Perhaps it’s just knowledge. Just knowing a lot about him. And knowing someone automatically makes you feel close to him. Even when you wish he was on another planet.
The first days, I couldn’t do anything if he was in the room. I pretended to read, but I couldn’t concentrate. But now I sometimes forget he’s here. He sits by the door and I read in my chair, and we’re like two people who’ve been married years.
It is not that I have forgotten what other people are like. But other people seem to have lost reality. The only real person in my world is Caliban.
It can’t be understood. It just is.
October 20th
It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.
I’ve just tried to escape.
What I did was to wait for him to unbolt the door, which opens outwards. Then to push it back as violently as possible. It’s only metal-lined on this side, it’s made of wood, but it’s very heavy. I thought I might hit him with it and knock him out, if I did it at just the right moment.
So as soon as it began to move back, I gave it the biggest push I could manage. It knocked him back and I rushed out, but of course it depended on his being stunned. And he wasn’t at all. He must have taken the force of it on his shoulder, it doesn’t swing very smoothly.
At any rate he caught my jumper. For a second there was that other side of him I sense, the violence, hatred, absolute determination not to let me go. So I said, all right, and pulled myself away and went back.
He said, you might have hurt me, that door’s very heavy.
I said, every second you keep me here, you hurt me.
I thought pacifists didn’t believe in hurting people, he said.
I just shrugged and lit a cigarette. I was trembling.
He did all the usual morning routine in silence. Once he rubbed his shoulder in rather an obvious way. And that was that.
Now I’m going to look properly for loose stones. The tunnel idea. Of course I’ve looked before, but not really closely, literally stone by stone, from top to bottom of each wall.
It’s evening. He’s just gone away. He brought me my food. But he’s been very silent. Disapproving. I laughed out loud when he went away with the supper-things. He behaves exactly as if I ought to be ashamed.
He won’t be caught by the door trick again. There aren’t any loose stones. All solidly concreted in. I suppose he thought of that as well as of everything else.
I’ve spent most of today thinking. About me. What will happen to me? I’ve never felt the mystery of the future so much as here. What will happen? What will happen?
It’s not only now, in this situation. When I get away. What shall I do? I want to marry, I want to have children, I want to prove to myself that all marriages needn’t be like D and M’s. I know exactly the sort of person I want to marry, someone with a mind like G.P.’s, only much nearer my own age, and with the looks I like. And without his one horrid weakness. But then I want to use my feelings about life. I don’t want to use my skill vainly, for its own sake. But I want to make beauty. And marriage and being a mother terrifies me for that reason. Getting sucked down into the house and the house things and the baby-world and the child-world and the cooking-world and the shopping-world. I have a feeling a lazy-cow me would welcome it, would forget what I once wanted to do, and I would just become a Great Female Cabbage. Or I would have to do miserable work like illustrating, or even commercial stuff, to keep the home going. Or turn into a bitchy ginny misery like M (no, I couldn’t be like her). Or worst of all be like Caroline, running along pathetically after modern art and modern ideas and never catching up with them because she’s someone quite different at heart and yet can never see it.
I think and think down here. I understand things I haven’t really thought about before.
Two things. M. I’ve never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She’s always been my mother I’ve hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks I’ve met or heard of, she’s the lamest. I’ve never given her enough sympathy. I haven’t given her this last year (since I left home) one half of the consideration I’ve given the beastly creature upstairs just this last week. I feel that I could overwhelm her with love now. Because I haven’t felt so sorry for her for years. I’ve always excused myself—I’ve said, I’m kind and tolerant with everyone else, she’s the one person I can’t be like that with, and there has to be an exception to the general rule. So it doesn’t matter. But of course that’s wrong. She’s the last person that should be an exception to the general rule.
Minny and I have so often despised D for putting up with her. We ought to go down on our knees to him.
The other thing I think about is G.P.
When I first met him I told everyone how marvellous he was. Then a reaction set in, I thought I was getting a silly schoolgirl hero-pash on him, and the other thing began to happen. It was all too emotional.
Because he’s changed me more than anything or anybody. More than London, more than the Slade.
It’s not just that he’s seen so much more life. Had so much more artistic experience. And is known. But he says exactly what he thinks, and he always makes me think. That’s the big thing. He makes me question myself. How many times have I disagreed with him? And then a week later with someone else I find I’m arguing as he would argue. Judging people by his standards.
He’s chipped off all (well, some of, anyway) my silliness, my stupid fussy frilly ideas about life and art, and modern art. My feyness. I’ve never been the same since he told me how he hated fey women. I even learnt the word from him.
List of the ways in which he has altered me. Either directly. Or confirmed alterations in progress.
1. If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist. Not what G.P. calls a “maker.”
2. You don’t gush. You don’t have little set-pieces or set-ideas you gush out to impress people with.
3. You have to be Left politically because the Socialists are the only people who care, for all their mistakes. They feel, they want to better the world.
4. You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible bad form.
5. If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.
6. You accept that you are English. You don’t pretend that you’d rather be French or Italian or something else. (Piers always talking about his American grandmother.)
7. But you don’t compromise with your background. You cut off all the old you that gets in the way of the maker you. If you’re suburban (as I realize D and M are—their laughing at suburbia is just a blind), you throw away (cauterize) the suburbs. If you’re working class, you cauterize the working class in you. And the same, whatever class you are, because class is primitive and silly.
(It’s not only me. Look at that time Louise’s boyfriend—the miner’s son from Wales—met him, and how they argued and snarled at each other, and we were all against G.P. for being so contemptuous about working-class people and working-class life. Calling them animals, not human beings. And David Evans, all white and stammering, don’t you tell me my father’s a bloody animal I’ve got to kick out of the way, and G.P. saying I’ve never hurt an animal in my life, you can always make out a case for hurting human beings, but human animals deserve every sympathy. And then David Evans coming up to me last month and actually admitting it had changed him, that evening.)