| london volume 1 part 1 - 1969 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[journal] London, Courtauld Institute Te Reriora, brown girl sitting facing me, leaning sideways from her crossed legs with her elbow on her knee, square shoulders, flat pointed breasts, high eyebrows with intelligent, amused eyes turned back toward the centre of the picture; another woman sitting cross-legged behind her in three quarter back profile, a relationship between the two of them something like Picasso's sleepers and watchers, one is alive and the other, because she is turned away, is dead or sleeping. A very small girl child lies asleep in the corner, shadowed by an orange-spotted white cat lying higher in the picture, at the same angle. On the left wall, a frightened woman held by a man, a snouty goddess watching them. On the right wall a standing god or goddess with its eyes on the man and woman. Through the door, a man leaving on horseback. Matte, strongly outlined figures like the figures on wall friezes, the entire picture a section of a frieze, brown skin shadowed by green, like bronze. A blotted look about all the colors. The focus of the picture the half-smile, the eyes, illuminated face of the forward girl, the head that juts forward out of the frieze. Van Gogh's Peach Trees in Blossom, like mosaic in miniature, enameled, structurally stylized into bands, clouds, colored cloud borders, sky, hills, red-roofed white houses - then, beginning to curve, white blossomed peach trees, fence, grass, footpath, grass - and, curving across the picture's corner, a canal or road, impossible to tell, because it's brown, blue and red. Hard and brilliant color, everything in its place, fixed tightly into place by the brilliance of the row of white blossoms. It's the 16th of July, I'm twenty four, lying on a rough blanket in the Academy Hotel with only my pants on, a bruised feeling on the soles of my feet, clammy skin, shiny nose, hair loose down my back, dirty fingernails, two bitter lemons in my stomach from a pub in Mayfair, plenty of dried sweat from the private showing Schlessinger gave for Midnight Cowboy tonight, anger and confused self-harangue because we stamped out of the pub in different directions, Peter ripping out a pound note and I muttering "I can pay for my own taxis," and now my knowledge that I must decide something. [from Peter's journal] de-emphasis on action, on meaning, on one-to-one experience, seems at least partly explicable as that of a young person simply, of talent and intelligence who has not yet found her way in life. So I begin to thumb through bits about our first trip to Toronto. [May 1969] But I cannot do it. The image I receive is too depressing - of an intelligent and aware but totally self-obsessed opportunistic girl. All other people are simply art objects for her, objects that should please her own sensibility. When they do not, when they attempt to enter into a human relationship with her, her impulse is to destroy them. Then she feels good. Then some compassion, her little smiles of tenderness. With Ellie, I surrender her. I mistrust her too deeply now for me to be able to care. She has said she wants to 'learn from' me. Well I have nothing to teach her. It is not as simple as that, more reciprocal, more dialectical. The pieces are beginning to fit together, but to form a truly frightening picture. Had I set out to imagine it, I could not have conceived a more selfish, less loving, more destructive person - at least with me. Her interest in art as extension, after Susan Sontag, is partly an expression of a cultural ethic, the new sensibility, her metaphysics as she would call it, but also partly lends itself to psychological interpretation. It is - again in part - an attempt to bypass the moral dimension of man. She prides herself - falsely of course, for she falls far short of her own ideals, of being open, tolerant, accepting. "Why be proud of being narrow," she once surprised me by saying in defense of homosexuality. She wants in her personal life to lead a path of pure self-interest and justify it to herself by a philosophical aesthetic. Things, people, ideas exist for her appropriation, her use when the mood is right. Any troubles in her nonplans meets with immediate impatience, anger, destructive asserting of her own will. Crouch End 20th July [journal] After that the night of anger, tears, explanation, self defense, accusation, tenderness, desperation, headache, fatigue, then the blurring of Isabel, Peter clamping his hand on my chin asking me why I did not believe him, my cry "Because you believe in IDEAS!", his hand across my face, my stagger to the bed seeming to imitate all the fight scenes I've seen in films, then Peter bending over me and myself struggling in both fear and rebellion - I screamed to make him stop, and to say "Take that you bastard" as my way of hitting back. His hand clamped over my mouth, "... because I'm bourgeois." In the morning, I had a purple bruise around my eye; ever since that evening we've swung between watchful concern to comfort one another and accusation and self defense, confusion like that blurred moment of violence, probably as blurred for him as for me, when I thought "Well this is very definite and very fatal, this is a signal, something has happened," very coldly, with only a little surprise. Last night I finally left, with Peter hurling the Sight and Sound after me, hurt and angry. Today is the moon landing; I hadn't realized until this afternoon. Now the telly and the continuing conversation with Peter in my head; somewhere across London Peter's conversation with me, probably more anger than hurt now, but still a conversation. What a dislocation of our lives we've been - I felt, walking down Gower Street to find a cab, as if I were suddenly lighter and healthier and had somehow come out of a long tunnel that had become more and more narrow to the end, with that symbolic punch, and then caved in. The moon coverage: images, below them a black band with white subtitles, time to touchdown, Andrin speaking, image of what looks like a large orderly office or schoolroom, static and factual voices on the soundtrack, then time measured to seconds, nothing random, the static a sound of tension, crackles with a texture like tweed, height above moon 11 miles, Armstrong speaking, white-shirted men moving calmly in the schoolroom, height above moon 9 miles, 9 nautical miles, 5 minutes to main descent burn. The surface of the moon as they see it coasting above it. Speed 4600 mph, 2 minutes to braking burn, cloud cover over the moon, 8 minutes, Greg behind me sucking his cheeks in with concentration, Huston "You sho' looking good," altimeter dropping fast, high gate, low gate, touchdown, flashing, white-shirted men in the schoolroom making restrained gestures of joy. "And take your