This is the transcript of a notebook written by my lovely Grandfather when he was a young man. The notebook starts when he was 21. I assume the scraps of paper were from a younger time, as he has copied them from scraps of paper. He was a journalist (who incidentally scooped the world exclusive on the "Miss England" smash which killed Henry Segrave, by booking a call to his editor from the only public telephone in Bowness, so that all the other pressmen had to queue). He began his career writing for the Leeds Mercury and wrote for The Yorkshire Post as a literary and art correspondent. He died in 1991.
Notebook
3
By
William
T Oliver
January
1924.
Copied
from scraps of paper.
One
evening in Autumn Term.
Came
home after reading some of Edward Garnett’s critical essays, in one
of which he pleased me immensely by praising D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons
and Lovers”, (a book I haven’t read, but whose title attracts me)
feeling exactly in the mood for writing… but I had a French
exercise to do… and even if I had had the evening to spare, nothing
would have come of it: the illusion would have been dispelled the
moment I sat down to write my first sentence. This feeling- I wrote
at the time- is a sensuous one like stroking a cat’s fur; it is a
sort of exaltation, and one has a vague desire to write beautifully
rounded sentences or quote some voluptuous line of Keats’. It is
often called up in me by the reading of some striking and suggestive
phrase, by the stirring up of my loyalty to some author of whose work
I am fond, by a walk round the art gallery, by the drinking of a cup
of coffee in the station buffet, or by the passing of a particularly
lovely girl. I always have it when delicately sipping that best of
all drinks, China tea… Belloc, I find (several weeks after, while
reading “The Path to Rome”), experienced it one evening [it is, I
believe, an emotion peculiar to evening] in the valley of the
Moselle, and he has described it, with an adequacy of expression it
is the dream of my life to achieve, thus “I found myself entering
that pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none
written); I was “smoking the enchanted cigarettes of Balzac”, and
if this kind of reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a
factor of happiness that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely
and silent hollow many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were
altogether his own master and controlled by no necessity, not even
the necessity of repression, all his life would pass away in these
sublime imaginings.”
The
queer thing is that when in this state I invariably and almost
unconsciously begin pretending (and here one of my secret
foolishnesses is confessed in writing) to puff on an imaginary
cigarette- which just shows how wonderfully accurate Balzac is.
A
few pages on, Belloc describes my ideal author:
“He
was a large laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of
hair, and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of
friends and talked continuously.”
Every
writer should work by night… I sometimes feel- such is my
incredible fatuity- that I should have written a really noteworthy
volume of essays by now if my stupid parents had not insisted on my
going to bed at the very moment I had got the writing ideas- produced
by an outing to the theatre or some concert, and roughly jotted down
under the disdainful scrutiny of fellow-travellers, in the train-
under control, and could, as it were, see “the lucid outlines
forming round” them.
The
notes I enter in this common place book are very often the vapid
remains of such moments… they are at present my sole consolation;
and even then they have often to wait months before I have time to
copy them up…at the moment of writing I have already been summoned
twice to supper.
March
5th
Have
been reading some of my old school essays this evening looking for
material for an article. Two things strike me about them: their
superiority in style to anything I can write now, and the flimsy
superficiality of their thoughts. They display- if anything- a
journalistic capacity for playing with other peoples ideas. Like
these notes they show that I think more in terms of what I read than
of my own experience. I am, as I have acknowledged before, in the
position of Charles Lamb- “Books think for me”. In literary
criticism I am pretty sure of myself; but in reflections on such a
subject as Democracy, or The Purpose of Education I cannot move far
without a quotation.
I
used to be proud of the way apt quotations recurred to me; but now
they appear so constantly, even in my conversation, that I am coming
to believe myself incapable of any independence of thought- a
dreadful condition.
What
hurts me most- I think- is that in an essay on “Public Opinion in
Schools, its Character and Influence”, written before “the Loom
of Youth” opened my eyes, while protesting vigorously and (if I may
offer a sop to my injured pride) eloquently against the examination
system I regard the muscular Christian ideal of British higher
education with apparent complacency… I console myself that I must
have written this after an exhausting game of Rugger. At any rate I
remember feeling very discontented after I had finished but not
knowing exactly why I did so. It’s chief fault I believe is its
painful crudity.
I
must set down my present views in this important matter later- before
I lose my self-respect. I certainly still think there is much that is
fine in the public school code… but anon…
March
9th
“Tono-Bungay”
After
repeated attempts I succeeded in securing a copy of “Tono-Bungay”,
and I have managed to read it at odd chance moments. The book
undoubtedly lost by being scrambled through in this way: the way in
which most of my reading has to be done, unfortunately; but it
nevertheless yielded some great moments as all Wells’ works do. It
is a masterly study of the English social system and as such will
undoubtedly be invaluable to future historians. The method used is
that of a series of vivid impressions set down by one who has seen
life at very different levels; as we read we get “a birds’ eye
view of the modern world”- the world which allows men like Uncle
Ponderevo to make huge fortunes out of selling “adulterated water”.
And the rottenness in the state of things is so convincingly drawn
that there is no need to point the moral- one recognises the justice
of the authors’ indignation: everything leads up to the moment when
George, looking down on the “vulgar magnificence” of that
unfinished mansion at Crest Hill, realises that it forms “the
compacted image of all that passes for Progress, for all the
advertisement-inflated spending, the aimless building up and pulling
down, the enterprise and promise “of our age: that modern life is
one vast dismal spectacle of witless waste”. Of the characters,
George seems to me an almost impossible person- many of his actions
appear quite inexplicable- and one feels that he is occasionally
sacrificed to the exigencies of the theme; but Aunt and Uncle
Ponderevo are wonderfully presented- as creations they may surely
rank beside Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. Aunt Susan is certainly the
inevitable mate of her imaginative yet curiously incapable husband,
and the friendship, and sympathy, the perfect understanding between
George and her is perhaps the most beautiful thing in the book. Uncle
Ponderevo cuts a pitiable figure after the catastrophe: his interview
with George on Crest Hill- with that painful admission of forgery:
“writin’ things down- I done something”- is a fine piece of
imaginative writing.
Wells
is a great artist when he is dealing with these victims of the
system- Kipps, Polly, Ponderevo, Hoopdriver, Bert Smallways. The
presentation of these small men, the underdogs, and the revelation of
their significance- that seems to me to be Wells’ most vital
contribution to literature. Like Kipps, George returns to his
boyhood’s love, the passionate, full-blooded Beatrice, at the end
of the book; and the separation of these two is one of the happenings
which I think Wells has thrust arbitrarily on his characters and his
reader to work out his theme. These two, -he endeavours to show-
though obviously made for one another, cannot come together because
they have been spoilt by their foolish upbringing. I may be
sentimental, but this seems unnecessary to me: the parting has none
of the inevitability shown earlier in the book- from Marion; the
phlegmatic Marion who only realised her folly and her love for George
when he was preparing to leave her:-
“And
then- you’ll be free?”
“Both of us.”
“And this life you’ve
hated-”
I
looked up at her wrung and bitter face.
“I
haven’t hated it,” I lied, my voice near breaking with the pain
of it all. “Have you?”
Wells’
prepares us for the brilliant, ineffective Ewart long before we see
him; but when at last we get a chance of listening to his
incomparable conversation- as coruscating as Wells’ own is reported
to be- we are not disappointed. His discussion of Mrs. Grundy’s
husband- who, he is convinced, is at the root of the trouble-, and
his immediate response to George’s challenge, “How would you have
things different?” with that dream of a great walled city of women
based on the fact that “Any woman who’s been to a good eventful
Girls’ school lived on the memory of it for the rest of her life,”
are vastly interesting. And his conversation with the admiring Uncle
Ponderevo, in which he supports several new and ingenious ways of
deluding the public is possibly the most diverting in the book: -
“True,” said my uncle, chubbily and with a dreamy sense of
mysticism; “true!” Wells’ sense of the possibilities of a
situation (such as this meeting) would have made him a great comic
dramatist … but then we should have missed those constant little
flashes of description which reveal such close observation and are
always so illuminating A book might well be written on this subject
of his genius alone; yet it, the chief concern of many novelists, is
merely the handmaiden of his more ambitious purposes. As I read I can
imagine Wells’ writing away with this somewhat dangerous facility,
and then coming to a sudden stop., knitting his brows and with a
quick sort of mental jerk, flinging out one of these scintillating
phrases. By this means he keeps his reader tingling: it seems a
miracle that words should be made so living, so richly descriptive
and charged with meaning. Often these phrases are put into the mouths
of some particularly vivacious character- such as Mrs. Polly- who,
(like those of Dickens) lives largely by reason of his extra-ordinary
verbal exuberance. Where he surpasses Dickens is in the fact that his
characters not only reveal, by their talk, their own personal
idiosyncrasies but also a very forcible and stimulating criticism of
life. In fact, at his best, Wells’ may perhaps be described as
Dickens with the intellect of Matthew Arnold. [This has probably been
said before, and will undoubtedly be said again]. All these
characters contain something of Wells’ own abundant personality.
What a man he must be to meet! It amused me today to think of Wells
butting his way to prominence just at the time when Wilde, Symons and
their decadent following held full sway. What a contrast this
energetic young science student with his quick, nervous apprehension,
his tough-minded application, moral earnestness and ruthless probing
of life made with these lazily epigrammatical aesthetes! Ewart, lying
abed in the morning, his mind “like a painted ceiling at Hampton
Court, with the pride of the flesh sprawling all over it” bears
some resemblance to them; but he was, at times, much too “vulgarly”
serious to be counted among their select number. And if we consider
Uncle Ponderevo, we can almost imagine Oscar Wilde sitting bolt
upright when confronted with that restless tradesman’s outburst
against the drabness of life in the small, provincial Wimblehurst: -
“Sacramental Wine!” he swore, “This isn’t the world it’s
Cold Mutton Fat! – Dead and Stiff! And I’m buried in it up to the
arm-pits!”
I
am wandering on regardless of the demands of “work” and it is now
bed-time once more … This perpetual necessity for “resting one’s
tired brain” (that is the unscrupulous way parents word it, knowing
that one dare not deny that the day has been spent in fatiguing
“swatting”) is, as I have observed recently, an unmitigated and
entirely damnable nuisance… There is much that I still want to say
about Marion and her parents, all so typical of their class, about
Aunt Susan’s witticisms, about that incomparable sketch of the
Wimblehurst blades, with their “slow knowingness, the cunning
observation of their deadened eyes, their idea of ‘a good story’
always, always told in undertones, poor dirty worms!” (This is
exactly the type of youth who frequents the Otley billiard halls),
about those lively schoolboys taking “pot shots” with a real
revolver (“and then Barker told about the severity of the game
rules and made Roots sore afraid, and we hid the revolver in a dry
ditch outside the school field”), about that positively reeking
description of the tropics, and about the amazing but sometimes
adorable Beatrice (reading the description of her in the train I was
moved to exclaim- having the carriage to myself- “all the rest of
life leads to love, and love leads to all the rest of life”- a
platitude but very fervently emitted !); but (this is a great
sentence) the rest of the family is waiting up and I must return this
book tomorrow. So just a word about the end. This is rather spoiled
for me by an unfortunate coincidence. In the description of the
garden party at Beckenham [an incident in the upward flight of the
Ponderevos there is an exquisite conversation in which great humour
is drawn from an excessively tentative discussion about cats and
dogs- “I always feel there’s something about a dog… I don’t
know how to express”…
Unfortunately
in his conclusion Wells himself is dealing with a rather intangible
idea, and he falls into the trap of using the same phraseology as
that employed by the two conversationalists earlier in the book: “How
can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and so
immaterial? It is something…” The result (for anyone who
remembers the former repetition of the word ‘something’ and its
amusing effect) is bathos instead of uplift. The occurrence of this
parallel passage certainly [vitiates] what should be a magnificent
conclusion. But the last sentence makes amends and sums up the book:
-
“We
are all things that make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission,
out to the open sea.”
J.C
Squire: - A Note on Style.
“Many
writers have other peoples tunes running in their own heads so
persistently that their thoughts fall involuntarily into the ready
made framework. If you are content to be an imitator, you may safely
adopt Sterne’s recipe of writing down one sentence and trusting to
God for the next. The Lord will provide. The flow will come. Every
word has hallowed associations, every sound has familiar sequences,
every situation has established developments: you may go ahead like a
house on fire. But the result might as well be in the house on fire.”
It
is amusing to set by the side of this (which is sound sense) Belloc’s
vigorous statement of the opposite view in “The Path to Rome”: -
“You
must avoid the cliché and the commonplace, and the phrase
toute faite. Why? Not
because you naturally write odd prose- contrariwise, left to yourself
you write pure journalese, but simply because you are swelled and
puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown
school calls ‘distinction’ in prose. My little friend, I know how
it is done and I find it contemptible… What do you turn out, you
hagglers and sticklers? Perhaps a bad [triolet?] every six months,
and a book of criticism on something threadbare once in five years.
If I had my way…”
G.K.C
Could
anything be more characteristic of Chesterton than the beginning of
one of the tales in “The Man Who Knew Too Much”? : -
“A
thing can sometimes be too extra-ordinary to be remembered.”
The
book itself is, as a matter of fact, a typical of its author’s
ingenuity; but it does not represent G.K.C at his best. One feels
that the devices which worked so successfully in the Father Brown
stories are here a little too apparent. One soon learns to fix on the
most patently innocent person in the tale as the villain; and the
obvious way the various characters are used as foils to the chief
character, a blasé person who is introduced Dickens-like in each
story with the same description, tends to be irritating. One is
reminded somehow of Wells’ description of the Jews as “not clever
enough to conceal their cleverness”. Then too, one is left with the
uneasy feeling that the rottenness in the state of politics is even
greater than one suspected. Who but Chesterton would have thought of
making a Prime Minister of England commit a murder? Not even Winston
Churchill.
The Train
i/
Watched a couple in the train tonight with great interest. They were
engaged in picking small stems of news out of the paper together, in
arguing about the spellings of words, and discussing the absurd
pieces of journalese they came across, in delicious undertones. The
newspaper offered a convenient excuse for their nestling down
together and enjoying this obviously delightful intimacy. She was a
handsome girl with a fine nose, frank intelligent eyes and a mouth
which matched her exquisite voice. Her delightfully sibilant ps and
ts made me tremble in sensuous enjoyment. How feeble art is when
compared with nature, I thought, but then: how wonderful it would be
to hear this goddess read poetry-
“Deep
in the shadow of a vale…”!
Too
wonderful in fact, for the combined charm of that voice and the verse
would overcome mortal ears: one would “swoon to death” in sheer
ravishment.
I
shared the pleasure of these two in each other’s company. To me,
sitting in the opposite corner and feigning to read, they appeared-
to use words which are forever associated in my mind with the first
meeting between Richard Feverel and the matchless Lucy Desborough-
“very beautiful”.
ii/
Small boy, travelling down by train to school every day, had somehow
procured (I wondered whether he had treated himself to the great
experience of buying it) a paper, and was reading it in emulation of
the business men he sees each evening. He was, I felt, getting rather
hastily into the rut: the time would come soon enough when this
action, now so fraught with excitement, would become merely
mechanical. But, for the present at any rate, it was novel; an
adventure. Presently, when I put my paper on the rack and took out a
book, he did likewise, producing a grimy arithmetic book from his
ridiculously large school bag. At Holbeck two men and a bright
talkative young woman got in, and one of the former began to banter
her about her knitting. She readily replied that it would be better
if men did something similarly useful instead of sitting in idleness.
