It’s her own fault. She shouldn’t insist on being called Caroline and treated like a girl in so many ways. I can’t respect her as an aunt. As a giver of advice.
Everything’s changing. I keep on thinking of him: of things he said and I said, and how we neither of us really understood what the other meant. No, he understood, I think. He counts possibilities so much faster than I can. I’m growing up so quickly down here. Like a mushroom. Or is it that I’ve lost my sense of balance? Perhaps it’s all a dream. I jab myself with the pencil. But perhaps that’s a dream, too.
If he came to the door now I should run into his arms. I should want him to hold my hand for weeks. I mean I believe I could love him in the other way, his way, now.
October 23rd
The curse is with me. I’m a bitch to C. No mercy. It’s the lack of privacy on top of everything else. I made him let me walk in the cellar this morning. I think I could hear a tractor working. And sparrows. So daylight, sparrows. An aeroplane. I was crying.
My emotions are all topsy-turvy, like frightened monkeys in a cage. I felt I was going mad last night, so I wrote and wrote and wrote myself into the other world. To escape in spirit, if not in fact. To prove it still exists.
I’ve been making sketches for a painting I shall do when I’m free. A view of a garden through a door. It sounds silly in words. But I see it as something very special, all black, umber, dark, dark grey, mysterious angular forms in shadow leading to the distant soft honey-whitish square of the light-filled door. A sort of horizontal shaft.
I sent him away after supper and I’ve been finishing Emma. I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people’s lives, she can’t see Mr. Knightley is a man in a million. She’s temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she’s basically intelligent, alive. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being. Her faults are my faults: her virtues I must make my virtues.
And all day I’ve been thinking—I shall write some more about G.P. tonight.
There was the time I took some of my work round for him to look at. I took the things I thought he would like (not just the clever-clever things, like the perspective of Ladymont). He didn’t say a thing as he looked through them. Even when he was looking at the ones (like the Carmen at Ivinghoe) that I think are my best (or did then). And at the end he said, they’re not much good. In my opinion. But a bit better than I expected. It was as if he had turned and hit me with his fist, I couldn’t hide it. He went on, it’s quite useless if I think of your feelings in any way at all. I can see you’re a draughtsman, you’ve a fairish sense of colour and what-not, sensitive. All that. But you wouldn’t be at the Slade if you hadn’t.
I wanted him to stop but he would go on. You’ve obviously seen quite a lot of good painting. Tried not to plagiarize too flagrantly. But this thing of your sister—Kokoschka, a mile off. He must have seen my cheeks were red because he said, is all this rather disillusioning? It’s meant to be.
It nearly killed me. I know he was right; it would have been ridiculous if he hadn’t said exactly what he thought. If he’d just kind-uncled me. But it hurt. It hurt like a series of slaps across the face. I’d made up my mind that he would like some of my work. What made it worse was his coldness. He seemed so absolutely serious and clinical. Not the faintest line of humour or tenderness, even of sarcasm, on his face. Suddenly much, much older than me.
He said, one has to learn that painting well—in the academic and technical sense—comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you’ve got that ability. So have thousands. But the thing I look for isn’t here. It just isn’t here.
Then he said, I know this hurts. As a matter of fact, I nearly asked you not to bring this round. But then I thought - . . there’s a sort of eagerness about you. You’d survive.
You knew they wouldn’t be any good, I said.
I expected just about this. Shall we forget you brought them? But I knew he was challenging me.
I said, tell me in detail what is wrong with this. And I gave him one of the street scenes.
He said, it’s quite graphic, well composed, I can’t tell you details. But it’s not living art. It’s not a limb of your body. I don’t expect you to understand this at your age. It can’t be taught you. You either have it one day, or you don’t. They’re teaching you to express personality at the Slade—personality in general. But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating. It’s all luck. Pure hazard.
He spoke in fits and starts. And there was a silence. I said, shall I tear them up? and he said, now you’re being hysterical.
I said, I’ve got so much to learn.
He got up and said, I think you’ve got something in you. I don’t know. Women very rarely have. I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and whatnot. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds. What you will.
I said, go on.
He said, it’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind. The technically accomplished buggers are two a penny in any period. Especially in this great age of universal education. He was sitting on his divan, talking at my back. I had to stare out of the window. I thought I was going to cry.
He said, critics spiel away about superb technical accomplishment. Absolutely meaningless, that sort of jargon. Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart. And all you’ve done here is build a lot of little windows on to a heart full of other fashionable artists’ paintings. He came and stood beside me and picked out one of the new abstracts I’d done at home. You’re saying something here about Nicholson or Pasmore. Not about yourself. You’re using a camera. Just as trompe-l’oeil is mischannelled photography, so is painting in someone else’s style. You’re photographing here. That’s all.