fucking Sight and Sound!" I'm thinking of Peter in his pyjamas, thin, indignant, blue and brown, body asking to be held and of the way he looked when he came in and found me reading his journal - his face like a sparrow hawk's, small, triangular, furious, but too young and too small to be frightening. I wanted to caress him into peace, defend myself, make a little raft of tenderness between us. He said "I'm not interested in justice, I'm only interested in survival now!" That's fair. "I need to hate you." Okay. "I knew you'd read it. I knew you'd write a long letter." "It doesn't help very much for you to say you knew, you know." Then a series of his cries, my strenuously quiet protests; he can say whatever he wants, because he needs to. My fucking instincts for self preservation - "Instincts are also to let you know what you can do and what you can't, inside the bounds of what you are, that's what I think." "And did your instincts say 'That's nonsense' about me?" "Yes." "Then there's nothing more to say is there." I feel now that I should have stayed it out, having gone so dreadfully far with him. My instincts are conservative - I fall back on my old fear when faced with our complete deadlock in mistrust and selfconsciousness. It's true that he has consistently misread most of what I've done and said in the last week, in fact since we've come to London. He says it isn't important: what is important is that I didn't ever really love him and so have used him by coming along and disturbing his life. That's true, I didn't ever love him enough, why not, I don't know, because he's more than I've ever known. But he wanted my soul, he wanted complete dedication - I could not do it cold, as he said I should if I couldn't do it as he did, desperately and seemingly, hopefully, completely. He wanted too much - he gambled as he did because he saw a renewal and freedom for his life, a return to what he was when he was younger. What he wanted wasn't unreasonable and wasn't wrong - did his wanting it too desperately prevent it? Or was it all my flightiness, lovelessness, father-like-ness, aggressiveness, insecurity? His greed or my selfishness? His insecurity, sexual and philosophical; or vulnerability due to a desperate abandoning of himself to an idea? Who asked him to? Who asked him for self sacrifice? His answer would be, It's not my fault for doing it, but yours for not asking! The strongest emotion is his, so the right is his. Now, and all day today, feeling loss rather than freedom and relief. He'll be glad to know - emptiness and failure, petty conversations beginning with the cabby last night. Still, the conversation with the cabby ended, when we arrived here in the complete dark and quiet, by his refusing my tip, asking about my foot, and making a joke about sending him Canadian chaw tobacco. There are some surprises and good things left in the world. I don't want to give myself away. "Lose yourself to gain yourself" Peter says is an insight - when, where, why. London N8 21 July c/o Greg, 101 Weston Park, day after the moon landing [letter] By now there is quite a bit of London to describe, and one day's worth of Oxford, Greg, Desser, tomorrow I'll go to Bristol to see Olivia. I'm at the same time very sad, like a hillside after heavy rain, leached out and full of gullies - sad and empty. I couldn't tell you about the past months since April, every day I changed my mind about it, it's been a long time of confusion and vacillation, something like guilt, bursts of certainty which couldn't be trusted, bursts of uncertainty which similarly could not be trusted. It was partly the problem of working next year. Mostly, as you must have guessed, it was Peter Harcourt. In the course of visiting me in the hospital through March and April he began to feel that the visits were the most important thing in his life, and from there jumped to a certainty that he was in love with me and that we could build an exceptional life together. My first response was panic - it had never occurred to me, and I'd always thought of him as being rooted in Joan in spite of his love affairs. My second was - he's the most remarkable and valuable man I know; what an honour, but I can't! After that, flashes of happiness, flashes of fear, days when his certainty and passion convinced me, days when they didn't convince me but left me ashamed to be so unmoved by what moved him so deeply. At the same time, the cast coming off, pain, worry, physical feebleness, the pressure from Peter to decide. The uncertainty about whether Joan wanted to keep him in spite of the way he suppresses her and makes her feel unworthy - if she did, I knew there was no question - but she never asked him to stay and even told me to leave her out of consideration - impossible! And his children and responsibilities - my unreadiness to commit my whole self and whole future to his crazy beautiful dream - the feeling of my own fearfulness and ungenerosity in not being able to leap into that dream he believed in so desperately and generously. I knew I had to keep my head, since he lost his - yet the hesitations and second thoughts made him feel rejected and began to give him second thoughts, which he didn't want because he needed his craziness. From the beginning, his insistence and my hesitation, repeating themselves in between days of feeling extraordinary unity and excitement, these again replaced by the pattern of insistence and hesitation. He proposed that I come to England with him, to give us a chance to see whether we could work out as he believed we could - and I finally said yes; that seemed reasonable. So I came to England, and within less than two weeks we'd worked ourselves into such deadlock, frustration, mistrust, despair, that we know for certainty that we don't work for reasons seemingly too deep even to understand, without even attempting to resolve them! It comes to this: he wants my complete commitment; I can't give it. Saturday July 26 The end of the sad tale you've just read is that on the night before the moon landing, at 2 a.m. I picked up my things and left the hotel and took a cab through the deserted streets to Greg's place in a Finsbury Park suburb, rang and was let in and slept on the floor and have not seen Peter since then - but have lived with a head full of unfinished arguments, protests, regrets, sadnesses, all sloshing together like clothes in a washing machine. That is that. I'll be in France next year but will come to see you before leaving, in early September. Greg sends generous and enthusiastic piles of love - he's been very good to come home to - my Mother Morrison as Peter called him. Olivia is fond of him and has been very cheered up by him - O is the same as she was, still gay and scatterbrained and unable to look after herself. She's left Don for good, and for good I