“Oh,” responded her companion “But we
think… The small boy eyed him from his corner with delightful
incredulity.
iii/
Caught a glimpse from the carriage window of a rare picture for a
modern artist. Nevinson, I felt, would have imbued it with a powerful
significance. Down below to the left of the railway embankment was a
lighted mill, a huge square building with countless windows and a
grey glass roof. This roof was composed of large prisms which looked
like hard flint-like waves and reminded me very forcibly of the grim,
unvarying routine, the cheerless sea of the worker’s life. Beyond
this ghastly erection stretched an appalling succession of parallel
streets, dark, narrow places, each with a single flickering gas lamp,
reflected in the rain splashed road, emphasising its cold misery. All
these, I suppose would open upon the same long street which would
possibly contain a picture house, a doctor’s surgery with it’s
dim, stifling waiting-room, several reeking “pubs”, a few cramped
shops, two rival fish and chip saloons and a Methodist Chapel.
I
can imagine the lord of this modern domain glancing up from his paper
as he reclines in a first-class “smoker” on his way home to
Ilkley or Harrogate; and his eye rests upon that mill with a look of
proud possession. He is probably on the Senate of Leeds University,
and is interested in education. Too damned ‘interested’!
Reading
today Stevensons’ candid description of how he wrote ‘Treasure
Island’, I was reminded of the keen pleasure I used to derive from
drawing imaginary maps. My delight in this occupation was, I believe,
partly due to my inability to copy with even the smallest degree of
accuracy, and the torture I endured at school in consequence. It was
so satisfactory to be able to indulge one’s fancy without needing
to give an eye to proportion and the kindred evils of the classroom.
And what a wonderful accumulation of peninsulas, fjords and
convenient harbours one could create just allowing one’s pencil to
roam at will over a sheet of paper! It was so easy, and the result
was so thrilling. I was, I remember, particularly fond of straits: it
was fascinating to see how narrow one could make them, and the care
with which they had to be drawn, lest the lines should overlap gave
an added sense of freedom which made itself felt in a particularly
exuberant coast line when one reached the open sea. There was
something complete and satisfying about an island too, but I usually
preferred an archipelago as this provided for all kinds of windings
in and out, and, owing to the proximity of alien states, created a
demand for “defensive forces” which appeared more desirable to me
then than now. One favourite trick of mine used to be to draw an
island with a very jagged coast and look at it until I could almost
see its rocks, trees and hills, and the waves breaking on its shores,
and then suddenly imagine it as an inland sea, thus swiftly changing
all my promontories into bays and completely reversing the picture in
my mind. I remember the slight shock caused by this queer sort of
mental exercise as peculiarly agreeable.
W.R.T
Spring,
1924
Sitting on a
seat down the sand-beds I can see her house right opposite, across
the river. It is simply unbearable not being able to see her on such
a radiant day: the brilliant sunshine, the merry birds in the wood
behind, all the freshness and wonder of the Spring, seem somehow
wasted; they have obviously been prepared for our joint appreciation.
Yet there is a sort of fierce satisfaction in knowing myself in love.
I have often been sceptical about love and thought I should never be
able to decide when it had arrived. One could not, I felt, be sure…
“I was the more deceived”. Love is something more than the
“astonishment… in hand and shoulder” of which Rupert Brooke
speaks, it is a knowledge,- the knowledge of a perfect sympathy and
understanding- and a feeling of tenderness. It is a purifying
experience also, it intensifies one’s idealism and makes one look
forward to a companionship which shall be a sharing of dreams. It
comes in flashes of sheer beauty, kindling wonderful desires, and it
also leaves you desperately inarticulate.
I seem to
have been unconsciously accumulating impressions of W. ever since I
first saw her; and each impression was a fresh revelation of her
beauty. The first time I remember seeing her is one evening when I
had gone down to the Manse to give H a book. I rang the bell and
waited on the steep front steps. Then I heard a light footfall and
the dingy door seemed to melt into loveliness. Yet, strangely enough
it took me nearly a year to realise I was in love. I talked
rapturously about her to S. (who shared all my secrets) for a
fortnight or so; and then she dropped for a time into the splendid
background of my world, just one of the many wonders which charmed my
greedy soul. I was in love with the world at that time and too
flattered by the way all nature displayed herself for my enjoyment to
pay special attention to any particular one of her delights. Perhaps
I wasn’t yet in love; for to be in love is to find in the beloved
the key which unlocks the door to hidden beauty of which you have no
conception; to discover something which includes all the rest and
gives it vital magnificence; to encounter ideal beauty made
miraculously palpable. I saw it once- and worshipped it- in the Venus
of Milo. It was in a Higher Certificate exam and it made me forget my
paper for half an hour. And now I have seen it again in W’s profile
as she bent over a book in the vestry; in the marvellous way she
kneels, erect and still, at communion. There is a poignancy in her
profile like that of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetic Symphony; as strong as
that but more subtle, more unconscious- essentially beautiful the
expression of something which only the rarest souls have felt. That
is something to be kept: it must not coarsen into bitterness or be
lost in indifference. I think sometimes she is the “lovely of
heart” of Yeats’s poem and that contact with me- or anyone else-
must inevitably spoil her.
Spring
1925
Spring is
here, and summer will follow, but all this beauty only makes the
current state of affairs unbearable.
Spring
1926
“The spring
hath fired my brain with splendid dreams,
As she hath
charmed the frozen earth to bloom,
Trancing me
with her old delight that seems
To flush the
brighter from my ended gloom.
No more like
one befevered and athirst
I cry for
you; the voice of my desire,
Drowned in
the whole world’s musical outburst,
Hath caught
the gladness of the wild wood choir.
You, like the
daffodils, were born
Not for mine
only but the world’s delight;
I can no more
engross you than the moon
That shows
with equal glory in all men’s sight;
But I can
praise you, O my dearest one,
As happy
birds sing to the rising sun.”
-A. Clutton
Brock.
This afternoon
W. was just sweetly pretty as we sat on the hillside. Then suddenly
she took her hat off. The transformation! I became incoherent, dizzy
in adoration of her. She was bewildered at my sudden passion- it
wasn’t passion really, it was too beautiful and utterly free from
calculation for that: so the psalmist must have felt when he said,
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”; it was
as if everything, the green of the fields and the blue of the sky and
the gold of the clouds had miraculously brought forth the good of
which they are the continual promise. Rupert Brooke knows all about
it, “fixed beauty there a star”.
We see this eternal beauty occasionally, and in those moments we
live.
I must copy this
out, it’s getting torn with carrying-
Within my heart
there is a royal throne,
Beautiful,
sacred, for you built it there,
With your dear
touch of hands and lips and hair,
Your strength
and love, the thoughts that you have shown
Only to me,
because I love you so.
Your laughter
and your dear stupidity’,
Your dreams and
hopes, which too belong to me,
All the familiar
ways of you I know
So well, have
raised it for the king.
A little bird,
born of love for you,
Who quietly,
mutely waits, as I must do,
Until you come,
and then each tiny wing
Beats wild
against my breast
As if it would
soar into your heart, and rest for evermore.
What is it
makes me copy out long extracts from books which interest me? I
suspect it is the sense of property, that desire for acquisition
which I pretend to despise so heartily in the business man. However
when I come across something in a book which seems good, beautiful,
true- whatever you like to call it- down it must go or I am forever
trying to remember the exact words and lamenting the loss of
something which meant
intensely for me. As one review writer has put it, “we are seeking
from life what we suddenly find in the spiritual content of a certain
novel”. I at least must try to bottle it.
Allan
Monkhouse is the writers’ author, a “specialist in fine
relations”. Two people for instance are at the shy suspicious stage
of falling in love. Intensely self conscious- they are both artists
and introspective, people to whom romance is an ideal- “They had
brilliant sunshine, the scent of honey, the drone of bees; it
occurred to Geoffrey that this was an extra-ordinary correct imitator
of happiness” He recalls a theory of his own “that love declared
itself at the powerful crisis not the relevant one” “He was held
back by the instinctive precautions of the idealist…’I’m
restless’, he said. ‘I’m immensely perturbed’” “It was
for him to take the gallant, romantic plunge, and delays and
hesitancies were affronts to his passion. Passion? Ah, that was it.
An ardent man could not acquiesce in less than that. So he must be
sure. He must watch, he must assay, he must measure the flood. Or he
must wait for the fire from heaven.” Then he goes back to
Manchester. “It was a simple parting for the Wibberleys, but from
her it was a perplexity to be considered presently. He knew nearer
home: “to leave her, to be without her, was intolerable.”
Of the War:
“He must be ready to learn, but he must be loyal to what he knew
and felt.” The incident of the reservist who offers him whiskey and
excuses the plain looks of his wife by explaining her value as a good
cook and a sound business proposition is an exquisite touch,
beautifully judged. Geoffrey realised as he “gazed with distaste on
his fellow-man” that “somewhere in that ugly carcass was the
precious residue of that indomitable spirit which was to shatter the
world, and somehow, in the fullness of time, to save it.”
Sybil’s
letter is crammed with beauty- the beauty Geoffrey says she has lived
into her face. As an actress she finds the touchstone for her parts
in her own experience of love. Of the potion scene in ‘Romeo and
Juliet’ she says: “I don’t know how to do it yet, and there are
times when I feel myself just clattering along like anyone else.”
Monkhouse’s triumph is that you accept this arrogance.
“We’re
not gushing lovers”, she says, “We shall incite and stimulate one
another to terrific heights, and find we’re exhausted and come
toppling down.”
Again: There
is nothing more merciless than the English of the comfortable class.
They do not enter into the feelings of others. You see it with their
servants, and even with their children. They may be kind but they are
implacable.”
She is not
frightened of death, feeling they two have “accomplished something
prodigious.”
“I want
peace- peace in my heart, peace with our foes, but I want a
passionate life too. I’m prone to sink back in mental and bodily
indolence and you’ll have to prod me on.”
She puts the
German position: a nation in desperate straits and so they took any
means. “To crush a great country is not right. Can you keep back
millions of people by writing on a scrap of paper?” “When Christ
said forgive your enemies if he didn’t mean forgive the Germans he
meant nothing. He could not make much of a Christian church become a
vast organisation, all machinery and salaries and positions and vain
repetitions with a few fine people wandering in the maze. We must be
ruthless but carry peace and love in our hearts.”
Bow Fell-
from “True Love”.
Geoffrey
writing from the trenches: -
“But I’ve
something to remember, I haven’t missed the rest of life. One has
glimpses, reminders, even here that bring back Skelwith Bridge with
its quiet fields and the cows, and even the hens. You remember the
evening when we stood on Little Loughrigg and watched the clouds
drift away from Bow Fell? The beautiful lines and the peak came out
and you spoke of the accident of beauty, and how rough chance
groupings of rock became exquisite form when you looked at them from
far away. And as to this accident, this irrelevance of beauty, I said
it was the same with a woman’s face, and that you really hadn’t
any right to be as beautiful as you are. (I withdraw. I never
believed that. You were lucky in the original structure, I dare say,
but you’ve lived your life into your face. I see that more and
more.) And you in your modesty turned to the mountains again and said
that there were no ugly ones, and that blunt old Wetherlam- that aged
mountain- was almost as beautiful as Bow Fell. But Bow Fell became a
symbol of the eternal, the impregnable, the beautiful.”
Meredith
“So that I draw a breath
of finer air, station is naught.”
The idea
(in “True Love”)- comes out in first chapter, that it may be
possible for two people to be rivals and friends. Arden carried on
his conception of a generous rivalry “till he imagined a strife to
the death in which friendship would remain.” This is put to the
test later in his love for the German Sybil. Sybil says: - “you
must champion your nation and I mine, we must be generous with one
another and help one another… Cannot we be chivalrous enemies and
lovers too? I see it as beautiful, beautiful. Is it possible?”
Then the
Germans killed him and the English killed her. And the final comment
is left with an Armenian and an Irishman, -two of the ineffective
“under” races. Imalian subtly used. He becomes communicative for
the purpose of the book in the last chapter after being inscrutable
all through: - “I’m exasperated… the world’s folly, my
powerlessness…” “Do you mean that the brutes harried her to
death?” “Oh, you’re a great nation.” “I’m an Irishman.”
“I beg your pardon, I’d lost sight of that. Yes, perhaps you’re
one of us… the beaten, the forlorn.” The outside observer can see
the silly futility- and the inevitability- of it all.
Feel that
Monkhouse is like “The Manchester Guardian”, a fine futility. He
is not a Tchehov. He just lacks the courage to be “utter”. He is
age, giving sympathy and understanding, but frankly at a loss as to
what can be done. He is sincere, admirable, not without courage; but
somehow depressing. And depressing because, for all his brave show,
you feel he is profoundly depressed.
A walk
The new moon
fields looked hoary in the faint light of the setting sun. The woods
were sombre- contrasting with the pale, luminous green of the grass.
Up o the left the haycocks began to move, and looking closer I saw
the farmers were “leading”- a slow stately procession up the
field; beautiful and dignified like the march of the seasons. This
sort of thing dispenses the exasperation at the wrongness of things
which finds its expression in the modern novel. One feels a sense of
fundamental harmony, a rich compensating beauty, which makes one’s
disquiet feel for the time merely superficial.
Monkhouse on
Palgrave- “Steadfast as the stars- the heart of England”.
An old actor,
speaking of the “Manchester Guardian”- “Y’never know where
the silly devils will break out.”
From “True
Love”
“Manners
are what matters most in the world, but they must go deep and include
everything.”
It is curious
that Monkhouse should have given his novel such a title. A much
better one would have been “True Minds” from the lines he quotes
at the beginning: “Shakespeare’s sonnet: “Let us not to the
marriage of true minds Admit impediments.”
The idea
suggested by the present title seems absurdly commonplace for such a
novel. It was probably suggested by the publisher, and if so you have
the amusing spectacle of the book of a writer who prizes
“intellectual honesty” above everything appearing before the
public with a title which will attract the sentimentally inclined who
will buy it and be disappointed.
I am getting
the hang of Charles Marriott now, after reading another of his
novels. And the more I read, the more I admire him. One of the
characters in “subsoil” says to Saffery, a novelist, “Your
books…make me see what I have felt already.” This is just
Marriott’s quality. I know of no other novelist- unless it be
Meredith in “The Egoist”- so breathtakingly interesting from page
to page; one who so consistently demands the attention of his reader
and keeps him so busy relating the argument to his own experience.
One thing I find is that after reading a chapter I will set the book
down and go off on tracks of my own, arriving at conclusions which I
am humiliated to discover are neatly expressed a chapter or two
ahead. He seems to forestall every idea his works can give rise to.
If a man’s soul were getting flabby I should advise a course of
Marriott’s novels. What delights me is the thought that I have
still a dozen of them to read. And the two I have read are finely
interrelated; the one explains or simplifies the other.
