Читать книгу A Notable Woman - Jean Lucey Pratt - Страница 21

11.

T.S. Eliot Surprised Me

Monday, 28 July 1935

Wembley, 10 p.m. I eat too much at home, that is the trouble. And Daddy sits up obstinately listening in when I want him to go to bed. Someone on the radio is talking about the Abyssinian situation. ‘Full of difficulties,’ Daddy says. ‘It all depends on the League meeting on Wednesday.’⁶³ Are we to be plunged into war again? Oh God, not yet, not yet.

Monday, 12 August

I believe neither in love nor in happiness, but only in living. If they are real they will come as the natural consequences of living, as by-products. I am not going to waste further time searching for them. That is the conclusion I have come to in my 25 years of experience, and that is the conclusion my little heroine Anne is coming to at the end of my novel.

Sunday, 18 August

Just to amuse myself I am going to make a list of my present friends, relatives and acquaintances.

To begin with, blood relations: My father, George Percy Pratt, ARIBA, JP, who practises in Acton, Middx, and lives here, in Wembley. His wife, my mother, who was Sarah Jane Lucey, and died when I was just 13. His second wife, my stepmother, Ethel, the daughter of Mr Watson, sometime brewer of Sudbury, near Harrow. Leslie Vernon, my brother, an electrician in Cable & Wireless Ltd, now working in London, but usually abroad. His wife, Ivy, from Jamaica. And their two-year-old daughter Ethel Lucey. Then there are various aunts, uncles and cousins whom I cannot be bothered to mention here and now.

Of my oldest Wembley friends I think Valerie is the most important, and her husband Jack Honour, who live now out at Oxley. Now my college friends, who are certainly the most important, are: Lugi, who is Dorothy Cargill, daughter of Mr Cargill, an ophthalmic surgeon in Cavendish Square; Gus (Peter/Geoffrey), the son of Dr Wilfred Harris, a nerve specialist of Wimpole Street; Joan, daughter of Stephen Hey, dental surgeon of Wimpole Street, and her husband Vahan Bulbulian, architect. Marjorie Nockolds (‘Nockie’), journalist, whom I have not heard from for months; John Rickman, Tarrant, Colin Gresham – all sometime scholars of the Bartlett School of Architecture (at UCL); John is learning to be a taxi driver and studies London at night on a bicycle. Eva May Glanville, or Mary Kate, of Irish extraction, a librarian at Bedford College; Constance Oliver (or Oggie), artist, of Adelaide Road, who had her first picture hung in the Academy this year. And others I do not care to mention.

Wednesday, 21 August

Molly Taylor has given me the address of Dick Sheppard. I will try to get in touch with him, but am rather frightened of the idea.

Friday, 23 August

I sent brother Pooh ‘Denied in Youth’ (my study of Ethel), and I have just received a postcard from him. ‘Best thing of yours I have read so far. Have only read it through once very hurriedly but it seems excellent.’ This is infinitely encouraging.

Thursday, 29 August

I am to meet Dick Sheppard next Wednesday. ‘We shall both be wondering what sort of person we’re to meet,’ he writes. ‘I believe you’ll be superb – from your letter you’re not dumb.’ Molly tells me he is now fully qualified as an architect. He is a cripple and was once in love with Molly. They trained together at Bristol until he came to the AA.⁶⁴ But he met with an accident some time ago, which paralysed him for several months. He will never, I understand, have complete use of his legs again – and a very good athlete at one time. Tragic.

Friday, 30 August

Wembley. I feel on the verge of hysterics. I am in a state where everything at home irritates me to distraction. But I remain outwardly agreeable.

To lighten the hour I must note down the story Aunt Jane told me the other day. A collection of old maids were discussing their wills at a tea party. One, when asked, replied, ‘I have left my money to my two daughters.’ There was consternation. ‘But you’ve never been married, have you?’ ‘Oh no – but in my youth I was never neglected.’

A nephew in law once asked Aunt Jane, so she told me, ‘Aunt Jane, are you still a virgin?’ And out she came with the answer: ‘In my youth I was never neglected.’ Delicious.