think. I realize that you must be exasperated with not having had a letter yet after three weeks, and now getting one so full of tribulation. But I'll mail this now on my way downtown to leave some flowers surreptitiously in Peter's room because it's his birthday. Many impressions of England and some return of energy and good spirits to deal with them, but I must mail this off now. 26 July This continues the letter mailed today, gloomy as it was. London - the picture, one picture, to remember is Whitehall on a sunny morning. Whitehall is a street, not a building - a very broad commercial avenue leading from Trafalgar Square past the Houses of Parliament on the north bank of the Thames. It is hung with very large British flags at the third floor level of the buildings - red, white and blue. Below them goes the traffic: red double-decker buses, deep blue lorries, square black taxis like patent leather boxes. Past the elegant white facades shaded out with patterns of centuries of coal dust - there I was standing in the midst of it all, waiting for a red bus to come along, and who should swing past but Desser, in a good mood for a change. Coffee and a feeling of really finding an old friend again. One afternoon Greg arrived on the motorcycle [red 1969 Triumph Trophy 250] and said "Come explore." So we went forth and east into a part of London neither of us knew. The 'City,' or the old formerly walled part of the city. The motorcycle! Sitting behind Greg, I can't see the road, only the buildings flashing by on either side, like a very rapid film cut very abruptly as we turn corners, pass empty squares, flicker past diverging streets - all the glorious rooftops, all extravagant, all different, all ridiculous, full of chimney pots, little coy windows, gables, turrets and towers, ridgepole decorations, baroque domes - suddenly there's St Paul's Cathedral, enormous and awesomely beautiful, then, flick! it's gone by and on the right is the river, London Bridge! And then past it the rows of identical warehouse cranes lined up precisely, and then the magical towers of Tower Bridge - there's the Tower itself, with tiny windows medieval prisoners stared onto the river from. We rode across the bridge once, all flicker of ships, cables, towers, docks, cranes - then we walked back across it looking at the muddy slimy water and the docks going as far downriver as we could see. On the other side, past the Tower, further down the embankment (as the riverbank is called), we suddenly came to a square, then behind it the back of a church and a little walled churchyard where dirty Cockney kids were shaking apples out of a tree. The church looked so pretty that we went around to the front - flowers all over the porch, and inside, more flowers, the middle of a flower festival designed to lure and trap tourists. The church was - and this is true - All Hallows Barking by the Tower, on Great Tower Street. No sooner were we inside, Greg clutching his helmet in his hand, than a cheerful little man with a guide's armband took us in charge to make sure we saw all there was to see. Which included: a sword rest where the Lord Mayor of London leaves his ceremonial sword when he comes to church; an exquisitely carved baptismal font cover made of wood, being painstakingly cleaned of nearly three centuries of dirt, the cleaning taking a year in all; a piece of crude brick wall, Roman! from the 7th century; in the basement, pieces of Roman mosaic floor, probably 2nd century but maybe earlier; also in the basement a portrait of William (Pennsylvania) Penn who was married in the church before going to America; also in the basement a tiny model of London as a Roman village scattered on the north shore of the Thames, with two little streams going through it past the temples and administrative centres (one of these streams is now a sewer artery of the city, tourists can pay to walk up it, far underground). (The original city is now about 18' below the present one as the city built on its own ruins.) Our guide pointed out all of this, with scandalous stories (of how America is buying London Bridge for a million pounds) and pointed observations about whatever came to his mind, and then cheerfully shoved us out without even pausing significantly at the offerings box. And then, just outside in the little square which had had only sleeping rummies before we went in, a black-moustached man stripped to his waist cracking his whip, bawling threats at a long-haired young man standing meek in the middle of the square, also bare to the waist. A crowd soon gathered and he bawled at them too. Then he cracked an iron chain as easily as he had the whip, and proceeded to use it to tie the boy up. He put him in a sack and tied him up with more chains, threw him onto the ground and put a sword alongside his chin, tucked under the chains. At this point Greg - who'd gone to get the bike - arrived. We never knew what happened to the boy in the sack. Tuesday 29 July Summary: returning energy, for walking, for teasing Greg, for missing and flirting with Desser and cherishing Alan a little, for whooping on the back of the motorcycle. No more rings under my eyes. Peter had just checked out when I went to leave red zinnias and 2 pears with a card for his birthday - gone to Stockholm. Three more weeks and I go back to Canada; silly and ridiculous. But I'm healthy again and I'm free of that swamp. The first week's guilt and pity has vanished (nearly) and anger reappears sporadically, when I remember his "I'm not interested in justice, I'm interested in survival" and when I remember my complicity in Joan's humiliation, which was not malicious but was stupid. I won't take anyone's word about his wife again. I grumble to Greg and he's sympathetic; then I grumble because he's sympathetic. Kingston Whig-Standard clipping July 25 City man found dead Ontario Provincial Police at Killaloe are continuing the investigation into the death of Michael John Easton, 37, of 544 College Street, Kingston. July 30 [letter] Leave tomorrow on the motorcycle for two weeks in Cornwall. Am being a very lazy tourist and have relatively few adventures to report. July 31 Just past Amesbury the highway sloped uphill, a long very slowly rising stretch. Beside it was a grassy bank, then a wood fence, then a field of ripe barley. The sun was straight ahead of us and very low so that it lit the bank almost from below - on the bank the long grasses with big ripe heads stood yellow-green and distinct from each other, poppies flared out brilliant red, and the barley with its whiskers fallen sideways was solid yellow. I was watching the bank slide sideways past us, the swipe of yellow between sky and grass, the blur of the poppies, when Greg said "That's it". I looked ahead to see that we had come to the top of the hill. Stonehenge was below, on the