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10.

Twentieth-Century Blues

Thursday, 24 May 1934 (aged twenty-four)

Dorset Square.

I have given up smoking until the exams are over. Why I don’t quite know; I suddenly decided last Sunday morning when I was at home that it might be quite a good thing to do. I must say it’s damned hard at times. I never realised how much it meant to me.

Aunt Elsie nearly died last Sunday. She has been in hospital nearly a fortnight now, and I have been convinced that her operation will prove successful and we shall eventually see her out and about once more.

Friday, 25 May

What mockery is this – Aunt Elsie died last night at 10 o’clock. Ethel has just phoned to tell me. She saw her yesterday afternoon after visiting me here, and the grapes I sent were never undone. She was my step-aunt: a quiet shadow of her sisters. How shall I write to them and what flowers shall I send?

Tuesday, 29 May

They buried her yesterday on Harrow Hill. The flowers, said Ethel, were magnificent, ‘and we felt really happy about it all – if only she could have seen them.’

I feel very tempted to pinch one of Lugi’s cigarettes. I have not kept to my resolution very well, having had one or two a day since Thursday and about half a dozen on Sunday. This weakness over so small a thing alarms me. Within a week or two I shall probably be smoking as much as I did before I left off. I like smoking and I want to smoke and at the present time I have no proof that it does me much harm.

Thursday, 14 June

I am angry and bitterly ashamed with myself. Gus is absolutely right: I have let myself slip, am getting fat and not paying enough attention to my clothes.

It seems damned unfair that some people – Joan for instance – can look marvellous by just stepping into the right frock and combing her hair, while I must spend increasing energy to achieve an effect which barely lasts longer than half an hour. I could, I know, look a little less suburban. In 50 years’ time some damn prig of a critic will be saying, ‘she lacked the necessary control of the organisation of her impulses’. Oh, we are bound with a thousand chains! For a hundred years we struggle to free ourselves of one, and while trying to file through the next discover that the other has once more twisted itself round our ankles.

Saturday, 23 June

For another fortnight I shall be in London making whoopee, wildly and without restraint: sherry parties, dinner parties, theatres, dances, art exhibitions, films – then peace, perhaps somewhere alone for a few weeks before I return to Bath.

As Virginia Woolf urges of young writers, I must not forget my patron, Posterity. And Posterity I must ask to be lenient with me, remembering that this is only an experiment. Stella Benson, I read a short while ago, has left an enormous journal to be published in 50 years’ time. 50 years!⁵⁵ If I live I shall be 74 – dramatic thought! If I succeed in making of life what I think perhaps I may, my Journal shall not be left so long unfriended.

I sent six letters to Bath the other day, five of which I owed to the people there. But the sixth was to Colin Wintle, and I swear I had no intention of writing to him when I began the others. I have not, after all, forgotten Colin. What will come of this affair God knows.

The July issue of Good Housekeeping printed the attached letter which I wrote after reading Sewell Stokes’s article in the June number:

A Girl Defends Her Own Generation

While I agree with nearly everything Mr Sewell Stokes has said concerning the ‘education of our parents’ in your June number, I feel that I must protest that his theory is not so simple to put into practice! Mr Stokes must be fortunate in having an exceptionally broad-minded mother. My own is dead, but my father, though he does not want to be educated in the least, is sufficiently good-natured to let me go my own way without trying to interfere. However, I do know only too well of the strife that goes on in the majority of homes today …

It is no good telling us to be patient with their obsolete opinions on drama and art; to ‘teach them tactfully all we have learnt,’ for they are not always ‘surprisingly good pupils.’ They adhere doggedly to the ‘We’ve lived so much longer than you have, my dear, and therefore must know better’ principle, simply refusing to admit the possibility of their being wrong …

We cannot introduce them to our Chelsea friends unless we are sure they will receive them without unreasonable censure. But it happens often that anything new or unexpected, anything they cannot easily understand and which does not fit into their own knowledge of the world, the older generation will set aside at once as unacceptable …

Miss J.L.P.

University College, London

Tuesday, 24 July

Colin Wintle – the maddening flippancy of his letters throws me back into a torment of doubt and sick dreams. What does he mean, what does he want of me, what does he think of me? Who writes on the back of GWR pamphlets?⁵⁶ ‘If only you were in Bath now … I am looking forward to seeing you next month … we’ll make a date now, for I’d love to take you out.’ It is bewildering. He may not be at all what I have thought he might be. Or he might be running away from himself, hiding behind the first woman who seems interested. It is possible, Gus said, to go either way or both.

