The Collector

don’t. They’re teaching you to express personality at the Slade—personality in general. But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating. It’s all luck. Pure hazard.

He spoke in fits and starts. And there was a silence. I said, shall I tear them up? and he said, now you’re being hysterical.

I said, I’ve got so much to learn.

He got up and said, I think you’ve got something in you. I don’t know. Women very rarely have. I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and whatnot. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds. What you will.

I said, go on.

He said, it’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind. The technically accomplished buggers are two a penny in any period. Especially in this great age of universal education. He was sitting on his divan, talking at my back. I had to stare out of the window. I thought I was going to cry.

He said, critics spiel away about superb technical accomplishment. Absolutely meaningless, that sort of jargon. Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart. And all you’ve done here is build a lot of little windows on to a heart full of other fashionable artists’ paintings. He came and stood beside me and picked out one of the new abstracts I’d done at home. You’re saying something here about Nicholson or Pasmore. Not about yourself. You’re using a camera. Just as trompe-l'oeil is mischannelled photography, so is painting in someone else’s style. You’re photographing here. That’s all.

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.

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.