side of a lower hill and overlooking Salisbury Plain on the north. It stood like a clump of burned-out trees, the rough rocks standing together in a circle looking deserted and completely undomesticated in the middle of a field beginning to turn blue as the sun fell. No trees, no people: a huddle of boulders. We crossed the valley and came up beside them, to find groups of tourists walking back and forth along a six-strand barbed wire fence. Admission hours were just a half hour past. The beautiful isolation we'd seen from the top of the hill was artificial. Even from the other side of the fence the rocks were beautiful, like one large sculpture made up of beautiful single rocks and groups of rocks, none of which are smooth. The low light gave them yellow edges and blue shadows, and by lying on my stomach I could see them at the top of the horizon, with nothing but sky behind them. A family of monoliths, with axis toward the sun at summer solstice! Ordinary tourists, we two in our motorcycle helmets, and a ragged bearded boy in a képi and a bedraggled blanket who asked us for matches in a French accent. I had daydreams of sneaking in among the stones after dark or at sunrise, and so wanted to camp nearby. On the top of the hill Stonehenge is built on was a ridge road where a line of tents and caravans had already formed, so we rode up the hill to the gravel road and found some flattened grass past two caravans and a tent full of French boys. We ate our bread and cheese and pears looking down at Stonehenge on one side and back at a crimson sun over a wheatfield. Then pitched the tent, the same little orange tent we'd taken into Hunting Island and Pennsylvania pine forests, and the same smell still inside it. Got into our down mummy bags and are very warm and nostalgic and have been lying with our arms around each other thinking about past trips. I've been jumping up and down exclaiming at how beautiful this circle of stones is. I want to come back again and again and see it in every kind of light. I want to put it in my garden. - We left London late this afternoon, found some country roads that plunged through thatched villages like Goodworth Cloatford and Abbot's Ann, but missed Free Folk and would have to go out of our way to hit Middle Wallop or Upper Wallop to the north or Nether Wallop to the south. As we came out of London G noticed a steering problem and we went several miles out of the way to his dealer's empire in Kingston-on-Thames. While we waited for a foreman to come back we had lunch in what the young English would call a very grotty little caf' - the cheap classical egg an'chips - one tough fried egg and a pile of good vinegary French fries - and a sweet, which in this area means any kind of dessert drowned in watery custard. Several hours later something else which is becoming ritual, a stop beside a stubble field to sleep for half an hour when the wind and vibrations make us seat-sore and sleepy. Also ritual is a stop at a village fruiterer. I bought pears and was determined to eat one sitting ceremonially on a stone in Stonehenge, but evening and morning were too much for my resolution, so we had to go back to Amesbury in the morning - ie: August 1 I forgot to say that when we got back to the motorcycle, the foreman told G at great length how the steering was perfect; both G's crossness and the steering problem disappeared completely and immediately. Stonehenge by the time we got back from breakfast had been changed from a silent massive holy place to a playground with rocks fallen for children and young men to climb on and for adults to photograph each other in (ie the important thing is not the place, but having been there, and so the photographs must be not of the place but of one another being there). I squatted and crawled and lurked waiting for the one second when everyone, every head and hand and handbag, should have moved out of my viewfinder rectangle, and so got some pictures of what seem to be deserted rocks. Later note - from Stonehenge we rode through more villages, west toward the coast. By evening we came to the sea in a funny grey seaside town - Minehead, which we called Mineshaft out of spite. To try to find a camping place we went out into the country. After tea, of course, in a second storey restaurant which seemed to me to come out of English novels about English seaside towns - a huge, long room with large windows, a broad floor, a wide staircase into a bakery storefront downstairs, young long-legged waitresses, a clock hanging just outside one of the windows, a fanciful tea menu, many little tables with little groups of people sitting thirty feet away from each other, tidiness and fresh air and a bit of the feeling of the La Glace Community Centre - also a big generous Ladies where one could wash one's face under the genteel stare of other ladies who only brush their teeth in the privacy of their own homes - out into the country, I was saying! We resolved to take the second road turning off the high road to the right, which turned out to be a road with a sign saying To Selworthy Road Unfit for Motor Vehicles. But as a motorcycle is more like a horse than like a proper motor vehicle we turned onto it undaunted and found ourselves flying along the side of a steep escarpment, in what was like a maze-path, a road so narrow and so tight between its walls and hedge sides, that we only very infrequently and briefly could catch sight of the beautiful and intricate view of the valley below and across, with its tiny fields and web of hedges pegging down the entire countryside in odd ragged bits of green and yellow, with huge luxurious trees and white farm cottages like knots in the web. Past a deep damp spruce forest, past a gate leading up into a long slope of sheep pasture, along red earth wagon tracks, and to the tiny thatched village of Selworthy, with its five houses running in a curve down the hill, and its ancient church surrounded by lichen-eaten tombstones and with its door opening out across all the splendour and serenity of that valley. Minehead, Somerset August 3, Sunday We're sitting in a very large cafeteria with our egg an'chips dinner plates stacked out of the way, Greg reading my book about English houses and me trying to catch up this travelogue in my usual detailed and immediately publishable style. I am constantly being distracted by the people passing on the seaside promenade outside the big cafeteria window. Greg looked up a minute ago to ask why I was looking sad. I'd been watching the families passing by in little straggles. Minehead is a poor man's (working class) resort, with its mucky rocky beach and grey cold Bristol Channel water; the families are shabby, badly dressed even in their holiday clothes. Every sort of distortion goes by - blue lumpy fat legs, noses like shiny sausages, varicose