Granddad's Notebook

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 5^th

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 9^th

“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 2^nd 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 7^th

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.”

• John Davidson.

October 17^th

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 31^st.

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. 16^th: - 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. 27^th

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 20^th 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 4^th

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 7^th. 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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