October 2nd
1925.
Have received
note from Middleton Murry with returned article: - “There is
something good and attractive about this piece: even though I do not
feel it is good enough to warrant my accepting it.” If only I could
create a piece of beauty to justify that generous encouragement!
October 7th
Gave
Middleton Murry’s letter to Win. It was a bit of a wrench but her
delight was sufficient compensation.
Win, the
dear, said Monkhouse’s novel was lovely but she found it hard work
keeping pace with the argument at the beginning. This because she was
not clever like me! I felt all the conventional emotions of the
flattered male.
“The
Dewpond” fairly establishes the plea I made to Sam that it was
impossible to answer his arguments against romance by any other means
than by a piece of creative work. Marriott’s novels show how
fascinatingly problems can be put and dealt with in this way, though
they are not the usual ‘problem novel’ which is generally the
exploitation of some popular preoccupation of the moment. They
triumphantly justify his contention that the novel is the
contemporary form of expression.
In ‘The
Dewpond’ Marriott says he is inclined to suspect the artist who
comes off as a talker. If he could express it in talk there would be
no need for further expression, for his novel or picture. Coburn
could not argue. “When called upon to explain obvious truths he was
all at sea. His notion of argument was to say the same thing over and
over again.” The result was that the politician could go away with
a sense of having demolished him. But “it wasn’t his business to
think or to know: it was his business to feel and to say. His
knowledge was limited, his reasoning was often defective, but what he
saw or thought was not a matter of any particular consequence.” ”A
stranger hearing that he had lately come back from a Mediterranean
voyage could have taken him for a very dull and unimaginative
person…He would keep repeating a word as if it were an ‘open
sesame’, forgetting that the jewelled cave unlocked was in his own
mind and not in his hearer’s.”
“Hundreds
of people can talk for one who can think; but thousands can think for
one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all
in one.”
Mr.
Saintsbury, Hilda’s husband was one of the thinkers: “He had been
young but he had never had youth, all his life he had been addressing
himself to intelligent observation.”
But
observation is useless: If the creative artist happens to be
insensible to any particular aspect of life, it won’t help him to
peep and botanise”.
When Coburn
left journalism, giving up the “live” daily and devoting himself
to writing about life, he did so because he began to realise that
words were “chemical rather than mechanical in their action” with
the result that presently the editor began to complain that he was
losing actuality.”
The big
failing of Coburn’s novels was his women: “No woman had ever made
him feel the better for his affection… No amount of observation
would put him straight- he had apprehended women with two distinct
and apparently incomprehensible sides of his nature.”
Then he saw
Hilda, and wrote “The Moment Eternal” in which with a flash of
intuition he got at the heart of his story and presented a living
picture. Later he was to find that although the novel had sprung from
a chance sight of her in a wood “he had said all he wanted to say
about Hilda in “The Moment Eternal”’.
In this case
the woman had been the father, the spiritual father: the novel had
been begotten in his imagination at the sight of her.
Later the two
met: she found out that he had guessed her secret and put it all in
“The Moment Eternal”: and she was married to a man who did not
want a comrade but a dutiful affectionate wife; one who treated her
as a child to be excused and who thought her incapable of fulfilling
her duties as the wife of a politician… Still Coburn and she could
have had what they wanted from each other without disturbing her
relations with her husband. As Coburn put it: “It isn’t a matter
of seeing her; it’s knowing that she’s there and free to one at
any time. With her there’s no need to explain or apologise.” “He
wanted far more than she, but what he wanted was so far beyond the
bounds of possibility that he could cheerfully forget all about it,
and make the best of what he had; she without any clear idea of what
she wanted was becoming dissatisfied. He could feel this and it made
him fidgety and apologetic…It struck me that if he did attempt to
cross the line between the good friend and the lover, it would be
less because he was dissatisfied with present relations than in a
sort of exasperation at her being dissatisfied.”
But the crash
came through outside intervention. As Marriott says: - “When lovers
fail to observe the limitations of good conduct as determined by the
peculiarities of their individual case, it is nearly always through
the influence of outsiders.”
In this case
the interference is quite unintentional, but it forced Hilda to take
sides and made Mr. Saintsbury’s limitation the deciding factor.
Two sentences
which are really essential to a full appreciation of “The Dewpond”
puzzled me when I read them, but they are explained in “Subsoil”:
-
“People
might not marry unless they are quite sure they cannot get what they
want of each other in any other way… Marriage had an intrinsic
value of its own apart from what may be called its incidentals such
as companionship and babies.”
The idea that
young people can get everything they want from each other without
marriage was new to me; new and disturbing. It comes out much more
clearly at the end of “Subsoil”. Sutherland and Loveday Rosewall
love each other, yet she will not marry him: “Her passions,
suppressed and refined during her first marriage had exhausted
themselves on Vaughan who had been led to her by physical attraction.
“To Sutherland she gave everything but passion; love, comradeship,
sympathy and tenderness; and he was not prepared to say that he was
not richer for what was reserved. Somehow he could never think of
Vaughan except as the passive instrument… Sometimes, considering
his happiness, and the way it had come about, he was inclined to
believe that circumstances by denying the fulfilment of affection had
forced him and Loveday into a relation that might presently be the
rule rather than the exception between men and women. He was talking
about this idea to Saffery one day, and Saffery amused him by
comparing marriage to the short circuiting of an electric current.
“You get the same phenomena”, he said, “ waste of energy and a
flare-up. Interesting by-products perhaps.”
In making
these hurried jottings it is almost impossible to do justice to, or
even to hint at, the admirable construction of Marriott’s novels:
the unity of effect without which no novel is successful. The various
characters in “Subsoil” relate the personal struggle going on
inside Sutherland, his artistic evolution and the revolt from
professionalism to a truer appreciation of life, to the general
movement. The same sort of thing, we find, is going on in the
business world, the social world, the literary world; there is a
general clash between the artificial and the real. Each character
stands for something- some attitude or influence- yet it is
Marriott’s triumph that each is a living being. There is some
sacrifice of actuality, but it almost comes off. Although it hits at
professionalism and technical proficiency it is itself a masterpiece
of technique. Every conversation, every situation- nay every word-
has relevance to the general theme: - “The struggle in which they
were all engaged was that between inclusiveness and goodwill; between
the privileges, whether material or intellectual, of certain classes
and a “common understanding”. But it had not occurred to him
before that the same struggle was going on in the nature’s of
individuals, though when he realised his own experience he saw that
it was true”.
Saffery acts
as the exponent of the new ideas: the men who can put them into
words. There are three ways, he says, of working: to make types
regardless of the facts, to record the facts with a carefully
unbiased mind, and to say what you feel about life, when the types
will happen whether you will or not.”
This last is
the method eventually used by Sutherland: he “planks it down
regardless” and achieves what Saffery calls “the universal
language of the heart.”
You only
achieved truth when you got back to this universal language- and
“Naturally when you begin to speak from the heart after talking
through your hat- or at any rate your head- for several centuries,
you don’t know tact and discretion all at once.” His contention
is that “the truly personal is the truly universal. We are liker in
our dreams than we are in ou8r waking thoughts.”
[Marginal
note- “The most truly impersonal work is the most indelibly
personal”- Middleton Murry; “Adelphi”, Jany ‘26]
Of the
picturesque school Loveday says: “They made nature look more
complicated, you make it look simpler.”
Ledward the
architect is fascinating when discussing his ideas, which are cruder
and more uncompromising than those of the painters: -
“Morris was
a good man, a good artist and a good democrat; but he kept his art
and his democracy in water tight compartments. Instead of trying to
find out what people wanted he told them what they ought to have, and
jolly well made them take it”…. “and you are letting democracy
into art?”
“Our
business” Ledward continues, ”is to get out of doors and windows
and fireplaces all that can be got. Particularly out of walls. That’s
where these painters come in. They’re engaged in rehabilitating the
wall; making it say, ‘Lord, how flat I am!’ instead of slinking
about and trying to efface itself. After all, a picture is only the
wall swanking a bit.”
The idea was
that the wall should blossom out into pictures. Wall and pictures
should be all “of a piece – totally connected; “they should
have a clear root-run into the general soil of the room, so to speak”
“What I bar” said Ledward, “are nice little professional
gentlemen making holes in my wall with their masterpieces.”
And Bessy
Mundy has significance. Like Vaughan she is “an occasion rather
than a cause, a pivot in the queer shift of circumstances that
brought out the qualities, good or bad, of more responsible people”.
Yet she was important. She showed Sutherland, when he thought of “the
apparent inconsistency that while it would not have worried him to
hear she was sitting for the nude, it worried him to think of her
showing off clothes in a shop”, that “you might express beauty,
or try to, you must not use it.”
Beresford
expresses very well the function of the artist: - People “expand
somehow” in church, he says, and adds: “I expect that artists are
religious all the time. We expand everywhere the same as they do in
church.”
What
Sutherland says at one point bears a striking resemblance to a recent
contention of Chaplin’s, who, indeed, may almost be said to have
worked on this democratic idea which is discussed throughout the
book: -
“My notion
is that the dealer’s public doesn’t matter, and it seems to me to
be a mistake to keep up a rotten system by fighting it on its own
ground with its own weapons. Much better to disregard it and
cultivate the public that really wants the stuff.”
Sir William,
referring to the industrial world links up with the artistic world: -
“There was the aristocratic ideal, with respect to birth; then came
laissez—faire with no ideal and no respect for anything except
material possessions; and now there’s the democratic ideal, with
respect for common humanity.”
As a writer
in “The Adelphi” pointed out this month, Chaplin’s success as
an artist is due to his respect for common humanity. Another of
Saffery’s illuminating statements: “You must be content to say as
an artist what you say and feel as a man. Until then you have been
seeing and feeling in a too special, a too professional way,
exploiting life instead of expressing it.” Vaughan was exploiting
life, he was “corrupting his vision with the results of deliberate
observation.”
The same
thing comes out in conversation with Sir William Bradley’s
industrial schemes: -
“As he and
his colleagues had been exploiting the picturesque, the failure of
the natives to keep up with modern requirements, so apparently the
newer organisations of capital were exploiting the native customs in
labour.”
Finally, the
business of art, Marriott decides, is to make things plain. The
artist must “clear his conception from all that might obscure its
meaning to the hearts of humanity.”
“What a
large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of
life by him who interests his heart in everything.” – Laurence
Sterne.
Ideals
Mr. T has
been talking this morning of moulding young life. The idea is
repugnant to me. My ideal, which I endeavoured to explain to Sam-
causing him to cry out upon me and to talk about the love of the
parent for the child and ask me what I should do if I had children-
is that which I found partly expressed in ‘subsoil’ which I began
to read as soon as I came home. Loveday, the mother, has come through
passion and disillusionment to the care of a child who means
everything to her. He is the significant thing in her life. But she
has more than love, she has understanding. And consequently she is
prepared to let him go to Jericho if it is for the good of his
development. Her love is not- as I explained the love of the average
parent to Sam- a kind of inverted egotism. His ideal is to “keep
the way open” That is it! To keep the way open so that the child
may hit on beauty in his own way, in his own time. What the people
who talk about “the problem of the child mind” and how best to
divert its thought into right channels have got to consider is the
possibilities of perversity- the chance that what seems to them a
perverse path may actually be a fresh way to the truth. And to a
finer vision of truth. The lesson the older generation of every age
has to learn is that of self-effacement. As for Sam’s personal
question: I feel that strong sensuous apprehension in Win which
laughs at theories…
“His heart
was worn and sore;
He was old
before his time;
He had wasted
half his life.
Night- it was
always night,
And never a
star above:
But the ring
of a manly stroke,
The flash of
a gentle look,
The touch of
a comrade’s hand
Groping for
his on the march,
Were more to
him than the day.
At the
thought of his youth,
At the pulse
of love,
At the swoop
of death,
He sang aloud
in the dark,
And touched
the heart of the world.”
October 17th
Saturday
evening- spent memorable hour in corner of water-colour room in Leeds
Art Gallery. Stood before the 1750-1850 English painters trying to
see all that Marriott meant by “planking it down regardless.”
There were the painters Sutherland admired, Cotman, Varley, Chambers,
Cox, Peter de Wint. Cotman in particularly gave me a sense of the
turning world, a sense not only of the planet adventuring through
space: He gave life and force to something we are apt only to know as
a scientific fact. Further on- in contrast to the simplicity of
Cotman- was a forest scene by Sargent: a breathless piece of
technical brilliance; an utter tour-de-force in water-colour. And in
the next room was a dark smudge which came to life at a few yards as
a pale moon faintly illuminating a river and a few houses. Just that-
but I could have watched it all night. It was a triumphant example of
simplicity “making it plain”; “restrained” “With no form or
comeliness”, but with the beauty of Mark Rutherford. It was severe,
it allowed itself nothing; where there might have been a glimpse of
landscape came the outline of a house.
When I went
on to the Turners which had thrilled me in the week before I was no
longer interested. I’d enough to think about for one evening.
“Everything’s
a coincidence, seen properly…” – Chitterlow in ‘Kipps’. Now
there’s genius for you!
It is a happy
coincidence that this week the “Manchester Guardian” should have
published an article on David Cox, an innovator in his time, now “one
of the most easily imitable of artists”: -
“But there
is a great deal more in Cox than some obvious points of technical
manner. He has fire, force, concentration, delight in nature and in
the dramatic expressiveness of landscape, its moods of serenity,
jollity, and tragic gloom. Without being one of the greatest painters
of all, he is one of those who will not cease to count.
October 31st.
A day of
dense fog. Went up to ‘T’Marsdens’ and was coming back intent
on the notice I was going to write tonight when I spied H. stalking
through the pale, sickly yellow glimmer of the gas lamps on the other
side of the road, with his air of a tragedian, cast suddenly upon the
streets but persistently ignoring “the wrack of this dull world”.
Brought him
home and bored him, with appalling taste, by a long recitation of my
enthusiasm for Marriott. Finally he escaped again into the fog, but
not before he told me casually that Win had written an article in
this issue of the Guiseley School Magazine. He also promised casually
to let me see it, and casually he told me it was good. It has brought
on the usual sweeping feeling of my unw0rthiness, and the immediate
urge to go running and assure myself that the impossible is true…
what is this mad feeling which makes me curse myself for a dog to
look as high; which makes me sure, desperately sure, that Win can
never love me; and yet which makes me equally sure that if I found
she didn’t I would rush straight, without another thought, and
plunge into the river. Which is me- this passionate, demented,
sobbing creature, or the laggard boor, the man who lets his mind
dwell lightly on other girls, the despicable egoist who wonders if
her beauty might not prove insufficient, who in some of his moments
would almost welcome the opportunity to declare his love at an end,
and be free to take his pleasure with others. There was a time when
my love was a fine thing, a lovely thing; now it seems simply a vile
craving to have a monopoly of this beauty and brilliance; to be able
to feel, as old Clayhanger felt when he surveyed himself in relation
to the not inconsiderable business he had built up’ “I’ve
accomplished this”; I, the crawling blustering toady that I am,
have won this, the possession of a real woman, a woman as subtle and
fine as she is. Oh!