veins. Parents are ugly; children are also ugly. Nearly everyone looks stupid, vacant, browbeaten, minimized. It made me remember the farm families in Grande Prairie, the people who came to the Auction Mart in rattling pickups, the women in shortie coats and frizzy hair, the bent-shouldered men, the spindly shy children. That made me remember how Father was ashamed of our rustic clothes and rustic manners in public; I suppose he thought we looked like these families? When I told Greg about this he said, "But the thing about these families is that they look stupid and vacant, and I'm sure your family didn't." Of course we didn't, although we looked intimidated. Why didn't Father realize that our gaucheness was part of our intelligence and energy? I don't think he ever knew how alive and intelligent we were, all of us, especially Paul. It's turning dark, but people continue to pass, some of them back and forth many times. Down the road is Billy Butlin's Holiday Camp, a resort for the working class; the name Butlin has an automatic connection in the English mind with the notion of lower class vulgarity, Greg says. This morning when we got up our fern and pine forest was full of sunlight and warm flies. We spent the day on more narrow country roads plunging down into and up out of villages. One, that we had to open a sheep pasture gate to find, was three houses big - Stoke Pero, with the tiny Stoke Pero parish church and graveyard on the hillslope - it looked more like a barn than a church on the outside, rough fieldstone construction, but a lovely wooden wagon roof and a beautiful divided door. Across a brown and gold and green moor hill called Dunkery Beacon, with view of all Exmoor and the sea, and along a road with English families on canvas chairs on all sides wherever the road widened into someone's gate and lane, we went to Exford. There we sat on the green and read the News of the World and when it was time went to have a Plain Tea - scones, thinly sliced bread and butter, muffins and cake and tea with a big dish of jam - in a Tea Room with two opulent cats and a discreet rattle of china cups and genteel conversation, a beautiful tea which made us warm and full for another cold windy drive up and down more hills to Cleeve Abbey ruins. Cistercian abbey built of crude red fieldstone, the abbey church completely gone, but a dormitory where each monk had a pointed lancet window and a stone armchair of his own, a tiny parlour which was the only place speech was allowed, the tiled elegant floor of an old refectory, garderobes which were really toilets in which monks hung their robes for fumes to mothproof them, a beautiful wagon roofed refectory with stone tracery windows, a Painted Room (where the abbot had visitors and where illiterate adults caught at little misdemeanors could be given a moral lesson from the wall mural, not once but nine or ten times - a picture of a man with saints watching him, fishes below to snap him up if he sinned and angels at his shoulder to encourage him), a cloister, an orchard, a Night Door and a Day Door, for the monks' entries and exits from very frequent masses. On the night we first found Selworthy, we saw a gate and a path leading upwards through the forest from the entrance to the village green - we followed the path, one of Exmoor's famous 'walks', we discovered, up through a beautiful bit of forest, very dark and full of the sound of running water. Then it came out into what turned out to be our first experience with real moorland - a strange beautiful slope vividly colored in golds, yellow-greens and the purple of heather. There were sheep everywhere in the knee-deep prickles (gorse?) and we were immediately found and followed by huge sheep flies, so that we had to walk with our heads wrapped in our jackets. The ground was stony and covered with a kind of silky gold-brown grass growing out of green tufts between the gorse, the heather, the tiny yellow flowers. Our first moor - when we came down the hill again I was elated, because it was my first long walk (and uphill!) without pain in my hip. (Two miles!) We got back down, after discovering a road along the spine of the moor, just as it began to grow dark - went back to the spruce forest and camped just out of sight behind a huge clump of fern, on the damp woody red soil. Next day, a heavily foggy day threatening to rain (it had rained all night), we found the entrance in Minehead to the moor road we'd found the evening before - we roared through running streaks of wet white cloud, nearly blown off the road by a wind toward the sea - along the spine of the moor with the sea falling away toward the north and the moor falling away toward the cultivated valley in the south. (Nearby is Lorna Doone's valley.) All around, the wet gorse and moor grass glistening, the goldbrown grass flowing like a palomino's mane; the ride was thrilling and beautiful and cold. When we came down into Minehead again I bought a pair of Wellington boots, rubber farmer boots, very 'stout' and warm and impervious to gorse spines. That night two other people were camped beside us at the pasture gate, in a rudimentary ragged tent, beside an odd black motorcycle - they turned out to be two rocker boys (a tame version of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang) on a holiday tour of the south and west of England - two polite and nice-looking boys, one a tall thin redhead and the other a small longhaired wild man, both with heavy Huntingtonshire (or something-tonshire) accents and passions for motorcycles. We admired each other's motorcycles at length, and again had no time to read before it was too dark. We stayed in our Selworthy forest for several days, making excursions into the moor to remote villages, often passing through beautiful, wild landscapes, high hilltops covered in flowing green and gold, muddy sheep, flying heavy clouds. Many teas and breakfasts in the Minehead tea room. Then one afternoon a late departure west again, along a hill road that nearly slid into the sea, sometimes as steep as 3:1, with a sliding sun behind cliff faces and thick yellow evening light transforming the road, a treacherous glorious stretch, with the colored sky and a sea like grey silk-velvet on the right, and green valleys suddenly diving down through the moor slopes on the left, beautiful, the watered rich green cuts in the dry gold hilltop moorland. Then a bed and breakfast, warmth on the third floor of a high old house. August 6, Wednesday It's sometime after six o'clock and I'm sitting in a sheep pasture, back against the stone wall, warmed by the sun straight ahead and reflected from the ocean. This is part of the Cornwall coast which is on the edge of an area of - according to our Esso map - Great Natural Beauty. Here the sheep pasture with its stone and hedge wall