Now I am going to be sordid and vulgar, to drag all my vulgarities firmly before me. With the names of the men I have known I could pen something so obscene and so exciting it would be the biggest bestseller on record. Those futile affairs of my youth … Arthur A., Gilbert D., a choir boy, a young waiter, Ronald on the Broads, F.E.S., Leslie J., Geoffrey R., Leonard W., Stanley B., David A., all the names collected from the Russian tour, Chris, Hugh P., Neville, John M., Neil A., Colin W. – oh it makes me feel quite sick, and I have forgotten half of them. This is what happens from being highly sexed, imaginative and timid. Damn good job I was timid too. But I am not so timid as I was.

Tuesday, 4 September

And now I have met Dick Sheppard. Interesting. We talked about everything and came to conclusions on nothing. I am passionately sorry for him but dare not allow him to see it. Vital, twisted, strong, impressionable, unambitious, morbid. We talked about perversions, sex, pregnancy, homosexualism, the bloodstream, death, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender, Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Donne, Webster, Marlowe, Corbusier, Paul Nash. Is interested in Communism, politics, crooked commercial gambling. The astonishing things he told me of the power of these big firms and the wretched use they make of it.

I like him. He is stimulating, amusing, he contradicts everything one says and himself. In the true modern tradition he believes in nothing and bullies convention. There is something fundamentally big and generous about him, yet one feels it is distorted – those terrible twisted legs have twisted his brain.⁶⁵

Wednesday, 5 September

It occurred to me as I woke this morning that Dick was making an extra effort to appear interesting for my benefit. He moved around the room apologising at intervals for his lameness. Aunt Jane asked me this morning, ‘Did he make love to you?’ Really, she sometimes shocks me to the core.

The attitude he reflects is the fashionable one of ‘I hate the country, open fires and little children’ – a healthy reaction to the sentimental value of these things.

‘If you want to get your book published,’ said Dick, ‘you’ll have to be the publisher’s mistress. I shouldn’t think you’ll have much difficulty …’

And he tried to perform an operation on his pregnant cat with a knitting needle because he thinks she’s too young to have kittens (not while I was there of course).

He works for Louis de Soissons at the moment, and is living in one of the flats designed by him out at Larkhall.⁶⁶ Dick condemns them heartily.

Sunday, 16 September

I have driven the Fiat to Wimpole Street and back, alone. Up the Harrow Road, across the Edgware Road and along the Marylebone Road, soon I shall be able to take that car anywhere anytime.

Monday, 23 September

The most extraordinary thing happened to me in the train as we neared Waterloo. I was finishing A Farewell to Arms (Dick Sheppard had read me fragments of it – he knows it, he says, almost by heart) and I had reached the description of Catherine’s confinement. I like this book immensely. It is written in a very hard, terse style I would do well to study. Catherine – I do not think I have ever disliked a character so thoroughly. She seemed to me completely impossible, until I came to the birth of the baby. Then I suddenly was Catherine; I was suffocating, dying with her. I had to close the book for I could not read further, the agony was too acute. I was nearly fainting, and then was sick, literally, out of the window. It was terrible; I could do nothing. At Waterloo the man opposite took my case down from the rack and asked if I would be all right.

I got into the Watford train and pains began, but at Kilburn Park it was all over. I didn’t tell my family, they would never have believed it was caused through the death of Catherine. But there can be no other reason. I was well: fed, warm, dry, and my period was over 10 days ago.

Thursday, 10 October

Gus positively brutal with Part One of my novel – how bad my style is, how poor my construction. I am in such a state of despair I could almost commit suicide.

Friday, 11 October

I am consoled. Herbert Read in his treatise on English Prose Style criticises a passage of Kipling’s in exactly the same manner as Gus criticises my work.