Thursday, 26 July

Dollfuss killed in Vienna.⁵⁷

‘This is a very terrible thing,’ said Mary Kate as she seized the Rice Krispies this morning. It seems she knows something about it.⁵⁸ ‘The League of Nations is no good whatsoever. They’ve tried to suppress Germany and Austria, which is futile.’

War … war … the muttering goes on on all sides. War in the air. England’s lovely countryside devastated. No escape anywhere.

Yet supposing it happened. Bombs dropping, bombs bursting away the slums of London and Leeds, and the dirt and depression of all our big cities. Life will be lost of course, blood will flood the streets, beauty will be desecrated. But afterwards – for it couldn’t last long this war in the air – if any of us have survived, if any of us can still pick up the torn threads of our lives and go on, what a magnificent chance for us to begin again. Given men of foresight and wisdom and sensitiveness, we have every opportunity of creating an age more golden than the Elizabethan.

Monday, 13 August

Bath.

‘Never trust your memory,’ Mr Richard Pearce, one of the clerks of the Acton Police Court, advised me last week. ‘Make a note of everything.’

And here I am again. Was welcomed warmly by all in the office today. Colin … oh, I don’t know about Colin. He is still as baffling, still as distracting. What right have I to think he can mean anything to me or I to him? Actually I know remarkably little about him. His worth has not yet been tested or proved at all. His father was a well-known doctor in Bristol and played an active part in the affairs of the city during the war. Colin himself went to Eton, to my immense satisfaction. There is a distinction about a public schoolboy that cannot be denied.

Wednesday, 15 August

I’ve got to get to know Colin. I’ve got to cut this nonsense out of me. Since those drinks with him this evening I’ve been in a flat stupor. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had gin on top of poached egg and tea. If I can’t make him want to marry me then I’ll give in and have an affair with him. Loved I must be or go on the streets. It is electric.

Perhaps the real difficulty is this: that I want to watch the play and act in it at the same time. I want to watch the evolving of my own drama.

Saturday, 25 August

I wish I were middle-aged and married, placidly touring England with a companionable husband, fat, comfortable and content, like the two Americans I saw at lunch.

Was it prelude, or merely an incident, that touch of his lips on my hand three days ago?

Tuesday, 28 August

I went round the works of the Chronicle again today. A sordid, confusing, dramatic process, printing. Colin I haven’t spoken to for a week. I feel that any day now I shall hear of his engagement to some Bath beauty – impending disaster is in the air.

Such an adorable and consoling letter from Howard this morning. ‘There seem to be very few men in London at the moment,’ he writes. ‘I suppose they’ve all followed you to Bath. Do come back home soon, we miss you so here.’ Nice, nice, nice! Howard and Gus have started rehearsing at the Old Vic for Anthony & Cleopatra.

Thursday, 6 September

For heaven’s sake, Jean, stand up and be brave! If you cower and slide and shiver anymore behind your silly little curtain of doubt and indecision he will never know or see or understand you. Can you really doubt what you’ve seen in his eyes?

Saturday, 8 September

I must go back and finish my last year at college, even if Mr Walker offered me a job now. It is my only chance of acquiring an extra amount of knowledge and academic training for which I think I shall be grateful in the future. Therefore it is no good encouraging Colin to fall in love with me. If I were not so clumsy I could do what I liked with him. My life I am still centring round my work; everything else must be embroidery.

Thursday, 20 September

Four more days in Bath. Then will begin the impossible scramble to get all I have to get done done. Move into Blandford Square, the unfurnished flat I’m sharing with Mary Kate; meet people; Liverpool at the weekend to meet Leslie and family who are now on their way from Jamaica.

I’m sure that I could win Colin completely. But it would be slow and delicate work requiring infinite patience. First to establish confidence in myself in order to establish confidence in him; then gradually to unfold myself, securing him cautiously by the thin, frail threads of mutual experience until the whole net is woven. Only then will he lose his fear of me and begin his own pursuit and struggle for conquest, while I, pretending to be blind, watch every movement and help every step.

