Sunday, 14 June
Jonathan Cape have returned the Chronicle.
Friday, 23 July
The Gods have given a sign. In returning The Suburban Chronicle, Lovat Dickson himself writes to me.80 ‘The manuscript shows ability and cleverness. It reads rather like a first effort at writing by a talented person who does not know what she wants to write about. I think if you were to alter this or attempt something else you might do well with it. I want you to know that we shall always welcome and give careful attention to anything that you may send in to us to see.’
Sunday, 22 August
Today I must get the News of the World. On Monday 9th I went to the tennis court but no one was there, and someone had left a News of the World in which a buyer’s glove-judging contest tempted me. I spent the evening entering for it – a foolish bait of £500. Results published today.
Friday, 27 August
There was peace in Hampstead this afternoon as I walked up Willow Road, Flask Walk and Heath Street. People passing quietly about their business, children playing, old women walking their dogs, cats in the gutters. A cool afternoon, the sky a far, faint tremulous blue, fishes along the edges of the ponds, and I have never seen reflections in the water so clear and still. We shall remember such days with longing.
Thursday, 16 September
[From affixed blue letter paper headed ‘British India Line’.]
I have … boarded this tub for Malta. The travel agency phoned me on the Tuesday to tell me of this vacancy. I nearly died in the rush to get on board in time, and am now dying again with boredom.
Crowd on board mixed. Am singularly fortunate to be in the same cabin with Mrs Molly Joy, a nurse at the military hospital. Pretty, rather plump, full of energy, very outspoken and sure of herself within her orbit (anyone outside it is accordingly an imbecile). I like her. Gorgeously selfish. I doubt she would have noticed me if I hadn’t been in her cabin.
There are several young females on board, but most of them going East of Suez and chaperoned. One slender young thing called Kitty – whom everyone seems to despise – an artist of sorts, and I’m not sure I shouldn’t get on with her well. She skips and hops a lot – they say she’s affected. The half-caste who sits opposite M.J. at meals interests me. He has a very cultured voice, a Scotch name, good manners, but the colour in him is unmistakable – African probably, and it makes him, I think, a little self-conscious. (Later: I’ve nicknamed him Sharkie.)
What I detest about life onboard ship is its close, gossipy, uncharitable atmosphere.
Monday, 20 September
Malta. Never, never can I regret this evening. Landing at 10.30 p.m., a riotous party onboard, Nockie to meet me, drinks, drinks, drinks, and now here I am at 26, Strada Tigue. This is going to be no ordinary foreign excursion. I can hardly believe I’m here, the depressions of the past week washed away in gin, white wine, Benedictine, shandy and beer. Dear Sharkie, I’m glad I’m not staying on that boat or I might have fallen heavily, coloured though he was.
I have been given a room with a marvellous view: wide, wide windows, air wafting over the rooftops from the sea. We are going to have a good time here, Nockie and I, and I shall write my novel for Lovat Dickson.
Saturday, 25 September
Within a week the sirocco has reduced me to tears, for no particular reason except possibly the foretaste I have had of the difficulties that lie ahead. I know that Nockie is not going to be easy to live with. No person of her intense individuality could be. For the English here she has a supreme contempt, she dismisses them as a chattering, artificial horde of hysterical women and half-witted men.
My impressions of Malta: sticky, sticky heat, dust, ugly sandstone houses, bright sunlight, tiring on the eyes, the colour everywhere is dead – the colour of bleached bones, ill-treated cats, herds of degraded goats driven about the streets, screaming children, bawling hawkers, few trees, tawdry shops, priests, church bells, a gale-whipped Mediterranean from my window, wind, always wind. But through Nockie the place becomes a treasure island; treasure hidden, waiting for us to discover it.81
Thursday, 3 March 1938
I am on Spinola Palace roof, watching the Fleet go out for their spring exercises. An aircraft carrier seems to be leaving, decorated with bunting. Far out at sea were four destroyers and four cruisers. They have turned, and stand as if at attention.