seems to roll down to the edge of the ocean, when stone cliffs fall almost straight down into the water. Many woolly and dirty white sheep with their ears standing out perfectly level with the tops of their heads are moving around us. A few stop and stare, but most are indifferent and go on with their noisy feeding, making a sound like chomping and tearing and snuffing, their sides shaking with greed - and then there's the pasture, every blade of grass backlit by the late evening light I like best, and the brilliant column of reflected light on the water. On either side the land slopes down in round farmed hills toward other sea cliffs. A village called --- built in the rust-lichened field rock rubble style of the area. A church tower, square and crenellated in the Norman style, on the far headland to the north, another pointed headland with islands tumbled into the sea off it miles downward to the south. Stone wall at our backs, then the road and the motorcycle and then more round hills full of oats, sheep, brown cows and of course fences. Fences, walls: there are nearly no fences we'd call fences, only stone walls, usually very wide and spread out toward the bottom, with stones running in different directions at different levels, and at the top a row of stones with the pointed end upwards. These are new fences. Old fences are exactly the same, except that they're invisible - grass, flowers, and usually a prickly hedge cover every stone so that the whole looks like an exceptionally solid hedge. On the Exmoor huge trees grow on the fences, short-trunked broad-branched very ancient trees with their roots starting down into the wall four feet from the earth. Impossible to imagine fence-breaking steers. No wire fencing needed for sheep. Permanent concrete solid everlasting divisions of fields into strange shapes wherever the stone wall needs to follow the contour of a hill or break to let through one of the labyrinth-roads I've described. Tintagel - a scattering of stone rubble walls broken and worn into jagged ineffectual lines around a beautiful high point of land. Two-foot walls marking the sites of tiny monks' cells from 600 AD, the bases or perhaps the protruding tops of the stone walls of a Celtic monastery, now covered with flowers and floored with a smooth lawn like a London front yard. Sweeps of grass and wildflowers, outbreaks of wild rough rock, caves, paths, all on a kind of island with cliffs sheer down to the water on all sides. A beach on one side, with green water and an island held in a small cove, a waterfall down the cliff-face into it with moss grown long and dripping all along it in a narrow strip, boys swimming like frogs from the crescent beach to the island-rock, water turning white, creaming up from rocks below the surface and smashing into foam along the cliff, the beach made up of perfectly flat smooth pebbles grating on each other and clinking like coins in your hand. We climbed up past the ruined castle where legend says King Arthur was born, and lay among yellow and white wildflowers in a clover bed at the far point of the cliff top. Greg teased me out of a bad humor caused by his seeming not properly impressed by the rock faces I obsessively photograph. We came this morning from a sad village called Hartland, where all the houses in spite of their pastel colors seemed huddled and bleak. We found a house with a stone at the base of the chimney with the date 1618 and an inscription saying that the almshouse had been built in the assistance of "three poore widdowes". We were driven by cold, irritation and the memory of Lynton to spend our second night in a row at a bed and breakfast. This time it was a cottage on the village square, a cramped cobbled space with an inn, a church, a war memorial cross and our cottage, which was obviously old, whitewashed and neat as it was. Inside, the walls and ceilings curve and jut queerly where beams and struts are concealed, like the inside of a cave rather than a house. But our cave room upstairs was blue carpeted and papered in delicate flower bouquets and winding ribbons - the dresser and armoir which are standard, the featherbed, the bolster, the chenille bedspread, the crocheted rugs, the flowered curtains. Deep window spaces very low in the wall, floods of light, more fresh air than we wanted, since we were very cold. The landlady brought up two cups of tea to warm our hands at - no charge. And the bathroom was full of teenage daughter. In the morning, the usual low-voiced conversations in the dining room downstairs, with some of us trying inobtrusively to listen to the conversation at the next table, like breakfasts in all bed and breakfasts. From there we went on down to Saint Ives, the holiday town best known in Cornwall, a fishing village creeping up and down the sides of a hill, with white sand crescent beaches on either side. Hippies and artists, tourists and lifeboat coastguard men in their navy sweaters and caps. I came to see Bernard Leach's pottery, since he's the most famous potter in England. We camped outside Saint Ives, on wild scrub land to the south, in a lonely stretch under a typical Cornish outcropping of old stones that look as though they've been sculpted and arranged. Stayed there several days, but then got so lonely that we moved down to a pasture campsite behind a little settlement of stone houses next to the sea. The farmer owner of the pasture came to collect his two shillings, and squatted on his heels outside the tent talking to us. William Berryman, the sixth William to farm on the site and the father of a seventh. His own father and brother lived just up the road. In another house, the only whitewashed one, a Canadian sculptor had lived the year before. Another stone house which had belonged to an old woman stood empty next to the walled pasture with its scatter of tents. William Berryman soon invited us into his warm kitchen with its huge stove. His wife, a pink and blond large plump woman who reads piles of books from the traveling library, a tow-headed David, about nine, who wouldn't go to bed as long as there were chocolate muffins and stories being passed around downstairs, three other children packed away into beds upstairs. Greg told wry Canadian stories, I told what Peace River Country stories I could remember, William went on about Cornish tin mines and about famous wrecks that had taken place just below his back fields on the very dangerous Cornish coastline. We were invited back for the next night, and that time got the front parlour, told more stories, looked at pictures, ate Cornish saffron cakes and drank tea, while David sat curled up with round eyes on a chair in the corner where he hoped he wouldn't be seen. The children have never been to London; the dairy cows give William a decent unambitious livelihood; Lower Porthmeor is a farm with a name and ancient connections to Upper Porthmeor just up the road. The stone houses are crude grey fieldstone, built exactly like the field walls. The houses are hundreds of years old, the walls are possibly a thousand. Each field has a name, each tiny fenced enclosure - most of the names are in Cornish, a lost language. There are no trees. Houses, walls, rock outcrops, all are the same, a beautiful desolate landscape that I want to see and photograph again. The William Berrymans are happy there too. 19 August 1969 [letter] First the bad news - I won't be able to come home this year. The complicated reason is that I haven't heard anything from the French government scholarship people yet, but I have discovered that the school to which I wanted to go in Paris has been practically disbanded. So it seems unlikely that I'll have any money for France and also no paid passage from Canada back to Europe. I had thought of coming anyway and picking apples in the Okanagan to earn my fare back, but Peter has put me in line for a job here in London and if I'm to get it I must be here and prepare to impress the right people. The job is exactly what I want, a one day per week tutorship in film at the Hornsey College of Art. It would mean setting up my own course, talking about film in terms of the usual visual arts - texture, form, line, color, movement, etc - and also in critical terms (the way English teachers talk about English). I want to be able to study film in exactly the visual terms art students are interested in, because I need to find some good use for my own preoccupations with the visual design part of things (eg I take rolls and rolls of 'useless' pictures of rocks), because I want and need to do some semi-formal art study for the sake of my photographs, and most important because I've come to the point where I quite desperately need to work seriously and responsibly at something. And London is a city I haven't exhausted yet; what a lot there is in it. Even Montreal seems tiny and provincial in comparison - book shops! Dress shops! Museums! Movies! People! Architecture! Libraries! Shapes and colors jostling each other on the street, a way of life quite different from ours (some of it remarkably silly), new kinds of weather, new kinds of buildings. Even after two weeks in the country I found myself missing it and wanting to be back. So my plane leaves tomorrow (taking Peter with it) and I've sold my ticket to a friend of Desser's. I've seen Peter several times since we came back from the West Country; we're cautious and formal with each other; I'm sad that I can't seem to find the impulsive generous thing to say to make him feel that I want to keep a bond with him, and at the same time I feel as though I haven't the right to make any sort of move, because I don't know now whether it would still hurt him if I did; whenever I see him I feel a useless tenderness for him, I'm not confronted by the impossible Peter who wanted my soul which I was too afraid to let go of, and so I'm free to love him; what a sad business it has been, in a way the saddest in my life. You are relieved and pleased that Greg and his motorcycle are roaring through my letters again - but I don't think Greg is the answer, and although he's roaring through my letters he isn't roaring through me. That's sad too - I go to Greg like a child to his mother, when I'm hurt or sad or confused, and in his patience and generosity he is like a mother and I go away comforted; but like a child again, when I've been comforted I must run away to the big world of danger and excitement and the sad dangerous search for somebody who'll know and love my soul (or something) and not only accept my childish moods and terrors out of his own phlegmatic well-adjusted solidity). Greg is as good as you believe him to be, and he is completely dependable, and he would happily spend his life with me if I was happy to spend mine with him, and I feel even now that I've been married to him for years - but sometimes I am so impatient with him that I hate his kindness, his predictability, his calm; I get BORED with him and then I despise him. He's completely unaware of the auras and signals that make people exciting to each other and there are so many sides of me he can't know. Sometimes I'm ashamed of him because other people underrate him and find him prosaic. None of this is generous or even humane of me, but that is the way it is: I often feel guilty, but that doesn't help. Besides the fact that I can get along neither with trustworthy simple men who like me nor with treacherous complicated men who alternately love and hate me, there is the complication that I'm beginning to want children. I find myself staring at babies in the subway and smiling at three year olds and planning the books I'll read my kids - and this with a complete inability to imagine being married. If I could support myself and were in a community of my own kind of people I wouldn't hesitate to have children without being married, but babies obviously must have fathers and I believe they should know them even if they don't live with them. My friend Patricia (divorced) gets along very well with her son, etc. I often think I'd have turned out better with no father (but that's impossible to say of course, and I got some, lots, of useful things from Father - although I also got my deadly intolerance and lovelessness from him). All that, and the problem of work, maybe solved now, but probably not, because it will be difficult to persuade the art college that I'm qualified, since, obviously, I'm not. I want it badly, though, and am preparing hard (which is a pleasure). It's like being back in school and having a difficult assignment. One more sad thing - Joan Harcourt sent us a clipping from Kingston - Mike Easton, my old friend going back to first year, who took me sailing and nature-walking, who co-directed the film we were going to do last fall, became quite seriously paranoid last summer, and this July, not quite a month ago, first burned down his canoe factory and then five days later drowned himself on a supposed fishing trip. "Police said the body, believed to have been in water since July 17, was too badly decomposed to be identified by sight, but the characteristics of the man's teeth were identical with those of Mr Easton." I wasn't surprised - the logic of his life seemed to lead to that, lonely, independent, misunderstood, unloved, cunning, devious, intelligent, homeless, Mike - thin and flexible as a wire, funny looking with his shorn head, hooked nose and Adam's apple, the tuft of white hair pointed down in the middle of his forehead, his maverick teasing voice sly as a snake's voice, if snakes had voices, his large sharp canny pale blue eyes looking about him with amusement, his wild determined energy and his loneliness. I can't imagine his body decomposing, it was almost fleshless. I'm very sorry to hear that you've lost your crops, poor Father. What will he do for work? Does he have schemes? And I'm very sorry you'll have another year without financial independence? But at least you won't have to ask for money for groceries? [M was teaching at Sexsmith school, her first job.] August 22 [journal] Peter went back to Canada on Wednesday. I found him at my elbow in the BOAC terminal at Victoria Station, brown and blue in new clothes, his face very thin and strange without the moustache, very young, with an odd irritated movement about the upper lip. We sat on a high luggage rack side by side talking randomly and trivially, as we do now, careful to be impersonal. Peter is very sad and raw when he is not gay or personal - what in other people is the oxidized self for exposure to others, in him is the vulnerable secret self whose appearance is so touching. I could not break out toward him. I didn't feel as though I had the right, having refused his best gift. I'd like to write him this winter. Will he really live in David Helwig's house, talking to the dog? I have a pervasive feeling of great loss when I think of him now - where is there another man like him? I wonder how important my certainty that I'm not marvelous, gay, perceptive, certain enough for him was in making my panic? Was it at the bottom of my criticisms of him, my long narrow eye watching him? He was important enough to be criticized severely; but couldn't I have loved him desperately or at least joyfully as he wanted, with Joan or without Joan? Couldn't I have gone back next year and comforted him? I don't believe I could have held him. He believed I could. What was it that held him when I was in the hospital, my simple dependence on him? My luxurious preparations for his visits, our talks building casually from commonplace to common being? "I just became aware that visiting you was the highlight of my day." He came, sometimes in the morning, sometimes later, sometimes at night; I never expected him but was always glad to see him. What did he wear, his long cardigan with holes in the elbows? A knit tie, a green shirt. That small boy's vulnerable body in jockey shorts. Shirt and undershirt taken off at one time, with the tie still around the collar and the buttons done up, laid across the chair in Patricia's bedroom. When I still had the body cast on and could only turn stiffly, like a log in water, limbs pulling back awkwardly. One night I managed to slide down and eat him until it spit out into my mouth, bitter nauseating taste. I couldn't swallow it or spit it out, so sloshed it in my mouth like a gargle and then spit it into Patricia's glass vase, around the stem of the daffodil and into the dry arms of the fern. Peter said "You amaze me" and I laughed at the freedom and happiness I had then. When he left Toronto he had fallen out of love with me and had begun to doubt whether he should leave his children for less than the complete self transformation he had wanted. What did he hold on to after that? At the Academy on Gower Street: "No, I know you were my last love." I wonder whether if he had really loved me he would have found a way not to frighten me as he did and have me in the end? I can hear him tearing into anger at that: "Really love you?!" he'd say. I didn't trust him. I didn't trust him to continue to love me or to continue to find me fascinating without my resistance. From Toronto when he had gone back I wrote that my adolescent journal had been "dead letters sent to dearest him who lives, alas! away," and that perhaps he was that dearest him, although "I had never thought of dearest him as a treacherous bastard." I really felt that then - now I feel it again, that he was my closest kin. But if we had lived together it would have been like the married couple with two religions coexisting. He talked about my being true, and about my helping him make moral decisions but he didn't want my true stubborn ambivalence, he felt accused by my true sadness and emptiness and especially my desolation, and he mistrusted my true impulses of warmth and love. I am only good at high spots, my states of grace. Ann's voice only slightly Scottish, laughing and teasing in the next room, reproaches me with my lack of grace in living through the long periods between. Greg - I looked at him this afternoon, sitting on the bed red-faced and untidy, brassy hair, long-nosed, a bog. I say "Greg, do you know what you are, you're a bog." Anger, but humiliated anger, humble anger. Discussion of the Ortega quotation I found this afternoon. The feeling of being lost, the straw grasped in desperation, the sad disappointing world juxtaposed to a passionate living person. Yes, sore and sentimental memories of Peter - Greg is an unjealous loving creature who allows one to be oneself; Greg is a bog. Peter is a jealous, self-deceptive publicly expansive privately petty and cramped being; Peter is living many-colored protoplasm and my next of kin. And I am more treacherous to myself than to anyone, in refusing, neglecting, to love both of them. Or Mother, or Father, or anyone else. Something else, perhaps something final, is that I say to myself now
that I do not like sex, that there is no need to like it, that I will not
try to find myself liking it, that it isn't worth the trouble it causes.
Orgasms are boring; at least mine are, ridiculous as sneezes, but even more
ridiculous because they're 'achieved' with so much drama and humiliation.
Most of the time I am dry; and actual penetration is irritating or sometimes
only boring. The actual moment, the strange fact of physical penetration,
still takes away my breath. But only very rarely, and then freakishly, for
no reason I can discover, it is all exquisite. Randomly: once with Ron,
once with Peter, the last time in Kingston with Greg, no connection, no
emotional framework, no physical similarity. If it were always that - I
would love everyone I slept with very well. But the way I betray my men
with my impatience, sadness, boredom, passivity or activity, anxiety or
only need ... I don't have to, I can live without it. But so much of my
life is sex - my stares at men on the street, my little performances on
the subway, my preoccupation with my own looks, my pleasure in flirting
with Desser, the new interest in babies, jealousy of other women, the excitement
and self-affirmation of a new love, the pleasure of a strange body caressed
and of being caressed by a strange hand, hard-won assonances with a male
personality, I couldn't separate myself from all of this. Yet I'm not a
lesbian because I cannot fall in love with a woman any more than I can with
Greg. One interesting corollary: prostitution. Another: the need to work.
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