Friday, 25 October

Last night I went to a meeting of the Tomorrow Club on the introduction of Constance.⁶⁷ Mr Adrian Arlington read a paper on School Stories. Mr Harold Raymond, a director of Chatto & Windus, was in the chair. An entertaining evening. I was interested to see a director of Chatto & Windus. Someone from the same firm came to the Bartlett School once, and in both I recognised the same quality: superlative culturedness. But I shall try Faber & Faber first: they might not be quite so alarmingly refined. I wonder, though, how far that refinement goes? What is Mr Raymond’s home like?

He rose last night and said he had been given the most astonishing piece of information. Eric, or Little by Little still sold at the rate of 4,000 (or was it 40,000?) copies a year. Who, he asked, was there reading it today? Who could there be possibly who took it seriously enough?⁶⁸ But the effect of last century’s ideals die hard. Uncle Herbert and Aunt Mary Lucey send me an improving book every Xmas. I am quite certain they would have sent me Eric long ago if they thought I had not read it. It has suggested this to me: to attempt a novel of a girls’ public school; to question and criticise women’s education as has been done to men’s.

I shall go on November 7th to have a look at the editors of the News Chronicle and New Statesman.

Monday, 4 November

Pop was too sweet this evening. He was about to leave, booted and spurred, for a Masonic meeting at the Connaught Rooms at 4.55 p.m. ‘I am supposed to be there at 5,’ he said as he filled his cigarette case. ‘But I am making a point of being late. I have to be announced: “Worshipful Brother Percy Pratt, Assistant to the Grand Superintendent of Works, demands admission,” and everyone has to stand up for me.’

Wednesday, 6 November

How incontestably right Ethel always is. I have left my bedroom door open again. ‘Jean, how many times have I asked you to keep that door shut? I have only to ask you to do something for me and you forget it immediately. You are selfishness personified. I am an older woman and feel the cold more than you do. If you’re going to live at home you must try to remember it’s my home, not yours.’

I try to keep within her narrow tracks, and then, because I am thinking of the next chapter of my book, I leave a door open and am a monster of selfishness. If Leslie and Ivy had not been through all this also I shall begin to believe I am. I don’t deny I am careless and even selfish, but I could prove she were more so if selfishness is lack of consideration for others. How very deliciously dramatic it would be if I could say, ‘Then if I am such a disturbance to you in this house, where I was born and which is mine legally, I must go to live with Gus. He has been asking me to for months. And you will have the pleasure of knowing you have driven me to living in sin.’ I wish I were big enough for that.

Friday, 8 November

Last night a very tired editor told the Tomorrow Club something of his problems. He was Mr Vallance of the News Chronicle. [He spoke of how] advertisements have tremendous influence on the daily paper. Advertisers of pills and toothpastes are the most powerful group in existence in England. Offend them and half the paper’s revenue is forfeit. The paper cannot refuse their advertisements although they know the majority are quack medicines and a danger to public health.

And this was amusing: reader-interest of the popular paper has been categorised as that which appeals between the knees and the neck. Above the neck interests and opinions differ widely, but the appetites of mankind are universally similar. Sex, death, food. Too dismally true.

Thursday, 28 November

I am almost converted to Socialism by a letter of Gerald Gould’s in last week’s New Statesman. I have always had leanings in that direction, but weight of family feeling and insufficient knowledge has kept me vaguely Conservative. I voted obediently for the National Government because Daddy insisted that I should, I had not arguments to support contrary opinions.⁶⁹

But I believe eventually we shall achieve economic freedom for the masses, which is the Socialistic aim. And I approve of it unreservedly. As Gould says, ‘It does not worry me that you have a bigger income than I have, but it worries me to death that so many people are underpaid or on the dole … and I believe that ultimately freedom is the one thing that matters.’

I think a great many honest people are struggling hard to achieve this freedom for everyone in the economic sphere, and I believe eventually they’ll win. We have such excellent tools – clean streets, tidy houses, orderly shops, comfortable theatres and cinemas, facilities for every kind of amusement and intellectual pursuit, museums, colleges, schools – the haphazard list is endless. And the material is there, good material, silks and cottons, steel, concrete and brick. But we don’t know how to use it. We distort it, ruin it, degrade it, and there is ugliness everywhere.

But you cannot aim at health, you cannot aim at beauty. But you can aim at the conditions which produce health and beauty.

