heart is dead. The past is more real than the present; and though it is a past one may respect, a huge segment of the European psyche, one can’t love it. A conviction that the whole ancient city was a huge folly, a historical mistake that we are still paying for.
Physically, and especially towards evening, there is a melting luminous light on everything, on the brick and marble ruins, the huge umbrella pines, the cypresses, the sere grass; sky of an ageless softness, an antique blue.
The picturesqueness of Roman ruins, using that word in its true sense. Pictures at every step. Shapes, vistas, volumes, arches, cubes, the whole pierced by blue sky, by shadow, earth, sunlight. The whole alphabet of the abstract architectural shape.
The only flower, this hot season, is the mauve-blue and white hypericum that grows lushly out of the dryest walls.
We’ve been also down the Via Appia Antica, which has the same air of massive fallen folly, ruins in noble landscapes. One isn’t touched; the experience is cool.
We’re amazed, when we look back, at how little D and M saw when they were here; a week of endlessly hanging around, Monica always washing. They’re victims of the car; the wheel has them right beneath it.
Domitian. All the marble in his huge palace had to be polished like glass; so that he could always see behind him.
20 August
Podge and Cathy have arrived. We looked forward to them coming, and now we’re disappointed. Something of the old woman about Podge, endless worrying about things that don’t need worry or even a second’s thought; a kind of horror silentiae, a ceaseless weaving of little things to do, to prepare, to plan, to discuss, to talk about, so that one ends by re-entering silence, when one’s free of him for a minute, as one drinks water when one’s hot.
Like all non-creators he makes an elaborate art of his life, creates it all the time and tries to place us all around him, to enmesh us, like a gear-wheel.
This is the great abysm I feel between me and the non-creator. It has very little to do with being published. I’ve always had it. But I have no need to create each hour of each day, in the sense that both Podge and Denys seem to have. The ordinary day is something to live through, to lie doggo in; it’s creating that’s real – not living.
Cathy is not, but looks, a young teenage beat, strongly, primly herself, with her pink-red face and green eyes and obliquely quick mind, a sort of tyro-mermaid hairstyle.
We went with them this morning to see the Pantheon, another work of the Roman engineer. To be admired; it doesn’t touch.
The Piazza Navona; a square with a strong character, a thin long rectangle with Bernini fountains. A good garden-statuary man, Bernini – he improves when one doesn’t have to take him seriously and examine the details. And a rotten baroque church by Borromini: all ostentation.
Hadrian’s villa.fn31 Whenever you feel jaded with Rome, it brings out some new surprise. The villa is rather like the Palatine; it gives one a puritan shock, that it should have been so big, the slaves involved, the Goering-like rape of statues from other countries, and so on; and then parts of it are so delicious that it seems not to matter. Because if we could we would all live like the better Roman emperors; if not the worse. The part E and I liked best was the Canopus, the long lake with its arcades of statues, its two swans, its curious classical stillness. Like all the best sacred groves, it excludes the outside world, exacts its own serenity.
Hadrian’s villa, like the Domus Aurea,fn32 has the fallen-meteor feeling. Of a terrible plunge down through time. Again and again in these Imperial Roman and Renaissance palaces (as in the best English country-houses) I have the feeling that this is what we (man) are one day to be. We shall have invented a substitute for slaves. We shall have severely reduced the population of the world. But we shall all have our Canopi and our Serapeia,fn33 our golden houses, our water-gardens, in which we shall live (sans guilt) as emperors.
Of course the imperial way of life is indefensible; but because it is a glimpse of the – or a – perfect way of life, it also seems indispensable.
Podge: his extraordinary feverish restlessness. Although it irritates us (and Cathy), it’s really much more a matter for pity than irritation. It’s as if he can’t tolerate any inward turning on himself, any silence, any pause. He is constantly organizing, washing up, jumping up and emptying ashtrays, throwing away minute pieces of paper, reading extracts from whatever he is looking at, starting new topics, dropping old ones in midstream. One wouldn’t mind if he speeded things; but he spends so much time discussing, proposing new plans, saying he’ll do one thing, and then changing his mind at the last moment, in a perpetual zigzag, like the pond-skaters, that he hinders rather than advances the day. Even his solicitudes, about doing the shopping, or washing up, come to seem no more than an excuse to fiddle-faddle, to look busy.
It’s plainly some inner compulsion; it seems to me it’s partly put on for Cathy’s benefit. E thinks it is sexual sublimation, which is very possible.
I think it is also something even sadder, simply an attempt to convince both Cathy and Eileen that without him they would be lost. One manifestation of his fussing is over Cathy: a constant telling her what and what not to do. Even the arch-crime of telling her what she likes and does not like. Podge plays down all the museums – ‘let’s give it half an hour’, ‘nothing here for me’ (standing at the postcard-table outside the Capitoline Pinacoteca). The poor child is frightened to seem interested, and at the same time evidently is interested. For her age, she is alarmingly shrewd and penetrating, though she (typically enough) covers her weapons. A charming but untouchable creature, really: sensitive and tender, and yet with those warning green eyes. Noli me tangere.
This energy comes out in P also in the additional details he now puts in his stories – to prolong them, to make them longer fields of exercise. And he has almost ceased to listen to anyone else – one tells him things half a dozen times and he forgets, and asks again, and as he asks, one can hear that he isn’t interested, the question is only to destroy the usurping silence.
St Peter’s. We went round the interior today; and it is no better than the outside. A huge baroque show-off, with literally not one good work of art (the Michelangelo Pietà was not on view) to redeem it. It seems to me a totally dead building; a tomb, not a church. And ten thousand St Peter’s could not tip the balance against a Chartres, or even a Wells.
Aïda in the Caracalla Baths.fn34 A very grandiose spectacle, thoroughly Roman in all its parts. As a production, absurd. The Grand March scene had entire regiments of extras marching on to an already crowded stage – there must have been two or three hundred aboard at the end, and four horses. Bravo, bravo, shouted the Italians, when the horses appeared; when a real camel was seen outside the temple in the moonlight; when the bass gave Aïda a spectacular thrust to her knees. It’s the grands coups de théâtre that get, not the music.
The big gesture dominates the Italians, in all their arts. The baroque, the superb, the colossal. They have no idea of Greek form, or the French genius for texture, or the English for understatement. (Thus Shakespeare, Dickens, Emily Brontë are ‘Italian’.)
They’re supposed to feel life more strongly; but I think they gesture because they don’t feel – it’s a feeling-substitute, an alienator from the true feeling. Perhaps that’s why they’re such a ‘sunny’, un-neurotic lot. They never have feeling-constipation, never have feelings to work off; but only the next gesture to think about.
Subiaco. A very pretty town in the mountains. We walked out to the two Benedictine monasteries. The others turned back after the first one, but I went on to the Sacro Speco.fn35 Fine wall-paints, the monks singing Vespers first in the lower church, then in the upper. Weird paintings of Death, riding his horse and pricking a young falconer on the neck with his long sword. The opposite wall shows a girl fresh in her coffin, with the bones beginning to stick through her flesh; and then as a skeleton. As powerful a memento mori as I can remember. In a courtyard, hooded crows and ravens. The holy rose-bush; the saint threw himself on a bramble to mortify the flesh, but at once it put forth roses. Two monks, an old one and a young one, coming together laughing after Vespers; the old one scolding the younger, the younger turning, pointing to something in one of the murals that had distracted him during the singing of the office. I got my usual sharp whiff of envy for the monastic life, the simplicity and discipline and above all the solitude.
A very lovely solitude in this swallow’s nest monastery. A path leads to it through groves of ilex, up the side of a green mountain valley with a stream far below; the path tapers to a narrow flight of steps that twist up round a wall of rock; then a little Gothic corridor-loggia looking out over the valley below. Some fine Peruginoesque frescoes, on the inner wall.
The evening ride back to Rome: long green valleys, hilltop villages, aspens, the sky turning through the softest blues to the veining amber-pink.
6 September
The journey home. The others were sad to leave, but I was glad to go. Not that I didn’t like Rome and the Italian experience, but five weeks without seriously writing or thinking, but seeing, travelling, conversing – I was glad to get away from all that. Out of Rome, E crying in the corridor, and past Tarquinia on its hill, out of hot, golden Italy into green, April-morning France; two hours in Paris, sharp and brisk and complex, so nice after the Romans and Rome; then the boat at Boulogne and across into the grey of England. We got home about ten.
There’s no pleasure in travelling any more; the bad meals on the trains, the expense of porters, of everything; the international trains are nets to catch money; tourists and travellers a vein to be mercilessly exploited.
The grey shock of England and the English. I haven’t had the extent of my exile from land and people so clear for a long time. They are foreign to me, and so the land seems foreign. It is impossible to communicate with the British, to say what one thinks in the language that one thinks in; always this rapid translation into ‘British’ from the English words in one’s head, into what-is-accepted and what-is-expected. So there is no communication, no love; one can only observe and hate or mock at Britain as it is.
All the Western European countries are deep in selfishness at the moment, all rich, all bent on getting pleasure out of life. It is irrational to hate this country for being so stodgily selfish, so mousily booming. It’s perhaps a sign of health, a feeling among even the stupidest masses that things aren’t quite as rosy as they seem. But coming back to England from Italy – it seems most like a colossal lack of style, an almost total inability to design life, to express life through the way one lives one’s daily life. The British sit like a fat pasty-faced bespectacled girl at the European party.
This terrible scuttle back to England: as if they are so glad to be back.
The 1962 British seem really to still believe Britain is best. Cleaner, nicer, honester, more civilized. I said earlier that the Italians were no more than the oil or the fat in the great stew; then the British are the water.
An extraordinary book we read in Rome – the banned-in-England My Life with Princess Margaret, by a former footman.fn36 Written, or ghosted, in a nauseatingly cloying, inverted style: the man sounds like a voyeur and a fetishist. He constantly uses turns of phrase (and the sort of euphemism, in particular) that I gave the monster in The Collector. Again and again he praises, or smirks at, behaviour by the filthy little prig-princess that any decent person would despise; and the horror is not that he does this, but that one knows millions of silly men and women in America and here will or would agree with him. A whole society wrote this miserable book, not one man.
A putti. We bought him in the Via Nomentana as our memento of the holiday. Seventeenth- or eighteenth-century, carved-wood and painted, with grey-black eyes, pink cheeks, a minute penis, and a charming wide-awake yet serene small smile.
11 September
The meaning of ‘real’ in ‘real self’. The way Podge exteriorizes his whims and moods and tries to present them as his ‘reality’; so he denies all his inconsistencies, changes of mind. He tries to pass off the gay, bright, busy Podge as the real Podge – the ‘fun’ criterion and so on is ‘real’ – not frippery or a persona. Whereas I’m both too lazy (and too afraid) to reveal my real self and too misanthropic to keep up a convincing persona of some other self. This keeping-up of a convincing persona, this creation of one’s own public face, makes the face become the real face. The only way to keep the real inner self alive is to keep the persona a blank, a shield, a thing the real self doesn’t respect or value – make it a painted prop, a cursory screen. Not an elaborate baroque structure. With so many people so much creative energy, so much labour and energy, and dishonesty, goes into the persona; and the real self is told it is not the real self, and becomes a prisoner in a castle. Terrible experiments are practised on it. Things get to the point where the owner would rather die than admit the real self is not the great plaster façade his mischannelled psyche has created.
The real self is the self most valued by the owner: the ‘inner’ self or the ‘public’ self.
It is this preservation at all costs (or, to be precise, at the cost of an engaging and fully fabricated ‘read’ public self) of the ‘real’ inner self that makes the poet. Not the skill with words; but the skill at preserving one’s own reality.
Home. A brisk mediocrity.
Existentialist notions of solitude; I feel myself closer and closer to the composite Sartre-Beauvoir-Camus character. This feeling closer comes from within, comes from circumstances (my nature, upbringing, history, etc) that existed and dominated me long before I had even heard the names ‘Sartre’ or ‘existentialism’. But if I write down this feeling closer (as I am in Tesserae and in some recent poems) it seems or could seem a pose-feeling – a Roquentinfn37 – mask I assume. It isn’t. But it is unfortunate to be naturally what so many others have stated artificially.
25 September
Cape have turned down A Journey to Athens. ‘It reads too much like a young man’s book.’ Maschler thinks it would spoil the effect of The Collector. Tant pis: it’ll have to go back into cold storage.
Feverish night (I’ve got a cold) – series of waking dreams about the psychology of personality. They seemed to be full of a brilliant penetration of the nature of self. Mostly in the form of forced puns; some in French. Later, when I was properly awake, I couldn’t remember any of them, but I had all that feeling of authentic loss revelatory dreams leave behind them. That one has slipped far deeper into the hinterland, the hinterland one has been trying to penetrate by conscious means. A weird glitter of profound paradoxes; left with a handful of ashes.
I couldn’t sleep afterwards, and it seemed the paradoxes were centred round a Bardot-like personage. (Last week there was a so-called ‘frank’ interview with her in Paris Match. I read it on Sunday.) It seemed part of the lost dreamscape was situated in an exchange of questions between an interviewer and a Monroe-Bardot figure. Nothing sexual at all: but a series of statements and definitions of self in the context of having great publicity and wanting private peace.
I think I’m going to write about it. It suddenly seemed a loaded theme. I see it in the form of a dialogue. Not a novel. Or a peculiar throwaway sort of novel, if it is one. Perhaps only a long short story.
This all came the night before I heard from Cape.
30 September
E and I have been revising A Journey to Athens. I was stupid to let Kinross have it straight from Mrs Shirley. I never saw her typescript. We’ve changed a number of things, cut a lot. But the damage is done, as regards Cape’s. I told Kinross not to send it to them before I had revised it. I feel angry with him, too.