I’ll never learn, I said.
It’s to unlearn, he said. You’ve nearly finished the learning. The rest is luck. No, a little more than luck. Courage. Patience.
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.
It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away. Shone on everything. Now I write down what he said, it seems so obvious. But it’s something in the way he says things. He is the only person I know who always seems to mean what he says when he talks about art. If one day you found he didn’t, it would be like a blasphemy.
And there is the fact that he is a good painter, and I know he will be quite famous one day, and this influences me more than it should. Not only what he is, what he will be.
I remember later he said (Professor Higgins again). You don’t really stand a dog’s chance anyhow. You’re too pretty. The art of love’s your line: not the love of art.
I’m going to the Heath to drown myself, I said.
I shouldn’t marry. Have a tragic love affaire. Have your ovaries cut out. Something. And he gave me one of his really wicked looks out of the corners of his eyes. It wasn’t just that. It was frightened in a funny little-boy way, too. As if he’d said something he knew he shouldn’t have, to see how I would react. And suddenly he seemed much younger than me.
He so often seems young in a way I can’t explain. Perhaps it’s that he’s made me look at myself and see that what I believe is old and stuffy. People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come u
p fresh and green.
But G.P. has. I didn’t recognize it as fresh-green-shootiness for a long time. But now I do.
October 24th
Another bad day. I made sure it was bad for Caliban, too. Sometimes he irritates me so much that I could scream at him. It’s not so much the way he looks, though that’s bad enough. He’s always so respectable, his trousers always have creases, his shirts are always clean. I really think he’d be happier if he wore starched collars. So utterly not with it. And he stands. He’s the most tremendous stander-around I’ve ever met. Always with that I’m-sorry expression on his face, which I begin to realize is actually contentment. The sheer joy of having me under his power, of being able to spend all and every day staring at me. He doesn’t care what I say or how I feel—my feelings are meaningless to him—it’s the fact that he’s got me.
I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn’t mind at all. It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.
He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.
What irritates me most about him is his way of speaking. Cliche after cliche after cliche, and all so old-fashioned, as if he’s spent all his life with people over fifty. At lunch-time today he said, I called in with regard to those records they’ve placed on order. I said, Why don’t you just say, “I asked about those records you ordered?”
He said, I know my English isn’t correct, but I try to make it correct. I didn’t argue. That sums him up. He’s got to be correct, he’s got to do whatever was “right” and “nice” before either of us was born.
I know it’s pathetic, I know he’s a victim of a miserable Nonconformist suburban world and a miserable social class, the horrid timid copycatting genteel in-between class. I used to think D and M’s class the worst. All golf and gin and bridge and cars and the right accent and the right money and having been to the right school and hating the arts (the theatre being a pantomime at Christmas and Hay Fever by the Town Rep—Picasso and Bartok dirty words unless you wanted to get a laugh). Well, that is foul. But Caliban’s England is fouler.
It makes me sick, the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.
G.P. talks about the Paris rat. Not being able to face England any more. I can understand that so well. The feeling that England stifles and smothers and crushes like a steamroller over everything fresh and green and original. And that’s what causes tragic failures like Matthew Smith and Augustus John—they’ve done the Paris rat and they live ever after in the shadow of Gauguin and Matisse or whoever it may be—just as G.P. says he once lived under the shadow of Braque and suddenly woke up one morning to realize that all he had done for five years was a lie, because it was based on Braque’s eyes and sensibilities and not his own.
Photography.
It’s all because there’s so little hope in England that you have to turn to Paris, or somewhere abroad. But you have to force yourself to accept the truth—that Paris is always an escape downwards (G.P.’s words)—not saying anything against Paris, but you have to face up to England and the apathy of the environment (these are all G.P.’s words and ideas) and the great deadweight of the Calibanity of England.
And the real saints are people like Moore and Sutherland who fight to be English artists in England. Like Constable and Palmer and Blake.
Another thing I said to Caliban the other day—we were listening to jazz—I said, don’t you dig this? And he said, in the garden. I said he was so square he was hardly credible. Oh, that, he said.
Like rain, endless dreary rain. Colour-killing.
I’ve forgotten to write down the bad dream I had last night. I always seem to get them at dawn, it’s something to do with the stuffiness of this room after I’ve been locked in it for a night. (The relief—when he comes and the door is open, and the fan on. I’ve asked him to let me go straight out and breathe the cellar air, but he always makes me wait till I’ve had breakfast. As I think he might not let me have my half-hour in midmorning if he let me go out earlier, I don’t insist.)