The blasted indecency of it!
Nov. 16th:
- Went to “pictures” to see Fay Compton in ‘The Happy Ending’
by Ian Hay. It was impossible slop, but there was a girl in it whose
movements were a joy, and Fay Compton- in her most beautiful moments
she reminds me of W!
Nov. 27th
Don’t know
whether to be pleased or disgusted. At the end of my essay “At the
seaside” which I intended sending to ‘The Adelphi‘ I wrote “The
art of life I suddenly realised lay in keeping constantly attuned to
the level of such experiences as had just been granted me, as a
perpetual receptiveness to beauty. The chief thing in this world was
to maintain the conception of life as an exquisite thing…”
Tonight I sit down to read Pater’s ‘Studies of the Renaissance’
which Frank Chippendale lent me on Sunday evening, and glancing at
the concluding essay I see: - “The service of philosophy, of
speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to
startle it to a life of constant and eager observation”, and then
after a magnificent passage, “to burn always with this hard,
gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
Trying to
express a real and- I thought- quite individual emotion I have
achieved – a feeble paraphrase of something said in 1868!
The review of
Percy Lubbock’s “The Region Cloud” in ‘The Manchester
Guardian’ is signed C.M. This, I think, must be Charles Marriott,
and if so it shows with what discrimination the M.G picks its
reviewers. In “Subsoil” Marriott’s Sutherland, an artist of
genius, cannot express his ideas in any other way than in painting,
and it is left to Saffery to put them into words. He shows why he
created such a character, in this review, and as before noticed, this
tiny fragment connects itself to everything of Marriott’s I have
read: -
What makes it
di9fficult to present the painter of genius in fiction is that
painters of genius, as a rule, have very little to say for
themselves. They are seen rather than heard. It is not so much that
they are inarticulate, for they will often talk a great deal and well
about subjects unconnected with their art, as that their art itself
does not lend itself to verbal discussion by a person engaged in its
practice. Pictures, like anything else, can be talked about from the
outside, but when a painter can talk about his pictorial intentions
he is generally a bad painter. He may have “ideas”, but they are
not pictorial ideas. It cannot be said that Mr. Lubbock quite
convinces us that Channon was a painter of genius- Channon himself
talks far too much about his ideas and his intentions for that, --
but he has certainly created the impression of a man of genius.
Perhaps the fairest way to put it is that Channon strikes one as a
man of genius who was a bit of a charlatan as a painter.
The theme of
the story is the gradual discovery of Channon’s vulgarity of soul
by a young worshipper, Austin, himself a man of great unrealised
powers, whom Channon takes up as a sort of survival of his own youth
and therefore capable of seeing him as he really is above the tumult
of his success. Channon’s vulgarity does not, of course, disturb
the impression of his genius, because many men of genius have been
vulgar; and one has, all through the book, the odd feeling that Mr.
Lubbock has seen the man truly but mistaken his profession – as the
reader will almost certainly mistake it in the first few chapters.
Channon ought to have been a great operatic composer- of the Wagner
type. At any rate, it is the excess of genius on the expansive side
that he represents, just as Austin represents it on the side of
caution. Austin is a little too nice for his job as a writer. It will
be seen at once that contact between these two extremes of genius is
bound to be fruitful in reactions, and Mr. Lubbock has followed them
with exquisite perception and superlative art. It is in default of
any other comparison that one says he reminds you a little of Henry
James, but there is really nothing to compare with the flexible grace
and continuous movement of his narrative. The people- Mrs. Channon,
Lady Cordelia, Bumpus, Sir James Clitherow- to call him “R.A”
seems a clumsy dotting of “i’s”- and Streeton, “a hollow
cheeked young man with a loop of black hair dipping over a large dead
eye”- are reflected in the narrative as in a moving stream rather
than presented directly. You see them in Austin’s mind, and when
they speak it is as if you overheard. The crisis comes when Austin
brings to Channon “the understanding that he doesn’t want”, and
so, with Mrs. Bewlay, the companion of Channon’s days of
struggling, he is left on the rubbish heap to muse upon the vision of
greatness now masked by “the region cloud.”- C.M.
Saturday
November 28.
Had a
restless afternoon; done nothing but walk about like a madman singing
“Marie my girl”. Wanted to sledge and couldn’t, so had to work
off energy. Wish I could canalise this nervous force, like a
waterfall used for electricity, and turn it into profitable work. At
one point I began criticising W. for spending her time rushing about
to trivial things- Sunday School meetings, Band of Hope sales and the
like-: “All her fineness is wasted”, I was saying; “she’s
restless, discontented, can’t settle to anything. Her life’s a
round of restless trivialities; it’s damnable!” Then I
remembered- I was criticising myself…
From
Marriott: - “Love doesn’t much matter: what does matter is
confidence.”
The
segregation in Otley makes for continual stupidities that would be
impossible in a community where there was freedom- the same
opportunity for intellectual contacts as there is between men. It is
humiliating to find yourself the creature of your environment with no
more real understanding, capability, or control of yourself than the
herd; a prey to cowardice and insincerity, sentimentality and
insincerity and an elementary crassness which is appalling in its
revelation of what you really are when divorced from your reading and
your fine theories – a despicable whimpering little cad whose only
means of expression is a foolish bewildered smile!
Sunday
November 29
Marriott’s
meaning when he says that the duty of the artist is to express life
and not to exploit it is clearly evident when reading ‘The
Adelphi’. Other magazines exploit life, use cleverness to twist
experience into something piquant or amusing, or-in he case of some-
uplifting; to supply interesting “copy”. ‘The Adelphi’
“planks it down regardless”- its only object the discovery of
truth and beauty. It is the difference between the amenities and the
necessities of life, between Compton Mackenzie and W.N.P Barbellion.
There is this
difference between Win and other girls. She is identified with the
beauty of the world and with all my dreams of creation and
self-expression. The others are disturbing influences: to follow them
would be to throw everything over and acknowledge my inability to
shape my own life; to fall into an abyss of futility and mediocrity.
A tragedy:
the man who has never faced the problems of sex but looked upon it as
something evil to be dodged. Inevitably he becomes prying,
dirty-minded. He stands in dark corners, a victim to a loathly
obsession, and watches women as they pass down the street. He
collects dirty stories and broods on them in secret. Sometimes his
obsession causes him to betray himself by telling one of these
stories, or raking some scandalous tit-bit out of somebody’s past;
and always when he finishes he gives an ugly, self-conscious,
apologetic snigger and says “that’s the sort of tale A tells in a
public meeting” (as if the whole thing was of merely psychological
interest to him) or “you’d never have suspected it to talk to
him!” He is strictly abstemious, upright, of tender conscience, a
chapel-goer – nasty, mean and pathetic. There is a fawning
aggressiveness in his voice when he talks to women, and, though to
some he seems the soul of honour and gentlemanly behaviour, to others
the very way he walks up the streets gives one a “creepy crawly”
sensation.
Lascelles
Abercrombie had an article in the ‘Manchester Guardian’ recently
on “Perfect Moments”. He put easily into words a vital experience
I have made several attempts to describe; and in the following
passage he gives a striking illustration of Middleton Murry’s
distinction between the conscious and the real: -
One lovely
summer evening I had bicycled down that enchanted road cut halfway up
the Malvern Hills, with the English Arcady (I mean, of course,
Herefordshire) gleaming up at me through the sunlit haze (and, by the
way, it is all downhill) and I had got off for a rest and a drink
outside that hotel which, as far as situation goes is the nearest
thing I am likely to find to the hotels of Paradise. Everything was
right for a Perfect Moment; everything, if I had been the chooser!
But I wasn’t; and the proof of it was that shambling round the
corner came three dreadful comic men- loathsome, leering men; men
beneath contempt; men with trousers made out of curtains, wearing
imbecile hats; erect vermin. One had done his face with whitewash,
one with brick dust, and one with burnt cork. They stood in front of
me, between me and that adorable Herefordshire; slouching clumsily
in, before the innumerable sunlit counterpoint of miles and miles of
visibly melodious Herefordshire hills, these comic brutes began their
music, one with a banjo, one with the bones, one with a hoarse
knowing bray: how a certain man had some painting to do on the dome
of St. Paul’s, and in the midst of his painting fell off the dome:
“and I don’t suppose he’ll paint again for months and months
and months…!”
Abysmal
vulgarity! Inconceivable idiocy! Why did I not spit in their faces,
stone them from me? Why? Because my whole being went out to them! Did
they suit my mood? Not that I was aware of; but they gave me what
sunset over Herefordshire could not give me- they gave me a Perfect
Moment.”
“Young
Felix” by Frank Swinnerton.
There is real
creation in this book, the creation of a family and through them of a
new and fascinating beauty. Every sentence rings true and contributes
to the impression of a complete, harmonious whole; always there is
life, but life subservient- naturally and inevitably subservient- to
the general plan. How marvellously true, for instance, how real a
creation is Aunt Julie; yet justifiable as her inclusion would be
from this fact alone, she is used merely to bring out the
understanding and sympathy between Felix and his mother. And who but
Mr. Swinnerton could make us believe in Estelle with her one fatal
obsession? Again, a living character who has a definite function in
the general development. “Young Felix is a piece of life, raw and
bleeding; there is no twisting or plotting; and yet this piece of raw
life is shown to be beautiful. That is the test of art: a work which
keeps you saying all the time – “This is true, this is true, this
is true”, and at the same time “This is beautiful, this is
beautiful…”
I fall in
love with authors, very much as a man falls in love with a woman.
Times come when I feel I must- that it is necessary for my spiritual
existence almost for me- to renew my acquaintance with them. Just now
after leaving Marriott alone for a few weeks- I have an urgent desire
to read another of his books- I should like to be able to get hold of
one just now; very much as at times I feel I can’t live another
minute without seeing W. It is a sort of compulsive restlessness, a
fever of the blood…
“Martin
Arrowsmith”
Great music,
as I said once to S,- or perhaps I had better say Beethoven’s
music- sends me off on egoistic thought wanderings of my own. I see a
dazzling hazardous path in front of me with truth dancing just ahead
asking to be seized and expressed in terms of my past experience; the
characters of forgotten friends take on a sudden beauty and
significance- so that each of them might become the subject of a
novel; and the music becomes intolerable.
I had thought
I was unique in this feeling; hat other people in the audience were
taking an intelligent interest in the music and following the theme
of the composer but I’ve just come across this passage in this
glorious novel: - “Martin found himself in a confusion of little
chairs and vast gilded arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with
programmes in heir laps, unromantic musicians making unpleasant
noises below and, at last, incomprehensible beauty, which made for
him pictures of hills and deep forests, then suddenly became achingly
long-winded. He exalted, I’m going to have it all, the fame of Max
Gottlieb- I mean his ability- and the lovely music and lovely women-
Golly! I’m going to be big things. And see the world… Will this
piece never quit?’”
Sinclair
Lewis seizes things so swiftly and unerringly; and manages so
triumphantly to express himself without using woolly conventional
phraseology. Ever since last summer I’ve been trying to put on
paper the feeling- well until now I can’t say what feeling!; but
Lewis expresses it quite simply- so damned
simply- in one short passage: - “Climbing
all day long, he breathed deep, his eyes cleared of worry, and one
day he experienced a miracle. He was atop a pole” (doing telegraph
work) “and suddenly, for no clear reason, his eyes opened and he
saw, as though he had just awakened he saw that the ‘prairie’ was
vast, that the sun was kindly on rough pasture and ripening wheat, on
the old horses, and on his red-faced jocose companions; he saw that
the meadow larks were jubilant, and blackbirds shining by little
pools, and with the living sun all life was living. Suppose the Angus
Duers and Irving Watterses were tight tradesman, What of it? ‘I’m
here!’ he gloated.”
And now I
remember, I once did make some sort of a shot at it in print. And a
generous person thanked me for “putting it into words”. I mouthed
and talked vaguely about El Dorado. But this! Here is the simplicity
of genius. How damned ignominious it is to be second-rate!
Lewis has a
marvellous compulsive way with language; his mind swoops
instinctively on the creative word. For instance:- “The frigid edge
of the stone sill bit
his hands…”; Martin twitched
with jealousy”; “Lena and Miss Byers bounced
with admiration of the hero”; and two finely realised longer
passages:- “He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were
flashes of fire. His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had
said or heard that night, till round his twisted body there was
fevered shouting”; and that terrible journey with Madeline when he
was going to confront her with Leora, “His half-hour journey with
Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressive thing, like a
tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through each moment as it
came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at the same time.
While he was practising the tactful observation he was going to
present ten minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he
had said two minutes before.”
I feel
tonight that I have an original contribution to make to the art of my
generation: that there is in my experience something great enough to
demand a life’s work for its expression, and demand an expression
as noble and individual as Hardy’s. But I know that this expression
would mean the creation of characters true to something beyond life,
passionate symbols of truth; and that the creation of these
characters would involve an agony from which I would be lucky to
escape with the loss merely of every ounce of vitality and not my
reason. I also believe, at this moment, that with Win I can
accomplish all this, but we shall both go through hell. I want to go
to her now. To kneel to her. To say “My dear; can you see things
above his life altogether? Can you see magnificent creation?” Next
Thursday I shall probably see her; and walk down the street with her;
and squeeze her hand foolishly, and kiss her perfunctorily at the
corner. And if I told her this it would all seem false, and I should
feel I was making it up. But by God! Its true and fine and
attainable- and a challenge to my ordinary, anaemic abominable self.
Another
instance of Lewis’s imaginative use of words: - speaking of the
people in a ship, “They bought from coffee-coloured natives who
came alongside in nervous small boats.”
February 20th
1926
Had to go up
to Farnley Hall for the meet of the Bramham Moor hounds. While in the
field from which they started, surrounded by all this crassness I
heard larks, and saw about a dozen of them fluttering above me. I had
a moment of pure ecstasy such as I never remember before. I had no
desire- as usually comes in moments of beauty- to put what I felt
into words. It was very heaven, and nothing but the transcendental
language of a Blake could have expressed it. It was one of those
moments when to utter the words “My God!” is not blasphemy. It
was the exquisite thrill of “a new created earth.” I mentioned
the larks casually to some people near me. They had not noticed them,
and were somewhat impatient at my distracting their attention from
the matter at hand with such irrelevances.
March 4th
How the
machinery of life makes slaves of the very best men- of Dad for
instance! Years of ceaseless work were behind his remark when he came
into my room tonight. I was in a chair near the fire reading- for the
first time for several weeks; trying to win back into the world of
“fine thinking” after soul destroying drudgery. He looked in at
the door and saw I was not busy with the reviews for next week’s
paper, as he would have expected. “If you’re not working” he
said, in a worried tone, “I should get off to bed”…
Win is the
honest one of us two, and I lack the courage to make hers bear fruit
in increased understanding.
I am
discerning a deeper and deeper love of the countryside, in that I
find my complete fulfilment in walking out into it. Writing about it
is mere embroidery and of no consequence; but I should like- I think-
to take Win with me. Would she be able to share my satisfaction and
understand my feeling without the embarrassment of words? My
expression of it simply irritates her as commonplace and unworthy of
the me which used to exist- he is gone I’m afraid, except as a
hardly held memory- in her imagination. But whatever the expression,
I believe the emotion is ultimate and eternal.