3 October
Eliz is in hospital (the Florence Nightingale in Lisson Grove). A new surgeon – Miss Moore-White – has seen her X-rays. The previous operation was wrongly done – all might have been well if she’d done it in the first place. The usual maddening medical vagueness and contradiction. The implication is that we were ridiculous to try and have the operation performed ‘on the State’. ‘You go to the NHS for colds, not for operations,’ said a shocked woman in the next bed at the FN – the very idea of expecting the State to provide successful operations!
It makes me furious. I suppose one is expected to be violently against the Health Service, now. But the thing that is wrong is the medical mind, the hate pent up in each doctor against the system they work under. It is the doctors who are rotten, not the idea. A great deadweight of doctors who hope the system will crumble.
The decision to have the operation has been Eliz’s. It’s been a sort of existentialist situation. That is, I have felt that it must be her decision. This is the situation where it is monstrous to decide for another person; the other, the self, Eliz, decides and her decision becomes part of her life, and by making her brave decision she makes something as real and almost as valuable as a child. We know the chance of success is minute; and we both know that if there is success there are a thousand troubles – a child one has paid so much for, un tant attendu, will breed anxiety, will seem intolerably fragile; but the thing we must be is certain, that a child is for ever impossible, and this really is why she has had the operation. One has to force an answer out of destiny sometimes – a yes or a no; and if one stakes enough, the answer comes. We shall know now.
4 October
Terrible, the day before the operation. I saw her in. It’s a tatty little place, a Hospital for Gentlewomen – so we felt a sort of pitying affection for it. Eliz in her Chanel suit and red glass beads, looking so fit. It’s the voluntary giving-up of health and being normal that is so painful. One doesn’t have to do it; and yet one is doing it. Sitting beside her in bed, a curious futility in the air; as always, not knowing what to say. Going away for three hours, killing time until the next visiting hour, at seven. London and Baker Street strange, very strange because it was the day of the great rail strike. Hardly any people or any traffic – like Victorian photographs of streets, all bare and peaceful under a grey-white light. I went to the Wallace Collection, looked at the pictures without really seeing them; went to the Classic and saw bits of A Streetcar Named Desire, a cartoon, a newsreel; and back to the hospital, and the awful last conversation – so unreal, these last minutes together. And the last kiss and the last word and the last touch and the last sight.
I couldn’t do anything all day today. 4.15, the theatre hour, and I went and had a cup of tea in the staff-room, fiddled in the office. Then went home and fiddled about with the guitar. Telephoned at six, but ‘she would still be in the theatre another half-hour’. An incoherent Irish nurse, who sounded as if it was not my wife or me that worried her, but this weird invention, the telephone. Finally, at seven, a sane English voice. ‘She (Miss Moore-White) has done what she can. Mrs Fowles has come round. She’s all right.’
7 October
Podge in London, visiting Eliz. He and I went afterwards to his mother’s house in Bayswater and had supper in a curious large dim ground-floor room. The room a sort of battleship-grey, lit by a mournful bulb dustily embedded in a sad Victorian chandelier. Canaries flew through the twilight. His brother Geoffrey was there, an absolute hollow man; his voice seems to be a conditioned reflex. He answers because you ask; an aura about him of death and solitude and failure, and the old woman, his mother, hovering in the background. He’s living there only temporarily, but I felt it was his true home. His wife, Wendy, has hereditary syphilis, now in its tertiary stage. They are divorced. But Wendy rings up Podge every week in Oxford, and his mother has coffee with her from time to time. Geoffrey talks all the time of her, though he’s engaged to a weird Spanish refugee. One ought to feel sad, but it’s high Chekhov; and played as such by Podge.
He told me a good deal, at last, about himself and Eileen: her flight from reason, her hatred of all he stands for, the terrible tension in Oxford, which Cathy now feels. E has long wanted P to go to a psychiatrist, so now, ‘to get peace’, he goes. ‘I want advice, I want to know just how three people like us live in a small house like that.’ We hold no brief for Eileen, with her sharp tongue and Irish obliqueness of mind; her jumping to extremes and general intellectual quirkishness. But of course P has this beaver-mindedness, this busy amassing of twigs to build the great rational dam – except that he isn’t really rational, so often, and merely picks up twigs to look busy. And there is his absolute lack of contact with things in themselves – so that all his physical contacts, food, conversation, drink, art, are a series of quick dippings-in, sips, and a dashing-on. I made this general criticism of his Oxford circle – that their language made stability impossible. I quoted to him Eliz Mavor’s remark ‘If a book is fun, what more can one ask?’ And of course Podge said that all she meant by that was that ‘we have all suffered and we’ve all lost ideals and now we get what hedonistic pleasure we can out of life’ – which I had supposed she meant. But these brittle masks of insincerity that little group put on when they meet together – Podge most of all – seem to me dangerous toys. One doesn’t drive a fast car with a windscreen of ordinary household glass; and their real faces will one day all be slashed.
I liked Podge very much again this time. He remains, beneath all the clowning and the inconsistencies, a fierce radical. I share his horror of this beastly society and world we live in, and like him, I recognize only two possibilities of decency in this world – one is either a Sartrean or a Marxist. He said that this morning, and I thought, yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Short of money. Touching bottom again. Soon we’re going to be truly stuck. I shall have to get an overdraft. We have saved a little this year, in a deposit account; but to save, in any real sense, seems as ridiculously impossible now as it did ten years ago.
10 October
Martin Cameron. The poor old Scotsman who was teaching shorthand with us in the spring and went back to Glasgow for the summer, and returned here this term. A miserable, feckless creature, too soft and gentle to please anyone – one of the sugary, weak tea Scots. He died on Tuesday in New End, at one o’clock in the morning. It’s been a greater shock to everyone than I expected. A lot of the students weeping, the Greeks especially. He died alone, he died alone, they kept on saying. You always die alone, I said. But they wanted a great keening, moaning family death for the poor man. Since he’s been ill, the women in the staff-room have helped him – old Mrs Barret and the golden-hearted Marion Singer; and there’s been a searching of consciences since he died. His loneliness stands out like a sore thumb among the comfortable small worlds we inhabit; and none of us did anything to help until it was too late.
He had a quiff and a great plump pink face, like a sausage; a portly stance; a boyish Scottish whisht way of intoning sentences very high when you’d said something that shocked him. But the great thing about him was his extraordinary mildness – the women called him womanish, but it wasn’t that, it was a sort of innocence. He’d never had any sex, a glass of sherry made him tipsy and maudlin, he always thought so well of people. A failure, an absolute failure, he always seemed; but now I look back on him and find a kind of Christlike meekness and mildness in him. Very faint, but there: il voulait bien.
He was the very antithesis of the twentieth-century man: no hardness, no independence (though he had to be solitary most of his life), no tough fatalism. A man like a glass of milk. That’s what people have realized – that a man like a glass of milk is more than something to be despised.
The wretched dying old women in Eliz’s ward: they don’t die quietly at all. Middle-class dying old women (as these are) seem to me rather worse than working-class d.o.w. The ones with Eliz spill out all their middle-class neuroses: ‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’ (They’re not in pain; it’s a childlike whimper to get attention.) ‘I shall get a doctor to tell you how to do this properly.’ (To the nurses.) ‘Call the car. I’m going out for a drive.’ An absurd jumble of illusions, the horrid bare bones of the effete bourgeoisie. Avoid all suffering, keep inferiors down, enjoy the good things of life, whimper and bully. Eliz doesn’t seem to notice it, but I think this hospital, so much better than the other in nursing skills and food, lacks humanity, and horribly. The hideous ghost of the lady, as opposed to the woman, stalks each ward along with the ghost of the great arch lady nurse, Florence Nightingale herself.
11 October
I went to Golders Green Crematorium this morning for poor Martin Cameron’s funeral. A morning of Scotch mist, appropriately grey and mild. There were about twelve of us there, from the various departments. The crematorium is a complex of brick buildings with asphalted yards; a doorway leads to an arcade, and there’s a shrubberied green lawn. We went and stood there, and made weak jokes, and a far black figure scattered ash, watched by a little knot of people, then stood still, as if he’d forgotten something. Praying, one supposes. It’s rather like a swagger golf-club, the crematorium, one half expects figures with bags to appear at any moment, or someone to cry ‘Fore!’
We then went and waited in the waiting-room. Awkward silences. Mournful autumnal water-colours. Notices: ‘As all sects use our chapels, incense may not be used,’ and ‘Light refreshments may be had in the forecourt.’ Finally we were ushered into a little chapel, Byzantine-Romanesque brick walls, oak pews, Turkey carpets on stone-paved floor. The ceiling was a bright sky-blue, floodlit by concealed lights. Instead of an altar there was a sort of puppet-theatre opening, framed in Corinthian columns with a broken pediment, through which one could see the coffin on a stainless-steel runway.
A dour-voiced Presbyterian minister read the service for the dead. Another character droned away on the harmonium, while the undertaker remained seated throughout in the little hall a few feet behind us. Absurd rubbish, the service for the dead, in magnificent language – so silly that I felt a sudden sense of shock sitting there. That we could all be listening to it and call ourselves adults.
‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust …’ – that I can accept – and the purple watered-silk curtain was slowly unwound down over the little puppet-theatre hole (I’d already heard shufflings and noises behind the scenes) and the coffin disappeared.
It was all over in fifteen minutes – a joke. It came as a shock that the poor man’s sister was weeping.
16 October
An hour and a half with Tom Maschler. I like him more now. He’s a totally different species to me; extrovert, débrouillard, pushing, shrewdly and aggressively with-it. I put on a wise-old-country-bird act with him, ask his advice on what I should do next. His advice coincided with my feeling: get on with The Magus. He’s spoken to Karel Reisz about The Collector. Chopping, the Fleming cover man,fn38 is doing the cover – he’s a super-realist, I don’t like the facile luridity of his work. I’ve seen the blurb – horrible, like being stripped naked before a crowd. They’re printing 5,000, instead of the usual 3,000. ‘Next July’ll do fine,’ said Maschler, when I asked him when he would like a new manuscript. A relief in a way – nine months’ grace. And a bore, the wait.
A work of art can only be persuasive; never provative. Science proves; art persuades.
24 October
Cuba crisis.fn39 It is extraordinary, the little effect this is having on people. They do nothing but joke about it. Endless jokes, in class, in the common-room. ‘There’s one thing – we’ve eaten our last English breakfast,’ said one of the Greeks. I explained how this part of Hampstead was tilted to receive the maximum blast – huge laughter. And the staff-room full of sick humour. I suggested a notice to be put up: ‘Owing to the end of the world today, there will be no classes tomorrow.’ Very funny. But for a moment this morning my Proficiency class went out of control: all shouting at the same time, a glimpse of the hysterical anxiety that underlies everything these hours. I had it walking along Fitzjohn’s this afternoon – the feeling that at any moment the huge heat-blast would come, all the houses fall. I don’t know why, it was the thought of the leaves being blown off the trees that seemed worst – the first gale will blow them off, anyway. The end of the world has seemed close these last few hours. The relief if we survive will be ludicrous. I think we will, because the Russians are only playing chess – Cuba is a trap sacrifice. But the vileness of this world, the things this vileness proves – the rottenness of all present political theories and philosophies and religions, for a start.
There’s a no-holds-barred at the moment between Maschler and James Kinross. Kinross says, ‘He’s a bagman, he ought to be flogging cigarettes round the Brandenburger Tor.’ ‘He’s so damned vague,’ says Maschler. ‘Sometimes I think he doesn’t know who the hell you are.’ Maschler wants to sell The Collector to Simon and Schuster. He says he’ll do it himself for nothing because he likes the book, and because ‘I would like to do them a favour.’ But he also told Little, Brown’s about the book, and now Kinross has sent it to them. Or he thinks it will have gone to them. As usual, he’s vague. It’s in New York, that’s all we know. Maschler’s latest news is that the book is being brought back from the printers, so that a big man from British Lion can look at it. ‘It’s all rather chi-chi,’ says M, ‘but it may work.’ I can see what Kinross hates in him; but my guess is that he sells a pound to a Kinross penny.
31 October
Dear Fowles,
BETWEENfn40
I have now had a chance to read this manuscript very carefully, and I am afraid that I thoroughly agree with Maschler’s opinion.
Although this shows considerable literary promise, and some extremely good characterization, I don’t think for one moment that its publication would in any way enhance the reputation which I am sure you are going to acquire as a result of The Collector. Honestly, I think it would be disastrous to consider publishing this work. Firstly, because the central theme is far too slender to support a book, and secondly because there is a slightly disconcerting naïveté about the narrator, which, whatever one’s politics, is going to grate a bit on the susceptibilities of English readers.
I do hope that you will forgive me if I am entirely frank, and say that the narrator’s outlook here strikes me as being a sort of political Uriah Heep. Don’t be furious. I should be a very bad agent, were I not to anticipate the unfriendly reaction this sort of viewpoint is liable to create.
Why don’t you give me a ring, when we can discuss this in more detail? Meantime, I am taking the liberty of returning your manuscript under separate cover. I think you should put this aside for a bit, because basically there is material here for something much stronger. But don’t consider publishing it, even under another name.
