The Collector

M. I gave you that book to read because I thought you would feel identified with him. You’re a Holden Caulfield. He doesn’t fit anywhere and you don’t.

C. I don’t wonder, the way he goes on. He doesn’t try to fit.

M. He tries to construct some sort of reality in his life, some sort of decency.

C. It’s not realistic. Going to a posh school and his parents having money. He wouldn’t behave like that. In my opinion.

M. I know what you are. You’re the Old Man of the Sea.

C. Who’s he?

M. The horrid old man Sinbad had to carry on his back. That’s what you are. You get on the back of everything vital, everything trying to be honest and free, and you bear it down.

I won’t go on. We argued—no, we don’t argue, I say things and he tries to wriggle out of them.

It’s true. He is the Old Man of the Sea. I can’t stand stupid people like Caliban, with their great deadweight of pettiness and selfishness and meanness of every kind. And the few have to carry it all. The doctors and the teachers and the artists—not that they haven’t their traitors, but what hope there is, is with them—with us.

Because I’m one of them.

I’m one of them. I feel it and I’ve tried to prove it. I felt it during my last year at Ladymont. There were the few of us who cared, and there were the silly ones, the snobbish ones, the would-be debutantes and the daddy’s darlings and the horsophiles and the sex-cats. I’ll never go back to Ladymont. Because I couldn’t stand that suffocating atmosphere of the “done” thing and the “right” people and the “nice” behaviour. (Boadicaea writing “in spite of her weird political views” on my report—how dared she?) I will not be an old girl of such a place.

Why should we tolerate their beastly Calibanity? Why should every vital and creative and good person be martyred by the great universal stodge around?

In this situation I’m a representative.

A martyr. Imprisoned, unable to grow. At the mercy of this resentment, this hateful millstone envy of the Calibans of this world. Because they all hate us, they hate us for being different, for not being them, for their own not being like us. They persecute us, they crowd us out, they send us to Coventry, they sneer at us, they yawn at us, they blindfold themselves and stuff up their ears. They do anything to avoid having to take notice of us and respect us. They go crawling after the great ones among us when they’re dead. They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

I hate them.

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and the mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren’t ashamed of being dull and little. I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie.

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

G.P. was laughing at my being Labour one day (early on). I remember he said, you are supporting the party which brought the New People into existence—do you realize that?

I said (I was shocked, because from what he had said about other things, I thought he must be Labour, I knew he had been a Communist once), I’d rather we had the New People than poor people.

He said, the New People are still the poor people. Theirs is the new form of poverty. The others hadn’t any money and these haven’t any soul.

He suddenly said, have you read Major Barbara?

How it proved people had to be saved financially before you could save their souls.

They forgot one thing, he said. They brought in the Welfare State, but they forgot Barbara herself. Affluence, affluence, and not a soul to see.

I know he’s wrong somewhere (he was exaggerating). One must be on the Left. Every decent person I’ve ever met has been anti-Tory. But I see what he feels, I mean I feel it myself more and more, this awful deadweight of the fat little New People on everything. Corrupting everything. Vulgarizing everything. Raping the countryside, as D says in his squire moods. Everything mass-produced. Mass-everything.

I know we’re supposed to face the herd, control the stampede—it’s like a Wild West film. Work for them and tolerate them. I shall never go to the Ivory Tower, that’s the most despicable thing, to choose to leave life because it doesn’t suit you. But sometimes it is frightening, thinking of the struggle life is if one takes it seriously.

All this is talk. Probably I shall meet someone and fall in love with him and marry him and things will seem to change and I shan’t care any more. I shall become a Little Woman. One of the enemy.