Monday, 29 November
Conversing with Lydia on the phone just now she told me some news that she herself only learned a few days ago. Some twelve months since A. Mc (Mac) was killed in a car crash. He had been suffering from blackouts, was driving himself and was thought to have passed out before the car crashed. Twelve months ago. I shed a few tears because for a long time now I have had only warm feelings for him, when I did think of him. I have never felt lastingly bitter, never. I could perhaps have loved him – I did as much as it was possible; now I don’t know. If I ever deceived myself that I had not sometimes a shadow of a hope that he might walk again one day into my life, I can do so no longer. I shall not turn into a Josephine – I couldn’t, I am much too of the earth, earthy. But when was it I went with Lydia and the others to that circle at the MSA? When someone with a smiling face and blue eyes and very fond of me was said to have been at my father’s side? I had thought then that it might have been my S. African, Chris, of long long ago. Curious. It would be interesting to have another sitting and see if this man comes through again. I don’t really want to try. I feel it might be so easy to get some sort of exciting message and then, there one would be – in the swamp. How simple, how satisfying it might be! To shut oneself off from the rest of this life and devote oneself to this ‘ghost’.
The news makes little difference to my life, to what I am now doing and planning to do. Not one iota. It just puts the finale on any daydreams I may have been in danger of dreaming. Anyway there’s not time for such indulgences. Phone went again just now, pulling me back to today again. Peggy D. re Liberal matter and a meeting tomorrow.
Sunday, 12 December
And not only day-to-day matters pull me to earth, but hard economic facts. I am becoming alarmingly impoverished and I must soon do something about it. Since Sept/Oct I have spent over £100. My overdraft is well over £250 and increasing steadily, my income (unearned) under £200 and no earnings coming in. Still have £3,000 war loan (1914–18 war) and half a house so that it may seem foolish to panic like this. But I want to reserve enough to buy a place of my own – say, at least £2,000. And meanwhile I must live, and costs are rising terrifyingly.
A job? Yes, but I want my job to be writing. All my training and experience and growing confidence point to it – and nowhere else. Not journalistic work in an office which calls for experience on a periodical of some sort, which I haven’t had. But writing books, articles and doing work perhaps for the BBC. If K.M. still refuses to sell Wee (though I must somehow manage to stay here till Babs has finished her schooling) then it looks as though I must really abandon this ‘cottage of my own’ dream for a while. This is hard medicine to swallow but possibly what I deserve.
Perhaps I could go back to Homefield, even buy Pooh out, keep one room there for myself, and let the rest of the house furnished. I am in easy reach of London from there and could use it as an office and living quarters pro-tem very conveniently. A ‘cottage in the country’ must be kept for my old age, although I feel terrified now that if I ever let go of my hold here I’ll never have another chance, that I’ll just go on getting deeper into the financial slough and never get out again. I know I’m nearly 40 but I don’t feel in the least middle aged or ‘set’.
Thursday, 6 January 1949
An evening to myself. Wonderful. Babs and her friend A. are at a party. Ever since her arrival in the summer my niece has baffled me a little. She is a quiet little thing with adults, stolid, stoical and in between her pleasures sulky, bored, contemptuous – an overwhelming indifference, a shattering contempt for all one’s efforts to get near her, to please her. While N. was here over Xmas she brightened considerably. N. has a marvellous capacity for drawing out children, but even with her I noticed the sulky mood.
Babs has much charm and sweetness in her nature which N. recognised and liked and it is this side of her I wish very much to see develop. But gradually I think I am discovering the other side of the coin – what lies at the root of her quietness and sulky moods. It is not the sensitivity, the timidity and uncertainties from which I suffered, although she possesses the normal little girl shyness. It is, I think, because she has managed to get her own way all the time with her parents and friends abroad. Used to much entertainment, to admiration and success, she wants it all the time. In her silences I perceive something cautious, canny, calculating. She is summing the other person up: saying to herself, how much can I get out of this sucker? This has become apparent since A. has been here. A. I do like immensely – a tall, gawky schoolgirl, with good manners and obviously not as spoilt as Babs. Babs is the dominant one in this relationship, and it is A. who does what Babs wants.