The sky is grey with light, low clouds. Sounds of rifle practice from nearby barracks, traffic along the road, dogs barking, the flip-flop of Carrozzi horses, the wind has carried away my blotting paper, below me wanders a fat boy playing with carnival ball, imitation leopard-skin hat on his head. Four aircraft carriers have passed in a long line northwards.
Thursday, 24 March
Nockie is in a deep depression over the possibility of war. If Mussolini bombs Malta we shall be lucky if we have 24 hours’ notice. The Spanish may seize Gibraltar and close the Straits. What should I do, I was asked, if I was suddenly awakened by guns?
Yet for all this talk of bombs and dictators and death I believe that I shall survive, and that my journals – if nothing else – shall survive with me. Some of the old faiths must remain. I shall pack my papers and send them home.
Friday, 25 March
We are seeing the death of democracy, says Nockie. Sooner or later we shall have to fight for our Empire, though not perhaps for a few months. There will come a form of Fascism to England. We may win if we fight.
Monday, 28 March
Nockie describes me sometimes as an engaging rabbit who will not leave its burrow, and that I must go out and suffer experiences as she has done: ‘I have had more experiences crowded into my 34 years than most people have in a lifetime. A war would not help me, but it might do you a lot of good.’
It’s time I went home. God, please let me survive the next three months.
Wednesday, 5 July
The luggage has gone. Just like that. A completely wasted year as far as my work is concerned. Have learnt something more of life, met many people, but in essence am no happier, no clearer, no surer of myself or path. But if it is possible, this ambling is going to stop as soon as I get to Graham Howe.82
Friday, 15 July
Hampstead. And now I am back again where I left off. Malta is an awkward dream that seems to have left little impression. Joan and Elsie Few gave me an uproarious welcome. The flat looks spotlessly clean, Joan has arranged flowers charmingly in my room.
It rained heavily as we approached Victoria. England was very grey and very green. I do not think that there are anywhere more beautiful trees than those in England. It is lovely, lovely to be home.
Friday, 22 July
I want a love affair. Something really exciting, stimulating. I know I am not unattractive, but I also know that love affairs don’t drop into one’s lap. I’m stuck, in danger of losing whatever little charm and ability for living I once possessed. Marriage with some worthy, reliable male seems the only hope. Today I counted up 8 or 9 possible paths to follow: architectural journalism, short story writing, the novel, ballroom dancing again, a job on the Dancing Times (through the Silvesters), furnishing and subletting flats as a commercial proposition, working for an architect’s diploma, marriage (to someone like Alan Devereux) or cutting adrift completely. I want, as Monica Haddow puts it, ‘to be rescued from virginity’. Feel myself growing flabbier and flabbier.
Urging myself to write to Graham Howe.
Monday, 25 July
I have been obsessed with the appalling idea of marrying Alan Devereux. In many ways so suitable – provincial upbringing, passionately fond of music, a very bad architect, loves argument, good physique, plays tennis well, owner driver of reasonable DKW,83 tends to be conventionally unconventional, I like his sister – but oh one wants something more than this. I must be sure of physical reliability and possibility of satisfaction. I compare every man I think of in this way with Colin Wintle. I had no doubts about my desire to sleep with him at all; I still think that
if we met again now I shouldn’t hesitate to have an affair with him. I wish we could meet and lay this bug.
I have had a cable from Barbados. Pooh and family expect to be in England by August 31st.
Friday, 29 July
I am still obsessed with the A.D. idea. I think it will be a long and difficult task, for he is obviously rather woman-shy. The idea is being most villainously encouraged by my friends. The Devereuxs go to Bavaria on Thursday. I made up my mind to join them so that I might have a chance of considering and settling this foolishness.
Wednesday, 3 August
The idea is with me day and night. All because I come home starved of affection, attention, caresses, a little scared by the approaching 30s, a little more tolerant of the idea of marriage, less willing to live alone.
