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14.

Into the Woods

Saturday, 27 August 1938 (aged twenty-eight)

I have chosen to visit Graham Howe on Monday morning rather than be at Plymouth to meet Pooh and his family. I am afraid Pooh may be hurt, but I want to see Dr Howe before – I want to feel not quite so hollow. Pooh may suggest my asking along a Boy Friend to make a foursome for something or other, and I Shan’t be Able to Find One.

Monday, 29 August

2 p.m. I went through dull torture from 7 o’clock this morning until I began to answer Dr Howe’s questions. I am interested at how still I sat, how quietly I spoke, and I answered everything he asked me as honestly and fully as I could. He suggested that the death of my mother had left a serious blank in my life which I have ever since been trying to fill. I have looked for this maternal understanding in the men I have known and imagined, and have made a refuge of my writing when it should have been an attack. ‘If, by talking things over with you, I can give you a new orientation in life …’ Orientation – I have never properly examined this word.

Dr Howe said that he did not believe in long analysis if he could get to the root of the problem by more direct methods. Most psychologists apparently go in for the long analysis. I am to go to him twice a week throughout September. 24 guineas. Thank God I have the 24 guineas.

Friday, 2 September

Pooh and family very well, very happy, niece adorable. But myself alien, taut, awkward. This evening Graham Howe taxed me with stiff mental exercises. Made me draw diagrams on paper to his dictation. I must have that protective Mother-Dictator. I have been seeking for someone exactly the same as myself so that I may identify myself with them: a oneness with the person I love. But in the centre of the self is the mother, the cup, the receiver, and on the outer circumference the father, the agent, the active member. The mother-dictator I seek is the centre of myself, the inspiration, the creative force which my marriage with the outer circumference of technique and opportunity will produce the work of art.

That I have lived so long with the idea of writing is my guarantee that the spark, the possibility, is there. I have been looking at myself from the outside, rudely, striving after ideas with a clenched fist instead of an open hand. I must make myself permeable. I must cut out these negatives, do more adding and less subtracting.

I walked down Marylebone Road trying not to cry. Astonished that anyone could have diagnosed my troubles so clearly. ‘Your only difficulty seems to be the difficulty of letting yourself go, until you reach the bottom, as far down the chambers of the self as it is possible to fall – to fall asleep, to fall in love. And when you have learnt to relax, you will be able to write, to live, to love …’

It seemed so simple as he said it, and as clear and sweet as bell notes. But I grew immediately suspicious and distrustful. If he goes on being as sympathetic and stimulating as this I shall start falling in love with him, which is absurd and must not happen. I wonder how many of his lady clients do, and how he copes with such a situation.⁸⁴

Tuesday, 6 September

The astonishing, astonishing things Dr Howe twists out of one’s dreams! Last night I was in a train passing through wide, wide fields, almost prairie land, set out with small piled-up hammocks of cut grass. In one field some black-clad men, one of them distinctly in the conventional costume of Hamlet, short black coat, tights, a sword, with a bomb in his hand which he placed carefully, furtively in the centre of the field, and began with the aid of the others to cover it with cut brush wood. Then I was in an attic, in a bathroom having a shower, by the seashore deciding to bathe, but had to go into some shelter to remove underclothes which I had on under my bathing costume, and then with the Silvesters in a ballroom I didn’t recognise.

And he said, was I bomb or seed, was I Hamlet, full of doubt and indecision? Bomb and seed both contained immense energy, but one burst in timelessness and was destructive, and the other grew in time and was constructive. To experience life, he said, one must plunge into the sea of the emotions; one doesn’t experience life through thought and criticism. I’ve been a sardine in a tin taking my tin with me.

But I am still full of doubt and indecision. Will he really be able to get me out of this mess, and help me to make peace with myself?

