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.’
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:
