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.
But this is what I feel these days. That I belong to a sort of band of people who have to stand against all the rest. I don’t know who they are—famous men, dead and living, who’ve fought for the right things and created and painted in the right way, and unfamous people I know who don’t lie about things, who try not to be lazy, who try to be human and intelligent. Yes, people like G.P., for all his faults. His Fault.
They’re not even good people. They have weak moments. Sex moments and drink moments. Coward and money moments. They have holidays in the Ivory Tower. But a part of them is one with the band.
The Few.
November 9th
I’m vain. I’m not one of them. I want to be one of them, and that’s not the same thing.
Of course, Caliban is not typical of the New People. He’s hopelessly out of date (he will call the record-player, the “gramophone”). And there’s his lack of confidence. They’re not ashamed of themselves. I remember D saying they think they’re all equal to the best as soon as they have a telly and a car. But deep down Caliban’s one of them—there’s this hatred of the unusual, this wanting everybody to be the same. And the awful misuse of money. Why should people have money if they don’t know how to use it?
It sickens me every time I think of all the money Caliban has won; and of all the other people like him who win money.
So selfish, so evil.
G.P. said, that day, the honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don’t know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren’t real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.
I’m not being frank. I still want money. But I know that it’s wrong. I believe G.P.—I don’t have to believe him when he says it, I can see it’s true—he hardly worries about money at all. He has just enough to buy his materials, to live, to have a working holiday every year, to manage. And there’re a dozen others—Peter. Bill McDonald. Stefan. They don’t live in the world of money. If they have it they spend it. If they don’t they go without.
Persons like Caliban have no head for money. They’ve only got to have a little, like the New People, and they become beastly. All the horrid people who wouldn’t give me money when I was collecting. I could tell, I only had to look in their faces. Bourgeois people give because they’re embarrassed if you pester them. Intelligent people give or at least they look honestly at you and say no. They’re not ashamed not to give. But the New People are too mean to give and too small to admit it. Like the horrid man in Hampstead (he was one of them) who said, I’ll give you half a dollar if you can prove it doesn’t go into someone’s pocket. He thought he was being funny.
I turned my back on him, which was wrong, because my pride was less important than the children. So I put a half-crown in for him later.
But I still hate him.
With Caliban it’s as if somebody made him drink a whole bottle of whisky. He can’t take it. The only thing that kept him decent before was being poor. Being stuck to one place and one job.