With every best wish,
Yours sincerely,
James Kinross
Literary Manager
4 November
I am hard at work on The Magus. Maschler the other day was talking about the ‘stylelessness’ of Grahame Greene. But I take it Greene is trying to suppress style as an expression of self – in other words, a style as clear as glass. It seems to me that this is not at all as easy as Maschler was implying. For highly literate (in other words, almost all) writers, the temptation to use rare or rarish words, to start metaphor-making, to construct elaborate sentences, to ‘Jamesify’ is almost irresistible. To overload words with one’s own literateness. On the other hand, one can be too simple, and the effect is the same – one is seeing the story, the events, the world of the book, through glass that is not clear. I am not saying that the engraved glass (say Woolf, James), stained glass (say Faulkner, Joyce, Lawrence), frosted glass (the working-class-narrator school) styles are wrong. Fred in The Collector is frosted glass. But I feel drawn to the clear-glass (Greene, Waugh, Forster) tradition. Defoe–Fielding, not Sterne.
5 November
Two telegrams today – of congratulations. One from Kinross, the other from Maschler. Little, Brown’s, in America have offered 3,500 dollars for The Collector. This is apparently well above average – 1,500 dollars, according to Maschler. We’re going to offer it to Simon and Schuster, just to see if they’ll bid more.
All this is curiously unexciting – unreal, perhaps. I think when it is published, the reality will come. At the moment I feel anxious about The Magus – it is terrible how a work-in-progress’s worth can fluctuate. One day I feel it is splendid, the next wretched. In general, I feel happy. As if I am clear of the field – not ahead of the field. The image of the right map-reading exercise, the cross-country run, keeps with me these days. The mass start, the enormous relief when at last one is alone. In space.
Cover of The Collector – by Tom Adams. I misunderstood Maschler. He said ‘like Chopping’. Apparently Adams doesn’t like Chopping and wanted to do a trompe-l’oeil cover to show that he can deceive-eye even better than Chopping. Which he does. A pale clouded yellow, an old key, a hank of fair hair (each hair painted separately) on a background of cork. Cape seem very excited by it. And I was, too.
12 November
Leigh. All death and money down there now – all the talk is of the dead, the dying and the money they will leave. Pure Ionesco conversations. M has an extraordinary genius for picking on totally irrelevant things – dates, details of meals. If the world ended, for her it would be the day after she had a letter from Hazel. She told E of Hazel’s ‘tragedy’: some young man she hoped Hazel might hook. But he wanted to go to bed with her; and she refused, poor nit. It is hopelessly unemancipated; she wrote to M for advice, which seems incredible in this day and age. The poor kid has never got free of the insipid cling of the Leigh mind: cold fish and respectability.
J. Loveridge. I told him about The Collector today. He received the news fairly well. Then revealed, to my amazement, that he was a poet. He’s written a long series on Elizabeth I, in sonnet form. ‘I read one to a friend and he burst into tears.’ I shuffled about, muttered things; it was difficult not to laugh. And pathetic: the ambitious little man with his secret poems.
If I like J. Joveridge, I loathe his damned cousin, the Air Commodore, who tries to introduce the language of the station commandant, the petty martinet, into all his work. Absurd pomposities and officialese: he ‘issues directives’. ‘Examiners should note’ (he means us when we’re marking college scholarship papers) this and that. He has a mania for graphs, systems, timetables, figures, facts; a born thrower-out of the baby with the ‘inefficient’ bath water. I suppose such men are really modern variants of the miles gloriosus, and should be treated as the figures of fun they really are. Easy for the audience, but not such fun on the stage. All his hectoring and bullying are on paper; and I’ll have my revenge on him one day – on paper.
Proof copies of The Collector. It becomes real, reads much better than before. Also the first publicity; an advertisement in the Bookseller.
A dinner with Jennifer Ardagh. Rather stiff and stilted; she has a genius for getting unnatural people around her. Her boss, John Rosenberg, head of MGM in London, a ridiculous man; he speaks with that odd Establishment voice, always very loud and nasal, very penetrating, with a sort of fossilized and faintly cynical elegance, or would-be elegance. Much use of ‘one’. The same voice as Jennifer’s ex-husband, curiously enough. Another young man from the TLS, Alan Davies; small, one-eyed, also trenchant, or would-be trenchant, and fossilized. Remote, such men, from living words, from creating. The eunuchs of literature, stuck at the harem doors. If they do write, at best they achieve a Firbank, a Chesterfield. The MGM man went on about how he wanted to live in some country house in Dorset. And then when we left, J told us the astounding truth – he was American. He’s also a Jew. Ashamed of both, so he puts on this astounding voice-mask.
We stayed on at the end, and J poured out her marital woes to us again (she did it a month ago). I tried this time to sidetrack on to us, our past: but she wants to talk and talk about herself. So odd, when we know her so little. Some sort of elective affinity, I suppose. I like her because she is capable of behaving existentially – as she did with the half-baked John Ardagh. That is, overcoming all her past and choosing to chuck him out. But she does still collect sickening middle-class zombies round her, and I can’t stand that.
22 November
Impossibility of sustained work. I just have no time.
Night like that of Sep 25th. I was very tired, slept badly. A night full of half-waking dreams about anguish. Once again I could remember nothing when I woke up – only a general certainty of having ‘seen’ something remarkable. On this occasion it was the complex subtlety of existence as a producer of anguish; the necessity of anguish. All use of words, all conceiving of ideas, all consciousness is anguish. The effect was very dry. Like seeing the beautiful efficiency of one’s enemy’s plans.
There are three levels of understanding of existentialism. The silly and fallacious idea prevalent in the late forties – existentialism as the latest style of Bohemianism; what beatnikism is today. The second, an intellectual notion, a knowledge of the theories, and no more. The third, a being existentialist, a feeling oneself irretrievably this: existentialist. The two most important existential feelings seem to me to be one, anguish, two, sense of isolation of self. Two can of course be a form of one. But it need not be. It is pleasurably dry. It gives one a sanctuary. No one and nothing can reach into the heart of that isolation; I exist there purely; I am uncontaminable.
8/9 December
Podge here for the weekend. Ronnie and Betsa Payne came to tea. Podge and I dislike Ronnie Payne’s world: Fleet Street and its tinsel glamour. We all said we hate the new television man: the telepundit, the TV ‘expert’, the man sucked dry by his public image. But it’s the old ‘disclaim’ business. The insurance in vogue. RP, in particular, wants to be such a person – has always wanted to be so. And Podge in his cynical way will admire any kind of false brilliance. There’s a sort of moral new music; he is adept at hitting between the old notes of the scale. They both made fun of me and The Collector – men-of-the-world with a born Candide.
Not that I don’t admire Podge for his political commitment. He wrote to thank Russell for his action over Cuba – and had a letter back;fn41 went to the House of Commons to lobby that sinister and ambitious man Woodhouse.fn42 He is constantly acting; is concerned.
13 December
Kinross. I’m reading his Irish novel.fn43 Absurdly bad – cliché-ridden, ungrammatical and badly punctuated, and full of ‘sham’ drinking and ‘sham’ sex. And how can he possibly judge me?
14 December
Ogden (Kinross’s partner) rang today – some by-blow of Columbia have made an offer for The Collector. £1,000 for the option, £6,000 if taken up in nine months’ time, another £3,000 if it becomes a book-club choice in the USA, and 5% of producer’s profits. If I’m lucky, I’ll gross £15,000 or so. But of course there’s Ogden’s 10% and Cape’s 10% and tax. What I don’t know is whether I should have held out – it was a gunpoint offer, of course, as Ogden admitted: ‘I wish I could say fuck you, you s.o.b.’s.’ He sounded soundly American.
We saw the New Year in with Gerry Mansell. Alone with them in their Hampstead Garden Suburb house. A house of the dead. Perhaps the snow made it worse. He has become an even more insufferable dullard; his egotism gets more astounding, his anecdotes longer – endless, endless, he makes the hours. His neo-Panglossian (not ‘This is …’ but ‘Mine is the best possible of all worlds’) is wearing thin, not that he has the humanity to let one see it. He is still the most successful and important man he knows. But poor Diana isn’t successful, can’t get a second child, and fills the room with a sort of stillborn-calf atmosphere. Numbing and white.
He, ostensibly very decently, drove us home through the ice and snow. Terrible how such people revel in the fun of unpleasant conditions; he did it only to show off, to run a negligible risk, to be a know-all. Absurd.
He hates me. When Eliz pointed to a novel and said ‘John’s literary agent wrote that’ he asked no question. Neither of them asked me a single question about myself the whole evening. I think it is largely personal, but he has a loathing of graduates. Just as he’s a Jew who won’t ever admit he’s a Jew, he’s a culture-and-learning snob who won’t ever admit he has none.
Memo: ask Jennifer Ardagh whether he knew about The Collector.
8 January
Kohn and Kinberg, the two Yanks who have bought The Collector.fn44 I went to them in Wigmore Street. In grey cardigans, earnest, sincere, and slightly obtuse men, I am afraid. They have their fixed view of the book, and I could see they wouldn’t be shifted. Principally it was that the ending must be happy – the girl must not die. I said, ‘That’s unmartyring the martyrs. Taking the nails out.’ ‘But wasn’t Christ resurrected?’ said Tweedledum (even Archie Ogden doesn’t know which is which). ‘She’ll be resurrected in people’s memories.’ Negotiations broke down here and we returned to initial opposing positions.
10 January
The Collector brings many anxieties with it. I suppose it is already, five months before publication, a comparative success. I’ve got a lot of money for it (for a first novel) and a lot of praise from those who’ve read it. But I sense that the professionals think it’s a freak, a flash in the pan.
One big problem is whether I should leave St G’s in the summer (May) or not. If the film money comes through, I’d be mad not to leave; if it doesn’t, I’d be mad to leave. I’ve got an accountant, and he advises my employing Eliz to dodge taxes; and to claim for expenses for ten years back.
I find the whole thing makes me restless, unable to concentrate. All the waiting. The indecision about what to write next. The problems of meanness – what sort of presents we should give to people who know we’re ‘rich’. Are we being generous enough? Problems of how to talk about the book with other people, whether to talk about it.
And all this makes anxiety.
2 January
Dear John,
I have read your novel, maybe more quickly than I should have done, but I knew Mother was waiting on the doorstep. It must be years since I read a novel, and for that reason amongst others I must be a pretty useless critic.
The difficulty for me is to get away from the meticulous character writing of the Victorian novelists who never allowed their people to change from the original portrait right through a long story. I suppose after this came the biographical, sociological brand of writers, bursting now into the psychology of Freud. We have broken from the sententiousness of our fathers, but it means learning a new language for some of us. This comes easily to modern writers, such as yourself, and the science of inventing terms to carry the meaning of sentences is no doubt necessary to cope with the amazing flow of ideas in the context of readable events.
You have a very good plot, although you may not like the use of this word. Dramatized it would require two, if not three top class artists, and as a film you would have to be prepared to let the hyaenas maul the carcase. I should let them do it. They know their job.
So far as your people are concerned, Ferdinandfn45 holds throughout and is psychologically drawn in a way that helps to bring light to the hazy understanding by rational men of the world of phantasy dwelt in by their unhappy brethren. I don’t understand the girl, and I doubt if I ever should do so even if I lived in a cluster of her breed. This does not mean that I doubt her existence in any way, and for this reason some of us should be grateful for the insight disclosed in your story. The artist fellow is a type of historical nastiness, and I despise him to the extent of failing in lavatory language to express my views.fn46 But he exists and no doubt thrives, like many gods whose perceiving eyes probe deeper than their souls.
Good luck. May the book go well. And have plenty of Eno’s ready for the belly-aching critics.
Glad to say Mother is feeling better, and I sometimes feel well myself. See you soon.
Love to you both,
Father
18 January
Pan Books have bought The Collector. £3,500. This is an English first novel record, it seems. Of course I get only 50% – 5% = 45%. I owe it to Tom Maschler, who seems to have amazed even Kinross. I haven’t changed my mind about them (since Oct 24th). Maschler came here for a drink the other evening. He thinks I’m naïve, I ‘think we’re all hostile to you’; Ogden ‘is an alcoholic’; ‘Look, we’ll be your agents and we’ll want 10% for American deals, not 20%.’ So I am a simpleton with him and to him, and find out what he feels and thinks. Poor Kinross suffers; we both attack him. TM gets angry when I say I feel sorry for Kinross, but I do. He gets a lot of money for nothing, but I’d never like to be alone with TM in business. He talks about literature and his love for it; but he is a pathological salesman. He even sells you his contempt for selling.
27 January
Spending. All this money tends to leave us completely unchanging; not unchanged. But it is like too sudden a change to a warm climate from a cold one – we still wear the clothes of the winter of our discontent.
It isn’t really for certain yet that I am become richer. I have handed in my notice to St G’s; and so far the book has earned £150 + £1250 + £1000 + £1750 (£5900), of which I shall eventually get £3,510 (– tax). But this is only two years’ salary (if E doesn’t work), with no allowance for a car, buying a cottage, and so on. On the other hand, there is a lot more money that may come in.
So this last week we have been spending:
| Overcoat and suit for me | £32 | |
| Suit for E | £12 | |
| Camera (second-hand) | £20 Retinette IIA 83963 (cost price £38) | |
| Pottery (all New Hall) | £16 | |
| Coffee-table | £ 7 10 | |
| Chairs (second-hand) | £ 4 12 6 | |
| £ 92 2 6 |
Eliz thinks the pottery a waste; but it’s neither a waste in terms of pleasure to look at nor as an investment. Such things can’t go down in price. For £14 I got from Pilgrim’s Place three New Hall teapots, two in perfect condition (one splendid fluted one, unused owing to a fire-crack) a slop-bowl, a jug, two saucers (one a Liverpool copy), and a Worcester fluted cup decorated at New Hall.
