If he came to the door now I should run into his arms. I should want him to hold my hand for weeks. I mean I believe I could love him in the other way, his way, now.
October 23rd
The curse is with me. I’m a bitch to C. No mercy. It’s the lack of privacy on top of everything else. I made him let me walk in the cellar this morning. I think I could hear a tractor working. And sparrows. So daylight, sparrows. An aeroplane. I was crying.
My emotions are all topsy-turvy, like frightened monkeys in a cage. I felt I was going mad last night, so I wrote and wrote and wrote myself into the other world. To escape in spirit, if not in fact. To prove it still exists.
I’ve been making sketches for a painting I shall do when I’m free. A view of a garden through a door. It sounds silly in words. But I see it as something very special, all black, umber, dark, dark grey, mysterious angular forms in shadow leading to the distant soft honey-whitish square of the light-filled door. A sort of horizontal shaft.
I sent him away after supper and I’ve been finishing Emma. I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people’s lives, she can’t see Mr. Knightley is a man in a million. She’s temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she’s basically intelligent, alive. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being. Her faults are my faults: her virtues I must make my virtues.
And all day I’ve been thinking — I shall write some more about G.P. tonight.
There was the time I took some of my work round for him to look at. I took the things I thought he would like (not just the clever-clever things, like the perspective of Ladymont). He didn’t say a thing as he looked through them. Even when he was looking at the ones (like the Carmen at Ivinghoe) that I think are my best (or did then). And at the end he said, they’re not much good. In my opinion. But a bit better than I expected. It was as if he had turned and hit me with his fist, I couldn’t hide it. He went on, it’s quite useless if I think of your feelings in any way at all. I can see you’re a draughtsman, you’ve a fairish sense of colour and what-not sensitive. All that. But you wouldn’t be at the Slade if you hadn’t.
I wanted him to stop but he would go on. You’ve obviously seen quite a lot of good painting. Tried not to plagiarize too flagrantly. But this thing of your sister — Kokoschka, a mile off. He must have seen my cheeks were red because he said, is all this rather disillusioning? It’s meant to be.
It nearly killed me. I know he was right; it would have been ridiculous if he hadn’t said exactly what he thought. If he’d just kind-uncled me. But it hurt. It hurt like a series of slaps across the face. I’d made up my mind that he would like some of my work. What made it worse was his coldness. He seemed so absolutely serious and clinical. Not the faintest line of humour or tenderness, even of sarcasm, on his face. Suddenly much, much older than me.
He said, one has to learn that painting well — in the academic and technical sense — comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you’ve got that ability. So have thousands. But the thing I look for isn’t here. It just isn’t here.
Then he said, I know this hurts. As a matter of fact, I nearly asked you not to bring this round. But then I thought… there’s a sort of eagerness about you. You’d survive.
You knew they wouldn’t be any good, I said.
I expected just about this. Shall we forget you brought them? But I knew he was challenging me.
I said, tell me in detail what is wrong with this. And I gave him one of the street scenes.
He said, it’s quite graphic, well composed, I can’t tell you details. But it’s not living art. It’s not a limb of your body. I don’t expect you to understand this at your age. It can’t be taught you. You either have it one day, or you 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.