A dream I had the other night is worth recording. I was stranded in Italy, brought into Mussolini’s presence, lavishly entertained and courted by him, was flattered by his attentions, had no doubt as to his intentions, but decided it would be amusing to lose my virginity to a dictator. But when he discovered I was a virgin he slapped me into prison. I tried to console myself with the thought that he is said to have syphilis.
Tomorrow we leave for Bavaria.
Friday, 19 August
I blush at my last entry. Nothing to record but another failure. We were bored with and irritated by one another. The object of my meditations was a muddler, fussy, with a tendency to meanness and narrow-mindedness. He bit his nails and gobbled his food and has a humiliating lust for cream cakes.
The Devereuxs, so Elsie tells me, are descended from Robert, Earl of Essex, their mother’s family from an illegitimate son of James II. I’m supposed to have an Elizabethan ancestor too, but it doesn’t seem to help very much.
Today I shall write to make that appointment with Graham Howe.
Friday, 26 August
I am
going to see
Graham Howe
(oh God!)
14.
Into the Woods
Saturday, 27 August 1938 (aged twenty-eight)
I have chosen to visit Graham Howe on Monday morning rather than be at Plymouth to meet Pooh and his family. I am afraid Pooh may be hurt, but I want to see Dr Howe before – I want to feel not quite so hollow. Pooh may suggest my asking along a Boy Friend to make a foursome for something or other, and I Shan’t be Able to Find One.
Monday, 29 August
2 p.m. I went through dull torture from 7 o’clock this morning until I began to answer Dr Howe’s questions. I am interested at how still I sat, how quietly I spoke, and I answered everything he asked me as honestly and fully as I could. He suggested that the death of my mother had left a serious blank in my life which I have ever since been trying to fill. I have looked for this maternal understanding in the men I have known and imagined, and have made a refuge of my writing when it should have been an attack. ‘If, by talking things over with you, I can give you a new orientation in life …’ Orientation – I have never properly examined this word.
Dr Howe said that he did not believe in long analysis if he could get to the root of the problem by more direct methods. Most psychologists apparently go in for the long analysis. I am to go to him twice a week throughout September. 24 guineas. Thank God I have the 24 guineas.
Friday, 2 September
Pooh and family very well, very happy, niece adorable. But myself alien, taut, awkward. This evening Graham Howe taxed me with stiff mental exercises. Made me draw diagrams on paper to his dictation. I must have that protective Mother-Dictator. I have been seeking for someone exactly the same as myself so that I may identify myself with them: a oneness with the person I love. But in the centre of the self is the mother, the cup, the receiver, and on the outer circumference the father, the agent, the active member. The mother-dictator I seek is the centre of myself, the inspiration, the creative force which my marriage with the outer circumference of technique and opportunity will produce the work of art.
That I have lived so long with the idea of writing is my guarantee that the spark, the possibility, is there. I have been looking at myself from the outside, rudely, striving after ideas with a clenched fist instead of an open hand. I must make myself permeable. I must cut out these negatives, do more adding and less subtracting.
I walked down Marylebone Road trying not to cry. Astonished that anyone could have diagnosed my troubles so clearly. ‘Your only difficulty seems to be the difficulty of letting yourself go, until you reach the bottom, as far down the chambers of the self as it is possible to fall – to fall asleep, to fall in love. And when you have learnt to relax, you will be able to write, to live, to love …’
It seemed so simple as he said it, and as clear and sweet as bell notes. But I grew immediately suspicious and distrustful. If he goes on being as sympathetic and stimulating as this I shall start falling in love with him, which is absurd and must not happen. I wonder how many of his lady clients do, and how he copes with such a situation.84
Tuesday, 6 September
The astonishing, astonishing things Dr Howe twists out of one’s dreams! Last night I was in a train passing through wide, wide fields, almost prairie land, set out with small piled-up hammocks of cut grass. In one field some black-clad men, one of them distinctly in the conventional costume of Hamlet, short black coat, tights, a sword, with a bomb in his hand which he placed carefully, furtively in the centre of the field, and began with the aid of the others to cover it with cut brush wood. Then I was in an attic, in a bathroom having a shower, by the seashore deciding to bathe, but had to go into some shelter to remove underclothes which I had on under my bathing costume, and then with the Silvesters in a ballroom I didn’t recognise.
