Amazing what a difference my meeting Roy has made to my feelings for Peter. I had a wonderful weekend at the Gornolds’, but it was chiefly on account of Roy.31 He is quite the sweetest thing I have met for a long time, and I am desperately anxious our acquaintance won’t end there. At first I wondered if he was just a spoilt and pampered boy amusing himself with a studio and a few paints. He is intensely selfish and lazy, but evidently frightfully delicate, and has consequently been waited on and surrounded by female adoration since birth.
I wondered at first whether his interest in art was not just a pose. We had a tremendous argument about Epstein on Saturday evening, and he was horrified when I spoke in favour of Epstein’s work. ‘But it is the produce of a distorted mind!’ he said.
It was on Sunday morning that he impressed me most. We walked along the front before lunch discussing the future of Britain. ‘Britain is the coming race,’ he said. ‘There never has been such a nation, and I still think the Britisher is superior to all foreigners.’ I had mentioned Russia and my interest in its future. ‘Rot!’ Roy had said. ‘Utter bunk! For one thing the people are physically so degenerate it will take about 900 years for them to produce a clean, perfect strain, even after a few generations of what appears to be more or less normal healthy stock. You will get throwbacks and lunatics being born. It takes years to get rid of all that in a country. Besides, with the equalising of women, Russia will cut its own throat. As soon as the women of a nation become equal with men that nation falls – it happened in Rome, in Persia, in Egypt.’
I asked how. ‘Why, men lost their respect for women and women became cheap. The Britisher has always idealised women, but if she once cheapens herself Britain will be in danger.32 It’s a woman’s job to look attractive and appear to do nothing. There comes a time when man needs and relies on women’s intuition. He doesn’t really care to live with an intellectual woman: he would rather be persuaded to a point of view with subtle flattery than argued into it, however clever and convincing the argument.’
It was all decidedly stimulating and exciting. I want to know more of him, to continue our discussions. Possibly he finds me a little boring, for I gave him little in return except a certain amount of spirited opposition. But I cannot forget those ghastly moments when he was seeing me off on the 10.15 to Victoria last night. In his eyes was the expression of the man who is deliberately avoiding the words the woman wants him to say. ‘When dealing with women you are dealing with danger,’ he had admitted in the morning, so perhaps he would not mention anything about a further meeting lest I construed too much from the situation. But heaven forbid I should ever marry him! He would wear me out in a week.
Friday, 1 April
Letter to Joan in a vain endeavour to disencumber her of this Crockett business:
‘I am beginning to give up the popular idea of love. It is so grossly exaggerated in our cinema and cheap novels and magazines. I am putting it aside as a myth, a fantasy, a poet’s dream.
‘To me, friendship seems the most important thing in life: to know well as many interesting people as possible. And if it remains purely intellectual it doesn’t matter whether one’s friend is a man or woman. I cannot see that “love” is anything apart from a combination of these two elements – sex and friendship. It’s this damn silly sex business that makes friendships difficult and induces one to expect too much of marriage. One is either first physically attracted and then attain[s] mental agreement or vice-versa, and “love” is built out of these two together. Its perfection lies in the balance obtained between them. Tragedies occur when there are wrong proportions on either side, such as one’s attraction being purely physical and the other purely intellectual. Love must be built on a very deep and wise understanding of the other person’s heart and mind – only then may one indulge and enjoy sensual pleasure. Love is a thing to be learned, a very long and arduous process of continual building.’
Friday, 8 April
Strange to hear the history of one’s family. Of my mother, dominated and oppressed by the fear her own puritanical and severely minded mother inspired all through the years of her childhood until she was 20. Her own father could not pick her up and caress her in the presence of his wife. And the wild, troubled spirit of Uncle Fred, mother’s youngest and favourite brother, the one adventurer in that terribly sober and phlegmatic family. And the kindly old man who was my grandfather, and the good position his father held as Lighterman of the City of London on the Thames.33 And the change in the family’s fortunes with the invention of steel and steam.
After that comes an emptiness and sense of futility. Grandfather sleeping with his housekeeper. Uncle Fred leaving his selfish wife in England, sailing to New York, making love to a woman, building up a splendid business, instigating the jealousy of his colleagues, going for a voyage on a private yacht and being buried at sea.34 And I am left wandering – is it all a pageant to please immortal eyes?
Sunday, 10 April
I am being cowardly again: postponing the hour of study will not help me in June. But I could scream at the flaccidness of this household. Why can they not take an intelligent interest in any of the arts? What does Daddy know about modern architecture? Precious little of any real value. Blount does all the designing in the office – that is probably why it is so rotten.
What I need at home is either intelligent opposition in my pursuance of the arts, or definite encouragement. I meet with neither, and flounder hopelessly when I come into contact with it outside. I wish with all my heart Mother were still alive. She played Chopin exquisitely and was the artist here, not Daddy. Ethel is just a very conventional materialist. I am grateful for all she does, and if she had been at all intellectual she might not have been content to stay here and look after the house. Damn money. I want pots of it – enough anyway to provide me with an adequate number of servants, trained people who will look to the care of my wardrobe and meals and all these petty irksome little details that take up so much of one’s time. And here am I, wasting what little I have to spare when I should be starting a thesis on the architecture of the French Renaissance.
I had left Peter on Thursday evening in rather magnificent form. ‘You will become hard and efficient and live in the suburbs,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear it! Why don’t you take up dress design? You respond so quickly to clothes in the right colours …’ And then the other night I took off my glasses and combed back my hair, and surprised him more than he had ever been in his life. ‘But you are almost beautiful!’ he said. ‘We could make something really astounding of you – will you let me try please?’
I know he is not flattering me in the least – he is no more in love with me at the moment than he is with anyone else. For his art is the art of creating beautiful women, and I know he has extreme genius in this direction. Together we might be able to establish an amazingly good business. If he provided the ideas and I could see to their execution, I would make a damn good manageress. We would dress all the elite of the world! I see myself superbly accoutred in black velvet, moving suavely up and down softly carpeted luxuriously lit rooms, advising gracious and lovely women to wear what had been specially designed to enhance their personality. We would have a special beauty parlour and medical adviser, hairdresser, manicurist and chiropodist. Even perhaps a psychologist also, for what is the point of clothing the body if the mind is not also well appointed?
I don’t want to become one of those whom Ruskin describes as having ‘fat hearts, heavy eyes and closed ears’. The only way to do this is to live beautifully, fully, by striving to attain an ideal that is perhaps beyond my reach, to reach for the stars.
This was Jean’s last entry in an exercise book until October 1933. She continued to write for the next 18 months, but in