I want time
with Win, anything but these sneaking furtive moments. Then, if she
found me unsatisfactory, I think I should be content to let her go.
March 7th.
Have just read “The Pot Boils” by Storm Jameson: a queer lump of
half-baked stuff, showing the influence of Turgeniev, Wells and
others, and photographing the pseudo-clever exchange of platitudes
which passes for discussion among a certain type of University
student. It strikes me as the novel of a fine writer in embryo, who
will smile at this afterwards. Here and there, as you stumble
through, you come across bits of real experience; and towards the end
the writing suddenly drops its slovenly gait and begins to step out.
There are innumerable evidences that the writer’s imagination has
begun to work at full pressure. The first instance is where Athenais
wanders off, remembering her own lover Thurlow (with whom she has
quarrelled) after witnessing the scene between Carey and the wife who
has thwarted his purposes and married him: “Richard, my dear, my
dear, I would have cared for you better than that… oh Richard, I
want you so”; she wanders a long way, and then comes this, a piece
of true artistic perception:- “The road stretched away and lost
itself in the shadow of sleeping houses beyond them, heavy clouds
swept over the edge of the far hill. The sky between was a deep clear
amethyst, veiled and barred by the clouds that lay across the moon
and drew together in the shifting darkness of the zenith. Scattered
lights beckoned across the distance: the trees were blacker shadows
in the darkness. The wind stirring her hair bore in its train vague
suggestion of dim stars. Athenais lifted her
head. “After all- one lives.” She spoke
aloud, though noone heard her.
And when the
lovers find each other again after the estrangement Thurlow says: -
“I wouldn’t care, I wouldn’t care if I’d found you again all
hard and spoiled and tired.” These natural little incidents tell
us all we need to know about the love between these two: it is
beautifully handled. Another is when Thurlow, despising himself says,
“I’m not the new Messiah, Thea, I guess you’ve got an
ineffectual sort of a lover…” and Thea replies- “You can be
John the Baptist”, she said and her voice trembled.
Her
description too improves as she warms to her work. “Beyond the
unseen fields trains met and passed, crawling out of each other like
clumsy glow worms: a goods train went clanking along its invisible
length.”
There are
pieces- inserted snippets- which must have been put in from a note
book. One day for instance she saw G.K.C in the British Museum, went
home excitedly and described him. Later she fits this piece in when
Thurlow is reading in the Museum Library: - “a giant of a man with
a shock of thick black hair, and shaped in front like a bow window,
was approaching as near as he might to the Index. Thurlow recognised
a well known poet and journalist. ‘some one told me he was dying’.
Then the thought struck him that the poet had been unable to get
through the doors of death, and he laughed aloud.”
Much of the
work is pure Wells, though the writer sneers at him. Here is a
typical passage: “I wonder what life was driving at when she
evolved me. There must be some use for the clever incapable. But I
want to know what this blasted life force was getting at in me- does
it run into blind alleys and leave things unfinished? Look at me,
with all my intellect, all my imagination- useless- like a heap of
machinery got together by a man who’s forgotten the motive power.
What shall I do? – What shall I do, oh God, to keep out of the
little wary ways of thinking, the little stealthy schemes? …”
(The dots are hers.)
And she
introduces- not inaptly- a figure closely resembling Kipps and Mr.
Polly- Posket by name, and introduces him by a superb Wellsian stroke
into a meeting of middle class dilettantes called to discuss the
proposals of the Nation Committee for Social Reform.
One fresh
piece of technique is worth noting: it is the way she will suddenly
switch back through the ages and give you he whole history, as it
were, of an emotion so that it seems to come swimming up to the
present. It is a new method of argument by pictures, and is very
effective. There is nothing new in her sociology.
It’s
disgraceful not knowing the birds by their calls. I passed one the
other morning which paused between each trill like a poet thinking of
one fine line and then another.
Tuesday
Imbecility.
We quarrelled
on Sunday over a friend of hers of whom I disapprove. She told me she
wouldn’t allow me to dictate to her whom she must choose for her
friends and left me. I planned to hurt her, to say caddish things to
her, to behave like a silly shop-girl and cut her dead. Today I saw
her on ahead and hurried to overtake her. She hurried to keep on in
front of me, but as she could not take completely to her heels in the
middle of the street I soon caught her up. She treated me with cold
politeness, exactly as I deserved. I kept up a show of proud
indifference until I got away. But she’s got me grovelling. Damn
it, I love her!
Sunday.
Love is
something fine which you grasp at intervals and try to hold, sex is a
loathly obsession from which you struggle to escape. Yet the two are
so much alike: identical yet opposite. Being in love is like carrying
on a desperate struggle with a beautiful but dangerous evil animal;
suddenly it lies down quiet, and you, watching, see in it a beauty
you have never seen before and could never have seen in anything
else; you lift up your head in happiness and relief, and the next
minute it is tearing at your vitals. The beauty, you say, is love,
the beast is sex; but they are both part of the same animal.
If only I
could not believe in love… that always seems to have been my
trouble: I pursue scepticism as others seem to pursue faith. But to
get things simple; to be able to say, for instance, “love consists
of friendship and sex attraction: friendship is valuable, sex
attraction is merely a blind natural force to be ignored as having no
intellectual or spiritual significance. I am attracted by that girl,
but it means nothing, this girl is my friend, she shall have my whole
heart, we’ll build together and incidentally satisfy damfool nature
by having children”. But that’s nothing but stupid dogmatising –
it’s just part of the truth but only part; sometimes it seems true;
at another time you feel that you really love her you would merely
designate “friend” that- you reach your complete
apotheosis in her; at yet another you hanker after the other girl, or
other girls in the street even, wonder if they hold some fine secret
you will miss by “conventional faithfulness”, or even- on the
lower plane- whether you can’t enjoy your adventures and
pleasurable experiences and come back to your true mate more content,
a free man who knows what is significant and what sham, what he needs
and what he can deny himself: Always, or nearly always- of course you
are the rank egoist. But then, how are you to know what is for the
ultimate good of either of you?
All this
because W has been honest and courageous in the few minutes I had
with her tonight and that has helped me to be honest with myself-
though not entirely with her.
Only one
thing is certain: that is that spiritual values are what matter and
that no useless pleasure can be sought or necessary pain avoided in
the search for them. No writing which sets out to state a case is of
any worth because there are no rules of conduct except what a man
knows- in himself- to be right. Some- or perhaps I should say one,
for Tchehov is the only one I know- writers have faced the question
and have almost expressed the truth (if we can but see it), but most
writers, of the very highest distinction, refuse to face it and
sentimentalise. There is a time in life when, unless his spiritual
growth is to be stopped, a man, (in usually youth, for this comes
early) has to say “I don’t believe in these superstitions; I’ve
finished with this stupid travesty of religion.” The same moment
has to come in love, the other hard thing to which people usually pay
lip service. It’s always true: you can only really save your soul
by losing the whole world. You must see life as a tale told by an
idiot…signifying nothing”, before you can appreciate its
exquisite possibilities.
Sinclair
Lewis’s descriptions of Leora in Martin Arrowsmith: -
“He was
always making discoveries about the observations of life which she
kept incubating in her secret little head”
“He and
Leora depended on each other’s loyalty and liking and certain
things in his life were settled forever.”
Leora
married: -
“Rarely
saying much about herself Leora had developed an intense mute little
life of her own. She belonged to a bridge club, and she went solemnly
by herself to the movies, but her ambition was to know France and it
engrossed her… “Oh, I would like to tramp just once between high
plastered walls, and come to a foolish little café and watch the men
with funny little red sashes and floppy blue pants go by. Really do
you think maybe we could?”
She knew what
Martin was, and she kept him to it: -
“You belong
to a laboratory finding out things not advertising them. Are you
going on for the rest of your life, stumbling into respectability and
having to be dug out again? Will you never admit you’re a
barbarian?”
“It’s
fierce being married. I did expect I’d have to follow you out in
the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a pillar of the
community.”
And her
wonderful gay courage! –
“He felt an
instant and complete comradeship with her, a relation free from the
fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeleine. He knew that this
girl was of his own people. If she was jocular, unreticent, she was
also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she
was capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic.”
“Her hair
was silky and honey coloured, her eyes were blue and her face
childish.”
“Lena could
accept, accept things and people as facts”. She was always untidy,
like the girl in Tchehov’s story- “she went about with hooks
unfastened and hair like a crows nest.
She will bear
comparison with the greatest heroines in literature; yet, compared
with all you know and feel about her at the end of the novel- or
rather at her tragic death before the end- very little is said about
her. She is present all the time, the most significant figure in the
book, yet she is seldom mentioned. She is like Win ‘in’ a
conversation, taking very little part, but saying the one thing which
really matters.
Commercial
enterprise is neatly summed up by H.M Tomlinson in “The Sea and the
Jungle”, a magnificent book: -
“Some
strangers idea of gain; profit out of a necessity not his, filled by
other men unknown to him.”
His
reflections in England from the heart of the tropics are interesting:
- “That land where even a reward has been instituted, as for merit,
for uncomplaining endurance under life-long hardships, and called an
old age pension.”
And amid the
luxuriance of the jungle he thinks of the poor wretch in Merry
England, where the riches of the earth are not broadcast largess as I
see they are here, but are stacked on each side of the road and
guarded by police, leaving to him but he inclement highway, with
nothing but Lord Rosebery’s advice to help him keep he wind out of
the holes in his trousers; that benefit, and the bleak consideration
that he can swink all day for a handful of beans, or go without. What
is prudence in that man? It is his goodwill for the police. To be
blue nosed and meek at heart, and to hoard half the crust of your
stinted bread, is to blaspheme the King of Glory. Some men will touch
their crowns to Carnegie in heaven.
“Thrift and
abstinence! They began to look the most snivelling of sins as I
watched, with spacious leisure, the next percussion of gigantic
trees, that superb wild which did not arise from such niggard and
flinty maxims. Frugality and prudence! That is to regard the means of
death in life, the fallen and projecting bones of a warped existence,
as good men dwell in courage, motherhood, rebellion and May-time, and
other proofs of vitality and growth.”
People of
Hanley, Bethnal Green, Otley and other respectable places, he feels,
would get the “generative idea that is wanted, a revelation, a
vision”: – “The world would expand as they looked. They would
get the dynamic suggestion. In vain afterwards would the monopolists
and the superior persons chant patriotic verse to drown the noise of
the chain forging at the Westminster foundry. Not the least good
that. The folk would not hear. Their minds would be absent and
outwards, not locked within to huddle with cramped and respectful
thoughts. They would not start instinctively at the word of command.
They would begin with dignity and assurance to compass their own
affairs, and in an enormous way; and they would make hardly a sound
as they moved forward, and they would have uplifted and shining
eyes.”
They are
doing it already in this general strike “against the Constitution,
yes and civilisation itself”- to quote the Capitalist press-; and-
the glory of it! – they are keeping cool, dignified, and preserving
their sense of proportion and humour, while the other side shrieks
hysterically about “preserving the freedom of the Press” – what
a phrase when you think of what controls the press; Rothermere,
Beaverbrook, Lloyd George, Charles Ogden, Holy Moses!- and showing
“that this great nation will not submit to the dictation of any
class or section”. You can see the difference by comparing the
Government’s “British Gazette”, full of appeals to the
credulity of that section of the public which stands in awe of the
words Constitution, Parliament, Law and so forth; tame domestic
animals brought up so efficiently to the whip that they don’t know
when it is being applied, full of appeals to the respectable, he
cringing, “the right-thinking” and full also of incitements to
the imbeciles and hooligans, more commonly known as “patriots”
and “loyal citizens”, who welcome opportunities for displaying
their valour by running down unarmed pickets with heavy
motor-lorries, proclaiming that the only thing to do is to “shoot
the buggers” and generally determining to break the strike; by
comparing this frantic “rag” with the “British Worker” which
counsels the strikers to try to make everyone smile, to take long
walks into the country and so make good use of this opportunity to
gain health and vigour, not to stand about the streets “swapping
rumours”, this is bad in every way, and not to countenance violence
or disorder of any kind: in other words be men, with clear heads,
courage and resolution, dignity and independence. I think Tomlinson
must have written those instructions. Either Tomlinson or Cunninghame
Graham or one of the few “men of might and breeding” left in this
grovelling, panic stricken generation.
Sir John
Simon, one of the leading purists in the country, as the “Telegraph”
gratuitously informs us- has been saying that in coming out as they
have done the strikers have rendered themselves liable by Law. As if
the law meant anything or was worth a moments consideration unless it
stood for justice. If I am drowning and I see a chance of scrambling
ashore, am I to allow myself to go under because I see a sign saying
“Trespassers will be prosecuted”?
The
Government say that this is an attempt to overthrow Constitutional
Government, what it looks more like is a calculated attempt by the
Government to crush the workers’ movement.
A section of
this so-called government has been busy for months, training men,
organising O.M.S, enrolling special constables and getting everything
ready to break any attempt at a strike. They knew- this section,
Winston, Birkenhead and that angel-child “Jix” with his addresses
to Bands of Hope, Free Church Conferences and the like- they knew
that if they could lead the T.U.C on, while the guileless Stanley-
their puppet and catspaw- carried on negotiations for a “peaceful
settlement”, could make them walk unsuspecting into the Government
parlour with the long discussed threat of a General Strike, and then
suddenly at the eleventh hour play their devastating, well hidden
trump card and announce that the strike was an unconstitutional act
aiming at the overthrow of democratic government, they would be able
to break off negotiations and leave the T.U.C with no means of saving
its face but to plunge and hazard everything on its last resort- The
General Strike. The workers by hat time would have committed
themselves too far to go back. There would be a struggle and with all
the sober law abiding citizens helping them to avert a national
catastrophe and save the British Constitution Jix and co. would be
able to put back the Labour movement for the next twenty years and
quash all talk of nationalisation. It is the most superbly brilliant
piece of political villainy in English History, a tribute to the
genius of its originators. The Government can, as a Labour member
said today: “smile and smile and be a villain”. Now they are in
the enviable position of having all the pillars of the community on
their side, and are able to arrest for “seditious talk” anyone
who can see straight and is not afraid to say what he sees. Meanwhile
the Archbishop Of Canterbury will preach on the present deplorable
situation on Sunday. And the Editor of the “Wharfedale Observer”
who prides himself justly on his fair mindedness and sympathy towards
Labour can write in all sincerity:- “An organised attack is being
made on Constitutional Government. It is therefore the duty of all
good citizens to support the Government in their attempt to maintain
the priceless privileges of freedom and liberty. So far the spirit of
the nation has been magnificent.” Yes, it’s devilish clever!