Montaigne, Essai XIV. His wisdom on the subject of money. The three biographical paragraphs on the three stages in his own attitude to it: perfect.fn47
Two nice howlers from the English girls’ essays:
‘Some people say Shakespeare was a homme de plume.’
‘I felt full of flustration.’
3 February
The Collector. The three sources. One. My lifelong fantasy of imprisoning a girl underground. I think this must go back to early in my teens. I remember it used often to be famous people. Princess Margaret, various film stars. Of course there was a main sexual motive; the love-through-knowledge motive, or motif, has also been constant. The imprisoning, in other words, has always been a forcing of my personality as well as my penis on the girl concerned. Variations I can recall: the harem (several girls in one room, or in a row of rooms); the threat (this involves sharing a whip, but usually not flagellation – the idea of exerted tyranny, entering as executioner); the fellow-prisoner (this is by far the commonest variation: the girl is captured and put naked into the underground room; I then have myself put in it, as if I am a fellow-prisoner, and so avoid her hostility). Another common sexual fantasy is the selection-board: I am given six hundred girls to choose fifty from, and so on. These fantasies have long been exteriorized in my mind, of course; certainly I use the underground-room one far less since The Collector. Two, the air-raid shelter incident. Three, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
Simone Jacquemard, Le Veilleur de Nuit. This won the Prix Renaudot last year. It’s based on the same idea as The Collector – on the same news story, I should guess. Anyway, a peculiar earth-worshipping young man who imprisons a girl in order to make her dig for him, and doesn’t have any sexual relations with her. She keeps a good deal closer to the original than I do; which doesn’t help her. But she really kills her chances by using a high old alembicked style and shoving in pages of earth-mystery and dark-force purple patches; pages also of Robbe-Grillet descriptions; a general Woolfishness (or perhaps it’s Proust). The general effect spoils the nice clean fantasy of the real original; such a weight of symbolism that the poor book is bursting at its seams.
8 February
Kinross rang me up to say that Little, Brown are, it’s believed, doing a first print of 20,000 – the biggest since Goodbye, Mr Chips. And the paperback figure has now gone up (potentially) to 35,000 dollars.
22 February
We’ve just sent some poems to Kinross and Maschler. Sequence Four, the series of thirty about various sexual perversions and disasters; the breakdown of love.
I’m working on another sequence – another minor-key one – Testulae. A few poems I wrote in Rome last summer; and a few more now.
These last two months I’ve been revising The Aristos. I think I’m going to recall it ‘Propositions’.
Reach for Glory.fn48 Kohn and Kinberg’s other film. We saw this at Richmond. Much better than I expected. It’s sincerely liberal and fails at a fairly high level; perhaps because the story is rather far-fetched. I was the same age as the boys in the film and at the same sort of school and at the same point in history, and it wasn’t like that.
Sequences of poems. A series of interstices on some ‘inner’ world. I don’t mean by this that the inner world pre-exists and the interstices merely open on to it. The interstices are the inner world. That is, I create a world by deliberately choosing to look at it as if through interstices.
17 March
Down at Leigh. Auntie Tots (Dorothy) died last week, so we went down to look over the loot; the leavings. Some surprisingly good furniture – three fine early tallboys, one Queen Anne, an early American wall-clock, several pieces of some value. A pathetic life she led, this Auntie Tots; very womblike, enclosed in the small world of her private nursing-home,fn49 with its decrepit patients, her cats and dogs, her mania for Dickens, for literature, Literature, her being dominated by the fierce, floridly dour Harrison. It ought to have been a lesbian relationship; they died within a week or so of each other; probably was, in some obscure, unspoken way. Tots was a gentle, myopic creature with the usual Fowles talent for dreaming and failing; and the obstinacy. We found her diary – a weird day-by-day jumble of quotidian trivia, quotations, rather touching strivings after something better. ‘This damned diary is a hell of a nuisance,’ she wrote one day. We’ve put down for some of the things, but F is insanely worried about keeping to the law. He followed us round the house, groaning as we picked and pocketed things. He has a mania for legal rectitude that I find about one quarter admirable and three quarters obsessive; but Hazel, M and Eliz found it absurd. ‘If we don’t take it, the workmen will.’ I think he wants money; it infuriates him that we should want to buy the good things at probate valuation off the estate, where we might sell them at auction and get more money that he can invest.
Very odd, this vulturine rummaging through the chattels of the dead; vultures must lead happy lives, since the activity is extraordinarily pleasurable, a real treat; the mystery, not knowing what is going to turn up next, the exposures of the past, the windfalls of the present. The true paradise, perhaps: being given the keys of the house of a dead eccentric.
24 March
Evening News – one version of the truth.
LUCKY FEW
A recent gloomy report from the Society of Authors confirms that most writers earn less than £500 a year.
For the lucky few, however, there’s always a pot of gold at the end of the typewriter ribbon.
A Hampstead schoolmaster, John Fowles, has just sold film rights in his first suspense thriller, The Collector (Cape, May, 18s.), and this before publication.
It sounds original and exciting.
A young clerk turns from butterfly hunting to kidnap a pretty art student outside Hampstead Town Hall.
What follows is told by kidnapper and victim almost like a police report.
28 March
Italian rights sold for £400.
French rights sold for (we hope) £600.
Now we are waiting to hear about an extract being published in the Sunday Times; still in the balance. (March 29th – no go.)
This Sporting Life. A good British film. But mainly because it is a bit more ‘real’ than all the others.fn50 The English film-makers have fixed on closeness to reality as the great yardstick. This film is terribly close; like Zola. And somehow it seems to lack all poetry, all complexity, all sophistication. Another little French film we saw – Truffaut’s Vivre sa vie with the adorably cool and pretty Anna Karina – seemed to me a ten times better film: more moving, though that wasn’t the purpose, as it was in TSL; far more contemporary; and far, infinitely far, more poetic.fn51 What those nouvelle vague directors have, and especially Truffaut, is a dazzling lightness of touch, a simplicity; and that, especially the latter, seems of the essence of the cinema. All the greatest films have it. Simplicity is to the cinema what the metaphor is to the poem.
London, March ’63
All Hail, hatcher of plots!
Should you remember a flying shuttlecock, a pattern of stars, a see-saw tree, a zany zoo-ramble, and an innate Admiral and yet earnest weekend culture-vultures, ceramic dogs (spotted as the minds that made them), ghost stories in crypts, ‘Edward’, birthday strawberries and cream, lessons on wild flowers, an elusive badger seen at the witching hour, then phone TEM: 4343 Ext 697 and ask for the British Sportsman’s Club Secretary and come to lunch. Should you remember none of these things, tant pis! But should you remember … oh what jollifications.
Another disagreeable foretaste of things to come; the appearance of ghosts. When I got this I didn’t know who it was from, Sanchia or Sally, and had to read it several times before it became clear it was Sanchia; so many things, details, become blurred in my mind. I remember spirit, mood, not exact details. But when I read the diary for that time out to E, there were references to everything mentioned. My instinct was to pick up the telephone and say no, no, no, keep art; then to keep silent; then to write and exorcize. The telephone rang last night and E answered, and a girl said ‘wrong number’; and now we think that was her. I shall have to meet her. But I want her back there, in that strange other-world at Ashridge; as in a glade in a beech-forest that can never be returned to. It seems a pity that the museum has to be a living-room again; especially as it seems she hasn’t changed. And I have.
When you receive a letter in 1963
Which seems to bear a postmark 1954
Why do you cry No, No, No!
Why this sudden fear?
In the moment
Beyond the present nothing
can exist.
Reality we hold –
Is here.
Not back in time
Or times that are not now
Then why this sudden fear?
The figure on the skyline
Waits.
One day you’ll doubt
Look up and see
That reality
is never held
But only imagined when it’s
past.
So why this sudden fear?
Elizabeth, March 1963.
‘There’s a sting in the tail.’
10 April
My last day at St Godric’s. I took in six bottles of sherry and there was a sort of party. The Loveridges have given me a carriage clock; the staff the Shorter Oxford and a soda-maker. Speeches, kisses, everyone being human and well-wishing.
I leave without any regrets whatever; I think this is because I so want to write, not because I am cold-hearted. I’ve always liked being in the stream of youth, the warm current of the foreign girls; their prettiness, their subdued sexuality, their groping through the forests of their upbringing and their wealth to some sort of humanity. And I’ve liked most of the people I’ve worked with; their unpretention and their communality, their determination to set up some sort of community. And I’ve liked (since I became Head of the English Department) the sort of relationship established on both fronts: the elder-brother one with the students and the rather withdrawn one with the other teachers; for I haven’t wanted to be too superior with the former or too identified with the latter.
The wilderness was it. And one gets an affection for even the worst wilderness. When I look back I feel I’ve done more useful work than I ever expected, and perhaps precisely because this wasn’t an academy one could be proud of. All one could ever do in it was a job of work – I mean there was no striving to be done for promotion or academic prestige. But simply each day’s work, and that done, all to do with the place was done.
Now, too, I am a professional existentialist solitary. I can’t make friends with people; they all bore me, even when I like them; even when I like them very much. More and more I listen, or want to listen. I seem to remember that in my twenties I wanted always to talk more than I ever did or could. But the only people now I can talk to are very old friends and I have to lump most other people in the Many – not contemptuously, but regretfully. Their minds don’t work like mine, they aren’t ‘free’ or ‘authentic’ in the senses I use those words. I don’t blame them. They are victims; conditions, or born that way. I don’t want to cut them (I’m talking of the people at St Godric’s) out of my life; but nor do I want to keep them in it.
Tom Maschler. Ringing up – worried that I am writing short stories for money, that Kinross is ‘milking’ me. It is absurd that he should give me this advice. He may know all about selling books, but I know all about the ideals of writing. The most absurd is that he does not even realize this ‘advice’ is atrociously insulting.
12 April
Being ‘free’ is nice; like virtue rewarded. We continue to spend too much money, but then we have had so many years of not being able to spend any money. I have pangs of conscience about not giving anything to charity. I must do that; but as with everything else I like to store these decisions up, to (neologizing by mood) constipate them.
Today I went down Fleet Road and bought some books. Fitzgerald’s Literary Remains (1889) in 3 vols;fn52 Ovid, Works, in 3 vols; Petronius, and some other Roman filth, in another volume; Thomas’s Lawrence of Arabia;fn53 Wyndham Lewis’s Childermass (1st edn) and Barbellion’s Diary (1st edn);fn54 also, 1830 New Hall cup and saucer; a Staffordshire transfer blue bowl; an album of Edwardian postcards (a new collecting mania) of Hampstead and musical comedy beauties; a Dresden cream-jug; £2.
I am devoting some of my freedom to writing my name in all the hundreds of books I have bought these last ten years. ‘John Fowles 1963’ in each one.
14 April
Barbellion. He should be more highly rated, both as a writer in the Jefferies/Lawrence tradition of describing natural England,fn55 and as an English social phenomenon: the sharply empirical odd man out. He’s really one of the first ‘angry young men’.
His feeling a secret Gulliver among the Lilliputian world around him; his loathing of Bible worship; his reading old diaries and having forgotten so much of them; his swinging from the scientific to the aesthetic, and back, in his approach to nature; his embroidering of the trivial: all these define me too.
I spent almost all my ‘intelligent’ childhood from ten to twenty walking alone in the countryside, watching birds, looking for flowers, butterflies; I suppose I would be a better writer if I had been reading more, and learning to write at that age, instead of in my thirties. But that love-affaire with nature – is it all waste?
16 April
Writing a piece, hypothetically for Encounter, about The Collector. In it I’ve said I’ve ceased to have the Bluebeard fantasy since the acceptance of the book. This is true, but it’s been a gradual trailing-off. One reason I haven’t mentioned in the article is the leaving St Godric’s; that is, I am being cut off from the most fertile source. I think that once I used to ‘kidnap and imprison’ generalized girls – archetypes. But for many years it has had to be someone I know – students.
Sunday Times, 14 April 1963.
The Late Developer
John Fowles gave up his job as a schoolmaster in Hampstead last week. He is thirty-seven and has been teaching since he left Oxford. For fifteen years he has spent his spare time writing. He completed two books and started, but never finished, another twelve. He considered himself unpublishable so he sent nothing off – until last year, when he sent a novel called The Collector to an agent. Jonathan Cape snapped it up.
It doesn’t come out till next month, but five months ago the paperback rights were sold for £3,500 and it was bought by Columbia, who have already finished a shooting script. Overseas rights have been sold in America, France and Italy and Cape have just started a second edition. So far, the book has made £12,000. Which is why John Fowles – ‘I suppose I must be a late developer’ – gave up his job last week.
He hasn’t allowed Cape to tell anybody about him up to now because he was slightly worried about the impression which might be created at his school – a well-known girls’ college.
The book is about an inarticulate clerk who kidnaps a student from outside her home in Hampstead. He locks her up in a cottage, but never assaults her. Cape thinks it is a remarkable feat of disquieting suspense.
Fowles says the situation is an archetypal male fantasy. ‘Psychologists call it the Bluebeard fantasy. I’d own up to having indulged in it myself.’
‘And he seemed such a nice young man.’
Sanchia. I went to meet her in the Press Office of the Savoy. A rather coarse-looking foreign clerk typing, two supercilious PR officers; and Sanchia, still with a girl’s face, but with grey hair among the black (she’s twenty-nine, I asked her later); with her same odd easy-formal manner, as if we’d last met yesterday and not ten years ago. She got me a whisky, fiddled about with place tickets for some dinner, helped the coarse-looking foreign clerk to type an envelope, whereupon he kissed the inside of her wrist in a very foreign way, shook hands with me, and left.
‘That’s Christoff,’ she said. ‘He’s the bane of my life.’
‘Christoff?’
‘The Christoff.’
‘The singer?’ And it seemed it was;fn56 he is lecherous off-stage. Then a vivacious foreigner passed through. That was Amelia Rodriguez, the Portugese fado singer.
Later, I got her out of the Savoy and we went to the Heneky’s at the end of the Strand, and there I forced her to drop her isn’t-life-fun mask. Slowly it came off, and in the end she told me everything that had happened to her in the intervening years. Five years in Africa, then this last two years in Europe: in Paris, in London, doing odd jobs, a sort of cheat poverty, because her parents will always help her if she’s absolutely lost. So she slums in the rue de la Huchette in Paris and as a waitress in Cambridge. This is a common situation among middle-class women – they want to be independent, they want to prove their independence; and yet they can’t, quite, ever, with that money behind them.
She still has the princesse lointaine charm I associate with her; only now I look through binoculars at it, so to speak, and feel pretty sure that it would disintegrate rapidly, this charm, if I ever came in closer contact with it. Because it is very largely based on a refusal to face up to reality, physical or mental. I dragged out of her the details of a relationship she has now ‘with a married man’. They speak always in terms of allegory. They live in India (where neither of them has ever been), S up a tree; the man comes hunting in her ‘domaine’; sometimes she speaks to him, sometimes she withdraws ‘so high’ that they can communicate only in the third person, by means of a heron. ‘The heron says …’
‘It’s so bloody childish,’ I said in the end. But for her it was ‘wonderful’: ‘We say things that can’t be said in any other way.’
Then she talked for hours about her family, her wretched, possessive, insanely insecure mother. ‘I can’t marry,’ said S. ‘I’ve got to have some escape. Every marriage for me is like my parents’.’ She said she had lived for five years in South Africa with a German, an ex-SS man. ‘He was very hard, but he taught me to be independent.’
She talked on and on about herself. I should have made an excellent psychiatrist. A certain category of woman, thirtyish, failed in their ambitions, ratted on by men (Jennifer Ardagh, Lorraine Robertson), find in me the ideal father confessor. In S’s case I asked for it, because I kept on asking her the sort of questions she hates but (I suppose) knows she needs: that is, she needs cornering, her evasions admitted.
It was very curious, the evening. We walked up and down the Tottenham Court Road, at the end of it; I had the old feeling of sadness – that I shouldn’t ever be close to her (like a mountain I shan’t ever climb, a country I shall never go to) added to a feeling of sadness for her – sympathy and pity. She was trying to express the same thing, in her usual very oblique way – making a tiny direct confession of emotion, then immediately retracting it, covering it up under some triviality.
I think, really, that I like her because she is unique, unique in her behaving, her looks (without being a raving beauty), and in her approach to life and in her extraordinary mythomania. I can see now clearly her faults, the pathetic nature of her evasions, her feyness, her swathing herself in ambiguities, her obstinate refusal to listen to, or even respect, male reason. (‘I hated La Peste,’ she said. ‘I hate the way he says what he means.’) She reminds me very much of the sort of young woman one reads about in Peacock – a sort of late-eighteenth-century amalgam of shrewdness and snobbishness and femininity – Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. That’s it. She’s Jane Austen-like, in her way.
My whole feeling for her was, is, and always will/would be literary. Not real. Eliz is reality; and I long ago chose that. So much so that I can’t say that I had even the ghost of a shade of Kierkegaardian anxiety – there was no choice to be renewed.fn57
19 April
Sunk in The Magus again; I mean creatively plunged. I have the skeleton, the symbolisms, the implications, so clear. It’s the putting of the flesh in all those big and little bones. The destinations, and the days getting there.
Sources: Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest. As in The Collector, but different, more direct aspects, this time.
The Conchis–Lily relationship is Jullié–Micheline at Collioure – my situation vis-à-vis them. Alison = Kaja.fn58 Perhaps that summer at Collioure is inherent in the psychological situation. It is not Spetsai at all.
23 April
Copies of the book. One to Denys, one to the Porters, one to the Loveridges, one to home, one to Sanchia (in which I wrote a properly cryptic ‘Dig the orchard’ and left it at that); two that I shall keep.
25 April
Fuss with Tom Maschler. I have written a piece called ‘Some Notes: The Collector’, in which he figures as a brilliant young salesman. He is hurt; nobody ever wants to be what he is. He wants to be director of conscience, guide, protector, all. We had dinner with him the other evening, and I liked him better. A house full of modern paintings; but even those, one felt, were bought because they were good investments, though he tried to keep that hidden. He has Midas fingers. Everything he touches turns to gold; but I like him because I think he does want some of what he touches to turn to something human.
An interview with a young lady from Books and Bookmen, a magazine I’d never heard of before. A nice kid, but a ninny; and it suddenly became ridiculous to talk seriously with her.
The Magus. I am working on this all the time. Conchis’s running away at Neuve Chapelle.
3 May
Curious dream. I was at a window looking down a façade at right angles. Various figures appeared at other windows in this façade. I knew they were ghosts – or ‘visitors’, as I am calling them in The Magus. I felt no fear, but a burning desire to make them look at me. I could feel my eyes bulging out of my head with the intensity of this desire. Yet their eyes carefully avoided me, as if I (the living) were the one who did not exist. I interpret this dream in three ways:
1. It is simply an extension of The Magus.
2. It is something to do with the elusiveness of created characters. They have a life and will of their own, etc.
3. It is a dramatization of my having to face the critics (of my anxiety); the first reviews will be out on Sunday.
5 May
First reviews. The worst in the paper where I would rather have the best – The Observer. By the egregiously dilettante ‘man of letters’ Simon Raven, who would manage to make War and Peace sound rather ordinary. But clearly I can’t complain.fn59
7 May
First swifts.
I spent three hours today down in the West End Lane library, reading The Times for January–March, 1915, and Punch from September 1914 to March 1915. I have been doing that part of The Magus for some time. At first, intense interest; then irritation. I wanted to get back to my imagined, simplified 1915.
9–11 May
Bad days. I get no pleasure from reading the reviews of the book – what reviews there are. There were none in the weeklies and papers I hoped might have something to say. ‘Quite a little masterpiece of suspense’ seems to sum up the general view – the ‘immensely unimportant’ sort of judgement. This last week has made me very jumpy and I wish to God now that I had cleared out of England – alone. Eliz doesn’t seem to understand what this is doing to me. On top of everything else I have got into a bad patch with The Magus where I can’t see whether the trouble is simply authenticating Bouranifn60 or the sheer impossibility of authenticating it under any circumstances – I wonder whether the patch is beyond my powers, beyond any powers.
We went to Sudbury on Friday, to look at a house – part of a Tudor manor house at Glemsford. But the experience disconcerted me completely; as we caught the train to Marks Tey, changed on to a sideline and ambled through Victorian stations and green fields under a wet grey sky, the whole business became unreal; and more unreal, going in a taxi through Long Melford, up an endless village street and round by some council houses into a lane.fn61 The house was very fine, beamed, gabled, lopsided, like an illustration in a Dickens novel. Nice old rooms and staircase, a pretty orchard. But I knew at once that I could never live there. Not at the end of an ugly village, with council estates going up all around. We saw another house at Little Waldingfield, and the next day another at Lavenham,fn62 one with a fine Jacobean staircase, a splendid piece of design; but the house in foul condition, so damp and dilapidated that I couldn’t be bothered even to pretend to the owner that we were interested. This whole area is much too conversion-conscious, too professionally ‘country’ to interest me. The villages are pretty, Sudbury is a nice little country town, but this is not what I want. I realized that my ideas about what I want in the country are so vague that it is ridiculous to make any decision until we have seen more of England and of possible houses or cottages.
I see now that I need 1. not less than an acre or so of ground; 2. either a very modern house (designed for me) or a Georgian one – Tudor is out – too dark, too introverted; 3. seclusion – I don’t want to be overlooked or overheard; 4. water – the sea or at least a stream; 5. an orchard – the Tudor house at Glemsford had a fine little one on a slope behind the house; 6. a hilly landscape – combes.
But besides all these limiting things I still don’t know whether I really want to live in the country or not. There is that Chekhovian sadness that hangs over all sensitive people in the country; that terrible loss of proportion we call local pride; that sameness, or lack – lack of incident, lack of choice; and there is still that old, old Tory view of life, Tory in the eighteenth-century sense, which lingers in the eyes of all educated people – I heard it in the estate agent’s voice, I saw it in the manner of a sad-genteel, cultivated hotel proprietress, in the curator of the Gainsborough Museum’s eyes.fn63 (Atrocious, the Gainsboroughs – his ‘Ipswich period’ is totally without genius.) A world with an unhealthy respect for money, property, family, tradition. Where the world is still squires and peasantry – older than that even. Chiefs and tribesmen.
Eliz suddenly lost her temper in the middle of the night when we got back. Quite unexpectedly. Whatever else was a failure at Sudbury, our making love wasn’t; something intensely aphrodisiac about hotel rooms. But my collecting of china irritates her – I think unreasonably. She was deeply offended when a stupid girl reporter came here the other day and asked me questions about the china and the books. I hate the collecting of living objects, but I just cannot see any harm in that which I do. Collecting is bad when 1. the objects cease to exist as objects in a collection, 2. the collecting is done purely for investment, 3. it is so expensive that it unbalances the rest of one’s life. Eliz keeps on accusing me of having nothing but these motives, although she has read and heard me say a dozen times what I think constitutes legitimate and illegitimate collecting. In Lavenham we saw by chance a New Hall teapot in a cottage window – and it gave me quite as much aesthetic ‘kick’ as collector’s excitement. I think this pottery is English with exactly the Englishness I admire and love. And as for the books, I collect them for reasons that would make most bibliophiles spit in disgust – because I want to read them, plunge back into the past. Not because they are rarities, in fine condition, and so on. My mistake has been – because I find it impossible to communicate the joy I feel in a New Hall milk-jug, an obscure eighteenth-century play – to boast of prices, of bargains. The silly girl reporter wanted to know ‘how much they’re all worth’; and this age reduces one to that – ‘how much they’re all worth’, in money. It shocks me often that Eliz thinks all money spent on non-practical things is ‘a waste’, is in some way ‘wicked’. This bread-alone view of life is a hangover from our poorer days; but it is also characteristic of all our friends, for whom collecting, in even the very humble way I do, is totally ‘out’. They are like the Porters, who buy the odd bit of bric-à-brac because it is ‘amusing’; like the Sharrocks, who like to be able to ‘live from one suitcase’. And over all hangs the interior decoration mania. If there is a blasphemy of the object, that is it.
Eliz attacked me, too, much more reasonably, for watching a girl in a house opposite through my telescope. It is sheer curiosity, or almost sheer, much closer to ornithology than voyeurism. But of course one is meant to be deeply ashamed of such instincts. Even if I was a voyeur I don’t think I’d be very ashamed.
The row is made up. The wonder is not that we had it, but that living so close as we do, and so isolated from other people, that we don’t have them more often.
Archie Ogden. A nice man, in spite of the fact that the demon Alcohol has him in its claws. He’s in torment without a glass in his hand; though once he has one, he doesn’t drink hard. Just happily sips. I think it’s high time we talked of New World courtesy – he has eighteenth-century good manners and graciousness, like so many educated Americans.
That lovely (pure American) joke about Philadelphia: ‘I spent a week there last Sunday.’
14 May
A wet afternoon. We have suddenly decided to go to Greece. To camp and hike through the Peloponnesus.
Hudson, Green Mansions (1904)fn64 I have never read Hudson before. I think I’ve even had some vague sort of contempt for him, not really as English. Whereas he is intensely English, of course; Green Mansions is quite as English as Robinson Crusoe. I found it, for all its feyness, a powerfully and truly sad work. I think I like it because I can feel exactly how Hudson was obsessed by his idea, by the idea of Rima; in books like this the imagination goes flaring through the dark spaces, the void of all the countless imaginationless, obsessionless books. It’s a pity he made Rima talk, though that last ‘Abel, Abel’ down into the flames almost justifies it; and whenever he describes her physically an Arthur-Rackhamish, James-Barrieish quality creeps in; while the sex is that odd misty half-ethereal, half-physical ballooning-out of emotions we call passion – the word has a pejorative sense now, of course; although if any book could tell us of the Sex Age, what we have lost by existing in it, it is Green Mansions.
The book fascinated me because I have just come to the part in The Magus where Lily ‘enters’; and because it has precisely the quality I think needs putting back into life and into the novel – mystery.
Hudson’s pantheism and his rejection of the idea of an interceding God – of course he is right. The latter requires the former.
17 May
A peculiar, very disagreeable day. I’m not feeling well, but it was something more than that. It started well enough. We went down to Dorset Square to see a maisonette flat Eliz had seen advertised. But very rapidly I had a feeling, still with me as I write, so like existentialist nausea that I can hardly believe it – though it is here and real. As we looked round the flat it began to seem at two removes. As if in a film. The nausea was not at the otherness of the objects we saw, but at their remoteness, as if they had nothing to do with me, as if I was seeing them in a film – in a film I didn’t want to see, moreover. Sitting afterwards in a coffee-bar – Eliz likes the place, she wants to move in – this nausea became worse, the sharpest attack I have ever had. A girl walking outside, other customers, Eliz, my own queasy stomach – everything only quarter existent. As if I was dying. Walking about the Baker Street area, arguing about whether we should take the place or not. One of ‘the boys’ who was in the flat took us in his car to the estate agent’s, just by Holborn Viaduct. Weird griffin-like creatures painted maroon and g(u)ilt (Freudian: guilt for gilt); an endless climb up past the gilded mesh of a non-working life. Down a long top-floor corridor; a clerk with a stutter. The whole building seemed empty except for this one Kafkaesque creature, who knew n-nothing. Eliz felt car-sick, and stood reading letters in the clerk’s tray. Quite openly. All my self seemed shifted out of me; it was as if only my body and the bodily sensations were left. As if my persona had blown up and there was nothing left except fragmented perceptions of coagulations of phenomena. We wandered about Holborn afterwards like two people in limbo. But with Eliz it was just a physical nausea. I felt, and feel, ontologically dislocated; as if there has been a break in the course of my life. It would be alarming if it were not so strange: that things one has read and written become so physically real.