Friday, 29 November

Wembley. I come home from a lecture by Stephen Spender on Poetic Drama, loathing the suburbs. And I wake up on a fair morning, glad to be here and disinclined to go again to London this afternoon. But this, I know, can never be the centre of my activities. I am right in loathing the suburbs; only if I fail shall I be forced back to them. I must make my own centre.

T.S. Eliot surprised me. All distinguished people surprise me when I see them. I expect them to appear in halo and cloak, but they never do. I expected Eliot to be taller. He seems such a very tired scholar – one never suspects him of being a poet. Spender is surprisingly young. He went to UCS. I read his account of it in Graham Greene’s The Old School. Pooh went to UCS, but I don’t expect he knew Spender.⁷⁰

Wednesday, 4 December

I don’t know whether my artistic consciousness is particularly low this afternoon (i.e. I am ready to accept anything without criticism), but I think I have just read the best article about money I have ever come across, by James Hilton in Good Housekeeping.⁷¹ Or is this the view of all sane, intelligent humans?

‘The real advantage money confers is the power to ignore it in the daily traffic of life. I believe that money and more money for the most of us is a good thing, and that far more lives are ruined by having too little of it than by having an excess. It is the possession of money that enables you to put money in its proper place, which is a secondary place.’

The great point in dealing with money is to get value, and the way to do that is to form your own private scale of values, and to watch that it is kept quite independent of fashion and prices. Do I want a new, patent, self-acting chromium-plated, electrically operated cocktail shaker to save me from one of the few forms of physical exercise that can be performed in the drawing room? I do not. Does it matter to me whether Mr So and So has one, or whether (as I am assured by all the advertisements) all Mayfair has one? It doesn’t.

Tuesday, 10 December

Have just hit on a brilliant solution of my difficulties. I will look for a small unfurnished room near Charlotte Street, at a minimum rent, which I can use for work and work only. Shall live with Gus at 109, but shall keep all manuscript and temperaments at the ‘office’.⁷²

Friday, 13 December

I have been feeling spasmodically very foolishly subjective and sentimental about the departure of the Pooh family. Having the Brat about the place has made me want one of my own desperately. I get very melodramatic to myself over the sensation that I am never to have any. It is expected of me as a natural sequence. The next event in the family, Jean’s wedding, how very gratifying. ‘In three years’ time,’ said Ethel to the baby yesterday, ‘I expect you’ll come back to find Auntie Jean pulling on the pants of her own little baby …’

Saturday, 14 December

I do hope this awful feeling of loneliness will pass. I hope it is only subjective, due to stifling influences at home. What is there to keep me at home? Except that I love my father. I love him. But then no one could help loving my father. As Nockie says, it is no credit to Ethel that she is devoted to him. And because of that (and partly too of fear) I have kept quiet within his house. I have climbed down, have tried to meet them on their own level, and what is the result. I am ignored. I lose touch with my friends in town, and here no one cares a damn what I do. I climb down, I climb down. I discuss the weather and menus and listen to family scandal without controversial comment. I have no rows with my family. I am not turned out of the house, but when I am here everybody seems to be wondering why I’m here and why I don’t go. It hurts. I am like a plant trying to find some suitable corner in which to grow and having to uproot myself perpetually.

Friday, 17 January 1936

I had my hand read the other day by a Europeanised Indian at the Caledonian Market. Usually palmists leave me sceptical or despondent and I try to forget what they have told me immediately. But this man seemed to be reading my mind rather than my hand.

‘You might seem to have a bright and happy disposition,’ he said, ‘but actually you are easily and often depressed because you are of an impulsive and highly sensitive nature. You feel that no one understands you. By the end of this month things will be much better for you. At the moment you are in an indecisive state of mind.

‘Early matrimony is indicated. Possibly this year. It will be a good thing for you. You will be happy, so long as you have courage. You are not financially embarrassed, and although money is not your ambition, you will prosper. You will always be surrounded by the elegances and graces. The next three years will be especially prosperous – 1939 will be an excellent year.’