Now, after a
week of deadlock, “the commonsense of this great People has once
more prevailed.” In other words a magnificent heroic gesture on the
part of the workers has come to nothing. The Government, headed by
that great Englishman, that model of British honesty and fair
dealing, Stanley Baldwin, pleaded that they wished to negotiate on
the lines of the report, the whole report and nothing but the report
but were prevented by the General Strike. So finally, at tremendous
risk- though how far they were compelled to it by the defection of
gullible trade unionists it is hard to discover- The T.U.C withdrew
their notices and the Government newspapers began to crow over “the
dismal failure of the General Strike”. Later, the Government
issues, according to promise, a plan for the settlement of the coal
dispute ostensible based on the report which the wicked trade
unionists were accused of unwillingness to accept. In this plan,
however, the sting in the capitalist side is conveniently and
unostentatiously removed; no mention is made of one of the chief
recommendations of the Commission, the purchase of royalties by the
State and the question of national or district agreements on the
settlement of wages is burked. All of which means that owing to the
“patriotism” of volunteers, the patent “honesty and sincerity”
of Mr. Baldwin- a bigger godsend to the Conservative party than
Dizzy’s great idea of the British Empire! - and, if we are to
believe the Prime Minister, “the commonsense of the great British
People”, the miners are being asked, not only to accept the report
of a Government Commission, whose proposals are naturally timid and
of dubious use, but to accept this report modified to suit the
capitalist interest. But then, as one of our poets reminded us in the
“Times” on the morning of the Strike, we must put “England”
before the welfare of our own petty selves. Remember that, miners!
But don’t ask what is “England”? Otherwise there will be
another great crusade to protect our sacred Constitution and our
leader writers will be informing us that there are grave signs of the
circulation of insidious revolutionary propaganda among the miners,
who must be shown- at whatever cost- that the government will not
submit to the brow-beating of any one “class or section” Again
“commonsense”- “whose other name” says Thomas Burke, “is
fear”- will triumph; and again choirs will chant on the wireless
those immortal lines of Blake:-
“I will not
cease from mental strife,
Nor will my
sword rest in my hand
Till we have
built Jerusalem
In England’s
green and pleasant land”.
The uplift!
Hell!!!
Oh, how I
wallow in myself! That’s why I like Beethoven. Tonight in Farnley
Wood W. got behind a large beautiful chestnut tree, with he setting
sun at her back, and for one wild moment she was- oh, all the usual
romantic nonsense- but intensely lovely, and vivid and fey and
maddening. I had a top-coat on, a top coat which always makes me feel
like an insurance agent- and a silly, quakerish plant pot of a hat;
but at that instant I was Pan. I seized her and held her absolutely
captive. My God! That’s what a man is made for; and what he
actually does is put on his Sunday clothes and promenade sedately,
and raise his hat to others also promenading sedately, in between
snatching furtive, silly glances at his girl, or else looking bored
and wondering what the hell to say. Of course he kisses her in the
front passage on a night: and occasionally escapes into the parlour
to “make love”: the most odious and unnatural thing invented by
civilisation. And finally, when he has saved enough money to buy her,
he gets married- also very sedately and in extra special Sunday
clothes; and they spend their first night together in a stuffy
seaside lodging house and have breakfast next morning to an
accompaniment of sniggers and suggestive remarks from fellow holiday
makers. This is the hideous travesty which civilisation has made of
love. This is respectability. Making what should be a glorious act
into a snivelling abominable thing; the thing expected of you under
the circumstances.
When I had
finished kissing her, W. said, “I feel dreadfully dishevelled”.
Imagine, what Pan felt, suddenly reminded of his plant pot hat and
Prudential coat! My bubble was pinched. I could have left her without
a word. Instead I began arguing about Charlie Chaplin whom I admire
and she regards as crude and vulgar. When we reached home we were
quarrelling loudly and I had behaved caddishly.
Later I came
home and remembering the noble lines of her cheeks, her chin and her
neck began to bellow “Annie Laurie” with canine emphasis and
conviction.
“…She did
not fly.
Nor started
at his advance.
She looked,
as when infinite thirst
Pants pausing
to bless the springs,
Refreshed,
unsated. Then first
He trembled
with the awe of things
He had seen,
and he did transfer,
Divining and
doubting in turn,
His reverence
unto her…
For he said:
a glad vision art thou!
And she
answered him Thou to me!
As men utter
a vow.”
When I first
read this, years ago, I thought it was marvellous poetry. Now I know
it is merely accurate description.
“Girls are
fine” I would half murmur to myself in my last two years at school
as I leaned out of my window, and in imagination I saw myself on a
Lovelacean search: -
“But I must
search the black and fair,
Like skilful
minerallists, that sound
For treasure
in unploughed up ground.”
In every girl
I approached was a glorious possibility, which had made me tremble
with expectation, and to pass one without getting a glimpse of her
face seemed an awful irrevocable act.
It is two
years since I first blurted out my admiration to W., and I suppose at
the time I thought and said that hers was the supreme beauty for me,
but this fact thrust itself upon me anew- and somehow differently-
the other night. It was- stating it without hyperbole- quite a simple
discovery; one of my sudden discoveries of the obvious which excite
me and amuse W: it meant that W. completely satisfied me, actually
fulfilled the promise of my early dreams- in a word that I was not
merely excited by her, but that I loved her and could be faithful to
her. It all came to me with a miraculous joy such as only children
seem to experience.
The next
night when I met her I wanted to tell her all about it, but of course
it was impossible: it would all seem so trite and silly to her, like
the babbling of an idiot. As I walked alongside her, and realised
still more what it meant. How lovely she was, lovely in every moment.
She was lovely when tired and plain, just as much as when sparkling
and radiant, lovely because she was she.
That’s
feeble, and foolish, and it’s been said many times before, but it
contains the essence- though they might chip the surface and polish
it, and reveal its beauty by throwing light on it from fresh angles.
I don’t think anyone will discover anything further about love:
there’s the true diamond.
Easter 1926
There is
nothing more tiresome to me than shop-window gazing, yet when W. and
I passed our time before the theatre in that way tonight, it seemed
the most fascinating occupation in the world. After the play, when
the band struck up, I was so happy I could have gone dancing over the
top of the world.
Tonight is
one of those we shall remember, at the time when we look back and say
“when we were young.”
There are a
few books- Gilbert Cannon’s “Pink Roses”, Wells’ “Ann
Veronica” (a curious admission everyone would say), Bennett’s
“Clayhanger”, Middleton Murry’s “The things we are”,
Meredith’s “Richard Feverel”, Sinclair Lewis’s “Martin
Arrowsmith”, Tomlinson’s “The Sea and the Jungle”, G.W
Montague’s “The Right Place”, Belloc’s “The Path to Rome”,
Tchehov’s “The Sea Gull”- which I want to “grapple to my soul
with hoops of steel”. These are the sincere, red-hot expression of
the men who wrote them. Behind each is a man, passionate for truth:
and they make life a splendid thing. You live in those moments when
you- an insignificant speck, appalled by your utter ineffectiveness-
realise the world as your parish. And you realise this, see things in
their true perspective, simply when you discover yourself at grips
with something greater than the world; when you read Tchehov, for
instance, and become suddenly- gloriously- aware that in the actual
moulding of your own little life, in the mere act of living, you are
experiencing a “high adventure”, grasping at possibilities of
perfection- of courage, loyalty, endurance, love- which a god might
be proud of; that nothing matters but the truth within you and your
struggle to be faithful to it. When you reach this, you have suddenly
seen the wisdom of God, that all experience is good, and ultimately
good; good of itself and not good merely in what it teaches us and
what it leads us to. This knowledge makes you understand the sayings
of Jesus- as the craven, superstitious minds of the orthodox could
never understand them: “The kingdom of heaven is within you”; “in
your patience ye shall win your souls”; I came that ye might have
life and have it more abundantly.”
I know all
this, and I know that this is what Middleton Murry is trying to get
at with his “mystical conception”- I quote W. – of the oneness
of literature and religion. It can only be expressed through art,
because only by its exemplification can people be made to see it;
tell it them baldly and they will say you are talking nonsense.
“To the
young people”, says Gilbert Cannon, “and the revolution in their
souls.” He understands it too. At least, (to continue) he
understands part of it. I have been turning over the pages of “Pink
Roses” in my excitement and I come across this: - “The splendid
folly which clings to illusions until one day they become reality”.
That’s getting warm, but the truth- the astonishing truth- is that
illusion and disillusion are all part of the same splendid reality,
and are both equally significant and equally right.
All this exuberance (to continue, once more) is merely the afterglow
of a marvellous day with W. I feel tonight- as I have felt before-
that I am in vital touch with what the greatest spirits have felt;
that I know what people like Keats and Shakespeare meant; that I can
move mountains; and that the moving of mountains is not of the
slightest consequence. And all because I have sat with her in a
lovely wood and walked with her, hot and sticky and tired- on a
motor-ridden road, had tea with her in a lavender curtained café,
gone with her to the “pictures”, and come home with her on a
crowded, suffocating bus. And then- the dear- she said “Oh,
William, I’ve cost you such a lot today!”
Whenever I
begin to put W. out of my reach, to think of her as the Madonna of
the Magnificent or something equally high and holy,; or when- on the
other hand- I lose my temper, call her cruel things and set her down
as a mean-minded little female, I’ll just think of the babyish,
adorable outline of her back which I noticed for the first time,
(incredible though it seems) tonight. Then my sense of humour and
proportion will be restored. I shall simply cry “oh, you lovely
kid” and my embarrassment will disappear. It isn’t the kind of
back which tickles your sense of property and makes you talk about
“my wee Mary”, it’s a comradely back with fun in it; the kind
of back- I think- John Shand’s wife had.
I came across
her hat in the drawing room today when I went in to play the piano.
Immediately my heart beat fast and she was with me just as if she had
come up suddenly from behind and put her hands over my eyes. It is in
these moments of untrammelled meeting in another dimension that all
self-consciousness and incoherence go, and you can really tell your
love. I wanted to go up town, on the chance of seeing her, but I
didn’t go and later it came on to rain. Afterwards I felt sure she
had been waiting for me and I had betrayed her confidence.
I’m amused
to find myself a Puritan. I danced for the first time tonight- a
fox-trot with Win’s breast against me and Win’s eyes just below
mine. As I walked home I felt I could never dance with anyone else:
it would be sacrilege.
If you can
appreciate Tchehov, Marriott, Murry, it shows that you are alive.
They do not deal with the Mechanical but with living experience which
you can only understand as it relates itself to your own. This from
Murry, for instance, means nothing to you unless you have been- or
are capable of being- deeply moved yourself: -
“The only
warrant for breaking through the defences of another personality was
the deep determination never to have done with it, to carry it with
one for ever, to find oneself through it, and in it.”
“The taking
of a wife or the taking of a friend was an eternal act; if it were
less it was a treachery, a degradation.”
If time is
nothing to God- as it is to us in our happiest moments- and all
outward seeming is mere seeming, could not the whole cosmos be but an
imperfect idea, a thought in the mind of God, a first dim, but
growing conception of some ideal beauty to be, like the initial
occurrence of a creative idea in the mind of an artist which blossoms
later into the perfect novel or poem? Or is the world the imperfect
expression of a much finer idea: God’s first novel, so to speak,
beautiful, promising wonderful things but crude and imperfect?
The first
speculation seemed to me, at the time I wrote it down, a likely
explanation of things. I was delighted with the thought that man was
responsible for the full fruition of God’s idea; that man was
really God (he was in the Father and the Father was in him), and as
man struggled upward to a realisation of himself, of his highest
possibilities, he was fulfilling not only himself but God. Music,
literature, art were only valuable as they stood for the living idea
which was God.
Genius.
A fragment of Walter de la Mare: -
“Twilight
leaned mirrored in a pool
Where willow
boughs swept green and hoar
Silk-clear
the water calm and cool
Silent the
weedy shore.”
Monkhouse’s
Marmaduke: -
Monkhouse’s
attitude is fine and sincere, yet the result is somehow hopeless and
ineffective. You feel that he sees clearly- and that the sum of his
seeing is nothingness. With all his courage and subtlety Monkhouse
seems to lack vision- there is a note of exasperation in all his
work. Yet how fine he is! Worth all the muzzy idealists. Perhaps when
I read “Marmaduke” I wanted Monkhouse to settle for me all the
troubles to which he has given such serenely competent expression in
this novel. I am Marmaduke (There speaks the egoist), I wrote about a
year ago: - “I have become wholly absorbed in life, in the mere
attempt to live, so that I can do nothing but puzzle and dream… I
should feel- strangely enough- that I was wasting my time if I
attacked some definite work. I sometimes feel immensely destructive.
I shall go through life spreading ruin, always acutely miserable, yet
feeling that all situations and experiences are valuable and
significant, material for the creation of beauty. Then comes this
novel, and I find I haven’t even he consolation of being unique.
“Prose
fiction is the only vital and comprehensive literary form today” –
Middleton Murry.
Middleton
Murry on Shakespeare
“The writer
creates out of his deepest experience. Deep, deep it must go if his
work is to outlast the ages, for by his power of reawakening deep
experience in us alone he lives. The bounds of the twilight world we
call the real change, with the centuries even with the years, but the
depths below, and the heights above remain for ever. And the height a
man can compass depends upon the depth to which he can descend.”
How Tchehov
shows us that a man is in love with his wife: -
“That which
in her words was just seemed to him uncommon, extraordinary; and that
which differed from his own convictions was in his view naïve and
touching”.
Middleton
Murry on Tchehov
“If we are
writers we think for a vain moment of assimilating Tchehov’s
method, and the method slips through our fingers like quicksilver: we
try to fix it and we are left with a handful of airy negations- no
plot, no ornament, no construction, no lies- and the smiling despair
of this conclusion that if we want to write like him we must be like
him. To see his world is not, after all, merely a question of opening
our eyes but of opening other eyes than ours…
All he wrote
appears as a function of all he was.”
“The
simplicity of Tchehov is very wise and very old, it is an achievement
wrung out of much knowledge and surpassing inward honesty. His
letters are simple, the attitude of which they are a natural product
is simple, but we sense in that simplicity a complete knowledge of
all the complexities with which the modern consciousness is laden.”
“The
intellectual consciousness of – say- James Joyce is impotent. Murry
shows for the apprehension of the eternal livingness of life which
was Tchehov’s supreme faculty. That is the phrase- that gets it
absolutely for those who know- “the eternal livingness of life.”
“There was
a moment when Tchehov possessed this knowledge” Murry goes on. “He
said he was glad at 28 he did not write a novel two or three years
before. ‘I can just imagine what a lot of good material I would
have spoiled.’ In addition to plenty of material and talent one
wants to be mature for one thing; and for another the feeling of
personal freedom is essential.’ Writers acquire this at the cost of
their youth.” They must win “independent self-existence” if
they are to fulfil their function as “the pioneers of
civilisation”.
Tchehov’s
work is “a mystery of simplicity with depths of understanding. It
is as though he understood not only that life was so, but also that
it must be so, as though he knew a secret.” Murry with that “it
must be so” is wandering away from the truth; he means “that it
was so and that it was rightly so” which is less capable of
misinterpretation. He goes on: “We look and listen and we feel that
we are trembling on the brink of a knowledge so incredible that it
cannot be… we are overwhelmed by a single feeling which, when we
try to hold it before our eyes, splinters like light through a
crystal into contradictory emotions: laughter, tears, pity, love and
one knows not what infinite and unfamiliar tenderness from our
depths.”