Babs is in danger of growing into a thoroughly selfish woman – she has quite a strong character already, and I am sure rejects everything an adult may try to say to her if she doesn’t want to listen. I can see why her parents decided she must go to a strict school in England. Ivy wrote me something like this a little while ago, that in Portugal Babs has been thought the ‘cats whiskers’ at everything she did, meeting with too easy success and having no discipline at school. She hated Oakdene at first but seems to have settled down and be making friends there now. I think she always will make friends easily with girls and boys, but I am not sure whether I can like her for it. But Babs is my brother Pooh’s daughter and for him I will love her and help her as much as I can.
Tom phoned on Xmas day. The Pilot Press is definitely interested in the MS and it has been handed from one VIP to another.
Saturday, 8 January
Darkness and country quiet outside. The still, brooding branches, like claws, like lace, and the light and warmth and quietness within the room, ticking clock and occasional bubble from the boiler in the kitchen – these are the only sounds that reach me.
The wonderful relief at being on my own again! I must be at heart myself a very selfish woman, getting what I want, the sort of life that pleases me in my own way, just as ruthlessly, inexorably as Babs tends to do. And it may be that this cold, selfish side of me brings out the selfish side in her, so that I have only myself to blame if I sometimes find her difficult – she is a dear little thing, really, and real love will bring out the lovableness in her. Perhaps I have been over-anxious, wanting to please, wanting to establish myself as the trusted, admired and loved guardian aunt too quickly.
11 p.m.: I washed up, prepared mutton stew and put it on to cook, washed my smalls. Picked up the Mass Observation Xmas Bulletin devoted to Panel observers’ descriptions of the traditional Xmas.170 There was something vaguely familiar about the first quotation, and I discovered it was mine!, extracted from something I wrote for them last year and got lost in, carried back to Xmases of my childhood.
This is the first time I have found MO using anything of mine. I am designated ‘Woman Architect, aged 36’. I have always felt a bit glum that from all the diary entries and Directives I have sent them they have never seemed to pick out anything for their reports. Now my vanity is appeased and my interest renewed. I shall start the diary again, which I think I have not touched since the spring. I also look on this as an excellent omen.
Friday, 14 January
When I woke yesterday morning I remembered having dreamt in the night of myself trying to learn the part of Lady Macbeth at very short notice.
Yesterday afternoon I went to hear Phyllis at the National Book League – she was advertised in their programme of talks for this week as giving one on the ‘Literary Detective’.171 I had not let her know I was going and thought that it would be on the detective in literature, but it was nothing of the sort. It was on detecting and collecting good books, and mainly for school children, of whom quite a few present. She read delightfully from some of her own favourites – Alice in Wonderland, Just So Stories, – an extract from Emerson on friendship, Rupert Brooke, two of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and finished with Lady Macbeth’s letter scene! Strange beyond belief.
Then I went up to the Information Bureau, as I
had written for a lot of books on eighteenth-century women before Xmas and had no reply. Nice young females received me and as soon as I said what I wanted, one exclaimed ‘But that is just what I am doing now! As soon as you came in I knew you were going to say eighteenth-century women!’ We discussed further – they are finding, as I have, that there aren’t many good books on this subject. ‘Are you thinking of writing one?’ said one of them. ‘There’s a need for it …’ Just as when two years ago I was making enquiries at Slough Public Library for books on Peg W., the assistant Librarian said, ‘Are you writing a book on her, how exciting!’
Wednesday, 19 January
She went back to school yesterday. Bless her heart, she does seem to like being here. Short, of course, of returning to her parents and Portugal where all the fun and sun are. She asked if she might come home every other weekend during the term. She says little about it herself but from other people and her parents it seems that she really has had ‘a wonderful time’ these holidays. Ivy writes, ‘I don’t think I can ever thank you enough for all you have done and are doing for the child. You have a share in her as an aunt, but there are aunts and aunts. Thank you again my dear.’ Success of any kind always bewilders me. I get cynical about it – but that from Ivy is genuine, means something. Ivy is a reserved person and not given to gush. Definitely not.