Tuesday, 13 September

Something somewhere up or down in the darkness sits and watches me betraying myself to Dr Howe, watches Dr Howe betraying himself, and is vastly entertained. I told him about Gus, and he knew at once what I was trying to say. ‘In homosexuals a woman will find a baby to handle, a man to dominate her, but never a man to love. He does it with such glamour: the salads he makes for you (God, how did he know?) are supreme, and his opinions are supreme but fixed. There must be no opposition, no hostility. And if they are strong enough they will succeed, and you can point to their success, but over a trail of corpses.’

And then the torture began. I said all the things he expected me to say in answer to his questions. There is nothing he has told me about myself that I do not know, there is nothing he can tell me that I could not find for myself in his books, and yet I cannot disentangle my problems alone. I am still looking for a nice comfortable prop, for someone to pat me on the head and say, ‘Poor little thing, how you do suffer. But you will win through, you will have everything you want in time.’

Thursday, 15 September

My article on the old fortifications in Malta has been accepted by the Architectural Review. ‘The best thing that could have happened to you,’ said Dr Howe. ‘A new day has dawned for you.’

That letter from [editor] Richards this morning was in the nature of a miracle. I still can’t believe it’s true, that this thing is happening to me. Some dam in me is breaking down. I have started to live.

Monday, 19 September

Living begins to be simply heavenly, but I can’t believe it will last. I think Dr Howe is a magician and one day the spell will break. It is beyond explanation – a feeling of deep, spreading warmth inside me, like being in love.

Tuesday, 20 September

Now from that deep bed of warmth I slip into a well of darkness, down and down and down, just as he said I must. He is far, far away on the edge, watching me with indifference, then not watching me at all. ‘Treasure your secret places,’ he said. ‘Learn to love that darkness, that emptiness. Out of the darkness comes the creator. There must be light and darkness.’ And so I am letting myself go. Perhaps I shouldn’t even try to write about it.

I am only one of many patients. I have so much to learn, so long and lonely a road to go. Grabbing at the next man I’m attracted to will be no solution. ‘But learn,’ Dr Howe said, ‘to make the best of what you have. If you can’t have that, you have this. Learn to love this.’

Friday, 23 September

Graham Howe says that there will be no war.

Tuesday, 27 September

War, war and yet more rumours. Why must everything threaten to crash just as I am beginning?

Wednesday, 28 September

Gus says it is agony playing in Idiot’s Delight this week.⁸⁵ Houses are packed and absolutely silent. The world at the mercy of a madman.

Midnight. And now the Four Powers are to meet tomorrow in Munich. Perhaps, says Grig,⁸⁶ Hitler in the end will be the means of creating a real world peace and a real League of Nations.

Thursday, 29 September

Hampstead. I return to a London plunged into a kind of fatalistic, smiling gloom. We’ve been told that everyone who can get out of London should. This panic leaves me cold with fury – why run away? Tomorrow I have to be fitted for a gas mask. The Edgware-Highgate tube is closed for Air Raid Protection measures. And yet underneath I cannot believe there will be a war. Joan just rang the doorbell. They have been listening to news and I am going to join them in Flat 1.

Friday, 30 September

We stayed up until 2 a.m. waiting for news. Panic spreads quickly. I mustn’t lose my nerve, I won’t succumb to this wave of terror.

I didn’t know whether to keep my appointment with Dr Howe or not. I told him that the panic in London was unnerving me. And what, he asked, would I want to do if the crisis occurred? I want to stay in London. I might be able to help, do first aid. Living, I said, was so pointless if one didn’t create something.

Our meetings are over. I tried to say I was grateful.

Monday, 10 October

Nockie came yesterday. She is full of gloom for our political future, believes that war is inevitable eventually, or conditions of dictatorship in England that will be worse than war, and urges me to go abroad away from it all as soon as I can. Hitler’s curve, she says, is parabolic. Watch it. We went to see Charles Boyer in Orage at the Everyman, and also the GPO film North Sea. As Nockie said, the struggle to live goes on while Hitler marches into Czechoslovakia. And fishing in the North Sea will go on, for even dictators must eat.

Tuesday, 20 December