It is not the otherness of things that is terrifying; it is when they lose their otherness, when they lose all intrinsic value, all ontological meaning. They are, but are not. They no longer reflect one, so one’s personality is no longer contained and ‘fixed’ (in the navigational sense) by them; it disperses through them out into psychological space, into the néant.
19 May
We took Jane and Bert Saunders to see the Dorset Square flat. Thank God, their good solid urban ex-Bohemian common-sense rejected the place at sight.
22 May
Awake at five with indigestion. Sitting in the long room, facing one of the small windows in the east wall. It was just light. And suddenly a huge ripe persimmon floated up over Highgate woods. I watched it through glasses, round, trembling-edged, orange and huge. Some odd distortion made the lowest part reach out, as if still attracted to the skyline, like an inverted droplet. On its right shoulder a black mole; the still drowsy sun, hanging over the cool grey banks of the dawn trees. A most lovely colour, a most lovely shape; and the moments full of silence, only pigeons cooing, no traffic, no men, pigeons cooing and swifts flying between me and the sun, all power, all nature, very mysterious, trembling there like a pregnant woman, more beautiful than anything I have seen for many months.
28 May
Off to Greece tomorrow. Crowded, these last days, tense, empty, nervous, dull; but at last we feel some of the joy of going. This morning I went to St Godric’s – a roomful of foreign girls with books to sign. Nice gentle, eager creatures, treating me and the book as simple, healthy things – as if we were a mother and child; so much better than the nervous miasma that surrounds the being an author in England.
6 August
American reviews are coming in – mostly very favourable. But the book is so often misunderstood – no one will take it as a parable, as the Heraclitean sermon it is meant to be.
The film treatment of The Collector from John Kohn – so bad, most of it, that I read it with a sort of stunned incredulousness. Changes in the story, the happy ending and all the rest, I’d accepted. But to find characters totally changed, motivations changed, worst of all, my ideas changed – that’s what I can’t stand. And as for some of the Americanisms they’ve put into the mouths of my poor English characters …
9 August
We’ve got out a huge list of objections; and I composed a letter.
This is going to be a very difficult letter to write, and to read. But here it is: even when I allow for all the demands of the box-office and the change in art-form, your treatment seems to me in many places hopelessly inadequate.
Please don’t think I’m dismissing all the work and thought I’m sure you and Stanley Mann have put in on this job. I like some of your visual inventions very much, and – one key thing – you’ve by and large jettisoned the characters and situations that need jettisoning.
Can we for Christ’s sake not now get together on this script? I understand that you feel I’m not competent to help you, but surely you need on the screen, with a story like this, as much consistency and authenticity, in visual detail, in motivation and in dialogue, as you can get. And if there is one word that can sum up my criticisms of your treatment it’s this: it is implausible, it just doesn’t make realistic English (or any other) sense.
Let me end by saying that my disappointment would not be so great if you hadn’t done such a good job on Reach for Glory.
There it is. Forgive, if you can, all the harsh words (my ‘urgent reaction’) in what follows; all my criticisms come from a desire to help achieve something better. You want to have a good film, I want to have a good film. Must we come at it from opposite directions?
But Archie Ogden thinks they’ve got me in the contract ‘by the short hairs’ – they could tell me to go hell. And would, if I sent the letter. So he will speak to them, and try to convince them that they have me in to clean things up. He thought, anyway, that it was a good job – they’d beaten ‘a really tough problem’. Part of the difficulty is the gulf between the English and the American imaginations. Even an American intellectual like Archie seems to me so unsubtle, so surprisingly content with clumsiness and obviousness in the script. It’s not a matter of intelligence, but taste – they like all their shadows lit, all their ambiguities elementary, all their symbolisms pushed down the audience’s throat. Understatement here, overstatement there. (Lecture over.)
14 August
Two days down at Leigh – miserable ones, full of a sort of choked nausea. I get more and more of this vile nervous rage at the stupidity of the environments I am condemned to – my parents. M irritates me so intensely that within a few hours of getting down there I find myself unable to look her in the face; F at least I have some pity and sympathy for, though his views on books and writing are so idiotically Victorian-suburban that I have to keep a tight hold on my tongue.
Leigh, though, was probably no more than an irritant on an already ulcerous situation. Because I feel myself at a crossroads, torn by so many anxieties and nauseas that concentration is impossible; all the American success means nothing – at any rate, brings me no pleasure. I am sick to death of The Collector, really, and the thought of having to plough all through it again (writing a film script) makes me wonder if I shan’t end up on the couch. I have forgotten what relaxation and peace of mind are – and the holiday in Greece has done me no good in that way. It was two months in a vacuum; now reality begins exactly where it left off at the end of May.
One major cause of all this mental ulceration is my feeling of frustration over the poems and The Aristos. Getting them published seems no more feasible now than it did before The Collector. I feel misinterpreted, misunderstood, belittled. Of course this is arrogance – the preacher in prison. But more and more I feel myself slipping out of control – that is, the ship won’t answer the helm of reason. I am what my obsessions and deep drives demand, not what my reason says I should be. Behind the façades, dark corridors: the commands come from the shadows, not the brightly designed surfaces.
A curious moment of peace at Leigh, when Eliz and I had escaped for an hour or two. We sat in the public library gardens overlooking the mild estuary. Feeling I was great enough to outlive, to outbe, all this period of neurotic worry about success, about being understood, about writing something else as good. But it was a glimpse of something far away, something that flashed past.
All the weight of this falls on Eliz, here and at Leigh. Sometimes she seems like a wall between me and my madness, my disintegration, the shattering of my coherence, exhibiting all the sanity and patience I once had, and she hadn’t – like some peculiar transference, this.
A hedgehog in the garden, at Leigh. I wanted to catch it, and in the end hurt the poor beast, which was stuck under a fence. It wouldn’t roll up, wouldn’t run, but lay half on its side, one pink paw out, its dull black eye staring reproachfully from among the bristles. I cursed myself for having used so much force – for being trapped by the old hunting maniac. The next morning it had disappeared; but I must learn this lesson.
20 August
Tom Maschler: ‘Mary Hemingway’sfn65 asked me over (to America) to do something with Poppa’s manuscripts. She doesn’t trust anyone else.’ Absurd: like a grasshopper assessing a Stravinsky. Not that Tom doesn’t say ‘God only knows why’ and all the rest. We like him a little bit more each time we see him: his restlessness, his meanness with his praise – the Jewish oil and vinegar.
These last four or five days I’ve been fighting the battle of the film script – two long sessions down at Wigmore Street, and three days on my own here (Eliz in Birmingham). Strange days – eighteen hours each day completely rewriting all the worst bits of dialogue (i.e. those not taken from the book), and suddenly having the trio Paston, Miranda and Clegg alive with me again. That odd state in which one’s creations seem so real that it becomes a bore to stay at the typewriter when one can walk round the room, and hear and see them.
After that I had to meet the other (and less real) trio at Blazer Films: John Kohn, a liberal, perhaps, but under such a crust of Hollywood-mogul crassness and with such a natural lack of sensitivity that the liberalism dwindles to near nothingness; Jud Kinberg, a nice, easy man, but a bit of a deadweight; and Stanley Mann, a slim stick of taut nerves, obviously intelligent, but a non-creator, a slick cutter-down of originals to the required size. Mann’s more or less on my side; Kinberg’s on the fence; Kohn is violently against – he wants gimmicks, suspense, two-dimensional characters, a happy ending.
I read out my bits of dialogue. Some they liked, some they didn’t – Kohn almost always not. The language in these script conferences becomes peculiarly tense and obscene: ‘OK, he wants to lay the fucking broad, but she’s a fucking little cockteaser, she won’t let him’; ‘Look, you got this goddam virgin fucking around …’ And so on. It reminded me of The Naked and the Dead – some war novel. It’s blasphemous; and in a way it has a sort of authenticity – they’ve thought about the film so much, tried so many possibilities, that you feel the characters have become really battered and shapeless, like things in war.
Both Kinross and Maschler think I’m wrong to have anything to do with them – especially without having got any financial terms settled. But on things like this I know I’m right. If they take only half the changes I got them to accept yesterday, then it’s worth it. I know the Devil when I see him; and he’s not going to walk over me.
Billy Liar. There’s a girl in it – Julie Christie – they’re screen-testing for the part of Miranda. She has the face – better than I expected. They won’t beat her for looks. Clegg is to be Terence Stamp. The director should be John Schlesinger, but they sent him the script.
Trying to find a house in London. Eliz is out looking most days. I don’t really know where I want to live – in London or abroad or in the country. Nor, at present prices, do I feel happy about the financial side. The cheapest houses, all in tatty areas, are about £10,000. Nothing under £15,000 in Hampstead. We’d have to borrow at least half the purchase price. And I think of all those writers who lived all their lives in a miserable state of debt.
Whiting, The Devils. A very fine play.fn66 A touch of genius, that rare, rare thing in modern literature. The idea of a mosaic of short scenes – yes. If I write a Robin Hood, this is the thing to keep in mind.
Genius: recognizing in another an achievement one could never have achieved oneself in the given situation; and which one would have liked to achieve. With this, always, a shock of delight. Because the curious thing about genius is that it destroys envy.
4 September
Little, Brown want me to go to America for a week, to help publicize the book.
Golding, Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin. The first is the better, though that ending is wrong. Ralph should die, and the earth be given over to darkness.fn67 The second is a tour de force of physical description; but the flashbacks are horribly weak.fn68 I think I have the following main criticisms of Golding: 1. he treats of extreme situations expressionistically, he comes from the Kafka (Rex Warner) line – expressionism and extreme situation do not go together, the one trips up, weakens, the other; 2. his dialogue is weak; 3. his prolonged descriptions of physical sensations and actions end up cancelling each other out – in practical terms, one skims them. Rule: the more extreme and fantastic the situation the more realistic (camera-eye) and sober the descriptions and dialogue. Examples: Robinson Crusoe; Darkness at Noon. Corollary: the more ordinary the situation the more exotic and fantastic language and dialogue may be. Examples: Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway.
The Collector is now third on the Time bestseller list.
Flying to America. This frightens me. Statistics mean nothing. It feels like a 50–50 chance. Not that death means anything. I wouldn’t mind dying now, in some strange way. In spite of the incompletion of everything.
14–23 September
Like most people who call themselves socialists I went to the States for this first visit with my suitcase stuffed with a lifetime’s prejudices against the place, prejudices softened by a good deal of liking for American literature and for a few beautiful American expatriates I’d known here and there in Europe, but aggravated by almost everything else. Somehow I have to explain how I came back a week later still a socialist (in my fashion) but also hopelessly in love. The faults are there all right, as plain as the eczema on an adolescent’s face; but nobody ever told me how forgivable and lovable and good-looking the poor child is. And so, at the risk of having all my friends tell me I’ve gone soft, this will largely be in praise of America. Just for a change.
One comes in over Boston, inferiority complexes on the qui-vive, one lands. A collection of scruffy one-storey buildings, a dirty corridor, peeling distemper, windows painted coarse brown with bizarre shapes scratched in them by idlers outside – spiders of light behind the immigration officials’ heads. It would be a national disgrace in Europe, but here it is human, unassuming. But ah, I think, the dreaded Boston Irish, now we shall see. I go up to the most unpleasant-looking official. He stares at my form. Tears it up, takes another and carefully fills it in again for me. ‘They oughta make it clearer,’ when I mutter an apology. ‘There,’ he says, ‘and I hope you have a really happy stay with us.’ From then on I am permanently off-balance.
Ned Bradford, Little, Brown’s editor-in-chief, a quiet, intellectual-executive type, met me. Glasses, sizing blue eyes. The bits of Boston we went through looked tatty, too – human. Because this is what one comes into the States expecting not to find – dirt, rust, tattiness, all the usual human failings of old civilizations.
On the expressway out south down to Marshfield, passing the English names – Weymouth, Braintree, and then the lovely-sounding Indian names mixed in with them – Nantasket, Cohasset, Scituate. Then Plymouth. Then Cape Cod.
The biggest shock is the beauty of the domestic buildings in the New England countryside – the Cape Cod and Colonial cottages, barns and houses. The lovely sober colours they’re painted in. White mostly, shutters and details picked out in grey, steel-blue and white; here and there a sober maroon house, window-frames and door in white. And the spacedness of the houses. America is where space is cheap, and things like this alter a nation’s psyche. Round here you have to buy at least an acre if you want to build.
Atmosphere of the Bradford’s 1780 house – of total informality tinged with gracious living (using that last term without most of the pejorative associations it’s accreted to itself). Simply living with easy grace, with pleasant things around one, and space, lawns, a lake, woods. ‘We just want to live on our own,’ says Pam Bradford, ‘and in our own way.’
This seems to me to be one of the tragedies of America, that the combined pressures of conformism and an only superficial consumer-goods paradise drive the decently intelligent into a nostalgia for isolation (shades of Thoreau) and the indecently intelligent to sex, alcohol and the headshrinker’s den. It is easy to sneer at the neuroses of wealth. I’ve done it pretty often myself. But socialism dismisses this aspect of the American adventure at its own peril. In this, as in so many other things, they’re pioneering for all of us.