Not being able to get on with my own work makes me bored, impatient, restless, but I hold it all in, I wait, I listen to what she has to say as amiably as I can, chiding myself sometimes for not having more to give her. But 39 and 15 is a big gap – bigger than I’d realised. All I want is her trust, her confidence in me and for her to make her own life while she is with me, and for me to be able to cope with any difficulties that arise, in the right way and with courage.
Sunday, 30 January
I started recently acquired Penguin edition of Elizabeth Myers’s A Well Full of Leaves. Though thick fog yesterday morning and not feeling at all well, I went up to Joan’s using up last day of the week’s season tickets to Paddington, and was absorbed in this book all the long way to Golders Green. Forgot my ailments, entranced. At intervals while at Joan’s I dipped in again and then on the crawling, dismal journey home.
The cottage is shabby, disgustingly dirty, cold. The cats had been shut in the kitchen all the time since I left yesterday, without much food as I expected to be home last night. They had upset my wood and odd paper boxes all over the kitchen floor, torn up spare magazine papers, helped themselves to a cake of shredded wheat and scattered the remnants, dirtied in the coal scuttle. In fact, the kitchen was indescribable chaos. Tomorrow I will set my chill little house in order and relight the fire. Tonight I will write of Elizabeth Myers’ first novel.
I think this is a most remarkable, important book. Her characters are not real life portraits, the end most vulgarly dramatic, the whole effort a little over-indulgent and humourless. I have said all the worst things that occur to me about it, judged just as a novel. But it’s so much more than a novel about ordinary people. The characters are not ordinary people, they are symbols. Beauty, Learning, Art and Religion – children of cowardice and stupidity. Beauty marries wealthy ignorance; Learning endures patiently his dull little life till Beauty and Ignorance give him his opportunity. Art, through the painful evolution of his character distorted by stupidity’s cruelty, wins spectacular fame and worldly success. While Religion suffers and learns and sheds light on living, is wedded to Love and dies. It is all as simple, as medieval as that, but it holds the attention because of the way it is written, the lovely, luminous handling of words and the pointing to a way of life we have forgotten how to live.
This is what I was trying to say here on Nov. 21st. We do not drink enough of these simple idle things, these divine and matchless moments: ‘The sunny window reflected on the door-knob, the look of candlelight on the scullery wall, coal-dust, the handle of the bread knife, the python in the hot glass cage in the Zoo, aspects of moonlight and water, the taste of marmalade, the furthest lamp at the end of the pier …’ all these sort of things and a hundred, hundred more, in every hour waiting for our notice, to be absorbed and understood. Again and again I have had faint prickings, little gleams of suspicion of the truth of all this, but to discover this truth for oneself is more than I am capable of. I do not open my eyes and my heart wide enough.
Somewhere too – but I’m getting too tired and numb fingered to go on – she draws the distinction between selfishness and self concentration, and explains the difference between morbid introspection and trying to know oneself, deeply, fully. I believe in all this, as utterly as did Elizabeth Myers but not quite so fervently – or so dearly. It seems to me she was tearing it out of herself, anxious to get it all out, crystallised and in print before she died.172
Saturday, 12 February
About midnight. Outside is a full moon, a white still night. On the kitchen hob a kettle sings, washing hangs on clothes horse round the dying fire, Dinah sits on my manuscript files. I have finished at last re-typing ‘Peg’. It has been purgatory, standing between me and everything else I need to be doing. But it is done now and checked, and tomorrow I shall pack the top copy to send it to Michael Sadleir (Fanny by Gaslight and Blessington-D’Orsay) at Constable on Monday. I pray and pray that something may happen about this effort of mine soon. (Still no word from the PP, and nothing from Tom for three weeks.) I seem to have gone on so long, waiting, waiting, hearing echoes of hopeful tidings, hints of favourable news, but nothing definite … always those shifting shadows, the deep and anxious valley. I can’t bear much more of it. When I dig down into myself I strike a vein of deep, corroding cynicism. I don’t believe in myself, or the goodness or use of anything. But the silly thing is, if one can only see it this way, cynicism has a value in itself and will only do damage if dug up out of its proper place and put to wrong uses. I must remember that. It is there to anchor one’s optimism, to check one’s vanity and egotism, to help keep the personality balanced, and to clear the air of sentimentality. A useful antidote to cheap emotionalism.