And he said, was I bomb or seed, was I Hamlet, full of doubt and indecision? Bomb and seed both contained immense energy, but one burst in timelessness and was destructive, and the other grew in time and was constructive. To experience life, he said, one must plunge into the sea of the emotions; one doesn’t experience life through thought and criticism. I’ve been a sardine in a tin taking my tin with me.
But I am still full of doubt and indecision. Will he really be able to get me out of this mess, and help me to make peace with myself?
Tuesday, 13 September
Something somewhere up or down in the darkness sits and watches me betraying myself to Dr Howe, watches Dr Howe betraying himself, and is vastly entertained. I told him about Gus, and he knew at once what I was trying to say. ‘In homosexuals a woman will find a baby to handle, a man to dominate her, but never a man to love. He does it with such glamour: the salads he makes for you (God, how did he know?) are supreme, and his opinions are supreme but fixed. There must be no opposition, no hostility. And if they are strong enough they will succeed, and you can point to their success, but over a trail of corpses.’
And then the torture began. I said all the things he expected me to say in answer to his questions. There is nothing he has told me about myself that I do not know, there is nothing he can tell me that I could not find for myself in his books, and yet I cannot disentangle my problems alone. I am still looking for a nice comfortable prop, for someone to pat me on the head and say, ‘Poor little thing, how you do suffer. But you will win through, you will have everything you want in time.’
Thursday, 15 September
My article on the old fortifications in Malta has been accepted by the Architectural Review. ‘The best thing that could have happened to you,’ said Dr Howe. ‘A new day has dawned for you.’
That letter from [editor] Richards this morning was in the nature of a miracle. I still can’t believe it’s true, that this thing is happening to me. Some dam in me is breaking down. I have started to live.
Monday, 19 September
Living begins to be simply heavenly, but I can’t believe it will last. I think Dr Howe is a magician and one day the spell will break. It is beyond explanation – a feeling of deep, spreading warmth inside me, like being in love.
Tuesday, 20 September
Now from that deep bed of warmth I slip into a well of darkness, down and down and down, just as he said I must. He is far, far away on the edge, watching me with indifference, then not watching me at all. ‘Treasure your secret places,’ he said. ‘Learn to love that darkness, that emptiness. Out of the darkness comes the creator. There must be light and darkness.’ And so I am letting myself go. Perhaps I shouldn’t even try to write about it.
I am only one of many patients. I have so much to learn, so long and lonely a road to go. Grabbing at the next man I’m attracted to will be no solution. ‘But learn,’ Dr Howe said, ‘to make the best of what you have. If you can’t have that, you have this. Learn to love this.’
Friday, 23 September
Graham Howe says that there will be no war.
Tuesday, 27 September
War, war and yet more rumours. Why must everything threaten to crash just as I am beginning?
Wednesday, 28 September
Gus says it is agony playing in Idiot’s Delight this week.85 Houses are packed and absolutely silent. The world at the mercy of a madman.
Midnight. And now the Four Powers are to meet tomorrow in Munich. Perhaps, says Grig,86 Hitler in the end will be the means of creating a real world peace and a real League of Nations.
Thursday, 29 September
Hampstead. I return to a London plunged into a kind of fatalistic, smiling gloom. We’ve been told that everyone who can get out of London should. This panic leaves me cold with fury – why run away? Tomorrow I have to be fitted for a gas mask. The Edgware-Highgate tube is closed for Air Raid Protection measures. And yet underneath I cannot believe there will be a war. Joan just rang the doorbell. They have been listening to news and I am going to join them in Flat 1.
Friday, 30 September
We stayed up until 2 a.m. waiting for news. Panic spreads quickly. I mustn’t lose my nerve, I won’t succumb to this wave of terror.
A Notable Woman Page 16