The Collector

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.

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.