A Notable Woman

by Jean Lucey Pratt

  Saturday, 19 February

  I wish that something very pleasant would happen today – that Tom would come with friends to explain what has happened to the MS at the PP.

  My hair is looking ‘perfect’ today: I wish it were always so. I could meet any of my old lovers without feeling age-conscious.

  Sunday, 3 April

  I have a difficult letter to write so perhaps it would be wise to sort myself out here first.

  N. accuses me of not being strong-minded enough with Babs, of not keeping her ‘in her place’, and is making a bit of fuss about coming here this Easter weekend. It is all of course quite true. With her usual skilful accuracy N. hits the nail on the head. I am, I know, frightened, and this must be apparent to the child. I am not and never have been self-assertive enough – part of all my troubles, says N., and something she thinks that through being able to stay here at Wee, I have managed to escape grappling with and am now having to ‘pay’ for. How very formidable all this sounds. I cannot help wondering whether her criticism is not a little influenced by the raging envy she feels for my circumstances and opportunities. I see her now, grey faced, elbows on the table, biting her nails as she mentioned Wee and the ‘leisure’ I have here.

  But it was a fair enough judgement and one I cannot ignore. It has cracked the ground between us and I can, by the way I write now in the letter that must go to her soon, widen the breach if I will. And in fact, I realised this morning, part of me does will, very much. The relationship has always been a little more than I felt capable of bearing.

  After the weekend she was here in March, full of her new Theosophical adventures and ‘expansion’, I felt – as I told her – like a pack-mule trying to keep pace with a high spirited race horse (a very restless, rather vicious one too), and for nearly an hour after she had gone on Sunday I wept from sheer nervous exhaustion and no other reason. I just couldn’t ‘take it’. She had then said or done nothing to upset my vanity in any way, it was just the amount of her own life that she seemed to want me to carry that I felt to be too great. And not only is the thrust of her own life too strong for me, she overwhelms me with her desire to live mine for me. Her tyrannies still trouble me, her energies sap mine. But she realises nothing of this, I think.

  I had a new sort of technique for my dealings [with Babs] before this came up. I think I try to come down too much to Babs’s level. If I kept myself more occupied and withdrawn in my own affairs it would help to keep her in her place as the little girl she still is. And in this way I could be more firm with the ease and confidence that can only make firmness effective. I am too anxious to please, to understand and be sympathetic – and this only arouses contempt in the young. I must give her less of my own time than I did at Xmas. Oh, how I am dreading it all now, more than ever! How I wish I could talk it over with someone of wisdom.

  The Pilot Press, who have had the Peg MS for nearly six months, has gone bankrupt. Tom and his friend have been very concerned and kind and have passed the MS onto the agents, Brown.174 I have also heard from Michael Sadleir of Constables, who have sent the MS back, but with a really kind, encouraging criticism. This is the sort of battle I expected to have to fight.

  37.

  To Be Published

  Wednesday, 13 April 1949

  Have been re-organising my diary writings. Shall keep this book solely for those personal outpourings I cannot contain within myself – my inner griefs and tangles and disease. By which I do implore the reader not to judge me wholly but remember that I have an outer and busy life in which the inner may be detected by the discerning but which also brings me much happiness and content that I do not often trouble to capture in words.

  My letter to N. last week produced two telephone calls and a promise to write. She has taken it all gallantly. She feared I had been taking her comments too personally. I must not forget to note, also, that plans are afoot in earnest for me to go to Portugal for the summer holidays with Babs. Our names are down on waiting list for passages on a boat due to leave about July 30th, and I am already getting clothes together.

  Tuesday, 19 April

  Another deadly, paralytic mood enfolds me. I feel I ‘ought’ to be doing many things but cannot get started on any of them. Babs is out, I have had nearly the whole day to myself and have done nothing except read Marco Pallis’s Peaks and Lamas.175

  Wavell, on radio the other night, speaking on reading, said that books should never be a substitute for action, good conversation or independent thought.176 He for one, he said, had taken refuge when young in reading when visitors came, and suffered now in trying to converse well; he could not grasp the idea expressed in the spoken word quickly enough or arrange his own thoughts in time to reply. This has happened to many of us, but Wavell has at least become a man of action with a sound reputation in his profession. I have read, and still do, so much too much, allowing myself no time to digest any of it before gulping at something else. I don’t know what I want at this moment except release, or some sort of resolution, of the continuing state of anxiety. There is always something to ferment and perpetuate it – N., Babs, the book, my finances and economic future, the next book, my single state, my never ending faults and fears and failings – a perpetual grumbling and whining and shivering and moaning within!

  It has been a rare and wonderful Easter, today cooler but still blue and gold and heart-breaking. One of the most difficult lessons for the westerner steeped in the Christian tradition who is studying Buddhism, must be the one of real self-denial, of relinquishing the popular conception of heaven in which ‘I’ is rewarded and preserved in perpetuity. We have a very strongly developed (and in fact deliberately encouraged) ‘impulse to individual experience’. We do not like to lose sight of or hold on the thread that seems to be peculiarly ‘us’, or the idea that we shall continue with it, distinct and recognisable, after death.

  All these different religions and the varying diversions in each are very bewildering. Each seems to have a major snag on closer examination, or, shall we say, some difficult obstacle to be accepted. The need for a guiding religious principle in our lives today is paramount, and one that is within the reach of the average man and woman struggling sincerely with their personal difficulties. (That is, within the reach of their understanding and practice, to help them on to the higher path of their choice.) In the world now there seems to be such a need for some helpful religion, a re-flowering of the awareness of the spirit and its destiny. Even at this low level in our search for knowledge, I am sure it is true to distinguish, as Pallis points out, the difference between ‘rational knowledge’ and ‘real knowledge’. The first comes from university courses and manuals of philosophy, the other is ‘the fruit of a direct intuitive experience – not so much acquired by accretion … as … a thing already there from the moment that the obstacles to its realisation have ceased to be.’

  Monday, 24 April

  I must try and ‘answer’ Lundberg and Farnham’s Modern Woman (Harper, New York, 1947). An able exposition of a pressing modern problem, presenting us with a formidable challenge we should not ignore.177 According to these authors I am a complete and hopeless failure as a woman, my only possible – if at all – means of salvation or restoration to psychic health is through their sort of clinical treatment, here and now quite beyond my reach. Logically, therefore, this book could drive me to suicide, and although I may never hear of them I shall be surprised if it does not do so to others. It is quite merciless to all who will or cannot accept their diagnosis and suggested cures.

  But I am grateful to it for at least a few clarifications. Some useful information, historically. A good bibliography. A clearing up of any last doubt I may have had concerning masturbation. And further revelations of the reality of my relations with A.M. Or should I have said, release from some doubt and fear and feeling of guilt concerning my ability to experience an orgasm. This, they say, may be had – and should be – as much and more than in other ways, by vaginal stimulation. Which
I knew nothing about and was not expecting, but experienced intensely (I wrote ‘intensely’ then felt I was trying to be dramatic) indeed and delightfully with A.M. (to some extent too with Hugh). And there were moments, too, when we were both ‘suffused with tenderness.’ This is not an exaggeration, I am sure, grown in retrospect, but true, and is vivid still. I cannot then be quite such a failure … or the potentialities for success are there yet.

  The danger of this book – of perhaps anything like this, is that it enables one to sit back and pigeon-hole oneself and friends into damaging and arid compartments. One thing which makes it gravely suspect to me is that there is no mention whatever, anywhere, of Jung. The authors claim that they are not Freudian but discuss Freud’s theories freely – and Havelock Ellis and others, but Jung might not exist. Is there really no alternative to the attainment of true balance and psychic ease except through full acceptance and development of one’s maternal faculties?

  I think this problem of neurosis is much more apparent and urgent among American women than here. I feel its views are limited – sound as far as they go, but dangerous, very, because they do not go farther. Women, obviously, cannot be saved by analysis alone.

  Friday, 6 May

  Babs back to school yesterday. I don’t know at all how far I am being successful in my role as aunt or not. There were none of the sulks these holidays that she had at Xmas, yet she still seems to give out in her silences a measure of scorn for me that I find chilling. In fact exasperating. She sometimes seems such a dull, self-centred, silly little girl. Oh, how boring teen-age interests and ideas can be! I do not seem able to ‘touch’ her at all. But she is not a demonstrative child and seems to have all the affection from her parents she needs. She has a great deal of sound common sense for her age and a turn for practical activities such as games, riding, dancing, dressmaking, cooking – although she says now and then she wishes she could write, and can write easily, and professes an interest in people.

  Perhaps I see too many of my own faults in her: I was probably just as selfish at her own age (am I any less so now?), intolerant, unheeding, ungrateful. She makes me feel middle-aged and incompetent, and perhaps despises, instinctively, the childless, man-less adult female (though if I were married, with a troop of children, she might loathe her cousins and uncle).

  Of course I want to be the child’s shining heroine, adored and envied, but this sickening sort of vanity has no chance to develop at all – fortunately I suppose. The trouble seems to be, as always with my family (aunts, uncles, cousins as well as brother), I want very much to like her but find myself barred by an insufficiency of interests in common. I know so many more people who are not my relatives that I like much better than any of them.

  Saturday, 7 May

  [A loose-leaf enclosure headed ‘Miscellaneous’]

  This weekend I intend shall be ‘mine’. No more housework than necessary. No Liberal activities. No visitors – we hope. Just me alone with my diaries, book, meals, cats and conscience. It is such heaven to be alone, yet I have such feelings of guilt about it and know that I should not enjoy a state of solitude and relative idleness for more than a few days at a time. I am sure my mother longed for just this sort of life and was never able to have it. I don’t know that it is worth sacrificing husband and children for it, but I think it is a need that many women feel that should be fulfilled if possible. There’s Lizzie M. She has two fine little boys, a nice home and a husband she loves and trusts – I don’t know any family where emotional conditions are more favourable. Yet she is not happy. She has not a minute to herself the whole day, is worn out, drained, longing to be able to do other things, for some of my freedom, but can see no hope of it for years and years. Peter earns a steady salary but not enough to give her the domestic help to give her that much leisure. There must be thousands like her – intelligent, sensitive, interested in cultural things, young, wanting to enjoy the simple pleasures available (an evening out with her husband, a cycle ride into the country on a fine afternoon) but chained because of their own right and instinctive choice of man and family.

  Joan’s situation is similar although she is not really happy with Vahan and doesn’t love little Hugo. But she is just as tied and tired and hungry for leisure.

  Peggy D. too has her problems, although her children are all at school and she has a daily woman to help with the housework. She is very happy with her new husband except when it comes to politics. He remains blindly Conservative and refuses to listen to her at all. He naturally resents her going out in the evenings so that she feels she must restrict her political activities to the minimum when he is at home – and as they nearly all take place in the evening it is a bit difficult. I say, ‘Yet if he wanted to go out in the evening on such affairs he’d go … it doesn’t seem fair …’ And she answers, ‘Yes, but that is just all part of being a woman’ Which does seem to be unalterably so.

  I wait for my lunch to cook. All I want to do this afternoon is to read Brideshead here in the still sitting room undisturbed, praising heaven for these hours, adoring the lilac and forget-me-not in the green garden beyond. Quiet, quiet. How terrifying the thought that I may have to let this jewel go.

  Thursday, 26 May

  I pause in the middle of spring cleaning to record that I am feeling better than I have done for months. Am not sure whether it is due to i) course of cod-liver-oil and malt, ii) a really good haircut-and-set two weeks ago which makes all the difference to my appearance and morale, iii) realisation that my responsibilities as Guardian Aunt are nearly over for this (school) year, iv) news that landlady K.M. has really gone to Australia (will she stay there??), v) meeting N. again last week on most amiable terms, vi) Joan and Tessa coming here for Whitsun, vii) surprisingly good passport photos which reveal that at 39 I do not look soured or neglected, viii) finances being not too troublesome at the moment.

  Wednesday, 8 June

  But the black moods return, beating at me like vultures with all-devouring wings. Irritation upon irritation leading to despair. A grinding, hopeless impatience. I have gone on so long waiting for news of the MS. I can’t bear it. I suppose I must up and make myself a nuisance again, write letters, push, push, push and stamp and scream to get a hearing, to get any notice taken. I have a longing for ‘revenge’ – to get back at life for always, as it seems, withholding what I most want – by tearing, wounding, destroying. See the good blood flow! Here and here and again here! I will stab you to death, to death I hate you so. All this milk-and-water mealiness about love and forbearance – pah! It doesn’t work. I have tried hard enough, but what has it done for me … See how my dagger shines! There it goes … to the heart … And now there is stillness … at last, at last.

  Sunday, 19 June

  And in reply to that silly outburst, life gently bowled me over and boxed my ears. Have had the vilest cough I have suffered in years. Not one cigarette in a week, not even the herbal kind, and I lying awake at night thinking of pleurisy and pneumonia and my Will. Now I am with Ethel.

  Some weeks ago I decided that what I have been trying to do for some time now is to de-N. myself. I must seem awfully dumb – no end of a sucker – not to have realised this before and that for years I have been living under an N. spell. She has, or had, such skill in convincing the feeble minded and gullible like me, that she was always uncontrollably right in her opinions, and for a long while her life and adventures seemed wonderfully glamorous and enviable. I have ceased to envy her for a long time now, in any way, but I am only just realising that her opinions also don’t matter. I don’t mean that they are necessarily wrong, or not worth noting (in fact they are often very right and worth consideration), but that my actions and the whole colour of my life [should not] be determined by them.

  Friendship should not be conditional. One should not approach another with an axe to grind. But please please tell me what to do when the other seems to come at you always first with an axe ready to rip you to pieces? Does one lay oneself, undefend
ed, open to the torture?

  Thursday, 14 July

  We are to fly to Portugal – a miracle. I had been dreading the four days at sea, at the mercy of the younger generation. But this week I learned there was no hope of passages for any Lisbon people this month or next, so Pooh has said we may fly. I am thrilled at the thought, beyond adequate expression. We shall be there in four hours, probably taking all our luggage with us. Josephine is coming to take charge after Bank Holiday weekend. There is no one else able to take on Wee as I had hoped and pay me something for it. But the cats’ welfare is my greatest anxiety and with Josephine here I shall have no fears for them.

  Having read this book through from April 23 entry, yes, N. has her witch-like, bitch-like phases. Let me state that courageously and adhere to it. But read Elizabeth Myers’s story ‘Second Sight’. People mustn’t be profaned by total rejection. Grant people even what you hate in them, then on the wings of this tolerance will ride the things you can admire. You must forgive, and look for those crumbs of redemption that everyone, everyone lets fall. If you can meet a good man (said Confucius) try to emulate him; if you meet a bad man, look into your own heart.

  Thursday, 21 July

  I take with me Christmas Humphreys’s Walk On!, T.S. Eliot’s poems (Penguin) and some Osbert Sitwell short stories. There will be no more time for anything here – so au revoir my private heart.

  Friday, 23 September

  We arrived home at Wee again on Monday afternoon last, the threads all waiting to be gathered together and the pattern continued. Babs went back to school on Wednesday and Josephine left this morning. There is still a vast amount of sorting and clearing up to be done and the jungle in the garden to tackle. But I must pause for a moment, with a cup of tea after supper, to give my old love some attention.