Pioneering spirit. There’s an old stove in the kitchen. ‘When there’s a hurricane we have to cook and do everything by that.’ It seems incongruous, beside all the apparatus for modern living. Incongruous and deeply appealing, of course. That is another not so obvious charm of this country. The close proximity of sophisticated gadgetry to the aboriginal wild. The trees that end nowhere.
Monday morning, into Boston in the rain. It seems a terribly ugly city, coarse and dirty, even though the area round Beacon Hill has a certain charm. ‘This is really nice,’ says Ned. But it isn’t. There’s very little urban architectural charm in the place. Some pleasant built-out bow-windows and Colonial doors, but mainly vistas of heavy Victorian-Edwardian brownstone ugliness. And the tired jams of long-tailed cars. The way American men drive their huge cars. Even miserable old wizened sheep try to look toughly relaxed, virile to the grave, in the driving-seat. They have a pathetic lack of dignity.
Bob Fettridge. He’s Little, Brown’s chief publicity and promotion man, and I owe him most for the success of the book, so everyone says. ‘He kind of looks like a store detective,’ says Ned Bradford. But he’s simply a shy, nervous little man, with a shrewd, intense face. I like him. There is a big lunch for me in a private dining-room of the Union Club – the two Arthur H. Thornhill’s, Senior and Junior. Senior a crusty old boy, but with a nice old pride in his imprint and a hatred of publishers who print books to catch the pornography market (such as Scribner’s have recently with Fanny Hill). Junior is the college-boy executive, rather English and slightly ludicrously top of the pecking order. All the various heads of department were around the table, distinctly nervous, angling for the right remark, the right moment to be sincere, the right moment to make a ‘sick’ aside (to get a laugh). All nice men on their own, all liberals, yet this organizational pattern is very disagreeably present at such reunions; and once again the pattern is basically power.
Power – this is America. The neurosis of power; the application of power; the poetry of power; the psychologies of power. The long cars, the great flowing expressways and flyovers, the huge buildings, the size and the space. Everything here, from the simplest conversation – all that has size, has energy, has space – is a symbol, an emblem, a metaphor of power.
To New York. In clouds all the way, but then we came down and there was the Hudson and the East River and the Statue of Liberty and the great cluster of scrapers in downtown Manhattan. We picked what Bob Fettridge said was the most typical New York taxi-driver he’d ever seen: a guttural, glottal Brooklyn accent – Thoid Avenoo – incessant talk, offers to take us round Greenwich Village – ‘I was a cop in the Vice Squad, I can show you everything.’
The University Club. Very staid and proper. No women allowed, and as like a London club as could be, even to the serried ranks of old fossils in the reading-room. But I have a nice big room, a splendid bathroom. Very solid comfort. I look over the Museum of Art courtyard, and Fifth Avenue is ten yards away.
The poetry of New York – under cloud, the skyscrapers losing their tops. Sunlight, the windowed cliffs floating in the blue sky, heavenly cities. The long vistas have an almost Claude-like peace. And the sunshafts catch little bits of green. New York is cool, zesty, young. The girls in bare-armed dresses.
Meeting Naomi Thompson, the LB publicity girl in New York – a short-sighted Scandinavian American of fortyish, plump, bossy, scatty in a deliberate sort of way, full of publicity raves and gimmicks. She lives on her nerves from moment to moment, sucks up and utters literary gossip like an alcoholic barman. A nice homely Nordic woman deep in her somewhere.
The pace of New York. Whip in and out of taxis, from one date to another. It’s not nearly so neurotic as one would think (or the natives like to make out). There’s a great lack of fuss. One slips into a studio, shakes hands, tests for sound, talks, shakes hands, is out. None of the empty exchanges of London life, which wear out one’s nerves so.
The Americans interview much better than we do, much more relaxedly, much less anxious to needle and much more anxious to find out what you really believe, why you do things, who you really are. I have a job explaining existentialism, still inextricably confused in the American mind with beatniks and that notorious New York folk villain Norman Mailer. I was needled once or twice on the Profumo affaire, but in general people realized that the thing was no more than a boil, and needed lancing; in any case the way Western sexual mores are going no country can afford to laugh at another over a Profumo affaire. ‘Oh, we laugh,’ said one New Yorker. ‘And keep our fingers crossed.’fn69
Days flow in and out so fast that things seem to go by as in a dream. Wednesday. Up at 7.30 to meet Norton Mockridge of the World Telegram for breakfast. He’s an avuncular type (it seems he’s the city editor, and hasn’t done such an interview for years), with a freckled bald head, and the bluff NY urbanity the older men have. Very agreeable, this American man-of-the-worldliness. Long serious talk. But the breakfast interview is a bore, really. On at 9.30 to an interview with Mitchell Krauss, a type I can tell a mile off. Nervous, phoney, as treacherous as a shark and as ‘authentic’ as a plastic mouse – an odd blend of harmfulness and harmlessness. All through the interview he was glancing anxiously round, fingers trembling. I realize my apparent stolidity worries the less experienced (and genuine) interviewers. And I’m glad.
Then a riotous three hours with Marguerite Lampkin, the star Condé-Nast ‘culture’ interviewer. A slim girl with dark glasses and neuroses worn like the best French scent and a Louisiana accent like one long caress – as she well knows. I went with her and Bruce Davidson, the ace Vogue man, very offbeat, simple, ‘genuine’, the James Dean type. Almost inarticulate, like a shy boy. Yet he’s the highest paid man in the highest paid magazine in the States. Somehow we seemed to strike up a sort of New Wave rapport, the three of us, and there were absurd posings in front of the Seagram building. Marguerite had worked with Tennessee Williams, lived with Isherwood, knew Freddy Ayer. All this bubbled out in her sweet-acid way.
‘Mah second husband was so clevah. You don’t know. We had cleverness all day all night long … and my …’ Her absurd indefinitely drawled ‘my’.
‘Come of it,’ I said, ‘you’re putting on that accent.’
‘Ah’m not.’
‘You bloody well are.’
She wrinkles her pretty nose at me, as phoney as a bit of Fabergé.
We went to the Central Zoo, we all hate zoos. Dozens of shots of me in front of the polar bears. We wander out in the park and I insist on an Antonioni series – ridiculous posings and standings and idle – walkings-about. I am Mastroianni and she is Vitti. Davidson gets all excited, dances about like Ariel. People on the sidewalks look at us standing rapt and alien and stand themselves looking puzzled and a bit shocked. This was great fun for me. We didn’t say a serious thing and it was so light, so presto, after the heavy stuff about what did I mean by this and by that.
Got to bed about half past one and up again at 6.15 for the big thing of the week, the TV interview on the most serious programme of the day, the seven through nine Today. This is coast to coast, and has huge audience raitings. I was on between Saarinen’s wifefn70 and Bobby Kennedy, so LB are happy. I felt relaxed, no blocks, although we didn’t get in as much as I would have liked.
Interview with Lewis Nichols of the New York Times. A stout, flabby man with the face of a huge pug-dog. He had the usual NY sour wit in its most concentrated form. I like it, this sour deflation of everyone and everything, this turning of everything naïf into something sick – the Albee syndrome. He got slightly drunk and was evidently in a bad temper with life in general. I too began to go over the edge and for about an hour we did a minor Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – he and I, that is.fn71 I became as ‘vicious’ about the Americans as I could. ‘God, how I hate the English,’ he kept on saying out of his Charles Laughton mouth. On that narrow tightrope, a well-beaten path round here, between bottle-smashing venom and don’t-really-believe-me-I’m-only-kidding. However, in the end we pulled ourselves together and ended more amicably.
My book is a sort of ‘in’ book in New York. Everywhere I went I met people who wanted to argue about it, about what I meant – and all because one of its themes is that of impotence: sexual, physical and psychological. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the same. It obsesses people because it is about power and impotence; not because of all the other things it is about. ‘All American women want to be locked up underground,’ said one lady. ‘We’re all in love with that monster of yours.’ All this line of talk surprised me; that effect of the book was totally uncalculated. But Americans won’t believe me when I say so.
Friday morning. My stomach gave out – too many clams, snails, bourbons, cigarettes. I took two overdoses of chlorodyne, and drifted most of the morning, not really aware of what was happening.
Gloria Vanderbilt. Ever since the girl-woman expressed a desire to see me, eyes have gone green.fn72
‘Vanderbilt!’ they say. ‘Good God.’
Gracie Square, an opulent tenement, up a lift that lets you straight into a hall. Round a corner. A very slim girlish creature, with greying black up-ended hair and crinkles round her dark eyes – these two things humanize her at once. That her hair isn’t dyed and that she has lines of suffering. In her den, panelled in Gothic wood, a bad painting in one corner (her own) and a french window out on to a terrace. Champagne and a heap of caviare in a huge glass bowl of ice. Three editorial men from Cosmopolitan. The two under ones were nice quiet fellows, but the editor was too fly, too talkative, balding, glasses, eager to impress Gloria-darling. We drank champagne – every half an hour she’d slip away and bring in another magnum – and talked and gradually a sort of warmth grew up and I played the let’s-be-serious game and shut the editor up a little. Gloria kept on jumping then and saying yes, yes, yes – she’s plainly a woman starved of authenticity, of seriousness she can believe in, starved of being able to believe in anything, in fact. We discovered we both liked Katherine Mansfield.
‘Oh, you must come and see what I have in my bedroom.’ And I noticed this remark, which anywhere else in New York would have got a wisecrack over the head almost before it was finished, passed. You don’t laugh at her naïveties. I smiled. Gloria told a story about Salinger. A friend of hers wrote to him to say that she wanted to kill herself by cutting her wrists. His answer was, ‘Cut deep and hold under cold water. The blood runs faster.’ She’s still alive. Another story about a girl who wrote him long inarticulate letters. One day he wrote back, ‘I don’t think I want to know a girl who writes as badly as you do.’ A few years later out came The Catcher in the Rye. Ever since the girl has gone around wailing, ‘But they’re my letters!’
She talked about Truman Capote and Oona Chaplin, her ‘best friend’ – she is that kind of American society girl. As a matter of fact, Vanderbilt seemed to me just about the least affected and most secure person I met in New York. Of course (to give a New York answer), boy, she can afford to be secure. Poor thing, she’s only the richest girl in the world. But meeting her I found it difficult to establish a correct socialist response. Anyway, I liked her so much as an obviously sincere admirer of what I tried to do in The Collector (which she knew backwards) that I was off-balance from the start. We also seemed to have all the same views on art and writers.
I had to get to the Albee play at eight, but she kept on holding us back and taking us round the apartment. More like a small palace than anything else. Upstairs to her roof garden, a film set, high over the East River, long white chairs, shrubs, statuary, and all New York spread around. Everyone struck rather silent. She put her arm through mine and pulled me round the back. ‘This is where I’m a voyeur. I’ve got field-glasses.’ There were apartment blocks all around. So we found another curious link. Then we went down to look at the lower terrace. Tugs tied to huge lighters, like insects with monstrous geometric parasites. A river of cars going along a riverside road below, a pulsing flux of bright light. All still up where we are on the terrace, almost Tibetan in its withdrawn peace. A room with a huge mantelpiece made of Louis Quinze and Seize gilded brackets, each one holding a rare pot – oddly like an interior decorating shop wall, really. Didn’t come off. Round the walls hung her paintings, children standing with flowers in their hands, staring out into the room with wistful, hurt, ambiguous eyes. Like her own brown eyes. Canvases much too large, she’d get twice the effect if they were cut down. But the pastel colours and the ambiguity of the faces had a certain Matisse-like charm. They were rather better than I expected.
Then we went into her bedroom and there on her mantelpiece was a ‘unique’ photo (‘I bought the negative’) of Katherine Mansfield, looking very serious, straight, black eyes staring with a faint troubled beadiness into one’s own. Gloria stood beside me and said, ‘I’ve put these beside her because she liked them so much.’ Two bits of Dresden, shepherdesses against a wall of flowers.
At her door, she takes both my hands in hers, and the others are rather embarrassed, but I know what she’s trying to say, in spite of everything, in spite of everything.
Outside, in the taxi, we treat her as the famous American phenomenon she is. Or rather the others do. All these victims of too much money want to flutter out of the gilded cage for a while, and I know how to hold the door open – as have most writers ever since time began. We can liberate them for a moment and they all want to be liberated for at least a moment.
The Cosmopolitan boys are obviously exploiting her, and she’s already stopped them putting her face on the front cover. But she wants to be a writer and I’d say she’s using her name at the moment to get herself into print; is unhappy about it, but can’t resist.
As if all her life she’s been Cinderella at the ball. I too have felt like Cinderella all this week. A play could be written on Cinderella at the ball; and not have a child’s line in it. But all glitter and anxiety. The wind suddenly blowing through the curtains, a sudden wind through the room. Then foghorns from the river below, very loud, very close. A sudden shyness, inarticulateness, she had.
Idlewild,fn73 the Tati-like magic of the doors that open automatically as you approach them. In the BOAC hall, a group of three English business men, all with pipes, in brown woollen suits, all jovial. One hears a joke, roars with laughter, turns, walks away for four steps, then turns back. Such silly little people. I hate the aggressive virility of some American men, but this mousy-goaty insularity of the English male is nauseating. They sat in front of me all the way back, these three, making eyes at the air-hostesses, asking them unnecessary ‘funny’ questions. ‘Is it raining outside?’ (Of course at 35,000 feet it can’t rain.) The hostess gives her mask smile. ‘Shall I go out and see, sir?’ Haw, haw, haw. Big joke with the girls.
