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,