Saturday, 22 September

White moonlight and hell. The black shadows and pale stars’ slate roofs like snow-drifts; wind through the pear tree, and drifting, broken races of cloud across the sky.

Colin makes love exquisitely. It is all I ever dreamt it might be, and he doesn’t care. No one’s touch has ever thrilled me more. But it exhilarates him only for the moment.

‘I may never see you again,’ he said without the slightest concern. And ‘I’m not a permanent sort of person.’ A passionate, casual devil who is going to break my heart. His, I believe, was broken long ago, and all his ideals shattered. ‘Yes, I had a stab at that when I was your age, but it’s not any good.’

I have absolutely no fear to restrain my desire this time. The cup has been lifted to my mouth and I am already intoxicated. It is real I know now, this wild dream of mine. He is as much in love with me as it is possible for him to be in love with anyone. Yet if I could only make him feel again, only break through the crust of his cynicism, then all this torment will not have been in vain. Fate will you be kind to me?

That terrible moon has moved from my window. What was it Colin said last night? ‘There are hundreds and thousands of people, married and with large families, who’ve never had a romantic moment in their lives. They are just stodgy, they fill up the world but don’t matter very much. It’s those people with that streak of lighting in them that makes the world go on.’

Thursday, 27 September

Wembley.

On Monday evening I discovered exactly the extent of my power over him. He has no desire to get married, but would be more than willing to have me as his mistress. ‘Can’t you pigeonhole the episodes of your life?’ he asked. ‘Tuck Bath away somewhere with Colin. “Oh yes, he had rather a nice mouth …”’

I know where I am at last. And I am not unhappy.

Sunday, 7 October

I am going to live as Francis Stuart lives, as Balzac and Goethe and Shakespeare lived – ‘prodigals of life, spendthrifts, gamblers. Adventurers, not studying life from a desk but in the midst of it.’⁵⁹

I must read his Notes for an Autobiography, reviewed in this week’s Sunday Times, it sounds interesting, stimulating. A book, he says, ‘shouldn’t be in your head. It should be in your flesh and blood. There are too many books written from the head.’

We are to move from this flat. Being almost on top of the Great Central Railway, the noise of the trains is too much for Mary Kate. Her heart is weak and the doctor says we must leave.

Wednesday, 10 October

I met Nockie today as I returned from lunching with Leslie at Simpsons (divine roast beef!). She is starting as Science Correspondent for the Daily Mail. She was running around London enthusiastically, determined to do her best with it, looking incredibly attractive in grey and scarlet. In love again, she says, with someone new. Shall I, I wondered as I watched her scrambling gaily onto a 536 bus, also have to submit to the conditions of the age, loving only as circumstances allow, my only anchor work and a certain inner fortitude?

Sunday, 14 October

Wembley. I have just finished reading Noël Coward’s Post Mortem and am greatly bewildered. Coward is representative of London’s moneyed classes, a society which seems altogether rotten and horrible and terrifies me to death. I have always felt Coward’s work is always of the same kind, and a little too rich, of the caviar and champagne variety, emphasised always with such vehemence that it leaves one wondering if there really is anything in the world but caviar and champagne. But I know that there is: I discovered it in Bath and can discern it occasionally at home. It flows deeply and quietly …

And just as I was beginning to get all smug and sentimental about the happy English house, I went down to tea. Now I am not so sure, not at all so sure. It began to seem rather futile, their conversation, and the absurd fools they make of themselves over that child, although I’m just as idiotic when I start playing with her, for she is rather sweet.⁶⁰

I don’t know that it is worth it: rearing children to dullness and complacency or death and disaster. Just because of a smile in a man’s eyes and the momentary touch of his hand. A fleeting second of divine intoxication which came and went and may never come again. Domesticity is not what I want, but being at home normally has this effect on me after a little while. Feel suffocated and depressed. The twentieth-century blues get me down badly in Wembley.

Monday, 22 October

Blandford Square.

The blues get me down not only at home. Colin gave me a month in which to forget him. I have done my best. I knew he had meant goodbye when we parted.

At home such an abundance of life has filled the house. Footsteps and scraps of conversation everywhere – a child’s voice, and a child’s belongings, and a half-dozen grown-ups running up and down stairs and from room to room in untiring attendance. And I, when I am there, feel very much on the surface of things.