And my impatience, my disgustingly childish whimpers and moans and storms – when I feel I could tear and crush and stamp and destroy, destroy, destroy. When I want to do it in the grand manner, not as a pygmy, but as a giant, causing earthquakes and whirlwinds and huge tempests! (Oh no one, I know, would believe this of me, but never mind!) There is at the core of these storms still that feeling of resentment and frustration, that deep sense of inferiority, of never being very good at anything – mediocre, mediocre, watered down copies of better things, an echo, a shadow, no substance, no strength. And the 40s ahead of me and still no sign of a husband! Just one of the 3 million surplus women, luckless, unwanted, unnoticed … Oh, I crawl, I crawl! It’s not fair O Lord, it is not fair, I do not deserve to be unwanted, unnoticed … and so on and on!
One does seem to reach a point where one can go on no longer self-sufficient, independent, alone in this way. Yet even as I write this I hesitate, not at all sure what I want. ‘Someone who understands?’ But haven’t I been crying for this since my mother died and hasn’t it always been better for me to work it out for myself? I think I do need the warm, personal exchange of the teacher – the living touch, which is what I have had only very briefly from Graham Howe in my life, and should have had much more in my earlier years. We all do, that heart-to-heart exchange, the living touch of wisdom. Not from books or lectures – that is only a substitute when you miss the real thing. Yes, it is this I am sure that I need, someone to draw me out and make me talk, make me angry, even confused, but make me talk, give me confidence to put into words all these dim thoughts that never receive expression, or at best are let loose to be lost in here.
Sunday, 13 February
Before I slept last night I opened Neville Cardus’s Autobiography (and very interesting it is too) and fell upon these words: ‘Humour is a necessary salt, and without a corrective of cynicism all seems foolishness and callow.’173 I do not walk alone.
In my work I know I can do a job conscientiously, I can make a home, make people comfortable, give them good food and all the right sort of atmosphere – which is no mean feat, though sometimes I doubt my power of love towards them. But I want to earn money by writing – and I want it to be good, alive writing, useful and contributory, creative in a real sense, not dramatically clever, highbrow, or syrupy dope for the ‘masses’.
When Cardus met Delius, Delius said to him, ‘Don’t read yourself daft. Trust to your emotions.’ And Cardus goes on, ‘… theory should … come after personal experience and much humble surrender.’ And this I think has been one of the big problems, one of the big stumbling blocks for me and my kind. Cardus lashes out at us, the new generation, after the 1914–1918 war, ‘unhappy and hot and bothered … dithering with self consciousness … Once on a time the young men from the universities looked to the Army, the Church, politics and the civil service and school mastering … (but by 1920) the discovery had been made of the possibility of careers for the educated classes in journalism and literature and music and theatre. Taste was better than ever no doubt (that was the trouble) … but it was all a product of education and middle-class breeding; there was no hint that these people, these dilettantes, ever felt deeply or were impelled riskily by imagination. We could anticipate their direction day to day, their preferences and prejudices; they would be as consistent as sterility.’
That is exactly the trouble with middle class education: theory is rammed into our heads and down our throats, stifling our hearts, from the time we start school and when we move on into the universities, it is a great banner that unfurls and wraps us round completely. With ‘unearned’ incomes to carpet our way for us we cannot help but become dilettantes to a greater or less degree – though I doubt whether many of the really successful writers today have had an ‘easy’ early life. But I don’t think Cardus means such people anyway. He is hitting out at a type I just escape being because of my lack of confidence but can be classed with because I fit in nowhere else. I imagine there are quite a number of them working for the BBC at present.
A Notable Woman Page 43