The Collector

 And the real saints are people like Moore and Sutherland who fight to be English artists in England. Like Constable and Palmer and Blake.

 Another thing I said to Caliban the other day -- we were listening to jazz -- I said, don't you dig this? And he said, in the garden. I said he was so square he was hardly credible. Oh, that, he said.

 Like rain, endless dreary rain. Colour-killing.

 I've forgotten to write down the bad dream I had last night. I always seem to get them at dawn, it's something to do with the stuffiness of this room after I've been locked in it for a night. (The relief -- when he comes and the door is open, and the fan on. I've asked him to let me go straight out and breathe the cellar air, but he always makes me wait till I've had breakfast. As I think he might not let me have my half-hour in midmorning if he let me go out earlier, I don't insist.)

 The dream was this. I'd done a painting. I can't really re-member what it was like but I was very pleased with it. It was at home. I went out and while I was out I knew something was wrong. I had to get home. When I rushed up to my room M was there sitting at the pembroke table (Minny was standing by the wall -- looking frightened, I think G.P. was there, too, and other people, for some peculiar reason) and the picture was in shreds -- great long strips of canvas. And M was stabbing at the table top with her secateurs and I could see she was white with rage. And I felt the same. The most wild rage and hatred.

 I woke up then. I have never felt such rage for M -- even that day when she was drunk and hit me in front of that hateful boy Peter Catesby. I can remember standing there with her slap on my cheek and feeling ashamed, outraged, shocked, everything . . . but sorry for her. I went and sat by her bed and held her hand and let her cry and forgave her and defended her with Daddy and Minny. But this dream seemed so real, so terribly natural.

 I've accepted that she tried to stop me from becoming an artist. Parents always misunderstand their children (no, I won't misunderstand mine), I knew I was supposed to be the son and surgeon poor D never was able to be. Carmen will be that now. I mean I have forgiven them their fighting against my ambition for their ambitions. I won, so I must forgive.

 But that hatred in that dream. It was so real.

 I don't know how to exorcise it. I could tell it to G.P. But there's only the slithery scratch of my pencil on this pad.

 Nobody who has not lived in a dungeon could understand how _absolute_ the silence down here is. No noise unless I make it. So I feel near death. Buried. No outside noises to help me be living at all. Often I put on a record. Not to hear music, but to hear _something_.

 I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything's quite normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

    _October 25th_

 I must must must escape.

 I spent hours and hours today thinking about it. Wild ideas. He's so cunning, it's incredible. Foolproof.

 It must seem I never try to escape. But I can't try every day, that's the trouble. I have to space out the attempts. And each day here is like a week outside.

 Violence is no good. It must be cunning.

 Face-to-face, I can't be violent. The idea makes me feel weak at the knees. I remember wandering with Donald somewhere in the East End after we'd been to the Whitechapel and we saw a group of teddies standing round two middle-aged Indians. We crossed the street, I felt sick. The teddies were shouting, chivvying and bullying them off the pavement on to the road. Donald said, what can one do, and we both pretended to shrug it off, to hurry away. But it was beastly, their violence and our fear of violence. If he came to me now and knelt and handed me the poker, I couldn't hit him.

 It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote about G.P. the day before yesterday. And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic, to be able to call my past back. And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

 I've been thinking today of the time I took Piers and i Antoinette to meet him. The black side of him. No, I was stupid. They'd come up to Hampstead to have coffee and we were to go to the Everyman, but the queue was too long. So I let them bully me into taking them round.

 It was vanity on my part. I'd talked too much about him. So that they began to hint that I couldn't be so very friendly if I was afraid to take them round to meet him. And I fell for it.