Never have time to do anything thoroughly, to think or feel or dream. Half an hour at this, an hour at that, and interruptions every 20 minutes. Half a dozen pages of Shaw, two scenes from Shakespeare, an act from Dryden, half a tale of Maugham and a chapter of Virginia Woolf. A paragraph in The Times, the headline of the Herald, the photos of the Mail, the glimpse of an article in the Spectator, a rapid survey of the Bookman. No time to digest them or form one’s own opinions or remember what one’s read, too busy planning the hours to be spent on Boswell, Matthew Arnold and Tennyson, on Plato and Kant and John Macmurray, plans that never materialise because of a pair of stockings that have to be darned, nails that must be manicured. Then a telephone bell rings or a letter arrives. Little bits of scattered knowledge cling uselessly to one’s memory. So much to do, so much worth doing, but in trying to do it all, one does nothing.

Wish that train would go. It has been hissing beneath our window for the past five minutes until even my nerves begin to feel a trifle shaken.

Saturday, 27 October

Colin is engaged to a Miss Flora Wagstaff of Claverton Down, Bath. God! And what a name.

But putting all personal heartbreak aside, I’d give a lot to know what has made him change his mind so quickly. Little over a month ago I know he had no intention or desire to get married. What is it in me that makes the boyfriends – after an exciting petting party or two – rush off hastily to marry someone else?⁶¹ That I do excite something immoral in men seems unquestionable, and the reaction makes them go all pure and domestically minded. It’s rather humiliating. I must manage my affairs very stupidly indeed.

‘Oh, what is this crazy thing called love? I’d like to know.’

I suppose I shall write: books upon books, and they’ll be good. Love to be only an incident. Work to be everything.

Sunday, 25 November

Let me try then once more to get this straight. What are for me the most important things in life? First, living: making friends, knowing and understanding as many different types of people as possible without destroying my own integrity; taking a constructive, intelligent interest in all contemporary art and literature; reading and knowing enough of the past to give the present its full value; travelling, not touring, which will involve a more serious study of languages; clothes, health and exercise.

Friendship is perhaps the most important thing. Love will come out of friendship, or is part of friendship, love in its purest and non-physical form. We want a new word for love. Love is so associated with sexual passion it is difficult to think of it without. Sexual passion is necessary and usually inevitable, but is only of relatively minor importance. We have sentimentally confused it with love.

And secondly, writing. If I am reduced to scrubbing steps and drinking gin I shall still keep a journal. Writing is so much a part of me that even if I never get anything published and have to earn my living in other ways, I shall continue in private. Living and writing – I desire to live fully only in order to write fully.

Thursday, 29 November

Bond Street has gone all carnival. All England seems to have come up for the Royal Wedding.⁶² And London seems to have withdrawn very discreetly. Elegance has retired with a graceful wave of the hand, leaving his favourite haunts free for the curious, eager mob to explore.

7 p.m. Christmas Day

Wembley. Reading over the confused outpourings of the last twelve months I don’t think I should like posterity to know quite how foolish I’ve been this year.

The major difficulty with which a diarist must contend is this: that since he jots down the day’s activities as they occur, he cannot work to any preconceived plan. He cannot collect his facts first, as does the novelist, and from them make a unified and symmetrical pattern. But that doesn’t mean he need make no pattern at all. Facts are showered upon him indiscriminately day by day, and these he must sort and arrange into a kind of mosaic which only a biographer may round off and frame. And he must have intuitive knowledge of the values of these fragments which pile up around him hourly. He must know what to choose, and having chosen, how to arrange them in an intelligent and interesting manner. To spread one’s thoughts and feeling too lavishly over the pages makes too loose a picture, while just to record events impersonally like so much scientific data becomes essentially tedious. Facts, and the feeling and ideas they may arouse must be combined by the chronicler without destroying any of their essential spontaneity or upsetting a certain balance which must be studied and maintained. Really, I believe a good diarist is born, not made. And I’m not a good diarist. I always want to say too much.

The diarist must do what other writers may not. His emotions are not recollected in tranquillity; his ideas are not necessarily formed after long and studious reflection. Nor is his narration of events picked from imagination or memory. His purpose is special and peculiar. He has to capture and crystallise moments on the wing so that ‘This,’ future generations will say as they turn his glittering pages, ‘was the present then. This was true.’