We feel this
too, momentarily, before life- and it is Tchehov’s triumph that he
can seize on these moments and somehow crystallise their magic into
words. There is nothing- again Murry’s explanation- mysterious
about this: he does it by complete faithfulness- he gets down all the
circumstances, and the magic, as in life, comes of itself. One
returns to Charles Marriott: “Plank it down regardless”.
Saturday: -
It was stupid
going to the play tonight. I knew from my attitude to the people on
the bus- the melancholy sweet man in the corner with the negligible
wife and the melancholy sweet little boy beside him; the young man
opposite who took us all into his heart and his confidence as he
looked round the bus before pouring his radiance of love once more on
the girl who sat cool and composed beneath it as if under a spiritual
sunshade (her self possession spoke of experience; and she seemed to
say “yes, they’re always like this at this stage, now watch me
manage him”; she was like a skilful cricketer at the top of his
form) – I knew from the way these played on me like the bow on a
violin that my brain was working at its best- a best as good (though
different) from that of Bernard Shaw, and therefore to be spent in
life, in creation, and not in listening to one of his plays, however
good.
Reading an
essay to Win: I knew for the first time what was bad and what good in
it. Where there was- as about twice- a piece of genuine imagination,
something actually felt and caught, she accepted it, and where it was
pseudo-poetic flaccid gush, she said “William, you want smacking!”
The conventional and false and tawdry was unerringly seized on and
torn away. Win is going to be so valuable to me that it seems a crime
for me to take what she has to offer. Either I must give in return or
the bargain’s humiliating and insufferable. There speaks the
egoist! I am wrong. This is not a business relationship- as between
man and man. She loves me (just imagine being able to write that!)
and so nothing that she puts into me will be lost. That’s a
profound truth, and it knocks all the truisms of “man and superman”
into a cocked hat.
The artist
and the life force (of which woman is the incarnation) are
irreconcilable, says Bernard Shaw: the artist wants inspiration and
he goes to the woman, the woman wants children and a breadwinner, and
tries to enmesh the artist and make him serve his purpose; when he
has got what he wants from her it is essential, unless he is willing
to be extinguished as an artist, for him to fly. The purposes clash,
and the man must escape with his spoil or be damned. Yet the two
purposes are not really irreconcilable; both artist and woman work-
though they may not recognise it- to the same end: the birth of a
finer race. The artist hands on the torch of the living idea to those
the woman has brought into being. Both are indispensable for the
creation of the beauty to be.
To lie on
soft grass in the middle of a moor during a hot afternoon with the
breath of the heather in your nostrils and all the beauty of the
world around you, and then to sit up suddenly and catch a flash of
blue in the distance which you know is the sea with all that it means
of action and high adventure- that is what it was like to nestle
happily in W’s arms tonight and then look up into her eyes.
That is as
Octavius might have described it. Then there is the Stella Benson way
of looking at it: one minute I was the spoilt child snuggling in its
mothers arms and the next W. had grown small- oh so irresistibly
small and yielding, to be enveloped by me the triumphing male.
Then comes
Bernard Shaw: this captivating smallness, his sudden triumph, was an
illusion created by the life-force to entrap me for its own purpose.
The truth is,
of course that Octavius, and Stella Benson and Bernard Shaw are all
right (!Inserted
on W’s instruction).
W’s
distinction between me and Katherine Mansfield: I describe, explain,
soliloquise- and the result is “something in a book”; she says
everything by just showing people ‘doing things’- and the result
is life. The difference is that one is stodge, calling forth the
inevitable comment- “I know all that!”, the other is vivid,
interesting- suggestive
But I’ll do the other yet; and if I don’t succeed, there’s
nothing as thrilling as trying, failing, finding out where and why
you’ve failed, and having another shot.
At Heysham:
Oh, what the
hell shall I do when W. goes? Here I am away from her for a week and
I simply can’t hold up or bother with anybody. I prowl miserably
about, and let out groans, only realising I have done so when I see
people staring. W. has entered my life absolutely, she’s taken
possession of me. I’m like a man with a limb off. I can feel her
there, and clutch for her. It’s all absurd but damnably real.
After a week
of freedom it’s funny to come back to the same old endless
discussions. Shall we get more meat? I wonder if that bread will
agree with me, it sometimes ferments. How are your bowels? (Heaven
help us!) Have you got your collar for the morning?; Be sure and get
up early and clean your shoes and so forth…
W. is
indispensable to me, and I know it as soon as I leave her. I feel
tonight that I must go straight back to her, I want to set off
walking- I could do it in three days and should be in Otley by
Wednesday night. The joy of it!
But I shall
stay the week. Apart from the fuss- I enjoy that too well myself,
hitting right and left, savagely proud of my ability to find weak
spots and deal smashing blows- Dad would be intolerably hurt. It is
cruel that anything should make me bored in Dad’s company; we’re
so firmly bound together, and he makes so few demands on me.
I feel like a
piece of elastic being stretched. Stretched to snapping point. And if
I break something will hit W. and something will hit Dad, but neither
will be me. I shall be left somewhere desolate in the middle.
Saw a girl on
the beach this morning with fair hair done like W’s at the sides.
From the back, at a distance it might have been her. My heart bounded
into my mouth and beat heavily in my ears. Later I saw a child’s
arm which seemed just like hers. I lay on the rocks and dreamed about
her. She makes sex seem so beautiful and right. I find with her
something which is the best of life- finer even than the thrill which
came at first. She can settle things for me; she can make me happy
and keep me.
My reading of
this novel by Stella Benson is opportune. I am in danger at present
of becoming very like “The Poor Man”: my life seems to be one
long wail. All I can think of is that I am losing W. and I find
myself crying hysterically: ‘My dear, I can’t lose you; you
mustn’t leave me!’ To say this is unmanly doesn’t move me. As I
said to mother I don’t really care whether I’m “manly” or
not. That may simply mean unnatural, priggish and absurd. But I do
care whether I’m unworthy of W.
There is a
passage at the end of Tchehov’s “The Lady and The Dog” which
Middleton Murry praises somewhere for its exquisite truth: -
“And it
seemed to them as though in a little while the solution would be
found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear
to both of them that they had a long., long way to go, and that the
most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning”.
That is how
we felt tonight as we sat facing the fact of W’s going to London.
Somewhere amid all this there lurked the possibility for the greatest
splendour, But where? If… When… But…
All the way
through “The Poor Man” you feel you can be sorry for neither
Edward (the hero) nor Emily (the heroine); the one is too much of a
worm, and the other too harsh and certain. Stella Benson lets you
think so right up to the last page and then makes you sorry for both
by a marvellous piece of writing which has the power to change your
whole judgement on a book. Emily loves Tam, who sends her away for
the sake of his wife; and Edward loves Emily, but is too poor a thing
for his devotion to give her any comfort. She shows him this finally
and irrevocably after he has followed her- as she followed Tam-
across the world. “Leave me alone” she shouted harshly and
hideously. “Can’t you leave me alone? I can’t bear you. I
couldn’t bear to touch you, you poor sickly thing…”
She hit him
in the face. She hit him again and again.
She was
crying again. She would not let him reach a rock of silence in this
wild sea in which he was drowning. She was crying loudly. And whose
voice was that beseeching her crying? “Emily…Emily…Emily…”
Was it his own voice?
“You must
believe it now,’ she sobbed. “You- poor- thing…”
She was gone.
The seas were still. A desert… a continent of silence…”
That is
genius.
Bank Holiday
Tuesday: -
When I saw W.
tonight all the happiness of yesterday’s long tramp came back and I
wanted to clap her on the shoulder and set off again, this time on a
wonderful timeless journey. She is always giving me something fresh
to love her for. I shall always remember the gaiety with which she
tackled that walk yesterday; the feel of her sturdiness beside me;
her songs and impromptus and perfect companionship. Tonight I want to
write all the poems in the world. I am full of her. When I put a
piece of cake into my mouth just now I felt that it was her arm which
lifted it and her mouth which received it and that as I ate my
expression was hers. W’s triumph is that she is never the female;
she gives unreservedly and never coquettes or makes demands. Beside
her, most women are mere exploiters. But what is her secret? With all
her spendthrift love, how does she manage to be still and comforting
and at the same time quick and vivid?
Frank
Chippendale seems to have carried off nearly everything. Today I have
discovered that he has won the £100 prize for a design for the
National Parliament House of Wales. But I can laugh at him tonight:
I’m still one up on him for I’ve got W. and I know- even though
I’m a poor blind bloody fool- that she’s the most marvellous
prize in the world.
Saturday: Win
goes Tuesday Morning. We went to the “pictures” tonight. We
simply couldn’t sit and do nothing with this awful knowledge
between us, so we sat and laughed at a Buster Keaton comedy, laughed
at his little pathetic figure, grotesquely clad in a red
Mephistophiles costume, and chased by a thousand bulls. Before the
end I was so helpless with laughter that I threw my legs over the
seat in front and simply bellowed.
Then we found
ourselves in the street. We had an hour before W. had to go home. We
set off towards our house- that was something to do: we were going to
our house; we would just think we were going to our house. We got
there. We sat on the settee for a few minutes. No-one spoke. There
was nothing to say, nothing to do.
I dragged W.
up to my room. We talked for a minute about books; then both relapsed
on my sofa. Then we kissed, but they were meaningless kisses- “off
top” as Sam would say. Down below- ready to thrust its head up at
the first touch of reality- was something we couldn’t face. One
real kiss would have let it loose upon us, one sincere moment and our
souls would have escaped from the thin shells which we must keep
intact if we were going to be “brave” and “prudent”, those
contradictions in terms.
Sunday: Win
asked tonight, as we sat and struggled again, if I had written any
more notebook. I said “Not for you”, and she understood.
Monday: Win
came to tea tonight. Coming home from work I felt I couldn’t face
the ordeal of the next few hours. It was like going to execution.
After tea I
proposed taking a boat out. She gladly agreed and we had a lovely
hour on the river. We took photos, and seemed to shake it all off for
the time. We were somehow glad and proud.
Later we sat
in my room, and managed to keep our heads above water. It was like
carrying something very fragile across a tightrope.
Win went
early. I saw her down to the gate, and we parted, of course, without
fuss.
I came home
and wrote her a “brave” cheerful letter. I went up to the post
with it: went down to her house to be near her for another minute,
and then came home and for the first time faced the fact that I
should not see her in the morning.
I suffered
then more acutely than I have ever suffered in my life. Now- weeks
and weeks afterward- I hardly dare recall it. I thought I was going
mad; I realised what it was to be mad, and pictured myself wandering
round their empty house. My head swam with pain, and I couldn’t
bear the light or the thought of sleep or work or anything. I think I
was kept from screaming out, or otherwise making a fool of myself, by
two quotations from Shakespeare, two poignant moments which I now
understood for the first time:
“Sleep,
Macbeth hath murdered sleep” I muttered, and the other, “She’ll
come no more, never, never, never, never.” That seemed adequate. It
helped me to feel somehow that there was beauty in this experience.
What was my suffering to Lear’s?
Yet there
must be a point beyond which suffering could not go and surely I had
reached it! But with the thought of Lear and beauty came welling up:
“How I shall love her after this; how we shall love each other.”
I suddenly wondered if she was feeling it as terribly as this: and I
hoped passionately she wasn’t; she must; I must take it all. Yet
she was strong and brave; braver and stronger than I. What a girl she
was; what a woman she would make! My love of her must make me better;
kinder, more thoughtful, more loving towards my people; it seemed
bound to make a tremendous difference.
But when
finally I ventured up to bed it got me again- got me numb, and
grovelling and gasping for breath- and in the middle of it when they
were rubbing my hands and giving me brandy, I suddenly burst out
laughing at myself. It seemed so damned ridiculous when I had so much
to be happy for. The muscles of my face, I remember, wouldn’t
respond to the laugh that came out of my mouth.
Later came
W’s beautiful message: “Don’t despair, for after all are we not
the luckiest and happiest people on earth?”
But what
would she have said if she’s known what an absolute coward I’d
been?
Tuesday, and
later in the week: -
Too sick to
be comforted. I’ve thought and thought of some way out, of how the
thing can be faced. My head aches, and my work- simple and trivial as
it is- is too much for me.
The morning:
W. goes at 8. They perform executions at 8.
I treasure
every little bit I can get out of her. Tonight I found a card someone
had sent her, and immediately collared it and took it off upstairs
with me. Every time I look at this new photo of her- so lovely and
clear and familiar- my heart seems to open afresh to receive her.
Already I can imagine myself going on the train to her. What a
journey that will be, sitting in a carriage with ordinary unexcited
people!
This goes
deeper than either sentiment or sex. It’s something tremendous.
October:
Much written in between not yet entered.
After seeing
“The Taming Of The Shrew”: - A Shakespeare play- “Romeo and
Juliet”, with it’s Mercutio passages, Henry VI, A Winter’s
Tale- always makes me marvel, as I see it played, I have had all this
wit and wisdom of fine English at my elbow continually and never
thought to turn to it. I wonder, if most of us were set the task of
taking some book away to a desert island, whether we should take
Shakespeare. Not, I think, if no-one else was going to know what we
were taking. But how much we should miss if we didn’t!
The joy of
that scene when the drunken old rapscallion who has been induced to
pose as Lucentio’s father looks out of the window and confronts
Lucentio’s real father.
Pedant- “thou
liest: his father is come from Padua, and here looking out at the
window.”
The real
father- “Art thou his father?”
Pedant- “Aye
sir; so his mother says, if I may believe her.”
This
situation, with that last sly dig- so absolutely what a tipsy man
enjoying the novelty of his position would say, yet so understandably
offensive to the respectable Vincento- is simply overpowering. Even
Shakespeare must have danced with delight after he had written it.
Scene to be
used sometime.
Two people
coming into a room, each completely absorbed by a different thing and
consequently each exasperating the other. At the same time they both
try to be polite and the strain becomes unbearable. But then- when
you [think of it] it’s one of the things which Tchehov handles so
consummately. It is one of the things which are always happening
wherever people are living together in intimacy. Home from hearing an
inspiring preacher M. must give it to someone. I come downstairs
about the same time, equally excited about a novel I have been
reading and wanting simply to sit and brood- as I eat my supper- and
imagine I have the power to do dazzling things. M. talks, loudly and
with emphasis, feeling no doubt, though trying not to face the fact,
and in any case it’s got to come- that I’m out of sympathy and
her meaning isn’t penetrating “And he said” she’ll go on,
“how God reveals, often to the humblest, most uneducated, the
simplest people, how
God reveals…” She trails off, fumbling for the word, and in the
meantime keeping going with a stream of interjections- “oh, he was
fine: he was ripping: he simply “got” you: you could have heard a
pin drop…”
I, when I
come back from the theatre- or some lecture or musical recital- am
the same, and M. similarly polite and unresponsive, struggling all
the time with the unreasonable but urgent desire to cry out: “Oh
for goodness sake shut up!”
“True
friendships between men and women are as rare as true love. The
greater part are a little comedy, badly acted.”- Oscar Wilde.
That is very
true and very finely put. But what is true love? I see the answer
somehow in the unrealised possibilities of absolute frankness:
frankness and humour and understanding. My novel must deal with
disillusionment shared- or rather faced together; and an entirely new
relationship: a life of experiment- experimenting with personality
and sensibilities. This relationship- springing from the completest
honesty and self-knowledge (with all the suffering this involves for
its attainment) is a kind of creative intimacy of the spirit- “The
marriage of true minds.”
(Copied from
an envelope as scribbled down in a Leeds café. Then follows this
cryptic piece- which seems to be the piece of real value, but through
my carelessness in not explaining more fully I can’t recall exactly
what it signifies, except to remember it was the most marvellous
experience I ever had: “Reason for Win’s disappointment, a sudden
revelation. ‘She leaned across the table and kissed him’ “ That
sentence I know contained in essence the whole significance of the
novel. But what the hell did I mean? I know this was the beginning of
the relationship I had made a hurried and clumsy attempt to describe,
but this was to put it in a vivid way, to convey everything in a
sentence. “She leaned across the table and kissed him”: I’ve
got to work it out all over again…)
Wells’
pessimism: “In this world there are incessant changes but most of
them are landslides or epidemics”- “Joan and Peter”
My ideas
simply move round in circles and what is the discovery of one month
is something read another. If I read Harold Child’s “Love and
Un-love” I shall probably find he has anticipated what I meant to
say: for this is what A.B. Walkley (who died yesterday, by the way,
still in harness: you never hear of a journalist retiring) says, “The
refinement of passion which passes into durable affection: that is
his main theme”. We should take up love as serious artists, for it
is “a long adventure in varying expression”. The Mother art is
love. “It is the art of self-expression by the constant and ever-
new adventure of continually readjusting our growing selves to the
growing selves of those whom we love. It is the only aim that we
never turn to dust and ashes in our mouths.”
I apologise
to Walkley: last week I quoted “…the surprise of perfect beauty
is perpetually securable” in an article and attributed it to Poe.
But that, Mr. Walkley, is the penalty of writing sentences which
stick in the mind of the reader.
But Poe is
always getting the credit for bright things I remember. To Sam I once
quoted as Poe’s Emerson’s “To believe your own thought, to
believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for
all men- that is genius.”
Another bit
of Emerson: The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.”
One of the
great sayings hat go to the head- every time you remember them:
“Those who come after us know us less by what we made than by the
love that we imparted to the making.”
A man who can
say that (Stacy Aumonier) understands but how inevitably love spells
fidelity; fidelity to the idea. It is the passionate fidelity
inspired by the “the great secret”. And this is true and
heartening: “They who have the great secret know each other in a
crowd.” And he might have gone on: “those who are trying to avoid
it; for it makes demands which some men cannot meet; those trying to
avoid it know those that have it, too, and are afraid of them” It
is the prize of suffering, the way of life.
I feel happy
and romantic and absurd tonight, and already I see myself jumping out
of the train at Kings Cross station and breathing “Hello, beautiful
lady!” as I kiss her hand. She touches the very best in me. I love
her as I shall never love another woman. She lifts my heart in
gladness, and I want to shout and shout and shout, and thump the
table and bring all the neighbours in, and throw things about like
Chaplin in that adorable cabin scene in “The Gold Rush”. My
lovely Win! I love you, I love you, I kiss you a thousand times, your
mouth, your- no, I can’t leave your mouth; I’ve such a lot to
make up. You’re as light as air and I’m as light as air, and
we’re both somewhere outside standing on air, and I’m holding the
back of your head, just where the lovely soft hair begins- oh, and
I’ve just caught Arnold Bennett looking at us and he was smiling,
just as if we were Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways and he was feeling
very proud of us. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile: he’s
always looked just blasé and knowledgeable before.
But what if
she writes tomorrow to say I can’t go! Win I must leave you a
minute dear to wring the neck of…
Brrr… I’m
getting excited…
Idea for a
light romantic novel: Young journalist who fell in love with a young
and attractive actress. Felt he must marry her. But first he must
become famous so as to be in a position to propose. Watched papers,
following her career, to see if she became engaged. His adventures-
based on my own experience of a local weekly; the excitement of
Leeds, the glamour of London. His character against him: many
failures; simply can’t carry anything through. Gives up idea; not
even on daily yet. Makes a few overtures to a girl he gets excited
about at a dance he reports. Then sees photo in paper: she
is appearing in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the “Old Vic”. Oh, if
he could play Mercutio: he doesn’t want to be Romeo, he’d be
Mercutio and alter the whole course of the play until there came a
happy ending in which he married Juliet. Mercutio was the real hero:
Romeo was a Light-o’-love; he couldn’t understand how to suffer
as Mercutio could: it required a man who could jest so marvellously
to suffer and be worthy. He wouldn’t kill Romeo though, as
Shakespeare had to do with Mercutio- he’d just show his obvious
inferiority and satisfy him (as he could easily be satisfied) with
another girl. Not his the gay yet unassuming devotion of Mercutio. He
looked at the photo of the actor chosen to play Romeo in the piece.
Yes, that was Romeo: he’d never seen a more vapid, mindless face.
The next time
he met his girl he was unresponsive: he was un-chivalrous enough to
start talking to her delightedly about going away. She had to have
it, there was no-one else to listen. And she didn’t come into it at
all. That night he felt certain qualms of contrition on account of
Ethel (she had cried inexplicably in the middle of his outburst) Had
he mentioned the actress. Gad he believed he had! What an utter fool
he was! Damned rotter too!! But he sent himself to sleep with dreams
of fashionable salons in which his wit would be supreme and people
would talk of Gertrude Basley and her charming husband, the novelist.
That would be at first, of course; Later they would talk of Edgar
Winterbottom and his charming wife, the actress. But how could he get
to London? That was the question which confronted him next morning.
He didn’t know what had deluded him into that roseate frame of mind
last night, but at present his position was very palpable. He was no
further than ever; no further than when he started trying two years
ago. But had he really tried? He had said that nothing was of avail
certainly. The question was what did he mean by ‘nothing’?
He looked
forlornly over the one or two manuscripts he had sent to London
editors. Yes, that was what was wrong. He was always going back to
what he had done; never going forward- always trying to ‘scrat’
things together; never plunging- as a real artist, nay a real man;
anyone but a molly-coddle; would do- into fresh creative work.
He sat down
desperately and wrote ‘The Dreamer: a short story’ He would do
something. As he did so he heard his mother’s voice coming up the
stairs: “Edgar, you’ll be late for the office” That was it!
Late for the office… he was caught in a machine. There was always
that cry when he felt like work: - “Edgar, your dinner’s
spoiling”; Edgar, we’re waiting to go to bed”…Oh, it was
damnable!
Arrived at
the office he had a brain wave. He would write to the editor of “The
Daily Argus” now. He
had always tried local papers before. Opposite him Joshua Nunns
turned copy out stolidly on a typewriter. Curtis on the other table
was immersed in the morning papers. And Cash- the authoritative Cash,
who was down on everybody’s weaknesses but his own- had not yet
arrived. He wrote quickly without crossing out, and when he had
finished he typed the thing out and put it in one of the large office
envelopes. There. For once he had done something.
The Editor of
“The Argus” was in a good mood that morning. He had just been
complimented on increased circulation, And told to spend money to
ensure holding the new readers. This kid showed imagination. He’d
probably work like hell! And an importation from the provinces was
often effective. Look at Arnold Bennett and James Agate. You never
knew! If his references ere good he’d give him a chance. Edgar’s
references were excellent. His editor was a little taken aback- a
London paper! - but he was a thoroughly good sort. And after all
Winte4rbottom had shown promise- in spasms.
So Edgar got
to London. And he was a success. His hero-worship attracted Sterling,
the popular playwright, and one night in a confidential talk Edgar
unfolded an idea for a play he had been “going to write” for two
years or more. Sterling saw possibilities in he plot. The
possibilities amazed and rather shocked Edgar but he soon found
himself drawing a comfortable thing in royalties. He confided in
Sterling. Yes it was very fine but he didn’t know how incapable he
was, he couldn’t keep it up. But Sterling was quite unperturbed.
“Oh, you stick to me”, he said.
Then one
morning, when he was still aghast at his own luck and looking round
(he did not send off straight away and ask Gertrude to marry him: he
was ineffective, paralysed, like a man in a dream as ever. He still
took a furtive glance at the papers, following her career, and had
even asked the dramatic critic who had met her what he thought of
her). One morning the news editor told him off to interview her on
her engagement. Edgar thought “If a short story would end here; if
a novel I should go back and marry Ethel” It was then that the dark
lady came along. And while he hesitated, she married him.
[END]
[The next
notebook has no title page; Granddad’s handwriting and notes are
more rushed. There is no date, although this is clearly written
during WWII. There is also no mention of Win. This is clearly a work
notebook rather than a personal journal].
“A Modern
History of the English People”: Post War 1918-1922” [by R.H
Gretton]
The parallel
with the present noted in 1880 is still the most striking fact when
you come to read of Parliament in the War and Post-War Years.
Speaking of Parliament throughout the War, Gretton says: Its members
appeared to be so inextricably bound up in the old habits of politics
that no crisis could shake them out of being politicians.
“Parliament” he says later, was soon back in the old ways, with
debates, divisions, party prejudices, harrying
of Ministers”
After the War
comes “The Coupon Election”: Now the House of Commons capped its
poor record throughout the War with the most unpardonable failure of
all. It’s first thought at the end of the War was apparently for
itself alone…..500 candidates took the field with the express
intention of the Coalition leaders Labour kept its hands full and
entered the fray along its own lines. But any other candidate stood
for election under the most unfair imputations- he had not the
blessing of Mr. Lloyd George, as he must have hindered the war… In
those critical weeks, with history under their hands the nations
leaders were wire-pulling.”
He records
that “at the moment of the Armistice and for a few days- only a few
days but that might have been long enough- the country was not, as a
whole, in a bitter or revengeful state of mind.” The nation might,
he suggests, “with its cherished pride in being a nation of
sportsmen, taking success like gentlemen, as well as defeat, have
been swung into a quiet generous frame of mind”. (It would have
taken more than just “quiet generosity” to have withstood the
fierce pressure of France at Versailles for her full pound of flesh!)
What is impressive is Gretton’s restraint in commenting on the
“Hang the Kaiser” election: he shakes his head wisely and sadly
over the whole rampageous business: “In the turgid banality of
political meetings only the poor resentments and angers, not the
dignity and prudence, of war suffering found voice.”
He gives a
summary of Lloyd George’s hoarding poster: “Trial of the Kaiser,
punishment of those responsible for atrocities, the fullest
indemnities from Germany, Britain for the British, socially and
industrially; rehabilitation for those broken in the War; and a
happier country for all” “A land fit for heroes to live in”-
how Lloyd George’s phrases come back on him down the years. Like
boomerangs.)
It is a
bitter picture which follows of the “angry confusion” of the
demobilisation of the soldiers clamouring to go home, women sticking
on to their jobs and refusing to be brushed aside, “a great part of
the labour world which had stayed comfortably at home all the time”
actually wanting to prevent the men who had gone from coming back. To
this was added the irritation of the rise in prices which caused the
suspicion that profiteering was on foot.
He shows how
the idealism of the “war to end war” was crystallised in the
eager welcome of President Wilson with his proposals for the Covenant
of the League of Nations. He gives the other side of the picture
which you gain from Hampden Jackson’s summary of the cold brutality
of the Allies letting the defeated countries starve. “In January,
two months too late to have any healing generosity in it- came
concern for the starving condition of the defeated countries”, in
both of which the war collapse had been the collapse into revolution.
What follows is important in view of what has been said since about
Versailles: “What left the battle area was not an Austro-Hungarian
Army, nor even Austro-Hungarian Regiments; in the very process of
going those military shapes melted uncontrollably into new
coalescences and only racial groups of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles,
Croats, Magyars and Slovenes filled the home-bound trains”.
Labour
troubles cropped up in [reute] form in Great Britain: there was much
talk of ‘direct action’. These were embittered by two opposing
views of the high war wages: the middle class thought of them as
given to bribe workers who were not patriotic enough to “do their
bit” without extra financial inducement; the labour world “deduced
that there was, as they had always expected, far more worry due to
them than they had ever been able to get until the war gave them
their chance really to frighten a government.” “This lesson they
proposed to carry over into peace time”. Neither side looked on the
advanced wages for what they largely were- “a mere adjustment to
prices.”
Gas and
electrical workers (an example of the danger of “direct action”
this new mood bred) threatened to plunge London into darkness. The
government replied with an effective threat to imprison every
striker.
The
Crisis.
If I am
speaking on rather a grim topic tonight, you must blame Mr. Brown. I
had intended to talk light-heartedly about “Journalism as a Branch
of Fiction”- a subject which I thought might amuse you; but Mr.
Brown suggested you would like a chance of discussing the recent
crisis: so here I am making the first political speech of my life.
I wish I
could describe to you what it is like for a journalist to put his
views before an audience. You see, he is used to sheltering
comfortably behind the formidable barricade of the editorial we. And
he never appreciates what a blessed refuge that is, what a source of
strength and confidence, until he is asked to leave it and come out
into the open. Then he feels rather as a French soldier who was asked
to leave his well protected quarters in the Maginot Line and advance
across open country. From behind the editorial we it is easy to fire
off sentences like: “If the Prime Minister had only heeded the
warning we gave him here last March Britain would not now need to
fawn like some mongrel dog round the jack boots of the Dictators”.
But this superb self confidence is apt to vanish when you have to
speak as an individual with all an individual’s limited knowledge
and judgement.
I think all
leader writers, for the good of their souls and to restore their
sense of proportion, and so that they can estimate their opinions at
their true worth, should occasionally quit the editorial we for an
evening and talk as man to man instead of as newspaper to public.
I suppose
with most people their most vivid recollection of the recent crisis
is still the relief they felt when we knew that peace would be
preserved. I noticed that Mr. Lloyd George in his attack upon the
Prime Minister’s policy during this weeks Debate in Parliament
himself said “I felt6 a thrill of relief when I heard there was not
going to be a war, although I did not like the terms.”
For my part I
think I was past feeling relieved by the time peace was assured. I
felt like a piece of elastic which has been stretched and stretched
until it has no spring left in it. I felt as though I needed at least
24 hours sleep before I could begin taking in what had happened.
If I, a young
man, felt like that merely because I had been facing this thing day
and night for weeks, writing continually about it, unable to escape
from it, what must the Prime Minister have felt making those flights
to Berchtesgaden and Godesberg, sitting up night after anxious night
in conference, preparing and making prodigious speeches to
Parliament? The strain on him must have been intolerable. How he
withstood it I cannot understand. I remember very vividly that when
he made his first flight to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden, my whole
fear was that he would be physically incapable of making any sort of
a stand against the Fuehrer in such circumstances. I certainly think
we should take that into account before we speak with contempt about
the decisions he took and the terms he obtained during those
nightmare hours. But when that has been said, I feel it is sheer
humbug to hail this desperate last minute settlement at Munich as a
great act of constructive statesmanship, a triumph for peace and
conciliation. It was a triumph for Hitler, a triumph for blackmail: a
tragic deplorable thing not only for the Czechs but for all who want
to see justice prevail and freedom preserved in Europe.
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