The Collector

 I'll never learn, I said.

 It's to unlearn, he said. You've nearly finished the learning. The rest is luck. No, a little more than luck. Courage. Patience.

 We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.

 It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away. Shone on everything. Now I write down what he said, it seems so obvious. But it's something in the way he says things. He is the _only_ person I know who always seems to mean what he says when he talks about art. If one day you found he didn't, it would be like a blasphemy.

 And there is the fact that he _is_ a good painter, and I know he will be quite famous one day, and this influences me more than it should. Not only what he is, what he will be.

 I remember later he said (Professor Higgins again). You don't really stand a dog's chance anyhow. You're too pretty. The art of love's your line: not the love of art.

 I'm going to the Heath to drown myself, I said.

 I shouldn't marry. Have a tragic love _affaire_. Have your ovaries cut out. Something. And he gave me one of his really wicked looks out of the corners of his eyes. It wasn't just that. It was frightened in a funny little-boy way, too. As if he'd said something he knew he shouldn't have, to see how I would react. And suddenly he seemed much younger than me.

 He so often seems young in a way I can't explain. Perhaps it's that he's made me look at myself and see that what I believe is old and stuffy. People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

 But G.P. has. I didn't recognize it as fresh-green-shootiness for a long time. But now I do.

    _October 24th_

 Another bad day. I made sure it was bad for Caliban, too. Sometimes he irritates me so much that I could scream at him. It's not so much the way he looks, though that's bad enough. He's always so respectable, his trousers always have creases, his shirts are always clean. I really think he'd be happier if he wore starched collars. So utterly not with it. And he stands. He's the most tremendous stander-around I've ever met. Always with that I'm-sorry expression on his face, which I begin to realize is _actually_ contentment. The sheer joy of having me under his power, of being able to spend all and every day staring at me. He doesn't care what I say or how I feel -- my feelings are meaningless to him -- it's the fact that he's got me.

 I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything _human_.

 He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.

 What irritates me most about him is his way of speaking. Cliche after cliche after cliche, and all so old-fashioned, as if he's spent all his life with people over fifty. At lunch-time today he said, I called in with regard to those records they've placed on order. I said, Why don't you just say, "I asked about those records you ordered?"

 He said, I know my English isn't correct, but I try to make it correct. I didn't argue. That sums him up. He's got to be correct, he's got to do whatever was "right" and "nice" before either of us was born.

 I know it's pathetic, I know he's a victim of a miserable Nonconformist suburban world and a miserable social class, the horrid timid copycatting genteel in-between class. I used to think D and M's class the worst. All golf and gin and bridge and cars and the right accent and the right money and having been to the right school and hating the arts (the theatre being a pantomime at Christmas and _Hay Fever_ by the Town Rep -- Picasso and Bartok dirty words unless you wanted to get a laugh). Well, that is foul. But Caliban's England is fouler.

 It makes me sick, the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.

 G.P. talks about the Paris rat. Not being able to face England any more. I can understand that so well. The feeling that England stifles and smothers and crushes like a steamroller over everything fresh and green and original. And that's what causes tragic failures like Matthew Smith and Augustus John -- they've done the Paris rat and they live ever after in the shadow of Gauguin and Matisse or whoever it may be -- just as G.P. says he once lived under the shadow of Braque and suddenly woke up one morning to realize that all he had done for five years was a lie, because it was based on Braque's eyes and sensibilities and not his own.

 Photography.

 It's all because there's so little hope in England that you have to turn to Paris, or somewhere abroad. But you have to force yourself to accept the truth -- that Paris is always an escape _downwards_ (G.P.'s words)--not saying anything against Paris, but you have to face up to England and the apathy of the environment (these are all G.P.'s words and ideas) and the great deadweight of the Calibanity of England.