You leave Idlewild, last light of the day, at 8 p.m. Then four hours later the dawn begins to rise over Ireland. The whole flight took just over six hours. Back at 28 Church Row, the strangeness of realizing that only nine hours before I was walking down Fifth Avenue, that it’s twice as quick to get to the heart of New York from here than to travel to Venice, say, by train.
The flatness, the lack of accent in England. This is my first impression. A sort of deflatedness. America is erect, England seems prone. I am talking architecturally, really. Then the lack of power – the current’s turned off suddenly, the tempo falls, the pressure goes, superman becomes man, power hardly matters, social prestige and caste take its place.
Going with Eliz to see a house she liked in the Vale of Health. I don’t think I could have stood it at the best of times, but to have to see it after this experience, with its cramped rooms, its boxiness, its present petit-bourgeois décor, its whole invitation to a quiet, small life. I was feeling tired of this before America. But I know now, deeply, that I need openness, I need space. It is not England that needs to be conquered, but America. From England, but living closer to America, closer to power, to energy. We must, within our means, get some kind of décor in which I can operate as a writer in that way (to use American language). To say that the English are living in and on their history is a cliché; but this is what I felt intensely coming back here. That America and the Americans are in some obscure (and even noble) way facing up to the size and dimensions of twentieth-century man and the colossal complexity of his problems. I imagine one would have exactly the same feeling in Russia. This has nothing (in this context) to do with the size of the countries, but simply to do with the extent to which the countries are obliging the individual to face up to the problems of modern existence. This business of a living décor is not very important; but one is conditioned (I am) by the spaces one lives in. It’s the rocket thing. One has to probe a wider space.
fn1 Although Britain had initially refused to join the European Economic Community, by 1962 the economic benefits of membership had become increasingly apparent and the British government decided to begin negotiations to join. Its application was vetoed the following year by the French president de Gaulle on the grounds that Britain was too closely tied to the US.
fn2 Made in 1960, the film stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as a married couple who discover over the course of an afternoon and an all-night party that their love for each other has died.
fn3 On 20 February 1962 Lieutenant-Colonel John Glenn became the second American to go into space – and the first to orbit the earth – when his Mercury spacecraft, ‘Friendship VII’, took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and orbited the earth three times. Glenn’s communication with Mission Control during the five-hour flight was broadcast around the world.
fn4 In 1959 the novelist C. P. Snow gave a lecture at Cambridge called ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, in which he held that English cultural life was split between science and the arts, and that more importance should be attached to the former. Three years later the distinguished literary critic F. R. Leavis took him to task in a Cambridge lecture of his own. In ‘The Significance of C. P. Snow’, which was reprinted in the Spectator of 8 March 1962, he made a savage attack both on Snow’s materialistic vision of the future and on his standing as a novelist. ‘It is ridiculous to credit him with any capacity for serious thinking about the problems on which he offers to advise the world.’ Leavis further added: ‘Snow not only hasn’t in him the beginnings of a novelist; he is utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters.’
fn5 The week after Leavis’s article appeared, the Spectator carried seventeen letters, all defending Snow and expressing their anger at Leavis’s comments.
fn7 Elizabeth Mavor (1927–) wrote several novels and biographies, including Summer in the Greenhouse (1959), The Temple of Flora (1961), The Virgin Mistress: A Biography of the Duchess of Kingston (1964), The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (1971) and the Booker-nominated The Green Equinox (1973).
fn8 Born in England in 1915, Alan Watts (1915–1973) went to the United States in 1938, where he built up a reputation as the foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophy to the West. Published in 1957, his two-part The Way of Zen became the classic introduction to Zen Buddhism. The first part explained its history and background, and the second its principles, which – in short – involve the importance of living in the moment, accepting the transience of nature and understanding the interconnectedness of all things.
fn9 The issue was topical because at the beginning of the previous month Britain had carried out its first underground nuclear test in Nevada.
fn10 A Zen word (of Hindu origin) for the state of experiencing an illusion.
fn12 JF and Elizabeth were there from 24 to 29 April.
fn13 James Kinross was a literary agent at Anthony Sheil Ltd. He had been recommended by JF’s typist, Mrs Shirley.
fn14 Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), an extremely popular Victorian writer, whose prolific output included historical novels, science fiction and tales of the occult.
fn15 Richard Whitton. The name was a combination of the maiden names of JF’s mother and his wife, respectively ‘Richards’ and ‘Whitton’.
fn16 A hugely successful BBC radio comedy show broadcast during the 1940s, ITMA was short for It’s That Man Again.
fn18 The Victoria Arms, a popular riverside pub on the Cherwell.
fn19 i.e. Elizabeth Mavor, who was married to Haro Hodson.
fn20 Jonathan Cape had just published Lowry’s collection of short stories, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, reviewed by Philip Toynbee (1916–81) in the Observer.
fn21 The film director Karel Reisz (1926–2002) had just achieved a notable success with his version of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
fn22 This concerned a man who had kidnapped a girl and imprisoned her for several weeks in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of his garden.
fn23 In Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), Duke Bluebeard warns his new bride Judith not to open any of the seven doors in his castle, but impelled by curiosity one by one she opens them to discover first his torture chamber, then other dark details of his past, until eventually she opens the last door to discover the ghosts of Bluebeard’s previous wives.
fn24 JF is thinking of Henry James’s first novel Roderick Hudson, about an American artist who travels to Rome with his rich patron. There he falls in love with the extremely beautiful Christine Light, who at the bidding of her family marries the Prince Casamassima.
fn25 A medieval hill town about fifty kilometres inland from Rome. The remains of Horace’s villa are just outside the town.
fn26 i.e. Gilbert Highet (1906–1978), whose book Poets in a Landscape (1957) related his pilgrimage to places associated with seven Roman poets.
fn27 ‘O, countryside, when will I see you?’ Horace, Satires, 2.6.85.
fn28 In Ode 3.13, Horace celebrates a ‘Bandusian spring’, which may have been on his Sabine farm, and makes mention of its saxis cavis, hollow rocks.
fn29 A west wind that rises from the Tyrrhenian sea in the afternoon and cools the city.
fn30 The huge temple-like structure on the lower slopes of the Capitoline Hill, known as the Altare della Patria, was opened in 1911 to celebrate the unification of Italy, but is commonly regarded as one of the ugliest monuments in the city.
fn31 This vast complex of about thirty buildings situated on a hillside just outside Tivoli, twenty-eight kilometres to the east of Rome, was the Emperor Hadrian’s preferred imperial residence.
fn33 A reference to another feature of Hadrian’s villa – the Temple of Serapis situated at the end of the Canopus lake and colonnade.
fn34 A vast semi-ruined complex of baths built by the Emperor Caracalla (AD 188–217), which could accommodate 1,500 bathers.
fn35 The ‘holy cave’ where St Benedict lived as a hermit before establishing several monasteries in and around Subiaco. He then went to Monte Cassino near Naples where he wrote the famous Rule for monasteries.
fn36 The name of the footman was David John Payne and the book was published that year in America by Gold Medal Books.
fn37 The chief protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel La Nausée, Antoine Roquentin, regards objects and people about him as just a façade that masks the purposelessness of existence.
fn38 Beginning with From Russia With Love (1957), Richard Chopping provided the hardback dust-jacket artwork for all but four of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.
fn39 The US blockade of Cuba that followed the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island began on 24 October. The world feared a possible nuclear conflict as Soviet cargo ships continued to head towards the quarantine zone, which the Soviet government had declared illegal.
fn40 This manuscript was the revised and renamed version of A Journey to Athens. See here and note here.
fn41During the Cuban missile crisis, the philosopher and anti-war campaigner Bertrand Russell had sent a telegram to the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev appealing to him not to be provoked by the United States’ ‘unjustifiable’ naval blockade. Khruschev then made the Soviet Union’s climbdown public in the form of a reply to Russell’s message.
fn42 i.e. Christopher Woodhouse, the then conservative MP for Oxford and a Joint Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office.
fn43 The Isle of Saints (Arthur Baker, 1962).
fn44 John Kohn and Jud Kinberg were two American screenwriter/producers who ran a production company in London called Blazer Films.
fn45 JF’s father – doubtless thinking of The Tempest, in which Miranda and Ferdinand are brought together on Prospero’s island – means Frederick Clegg, the ‘Collector’ who kidnaps the art student Miranda Grey.
fn46 The ‘artist fellow’ is Miranda’s mentor, George Paston. Following his advice to live an authentic, committed life, Miranda breaks with an aunt over her failure to appreciate art, a gesture that recalls the sort of impatience that in real life JF felt for his mother.
fn47 For the first twenty years or so after childhood, Montaigne had no fixed income and was dependent on the help of his friends. What spending he did was all the more enjoyable for being fortuitous, and he found his friends were generous because he was always scrupulous about paying them back. The second stage was to have money. He laid by reserves and tried to insure against every emergency, but there never seemed to be enough money for all the emergencies he could imagine, and he found the more he accumulated, the more he worried. The third stage was to make his expenses match his receipts. He contented himself with having enough to meet his present needs, realizing that he would never have enough to ward off all the ills that fortune can bring.
fn48 Set during the Second World War, the film was adapted from John Rae’s novel The Custard Boys, about a gang of jingoistic teenage boys who play a series of brutal war games and long to be able to fight in the war before it ends. One of the members forms a friendship with a Jewish refugee boy who has been ostracized by the gang.
fn49 Together with her companion Harrison, Aunt Dorothy ran a nursing-home in Westcliff-on-Sea.
fn50 Directed by Lindsay Anderson from David Storey’s novel, This Sporting Life starred Richard Harris as Arthur Machin, a professional rugby player who falls in love with his widowed landlady.
fn51 Vivre sa vie chronicles the day in a life of a prostitute. JF misattributes the film to François Truffaut. It was in fact directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
fn52 The Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, most well known as the translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
fn53 With Lawrence of Arabia (1924) by Lowell Thomas (1892–1981), the American journalist who met T. E. Lawrence in Jerusalem in 1917. In his dispatches from the Middle East and lecture tours after the war he was responsible for building the legend around Lawrence’s exploits and was the first to dub him ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.
fn54 ‘Barbellion’ was the pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889–1919), who wrote two volumes of journals which chronicled his struggle with an illness diagnosed as ‘disseminated sclerosis’.
fn55 JF is thinking of D. H. Lawrence and Richard Jefferies (1848–87). Jefferies wrote several books on the countryside and, most famously, the children’s novel Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which drew on his memories of growing up in rural Wiltshire. Bevis lives on a farm, and plays games of make-believe with his friend Mark, turning the surrounding meadows into jungles and deserts.
fn56 Boris Christoff (1914–1993), a then popular Bulgarian opera star.
fn57 The Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) held that a necessary state of anxiety preceded the choice to make the leap of faith into Christianity.
fn59 In a review of faint praise Simon Raven wrote: ‘This book has two merits. There is, first, an intriguing study in warped sexuality … Secondly, there is some cunningly worked suspense… An entirely plausible ending further recommends this tale.’
fn60 The name which JF gave to the character Conchis’s villa. It was modelled on the Villa Jasmelia which JF used to visit when he was teaching on Spetsai. See note here.
fn61 Sudbury is a small market town situated on the River Stour in Suffolk. Getting there by train from London required JF and Elizabeth to change at Marks Tey. Glemsford is a small Suffolk village to the north-west of Sudbury situated on a hill overlooking the River Stour.
fn62 Two more villages in the South Suffolk countryside close to Sudbury.
fn63 The Gainsborough Museum was opened in 1961 in the house in Sudbury where Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) was born.
fn64 Born in Argentina of American parents, William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) lived in England from 1874, where he published novels and several books on nature. Green Mansions (1904) tells the story of Abel, who, fleeing persecution in Venezuela, travels into the jungle, where he falls in love with Rima, a girl of the woods. The novel ends with Rima being captured by Indians and burned on a pyre.
fn65 i.e. Mary Welsh (1908–86), Ernest Hemingway’s fourth and last wife, whom he married in 1946.
fn66 John Whiting (1917–63) based the play on Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun, which dealt with a historically documented case of demonic possession in seventeenth-century France. The play opened at the Aldwych Theatre in 1961.
fn67 In The Lord of the Flies (1954) Ralph is hunted down after the failure of his attempts to organize his fellow-schoolboys into a civilized society on the island where they have been stranded, but is finally saved by the arrival of a navy ship.
fn68 In Pincher Martin (1956) the narrator is a British naval officer who has been shipwrecked on a rock in the mid-Atlantic. As he struggles to stay alive, he recalls details from his past life.
fn69 The Profumo scandal had dominated the headlines since March, when the defence minister denied in Parliament that he had had any improper relations with Christine Keeler. In June Profumo admitted that he had misled Parliament and resigned. In August Stephen Ward, the society doctor who had introduced Profumo to Christine Keeler at Lord Astor’s Cliveden estate, committed suicide after he had been put on trial for living on immoral earnings.
fn70 i.e. Aline Saarinen (1914–1972), a celebrated commentator on art and architecture who was the widow of the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen (1910–1961).
fn71 In Edward Albee’s play, which had opened on Broadway some weeks earlier on 13 October 1963, husband and wife George and Martha drink into the early hours and, in the presence of their late-night guests fellow-academics Nick and Honey, become brutally frank about each other’s failings.
fn72 Heir to the huge Vanderbilt fortune, in 1934, aged ten years old, she was famously called ‘the poor little rich girl’ in a custody suit between her mother and aunt.
fn73 New York’s airport, which had been built on the site of the Idlewild golf course, would shortly afterwards be renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport.