| london volume 1 part 3 - 1969 october-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5 Makepeace Avenue, London N6, Friday 24 October Mrs O'Hare - last Monday's scene when I went back to Mrs O'Hare's, cried into my sleeping bag on the doorstep when she turned against me so stonily. She refused to listen, repeated obstinately and coldly, "Now if you'll just take yourself away from my doorstep." "You can try that trick all you like. It'll do you no good." And I felt embarrassed, only slightly, at crying so copiously. Her husband dangled his hands beside him and said nothing. "Not even a package of cigarettes," coldly, righteously: I had not tipped her. Eyes red and angry - was she sad because of something else? "But I didn't mean to offend you. I liked it here very much. You were very good to me. Didn't I say so?" I was confused and bewildered by her change of tone. "Why did you leave then?" and "Take yourself off to your other landlady that you paid in advance!" Something illogical that she resented me for - what was it exactly? I couldn't understand. I said I could have friends in in my new place. "If you'd asked - but you didn't ask," seeming denial of what she'd often said, a chaotic resentful person, red faced rather than rosy, her face set in new rather sow-like anger. From my own red-eyed mascara streaked face near the floor ("Now, if you don't mind I have company downstairs," prissyness and anger disguised as one another) I said my vengeance say: "And I've learned something about landladies - everything they do for you, all their kindness, is for money." And she pushed the door shut behind me, levering me outside onto the step. And I went off crying with my two heavy bags, silly pathetic overgrown person in pigtails - was embarrassed on the bus. That was why she no longer swept up the carpet or gave me tea in the evenings? "Not even a package of cigarettes." My Mrs O'Hare who gave me such a happy few weeks in her dim big clean room full of flowers! People should look after themselves, because it sours and angers other people to look after them? Olivia last weekend in Oxford. Got her from the train with Don; she was in her blue corduroy skirt and the jacket I helped her find fabric for - played darts and drank beer, she was herself as always, impatient, flapping, snapping at Don about his grey flannel pants - waltzing with Don, stamping her boots, out of control all around his own springs and thumps. We felt kindred again and Don was almost included. I saw her to bed and was leaning on the door saying "... and I've begun to go around wanting to hug people." "Come and hug me then," she said. I did, quite awkwardly but gladly. I found myself saying "You're little!" with the kind of embarrassment that is - self conscious about sex? Self consciousness about showing love? We felt that we loved one another. In the cold morning before she went to work she brought me tea and we sat in silent companionship feeling transparent with one another again. Don - all weekend, physical tension growing, his body so quick, elastic and eloquent. I'm always aware of it - where it is, what it's saying. The formidable indifference it seems to turn toward me. He reminded me of the night I got drunk on wine and necked with Bruce Stewart on the floor. What he doesn't know is: that I got drunk out of longing for him: that I remember it because of the smell of his armpit and the feel of the tight small muscle in his arm when he lifted me to my feet afterward. I wish I'd asked him in Oxford whether he knew why I got drunk that night. I slept very uneasily, thinking of him, in that clammy cold bed. Finally unrolled my sleeping bag beside me under the cover and wrapped myself around it, thought of Don's back under my hands. Without sex - my own sexless sort of sex - I longed to have his body between my arms, just that. But I longed for it - it was like my early childhood longings for various boys, Ken Driediger especially. Just that clear straightforward movement of my body toward another, a complete gravity that strains me star shaped toward someone. And in Oxford I was reading An Unofficial Rose, about a group of people who are all in love with someone, seldom in a way that is reciprocated or possible - the child Miranda, the old man Hugh, all full of the tensions of tenderness arranging them in some taut stiff listening posture toward the one they love. All the people I've loved in my life! J'ai un faible pour toi - there's something soft and ineffectual in me because of you, it makes me wait and listen when I should act, talk, sing, dance, for you. Peter - I want to dance for you, he said, and he'd send cartoons and tell jokes, dear Peter. - Ian Brown - Greg and Nesta had been telling me that this person, Ian Brown from Kingston, wanted to meet me. (Why?) He telephoned; we arranged to meet this afternoon. I came early, in my black skirt, and sat outside the Duke of St Albans pub [Parliament Hill Fields] looking at young men. I was a little excited: from his telephone voice I could tell that he's young. He says "cool" and "a beautiful thing" a lot. He's enthusiastic; he's self confident, for all his saying that he's "scruffy and ugly." I guessed - middle height, light brown hair, blue eyes - he came up the road and I knew immediately that it was him - middle height, longish light brown hair, green eyes, untidy unformed clothes, a corduroy sports jacket with a string of beads. (Greg "He's very handsome," said diffidently.) Strange formed-unformed person, certainly young, anti-intellectual, interested in "beautiful moments," intelligent but not amazing [in another hand: "not true, okay: IAB"], jumping up to act out parts - as I was writing he called to ask Nesta and me to lunch, and to talk, because the afternoon had been incomplete - he said "I felt strange when I left, because I didn't want to go." He wanted to talk more about the analytic-creative problem, because he felt he'd been general and unsupported. We went from an argument, outside with our beers, to a kind of playful warmth, sitting on the grass beside the Parliament Hill Fields pond, climbing to Highgate Village buying elaborate cookies, Jersey tomatoes, rolls of smoked cheese, looking for a washroom, and coming into the tangles of Highgate Cemetery to find Karl Marx and eat our lunch beside him. Now on the telephone when I said "... and I'm always unfairly unhinged by graceful people," he said "But you're a graceful person," and I was delighted and touched. Sunday Went to Ian's for lunch with Nesta, felt shy and vulnerable and became all the more brittle and cheerful - he played piano with his big square hands and sang along with it, growled, frisked - and he's lovely. I was confused by Nesta's being there, because with her he's more comfortable and flirtatious than with me - also because she talks incessantly and I find myself trying to pace her, both to amuse myself with my own inventions and as a nervous kind of compulsive mimicry. Then I was more confused, because I felt as though I'd overflowed my boundaries. I was irritated by some of Nesta's sturdy insensitivities; I felt a kinship with Ian that was unexpressed and temporarily covered over, and which I still felt quite certain of and which came to surface when we sang (me very quietly, just droning in the rhythm I'd found in my head - Nesta quite gaily but uninventively) and Ian and I seemed to have our heads together in finding our rhythms in relation to each other, privately. Then we went to Portobello Road - the beautiful Irish setter, thin as a greyhound with a big sad head, silky red - the memento mori painted on glass given me by a man in the stalls who said "If you really like it, take it, but quickly before my wife comes, and come back to talk to me some time" - and Ian became silent. I said "Are you fed up?" and he said "Yes" and left. Today Nesta called him to say goodbye and I talked to him - very shyly, and he seemed just as shy. "Am I still supposed to come over today?" "If you want to." "But am I uninvited?" "Of course you're invited. I thought you wouldn't want to now." "I do want to. I was confused." "I was confused too. We'll talk about it." "I was going to send you a book. I'll tell you about it." Nesta told me only that he'd written me a letter and that he still wanted to see me. Now I'm writing really to gather up my anticipation and my vulnerability. I feel precariously placed in the midst of fear, shyness, courage, waiting, a little tentative love that's really a little vulnerability. I feel a small gathering of energy, like a resolution - I want to be careful, knowing, cherishing, very attentive - I want to be free, accurate. I want to know how long to hold my breath, how slowly or how quickly to unfold myself, how slowly or quickly to unfold him. I want to share books, bring presents, become beautiful, become brave when I need to be. Murdoch's book about all those people in love with each other: about Marie-Laure, "Her very touching beauty and tenderness combined with the highly intelligent way in which she dealt with him, her developed sense of the strategy and tactics of love, impressed him and began to attach him. But then he began to feel afraid .... He had never so entirely surrendered to a woman. He did not approve." I have a strong sense of the "strategy and tactics of love," a feeling of being ready for something to happen, and a delight at the existence of strategy and tactics, and surprises. We'll see. 26 October [letter] Today was a magnificent day for letters - yours and Rudy's, one (a picture) from Jerry, one from Meinhard Rudenauer (of whom a larger story later), one from Jean Royce (the former registrar at Queen's who took such good care of me), some application forms, some color slides, and Bill Volk's cheque for $200! A great deal has happened since we've last heard from each other. I've often thought of Judy and Michael - I'm glad they came to see you. I think I told you how nice the last time I saw Judy in Toronto was. We felt very close and without the old tensions and jealousies. I really loved her - and Michael is easy to love. It's just as well that you wrote c/o Greg because I've moved again: 5 Makepeace Avenue, London N6. I have a small room in a family house beside Parliament Hill Fields, a high pretty village-like section of London north of the centre. On one side is a huge park, the Fields, which has a path from which I can see all of London lying below toward the river in the south. The Parliament Hill Fields are connected with Hampstead Heath, a wild stretch of woods hiding in the midst of residential areas. North, along up the hill, is Highgate Village, with its trees, pubs, churches, all on the hilltop. East of Makepeace Avenue is Highgate Cemetery, an ancient undomesticated burial ground in which trees 20' high have pushed themselves right through the burial slabs, and all the paths are squeezed into narrow tracks by the energy of the growth on either side of it. Karl Marx is buried there, and his tomb is always covered with flowers. A very spooky place, full of generations and generations of people. The house I live in is on a very well behaved quiet street running along the side of the hill, overlooking the city. The family more than fills the house on its own, but they take in three or four student lodgers anyway. Roodal Kissum is Trinadadian, with eyes and an accent like Rasheed's, and a flashy emotional temperament like Rasheed's as well. Sheila Kissum is about 40, American, and says she's at least partly Cherokee. There are six children, running from 22 down to three, with a fourteen year old, a nine year old, a beautiful five year old girl and two beautiful and flirtatious boys, four and three, Richard and Mark. I'm certain to have someone in my lap during breakfast, and there's always some creature in the hallway to hug when I'm on the way in or out. I'm never sure when I'm going to innocently do something to bring down the indignation of irrational Roodal. At eight o'clock every morning the house bangs alive, no possibility of sleeping in - I've been invited to spend a West Indian Christmas with them - it's quite different from the isolation and silence of Mrs O'Hare's. My room is little and quite shabby, but has a huge window onto the back garden and is painted white. I've bought a little laurel tree to humanize it, and on Saturday, at the Portobello Road market, one of the antique dealers gave me a quite beautiful memento mori picture painted on glass with very rich colours glowing out of the dark in it. Bertrand Russell hung under the mirror, a patterned green carpet, a very small couch, and a nondescript table given me by an antique dealer I discovered down the road. The last while has been full of presents. Bill's $200, which you must be wondering about - I've decided to give myself a postgraduate course in film, roughly equivalent to a master's degree. Since I'm too late to get into the one British school where it's possible [the Slade film course], I am doing it myself, with resources pieced together from various departments and institutes. The British Film Institute has agreed to supervise my thesis and help me with viewings. The Slade School is letting me in on its seminars and screenings. I've had no luck finding a job teaching film and refuse to waste another year going on tangents (trumpets flourish) and so eventually with a great deal of embarrassment I wrote a letter to Bill to ask whether he could lend me some money. Once long ago he made me promise that if I ever had to leave school because of lack of money I would write him - so I wrote to ask whether my self educating plan for this year would count, and he sent back, by return mail, $200. Also he sent a very short, elated letter: he says "I'm excited. I'm thrilled. I'm flattered," and "Keep doing what you want to do. I'll try to help." It's true, too, I'm sure - he's excited with being able to help me become whatever I'll become, because he believes in me. Father should be like that - I mean, the relationship of children and fathers should be like that - I think you believed in my possibilities although I'm not sure whether you believe in my ability to find them in the most unperilous way possible. Anyway - that means I'm a student again. After a few years I'll be able to teach film at a university while I wait, perhaps forever, to be able to make one of my own. A movie I've seen recently, 10,000 Suns, has made me very enthusiastic all over again. It makes me want to make a film - or write a novel - about your life, which has been extraordinary and full of changes and meanings. I suppose only you could do it right, because you know the atmosphere and the detail of your life as no one could, no matter how much research - perhaps we could collaborate? You'd make a very good film. I like your idea of heaven very much. We could put it in. That heaven I'd like to go to as well. The problem is that I'm too often too close to feeling that now, especially in the last two months. The expansion of horizon, the continuous challenge to grow and become and do and experience, all exist for me in the moment, in this surprising city so full of things and ways. I've had and still have a charmed life. I wish you could have your heaven on earth too. I've been very happy the last while, and certainly as peaceful as possible with so much uncertainty and moving about. I feel very full of affection - I saw Olivia in Oxford last weekend and really found her as kindred spirit again, and really loved her. There's Greg, who's my family here. There are new friends, Jenny Pozzi from the film course, and Ian Brown. 28 October [journal] I dreamed last night that I sat down here to write about Ian, when Ian himself came and said "I will write it, because I want to remember as well," and began to write. The strategy and tactics are not so much constructions as they are a kind of calm - from what I know about other men, I'm peaceful about Ian. Partly also because he's myself two years ago. He wrote me a letter: "Je vous aime un peu." I said, "Yes, that's it," and he said "It's been a long time since I felt like that" and we changed the subject. He tried to play piano, tried again in the dark, came over to the window and said "What shall we do now?" and I blindly put my arms around him, and found the small of his back and could tell at once how beautifully he is made. So we stayed in. With him I'm very near to knowing the person: his interest in how I find him - his envy: "Even with Jerry, I feel myself draining away into the other person," "I'm very jealous, I have to warn you, I'm jealous about everything." The way he scrutinizes me, says "Look at me" - the way he went off on Saturday because he thought I was finding him a drag! In the morning, Jeremy upstairs began to play his guitar and Ian sat down at the piano and I came up - we all three sang and pounded and drummed until we were exhausted. And Ian was beautiful (so is Jeremy!), accurate hands falling on the keys, yelling blues. "Sometimes when I wanted to meet your eyes and you weren't there ...." He lies above me and watches my face - his two front teeth overlap slightly, and when he plays his mouth falls open in concentration - he doesn't like his mouth. He has a narrow ring of stone-green around his large dark pupils, and his eyelashes are furry, like Jerry's. And that beautiful body, really the most beautiful I've ever laid hands on - solid, precisely modeled, articulated, and yet delicate - his shoulder blades and upper arms. He kneels on the bed with his prick standing straight up in front of him like a candle! Thursday After three days we met again, this time like last time sliding imperceptibly but very rapidly into greater and greater intimacy and confidence. He amazes me, and I simply open to him. We speak to each other with a recklessness that comes easily: "Ever since last time I've been going around feeling ravishing." "To tell you the truth so have I, there's not much competition at LSE." "I'm shy with you when I'm delighted with you." "I've known at least three of you since I've met you." "I want to be, I have to be, simply the best lover you have ever had." I came from the Slade seminar a little intoxicated by three glasses of wine and the thought of all the world of filmmakers waiting for me to meet them - I veered down Tottenham Court Road, people gliding in and out of my path with slightly abnormal proportions - to Picadilly Circus and Ian sitting reading under Eros. We grabbed each other and he lifted me off my feet and then we sat with our legs touching and talked over what had happened in the last three days. Then we went to Jimmy's basement place for dinner - it was so Greek that we talked about our Greeces and our Yugoslavias, with our stuffed vine leaves and raw cabbage and chips - then coming down Oxford Street we discovered the movies at the Academy, Adalen 31 and Ulysses - so we went to see Ulysses, which was even better than I remembered, beautiful strong black and white, and the slowed-down intensified sad-sweet feeling of raw consciousness condensed by an evaporation taking place on screen - I'm having trouble saying this - the narration, Molly's, Dedalus's, Bloom's, thoughts, and the images rising over them like vapour. Then we rushed to the Baker Street Classic to see the animation films and their makers lined up across the platform with their hands crossed over their chests or behind their backs. Sat in the back of the balcony, knees together, necking during reel changes, Ian delighted with the films. And then rushed home in a taxi and took each other's clothes off! That narrow spindly couch in the living room, with both head and foot end falling off - we manage. That beautiful body of his, perfect fine-grained skin, unfashionable strength - the sort of body that is invisible under clothing. When I touched it under the big sweater he was wearing on Sunday, I was surprised to find it so hard and so sculpted - completely different from Greg's rather soft wide unformed body - I think I was surprised to find it at all. We lay together on the couch very quietly and he kissed me little kisses on my neck and shoulders. I said "That's exactly how I feel," and he "I said to myself, she feels very tender." We got through my usual crying anguish very well; I told him why I'd given up sex forever, and it was afterwards that we lay together so peacefully. It was exactly right, nothing of Peter's or Desser's dismay, just smiling assurance that his pride demanded that he be the best lover, number one - and not like Peter, who wanted his vision of impossible ecstasy out of me. Not fair - I never particularly wanted to sleep with Peter at all, sometimes wanted to want to, often was put off by his methods and by his desperation - I don't think he likes sex; I never found any real voluptuousness in him. Ian - like his piano playing - is playful, sensitive, confident - improvises. I like him. He's not voluptuous particularly; he doesn't go about it like a sacred mystery, as Desser does; he just makes love as he talks or plays, straightforwardly, with energy that is responsive and originating, but not insistent. I wrapped myself in a blanket and growled at him - and he said, as he has once before, "You are a woman, not a girl" - quite true. That was in the morning, after he'd come to fetch me upstairs. We'd lain alongside, half asleep, until he came into me from the side and we woke up to dance. Later we sat naked crosslegged on the bed together under a sheet and looked at his photographs. Jerry came upstairs to say goodbye. We went downstairs to breakfast, he made buttery scrambled eggs, which we had with big flakes of ground pepper, sitting at the table in the sun. Good music on the radio. Good coffee. Talk about how we learn and understand - a patch he wrote in Kingston. Then he played for me, improvising, from blues to Schubert (a song he bellowed out over heavy chords), playing Dudley Moore playing Bach and Mozart, to rock, to something very impressionistic remembering the animated film from Russia, lovers riding through sumptuous forests. He's very good at it, and very confident in it. "I can play well for you now, my hangups are all gone. Last time I couldn't because I really just wanted to get into you." Sunday November 2 Yesterday Holland Park, ripe-pear colors of leaves, the chestnut almost bare with scattered gold and brown leaves held up against the light, its complicated stubby branches making me think of Patricia's backyard chestnut - half circle completed. Another tree with flat silver leaves twisting and glittering like Chinese penny plants or shell wind chimes. I lay on my back on a bench, Ian and Caryl lay on others. We looked at Ian's clearing, with a red tree far back at the bottom of it. Peacocks and op-fowl. Piles of leaves, crooked trees fenced in by old slat fences. Then Kensington Market - basement air poisonous with dye fumes. Ian went off rather distantly - "And you'll end up going off with Caryl" was what he said in the morning when she arrived at the door. We slept badly on Mary's mattress on the floor - in the morning, before it was really light he turned to me, while I was still asleep I think, and finding me more interested in sleeping than in him turned his back with a humpf! of his whole body - which I could not resist, because it was so straightforward and friendly, so I reached for the back of his neck and he turned over immediately. By the time it was light we had (both!) contented ourselves and were settling in for talking in bed, I suppose, when C appeared. The night before, in the kitchen, I'd been nibbling at him when he said "You mustn't spoil me. I mean I don't want to take you for granted." My stomach tightened and he said "I don't know what I mean. I feel strange. I can't be happy all the time, it has to come and go." I sat down on the floor and said "But the happy part of the cycle might be expected to last more than a week" rather ironically, or as ironically as I could, with the fear in my stomach. Somewhere earlier I had also said "But that's awful, having to be careful not to be too nice." He came and sat down beside me on the floor and said "It was just that at this moment I don't desire you as much as I usually do. It's silly to say so, because I know it will hurt you and it will probably change in a moment." I mumbled on about how, oh no, we must be honest, and the ambivalences are important, they are the elements of a relationship, etc, while he stared at my face and saw how guiltily I looked hurt. We got up and flapped around with our coffee - I thought, I must claim him, ask him for something: I said "Would you take down my hair," and he said "Oh baby" because he knew what I was saying - and he took it down. When we went upstairs he had to win me away from some designs I was remembering in my notebook - he did, very well. His gracefulness in trouble pleases me. We left each other rather coolly and are both waiting to get our ardour back and hopefully to do some work. In some conversation he said "But you think it isn't worth it?" and I found myself saying "I haven't thought about it. I've jumped in." "So have I." From before we met, we've jumped in and in our uncertainty we're certain. It's better than Peter and better than Desser. - Image - Ian naked at the piano, delicate neck and shoulders bent slightly forward, knees apart and right foot thumping on the pedal. About Leslie: "She had mastered the little things." A surfeit of bodies, indifference, his long face with the guitar in the corner, retreat. Tuesday He's quite unordinary and I'm getting very fond of him, my tired about-to-go-to-sleep summary of our Sunday on Hampstead Heath and our telephone conversation tonight. "... so that I think of you once out of every six minutes or so" he said and I'm amazed; he quietly assumes that we're all right and that I must be smacked [N.B. not meant literally] when I'm being morbid. Wednesday morning Two things: Sunday on Hampstead Heath when he talked about the next art medium and later when we talked about criticism I felt very painfully an alienation - his not being kin, his otherness, his preoccupations different from mine: his not being kin. I felt that he doesn't know me - I want him to know me all at once, my childhood, everything that dazzled me, everything I loved, and even now exactly to follow my excitements. He rebuked me; I'm not sure if he was right to, on the long run, but at the moment he was right. It's too soon to tell. Only Madeleine can curve herself so exactly into the shape of another's mind when she has known them only briefly (the curve that strengthens, doubles, another's freedom in being himself). (Madeleine - a Suzanne. Does she know what she is? Could I make a movie for her?) The second thing - he seems quietly and certainly to know how to gather me up, collect me, pull me in; I lie against him concentrated and grateful, and praise his back with my hands. I've begun to love him - I don't know what that means to my freedom and arrogance. I've been arrested - my eye isn't roving: when I saw someone on the street who looked like him from the back my body warmed. What it means for my freedom and arrogance is that I must be wise. He rebukes me for my touch-wood skepticisms, but they're part of my pleasure. Wardour Street Haiku:
My frivolous thought with Ron Matheson, that I'll write a poem for every one of my lovers and publish them titled with the lover's name, a whole bookfull.
Adalen 31 and 10,000 Suns make me think of a film about my mother, on Kracauer's principles of course! Notes to follow. Friday The Judy Collins concert - she in a long white dress, like a nightgown, and her hair hung down her back, her face and expressions invisible from where we sat in a loggia box (Royal Albert) - after the intermission she began singing well, First Boy I Loved, Clouds, Bird on a Wire, Chelsea Morning, That's no Way to Say Goodbye. Clouds and Bird on a Wire were the last two songs of her program. I had been leaning my face against the loggia curtain, looking at her between it and a pillar - her very slight swaying movement, her long silent pauses for tuning. (She sat at the piano with her head bent over it singing into a microphone and playing with a very light rippling touch) - her boy pianist leaning in and out of his music, and a little girl drummer almost invisible. I had been pulled into the spotlight with her by this time and felt that she - the songs she chooses, the intelligent passion and the love she sings them with - stood there as a concentrated argument in favour of a yes rather than a no. We clapped her back on stage, and she sang Michael, getting it wrong the first time ("No! That isn't the right song at all!") and then Turn, Turn, Turn telling us to hum the chorus - like a priestess bringing us together into love and worship of life - and I loved Greg sitting in the next box intent behind his long nose and glasses - and Ian as I remembered him striking naked poses in the living room last night (Charles Atlas, the Flowers-by-Wire Greek God) and Frank (first boy I loved) and Paul and Don whose letter came today and Mother and Olivia who would have loved it. When she'd come on stage and thrown her arms up for the last time I rushed out of the box to hug Greg, who was leaning against the wall opposite looking softened and wary - we rushed out leaving David and Leslie behind completely - the rain had stopped, wet shining streets, the way our bodies still fit so well together, the way we are transparent together and do not stumble over one another. Also the round soft pink feel of fat around his middle. Saturday Carmichael, Jimmy's Restaurant, The Magus: he picked me up and whirled me around like a saw through the Saturday night crowds in Leicester Square, laughing and crowing and leaping like a lunatic. When he set me down a pigeon shat on my head. We turned and went back and he carried me across again and set me down beside the chestnut vendor. We found Saint James Park - the ducks swimming in the dark without a ripple, and sitting asleep on islands, black and white like curling rocks. A sign: "Do not feed the pelicans. Unsuitable food has been the cause of death" which made us shout because of the ambiguity about whose death. Don's face bleached out and his eyes pale grey in the light from the restaurant sign that we used for a light table to look at slides. Westminster - the clock face like a moon, the --- Hall lights reflected on the river, "I've been wanting to kiss you for years." Narrow flat snake tongue - his strained voice and strained face - his Greek eyes which I've loved since six years ago when I was in first year and he in second - and he's loved mine; we both of us remember vividly our unspoken history: a fried egg sandwich eaten outside 40 Clergy street on furniture being moved, talking about Greece - a conversation in the library landing before I went to Europe - last visit to Oxford when neither of us could sleep - my desolate drunk necking with Bruce on the floor because Don was with Olivia. He took down my hair and we threw two little bobby pins into the Thames: the cat is out of the bag but he's not going far, the two big pins I put carefully back into my pocket. "You don't have to take the tube," all his physical hunger. "Yes I do." Bitch, I say to myself. All the same - no, I don't want to go to bed with him. Because of O? Because of Ian? Because I don't want to take him on - because I've loved our kinship for so long that I don't want it to become sexual and problematic, and neurotic, and the struggle it would become, a really bitter struggle. Still, his need and my refusal: bitch. But it was right. The huge physical tenderness I felt for him last time in Oxford - it wasn't sexual either. Ian is part of it - I've begun something with him and already I'm loyal to him. Because I mistrust his strain to soften in love-making? Because we aren't actually close enough and have too much reality to catch up on before we can be safe with each other? Because we are too close? It's a little like Peter - kinship at the same time unsexual. He got off the tube at Tottenham Court Road - rather resentfully, "What are you looking so smug about?" and got up and stepped out. When the train began to move I saw him several cars along the platform, turned squarely toward me and vanishing instantly as the train passed. That flash - both loving and resentful - Don standing looking for me, my own face turned stiffly looking for him. Back to where we began. He was taking the Centre Line as far as it would go and would hitchhike back to Oxford. "You've grown into me. Like a transplanted branch. You're always there." "In a way I always knew and you always knew, it was always there, like a bulb planted." Is he standing frozen somewhere on the A40? Tomorrow I go to see Ian. "Comical, this time the time was very nearly right. The approximations are getting closer and closer." Ian? My beautiful Charmickle, after so long, and myself holds its distance warily, dishonestly, and sends you off to the A40 in the middle of the night. Uneasiness like the interview at the Vietnam demonstration. The interviewer: "This young woman has just put her slip in the box," (Theodore Brown, dead). "How many times have you gone around today?" "This is the first." "Are you going around again?" "No." "Why not?" "I'm going on to other things." "What effect do you think this demonstration will have on President Nixon?" "None." "Do you think it will have any effect on the long run?" "If any, only in a cumulative way, along with many others." Pause. "But, you know, you have to do it anyway." His sharp face, his intense listening sympathy. I was unnerved. It seemed hypocritical to have filed past and spoken my accusing name in an accusing tone, relishing the nightfall and rain-shininess of Grosvenor Square, on the way to Jimmy's Restaurant and the Rialto Cinema. "Enjoyed speaking with you," muttered after me, and Don's "You don't know how to score, do you," making me even more uneasy at the same time as pleasing me. Incident soon forgotten. Monday A Sunday and Monday with Ian - his delight at being slowly undressed while pretending to be hypnotized, my unambivalent (for the first time?) immersion in him, our swimming together in such warm buoyant water - joy and tenderness. His unsentimentality ("No holy prick in sacred cunt"), his affection - his touching, touching beauty. His energy and invention, his capricious sweetness and opposite, self-contained, gathered-in otherness. What a marvel, what a lovely man! Eyelashes, nose, arm socket, round soft stack of hair, overlapping long front teeth, irregular battered long chin, long suggestive green eyes - and his name which isn't a name but a random group of articles or prepositions, I-an. We stand looking at our two heads together in the kitchen mirror, touselled and pink from tumbling in bed upstairs - midafternoon, midevening, and again when we get into bed although we'd thought not - I'm bothered by his mechanical expressions, sometimes by his patches of ignorance - but then he stubbornly obviously goes on about his preoccupations - and his preoccupations are most of the right ones - rhythm, creativity, form. His leaps from abstract organization to that completely fluid and inventive sexuality in which he's at home as a fish. His arrete. Tuesday Raymond Williams: Sexual relationship, which is our fundamental communication process, in which life is offered and accepted - the ability to communicate is not a matter of abstract qualities, such as feeling, intelligence or will, but is rooted in certain whole patterns of organization: success or failure is a matter of the whole self. Struggles and failures of Peter and me, Desser and me - my strong feelings about the instincts of my whole self, which disorganizes me completely in a wrong situation - differences between energy levels when my organization meshes or doesn't. Wednesday The difference - last Saturday, Ian gone completely indifferent - his hints that I should play harder to get - the stupid business of going to a show and having expensive drinks in the bar (neither of us like them) - my knowledge that he wants me to be delighted, not critical - silent tube ride - expensive dinner whose main fun was our surreptitious-obvious adding-up-of-the-bill between courses - arriving home, irritated by an argument about critical standards as usual, sitting bleakly in the living room - I didn't have tube fare to get home and had to meet Olivia at Paddington in the morning. He came downstairs with all his bedclothes so that I could sleep with them on the couch - he sat across the room on a chair and said in a little voice, "Don't go" to which I replied with annoyance, "I can't." He said something about it being true that we don't get along very well, but that we also have things going for us, that we take our arguments too emotionally - I said "Come and sit here," and he did, coldly - we put the bed together and he jumped me, to my surprise but unfortunately not to my resistance - muttering about his probably being a bastard, and about it being too easy, going out and coming home to bed, and about how he shouldn't feel like that - which annoyed me and launched me into a cross self declaration of how I had nothing to say about that, since it was quite possible that he was a bastard and that if he felt like that, well, tough, but I couldn't tell him what to feel or not to feel - whereupon he laughed and reached for me, saying that perhaps, as I've said of him last week, I was learning to handle him, and that he liked people to be hard sometimes, not always soft - which made me even more annoyed, and launched a declaration about how I had no intention of being hard in order to please him, as another way of being soft - silence, both of us unable to sleep but Ian seeming to, me lying and muttering nonsense syllables pretending to curse under my breath. Jeremy came in with Allan and asked for my mattress. We tried sleeping together - he didn't want to talk - I got J's army parka and made a bed of two chairs - he crossly told me to come back, feeling embarrassed at having the bed to himself - I said I was comfortable, slept lightly, dreamed, woke with twenty minutes to get to Paddington, I'd lain half awake quite comfortable in the chairs, and heard someone going singing by on the desolate Sunday morning street - I liked that - two slices of my wonderful, nutmeg-icing chocolate birthday cake into a bag, the tin can raided for cash - Ian burrowed under the blankets - I dug him out by force, stroked his hair, said I was going; he looked sullen - I said "Look at me," he did, hostilely - I said "Now say something," hostile silence - "All right, don't," both doors slammed. Arrived at Paddington in time and discovered my face in the women's washroom mirror, greasy, red-nosed, cross, with cracked red eyeballs and black-ringed eyes - spent 4 pennies to wash it and then paced the platform waiting for Olivia - a brass band had set itself up on folding chairs at the end of the platform, a thin-necked conductor in his Sunday suit, discontented people standing waiting for late trains, all in the grey flat light under Paddington's arched roof - I was still cross but had begun to be amused when Olivia arrived ("See my red eyes?" I greeted her). We went out for a good day trying clothes in my room, eating boiled eggs and cheese and toast, drinking tea, as my room filled with smoke, and then seeing Adalen again with Greg - Olivia hobbled in my black skirt, with her Kotex sliding up around her bottom. When I got home I telephoned Ian who was in a good humour; I stupidly told him that I believe in him, by which I meant I suppose that he's worth some trouble even though he's an egotistical baby; he said he was sorry for something and that he'd thought of me all day and that he'd see me on Thursday and had been going to call me on Wednesday (he'd have been able to live in suspense those three days, the bastard?). Tonight I'm cross again to think of how he complicates things. First, he doesn't like me to be critical and independently-minded, only emotional, "I've begun to understand why they do studies in the States about college girls who pretend to be stupider than they are because it pleases their boyfriends," also he knows that I criticize his ideas and he's uncertain about his own intelligence. Second he has moods when he finds me irritatingly soft - he doesn't want to be touched ("You're spying on me," as I look at his profile in the subway), he wants to be resisted and to conquer. Conclusions - I've no reason to be kind to him, and given a choice between wavering moods I might as well let go and be unkind because on the long run he wants to be treated badly. A much cruder and less tactful honesty about little things. That's all right; it's within my principles! But no backing down on my moods of tenderness - they're me and I will express them. What it amounts to is scrupulous honesty as a method - and it will irritate him, but we must talk about why it does. I've a leg to stand on - that he is immature and egocentric and obsessed rather boringly by things he can't talk well about yet - but only that one, because he is quick, talented and lovely (the blue denim shirt, the charcoal checked vest!) and sometimes perceptive and sensible about our fallings-out. Saturday in November [letter] I've been a long time waiting to finish this and mail it, mainly because I've been so happy and disorganized. We've had a most beautiful beautiful autumn, a hot brilliant October and now a misty wet November in which the slowly slowly turning colours glow like stained glass all over this beautifully overgrown area of London. It has been too beautiful to work much, so I've had a little frenzy of happiness and energy and will begin to work now that it's wetter and colder. There is of course a man mixed up in this euphoria as well - both a cause and an effect of it. November 18 [letter] I've thought of you often, mainly because I've been happy, and when I'm happy I feel surrounded by all the people I love. I saw a quite beautiful film called Adalen 31, made in Sweden, but with the same sort of light and countryside, paths through woods and lumber-built houses set down randomly in the grass, as in the Peace River country - it made me think again of a film about you, partly too because it was set in the 30s. But it would be very hard for me to recreate faithfully and intensely (as I'd want to) a time before I was born. I don't think I used to ask you enough questions. Still, I can always remember being interested in your childhood-girlhood. I seem to live in the past much more than most people, generally - everything that happens in the present refers back to, evokes, creates a resonance with, enlarges or makes more colorful a whole system of events and people in the past - I'd feel as if I didn't really exist if this weren't so. Am sad to think of Grandpa and Grandma Epp transplanted away from the yellow little house with its orchard and wonderful Grandpa-built sheds - the man who was always making things. When I think hard I must admit that I always loved the surroundings, the locations, the houses, of the grandparents more than I did the people. In the case of Grandpa Epp that was alright though, because his surroundings were always an expression of himself. I feel rather guilty because at the moment everything seems right and nothing seems uncomfortable or difficult in my life. 'Working' means reading stimulating theory and seeing all the best films ever made and then trying to relate them to one another - a complete pleasure because I'm able to use everything I know and want to learn. I have more and better friends than I ever have had and seem to be closer to old friends. Very few active neurotic problems, for me. Huge freedom and rather amazing energy. So many of my old problems seem to have resolved themselves, dissolved away, and many latent strengths have stiffened up into active ones - exhilarating. I suppose this is what's called the prime of life - I wonder how long one can hang onto it. (Also I've never been so nice looking ever before - that's exhilarating too - and that can't last, for sure.) What have I told you? Do you know about my very small white room, my large window overlooking gardens on a hillside which only now is becoming visible as the leaves drop? My small laurel tree? The work table an antique dealer gave me? The pathetically inadequate electric heater which is supposed to keep me warm? The row of magazine photographs of beautiful faces set up among the leaves and flowers and laurel tree on the window sill? The blue willow teapot to use primarily for warming one's hands when working in the cold? (The shocking completeness of my English indoctrination is exemplified by the fact that I now drink tea with milk!!!) The two floor-length skirts I've made to wear to school, one black and regal, the other deep blue velvet-corduroy and very wide-swinging? Monday morning, very dark clouds moving very evenly east, the two backyard willows with still a powder of leaves on them, the white point-roofed house across the garden from my window becoming visible once again. Greg says that London in winter is a completely different London, because everything hidden by leaves in summer becomes visible. I continue to love the city, partly because I can live here as I want to, partly because it seems to revolve around me like a department store door, showing different reflections constantly (most of them full of pushing people) - it is the first real city I've known - maybe it's the only real city in the world? I suppose Paris - but I wasn't at home there. And wasn't here either, until I had my own room and a place to go to work. Another thing, all of Europe seems to branch out from London, all the places I want to go, Sweden and Budapest. Africa too, especially Algeria, Morocco and Ethiopia and Egypt. Men. Your description of feast and frustration - I remember it often. Doesn't it astonish you a little too, the good, sometimes exceptional men who love me or have loved me? I sometimes hesitate at the thought of how promiscuous you must fear me to be, and I wish you knew me and how I live so that you wouldn't fear it. I am promiscuous, by any conventional standard. At the same time, I'm in control of what I do, and I'm usually responsible, or try to be. That can't comfort you much because you can't know what it means in detail, in actual encounters. I'm very, very certain that conventional, monogamous for-life marriage is a frame that doesn't fit me and really fits few of the people I know either. Our generation or the next or the next will have to think of something different. And in the meantime, I, and other people like me, have to find our own rules. I went with Greg to a Judy Collins concert last week - tall girl in a white long dress with hair all down her back. By the end of the evening the audience and she were swallowed up together by an almost religious feeling of praise of the world: she is like a priestess making us turn and look at our lives and see how full they are and how amazing, I was very moved; Greg was as well. Sunday 30 November [journal] Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, I've jumped up ruffling my hair in the pub where I finished it. Letters to M, Bill and finally to Don. Hampstead Heath on the cold orange silent crossing tonight. Pale gold-white-grey sun and snow cold but beautiful afternoon. Prologue. Ian's green-eyed glances across the table yesterday at tea: "I'm really very happy. You frustrate me, but underneath there is a layer of tremendous happiness," very simply. Despair on Thursday - he'd chosen not to like me. "I don't feel safe with you. I want you to just like me for a while and not desire me." In the morning he was eager - I was pleased, because I'd known myself and him for once. Monday Dreams last night (dreamed inside my sleeping bag under a sheet, two blankets, a bedspread, and my cloak folded double) of coming into a forest, no, more like a PRC pasture, climbing over rocks, with a boy from home (Gary Angen?), coming to boxes of rotting apricots on a ledge, behind them a window into a house we explored, the occupants we assumed to be away, but I suddenly found a grizzled man (thin, sleeping flat on his back - like my father?) asleep on the floor in a dark bedroom. He jumped after us, we scattered through the rocks and trees, a group of us, to find our motorcycles? Cars? Another strange house - a corner room at the top of the stairs, the furniture built into its uneven walls - the floor sloping up at the sides and corners at least eight inches. Behind the door, a bed-settee going the length of one wall, with spindle-knobs for decoration and a shelf desk built across the head end so that there was almost no room for a head - painted dull antique green, including the floor, black or brown wood railing on the wooden couch with its lumpy pad of blankets. A small black table against the opposite wall, with hind legs shorter than its front legs in order to cling to the sloping floor. I found a vent on the wall opposite the door, opened it, and in opening it seemed to open the entire wall like an airplane hatch, onto a broad ledge leading to windows, beyond that more broad concrete ledges, stairs, an ocean, darkness with some long-after-sunset streaks of light in the sky, people coming and going from the beach. Judy - I was stroking her clitoris - I tried licking it but didn't like the taste. She was pleased. Gerald Student, being in bed together in a cafeteria at La Glace School (Adrienne Morrison fat, heavy, sad and married). Telling him offhandedly that it does make a difference - it's never any good with people you don't really like. Being naked in the sun somewhere, or wearing just my man's undershirt and wondering whether I should put on my black pants because it was public. Landscapes, inventions, movement, trivia, disguises, old longings, present misgivings, simple recognition of things I've known - is it true that dreams pull the self together at night, tutor it, remind it, form it, exercise it, give it practice for things that haven't happened yet? And I still want to learn what I can about dreaming and movies. On Friday morning, Ian stroked me to a climax for the first time - it gathered itself slowly, concentrated itself slowly, warm and acid like Glüwein, thick and soft, slow, like honey, sharp like honey, and then began, caught itself, began, caught, and flowed slowly back outward like lava into my crevices, all my cells crackling from the changes in temperature, all my core flushed with it - I was possessed and grateful; Ian was a little bored. In the dusty little museum on Second Boulevard there was a collection of rare, marvelous objects, but all the townsmen except Cincinnatus found them just as limited and transparent as they did each other. Accused of the most terrible of crimes, gnostical turpitude, so rare and so unutterable that it was necessary to use circumlocutions like 'impenetrability', 'opacity', 'occlusion' amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him. [undated letter] I only last week got your second-to-last letter because it had been sent to Weston Park, where Greg no longer is. (His new address: 73 Southwark Bridge Road apt C.) That was the letter you wrote over a month ago when you'd spent an afternoon with my Sunnyside letters - you think I've changed a lot since then? Become less sparkling and euphoric? True, partly - D and O say they notice a little new world weariness. But one of the things to remember is that in those days nearly all my energy, love, euphoria, tenderness, went into my secret life, my journal and my letters. Now much more of it manages to express itself toward real and present people, and so there's less hoarded up for letters and for journal. There is a deep and I'm sure permanent sadness and watchfulness in me, but it is not and never will be bitterness; it knows how to turn its sharp edge into joy; it makes me grateful; sometimes it makes me tolerant; it keeps me from losing myself. I know how to live with it, and I never will be like Father, even when I'm older, because I know how to cherish (and have always known) and because I've begun to learn how to live with people that I love and not always judge them by criteria which are my criteria. The Slade School has suddenly had a vacancy and is taking me in as a full-time regular MA-equivalent student. After one more year I'll be qualified to teach in either British or Canadian universities. In Canada, as a beginning lecturer, I'd be making about $9,000 per year, when I only need $2,000 to live on - I know, it's incredible! Paul has written a long letter - is happy. I'm glad he's begun something and delighted that it's design. He's going into a world I love and covet. I suppose I'm gladdest of that because it means I won't lose him. [Paul had begun at Sheridan College.] We, Ian and I, woke this morning to sun and snow, like the PRC. Had scrambled eggs and toast and honey and good coffee, read the papers. Played the piano. Listened to Schumann and Brahms on BBC. Necked a little. Perfect Sunday contentment. Then I went out to see Prologue at the Film Festival - the film whose making I got into in Montreal last June, edited by my friend Christopher Cordeaux. The one line I had in it came out quite well! When I came out night had fallen, everything was beautiful, orange and gold reflections on the Thames, reaching almost across it. I took the bus instead of the Underground - sat on the top so I could see the city looking so different. I walked home across Hampstead Heath - orange sky with pale stars in it, the city massed on the south, gnarled trees, people shouting with their toboggans in the dark. Then from the top edge of the hill, Highgate Village lying toward the north across a shining black pond, a hill covered with houses and lights like sparklers, a church spire at the top, the sky deeper orange on the horizon - like a magic village, enchanted into London out of a fairy story. Peter sent my cloak, so it's warm, even with the snow - it goes down to the ground, is very wide, and has a big collar that can fold up around my ears like an Elizabethan ruff. My long skirts are warm and graceful too. Olivia borrowed one of them when she came to visit last weekend, she was so covetous. I lent her a stack of clothes, gratifying because she always used to lend me hers and I wore out a lot of them. Greg reads all your letters and talks of writing you and is happy. Wednesday [journal] Yesterday Greg's friendliness, funniness, kindness - offering his hot bath, bread and cheese, creamy milk, attention to my ambivalencies, failures, crossnesses; big hugs, his electric blanket, his newspapers, the story of Anna O humorously read from Jones on Freud; Daddy, and I pull my chair up closer but in a daughterly affectionate way keep him at arm's length when I'm in bed. And a wild cherry lozenge for my sore throat! Ian on the telephone saying that yesterday he had really needed me, sounding hesitant and depressed - me brightening at the confession that he hadn't really intended not to see me until Thursday and being suddenly generous and understanding, being able to afford it. He confessed jealousy - my sensible self thinks, "Ah, that's good - remind him of my value." Right - treacherous Ian, like myself, not a true lover and only true on impulse - ie not at all. Makes me think of Peter, judgment on my treacheries and shallowness. Thursday 11 December Olivia - Ian - wing shoulder blades, childish thin shape under the covers this morning not wanting to wake, great gentleness and happiness with me since I came back on Tuesday, the pleasure on his face when he came home from teaching and found me still there. Don - sometime Tuesday morning, very early, lying with my head against his shoulder, asleep-awake, he held me like glass, crystal, not wanting to move, wanting to stay awake, bent watching around me tense as crystal himself, his shoulder below my head, his arm, strained with tenderness. I thought of it on the train back to London; half asleep looking at the wet foggy countryside through half-closed eyes; my stomach jumped.
Monday The building feeling of need to pull myself together, the softness of my moral muscle, confusion of loves, the confusion of friends - last night I walked home from Euston - Camden Town, Kentish Town, Parliament Hill Fields, orange streetlights, gritty wet pavement, a little fear, no fatigue, footsteps, a middle earth with no freedom or exhilaration, only energy. When I got home and could see the Post Office Tower blinking from my hill I felt as though I had walked a city's width - very far. When I came out of Ballet Rambert Ian was leaning against the railing outside looking stone cold angry, unshaven, eyes grey and flat. "I'm not going to be reasonable, there's no point in our talking because we won't get anywhere. We might as well just go our separate ways, and if I go home now I'll never never see you again." He was frustrated because he can't find me when he looks for me, I'm not home when he telephones, I came with Greg on the way to a movie, he doesn't want me to sleep with Don, I've been only half present because of my confused life, I had plans to go somewhere on Monday when he wanted to buy tickets to Roy Hart, I'm not helping him find his way into film. He's told me from the beginning that he tends to become possessive, dependent - that he's a one-woman man and wants to live completely with his one woman and do everything with her. Very early he said "Let's be good to each other and not be neurotic with one another." We stamped south, he came out with his grievances stubbornly - I was ashamed of my coolness. We turned the corner, several times he stopped and turned to go off by himself. After I'd left with Greg he'd walked to Holland Park, and then walked to the Open Space - when he'd changed and come off, he went home, tried to shout down his jealousy and frustration, but couldn't - his 'old brain' put him into a fury and he'd come to the Jeanette Cochrane to stage a scene, especially if I'd been with Greg. As he waited he tried not to lose his anger but some of it leaked away when he heard the music. We came alongside Saint Paul's; he stopped in the road; I put out my hand to pull him over; he put his arms around me; a move but not more than a truce yet. He said, "Don't answer me with logic. It won't reach me. Answer me with emotion." I knew he was right and felt helpless because I had no emotion except confusion and hollowness. I told him how I'd had to fight tears all evening when he told me something had died and he no longer felt anything for me and about how I'd rolled up my Bartok and put it into my bag ready to flee forever because I couldn't bear it. We came to another corner. I think he said "I'm going to stop talking, I'm not going to say any more." I found myself crying "No, no, no, no, no, no" and banging my head against a telephone box. I remember thinking dryly that I could manage two little half-tears for physical pain at least. That brought us together: he said "I don't know why we can't just say to one another that we have love for each other." "I have love for you." "And I have love for you." We took a taxi home. Like Skammen. Olivia just now telephoned to say that she's coming with Don to London this afternoon and could I contact Greg - solves part of my meditation - I won't have to brace myself to wrestle with my confused loyalties and disloyalties. December 29, Sunday Ian has read up to here - mostly stupid solid dense oldfashioned unamazing thinky stuff, too bad.
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