The dream was this. I’d done a painting. I can’t really re-member what it was like but I was very pleased with it. It was at home. I went out and while I was out I knew something was wrong. I had to get home. When I rushed up to my room M was there sitting at the pembroke table (Minny was standing by the wall—looking frightened, I think G.P. was there, too, and other people, for some peculiar reason) and the picture was in shreds—great long strips of canvas. And M was stabbing at the table top with her secateurs and I could see she was white with rage. And I felt the same. The most wild rage and hatred.
I woke up then. I have never felt such rage for M—even that day when she was drunk and hit me in front of that hateful boy Peter Catesby. I can remember standing there with her slap on my cheek and feeling ashamed, outraged, shocked, everything … but sorry for her. I went and sat by her bed and held her hand and let her cry and forgave her and defended her with Daddy and Minny. But this dream seemed so real, so terribly natural.
I’ve accepted that she tried to stop me from becoming an artist. Parents always misunderstand their children (no, I won’t misunderstand mine), I knew I was supposed to be the son and surgeon poor D never was able to be. Carmen will be that now. I mean I have forgiven them their fighting against my ambition for their ambitions. I won, so I must forgive.
But that hatred in that dream. It was so real.
I don’t know how to exorcise it. I could tell it to G.P. But there’s only the slithery scratch of my pencil on this pad.
Nobody who has not lived in a dungeon could understand how absolute the silence down here is. No noise unless I make it. So I feel near death. Buried. No outside noises to help me be living at all. Often I put on a record. Not to hear music, but to hear something.
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I’ve become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I’m not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything’s quite normal. It’s like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.
October 25th
I must must must escape.
I spent hours and hours today thinking about it. Wild ideas. He’s so cunning, it’s incredible. Foolproof.
It must seem I never try to escape. But I can’t try every day, that’s the trouble. I have to space out the attempts. And each day here is like a week outside.
Violence is no good. It must be cunning.
Face-to-face, I can’t be violent. The idea makes me feel weak at the knees. I remember wandering with Donald somewhere in the East End after we’d been to the Whitechapel and we saw a group of teddies standing round two middle-aged Indians. We crossed the street, I felt sick. The teddies were shouting, chivvying and bullying them off the pavement on to the road. Donald said, what can one do, and we both pretended to shrug it off, to hurry away. But it was beastly, their violence and our fear of violence. If he came to me now and knelt and handed me the poker, I couldn’t hit him.
It’s no good. I’ve been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can’t. Writing here is a sort of drug. It’s the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote about G.P. the day before yesterday. And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn’t understand. I mean, it’s vanity. But it seems a sort of magic, to be able to call my past back. And I just can’t live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
I’ve been thinking today of the time I took Piers and Antoinette to meet him. The black side of him. No, I was stupid. They’d come up to Hampstead to have coffee and we were to go to the Everyman, but the queue was too long. So I let them bully me into taking them round.
It was vanity on my part. I’d talked too much about him. So that they began to hint that I couldn’t be so ver
y friendly if I was afraid to take them round to meet him. And I fell for it.
I could see he wasn’t pleased at the door, but he asked us up. And oh, it was terrible. Terrible. Piers was at his slickest and cheapest and Antoinette was almost parodying herself, she was so sex-kittenish. I tried to excuse everyone to everyone else. G.P. was in such a weird mood. I knew he could withdraw, but he went out of his way to be rude. He could have seen Piers was only trying to cover up his feeling of insecurity.
They tried to get him to discuss his own work, but he wouldn’t. He started to be outrageous. Four-letter words. All sorts of bitter cynical things about the Slade and various artists—things I know he doesn’t believe. He certainly managed to shock me and Piers, but of course Antoinette just went one better. Simpered and trembled her eyelashes, and said something fouler still. So he changed tack. Cut us short every time we tried to speak (me too).
And then I did something even more stupid than the having gone there in the first place. There was a pause, and he obviously thought we would go. But I idiotically thought I could see Antoinette and Piers looking rather amused and I was sure it was because they felt I didn’t know him as well as I’d said. So I had to try to prove to them that I could manage him.
I said, could we have a record, G.P.?
For a moment he looked as if would he say no, but then he said, why not? Let’s hear someone saying something. for a change. He didn’t give us any choice, he just went and put a record on.
He lay on the divan with his eyes closed, as usual, and Piers and Antoinette obviously thought it was a pose.
Such a thin strange quavering noise, and such a tense awkward atmosphere had built up; I mean it was the music on top of everything else. Piers started to smirk and Antoinette had a fit of—she can’t giggle, she’s too slinky, her equivalent—and I smiled. I admit it. Piers cleaned out his ear with his little finger and then leant on his elbow with his forehead on outstretched fingers—and shook his head every time the instrument (I didn’t know what it was then) vibrated. Antoinette half-choked. It was awful. I knew he would hear.