| london volume 1 part 4 - 1970 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
January 2 1970 [journal] [For the Christmas holidays Olivia had been to her mother's house near Porthcawl in Wales and Ian and I stayed in a bed and breakfast nearby.] Notes on Christmas and New Year, another level crossed with Ian, talking, walking out in huffs (cold, moonlight, wasteland of dunes, Newton Village green and churchyard and bastion church tower, empty streets, dogs barking - the walk from Nottage, through the trees, the stone fences, the curving road, pools of still water, the white horse in the dark field, the cold stars, Nottage walls and houses, our room, deep blue velvet curtains in a tent over the table, Christmas branch in a milk bottle, silver balls and green yarn, candlelight, our big packages on the table, my dirty sock pinned to the end of his bed with stuffed apricots, a pack of Calypso and one of our tangerines in it, my mandolin, his white fur waistcoat with black lining, his blue shirt with a single button sewn on to keep it, his haircut, I cut his hair and he combed mine and we went to bed, breakfasts with fried bacon and eggs and mushrooms in the dining room, singing at the piano loud and daring, our harmony in 5ths (?) on a made-up praise hymn, night after night one or the other of us going downstairs alone through the dark house to walk out our frustrations, feeling our way back to each other, his face on the pillow in the next bed, sometimes our complete softening into tenderness, the last night when we coolly and violently fucked until daybreak, and he told me about Muriel's silky hot thighs to work me up, sulks, estrangements, hurt feelings, arguments, doubling-back confusions, the Boxing Day walk past Rest Bay all the way from Porthcawl on the green turf, many people walking, black rock laid out in a sculpture garden, basins filling with foam, a black wave-scraped temple on the curve to the Bay, tiny sharp craters, the small boy's shrimp and crayfish, the Henry Moore bundles of rock - on top, the moon-line of nothing but black jagged rock, a field of it, with the sun falling slowly but visibly, sinking into a purple strip that grew larger until it had swallowed all of the sun not yet dissolved into the Channel - we stood, still slightly estranged, and watched until it was completely gone. Then we came through the pastures of Sker House, green wet sod, over the gate looking at the house, with its south end bit open and full of hay - a cow pasture, the cows coming down the road and a man herding them - we asked in English whether we could come through - he said, "No English, français" so I spoke to him in French. An orange cat beside the barn, he got his coat and showed us through the back gate, and walked down the road with us, his dog - Moroccan, beautiful face, young wife due to have a child in two weeks, moustache, friendly straightforward unpolished manner, radiance - the direct smile he gave us when he said goodnight. I called after him, "... et dites bonsoir à votre femme de ma part!" He said that he would and thanked me and waved, and I was full of happiness. Ian too. The sky had been red and beautiful behind us, twigs from the hedge lined up against it, Sker House behind us, our happiness in spite of our distance - the Maid of Sker pub, we were the first customers, pints of Tartan and packages of crisps, Ian asked me about Europe and I sat with my feet on the fender of the electric fire with my cape around me and had just gotten to the five Turks, on my third pint, when Olivia appeared, disappeared, Ian disappeared with her, Greg appeared, I got Ian and Olivia out of the vestibule - we went home, Olivia and I, Ian and Greg, Ian and Olivia, Greg and I, Ian and I, Greg and Olivia, frustration, sulks, depression, anger, Ian and I walking home in silence, Ian beginning to pack, I helpless and reasonable, "Why don't you yell at me?" until finally we put our hands out toward each other, made love with half our presence, oddly said we loved each other just when it was not really true, went to bed, and in our distance and coldness and separation screwed like eating pork with our fingers until Olivia suddenly appeared making a scene on the doorstep, arguments, pleas, cold partings, re-arrivals, tears - we scrambled all our things together and went with them to Bridge End to take the train, waved goodbye to blond smiling Mrs Roberts on 250 New Street in a house called St Kitts, sorry to leave the room, on the train read each other poetry from an anthology - he showed me Marvell's In the Garden! - suddenly looked out the lunch car window to see the white shapes and the lights of the plant at * looming misty and magical right outside the window, left each other at Paddington and went home to spend several days by ourselves, each missing the other and feeling a bond. Confused angry telephone calls from Ian wanting to settle the jealousy question, should he call Olivia and try to develop the relationship? I knew I'd done my best to wreck any possibility and don't know if I was clumsy or clever - New Years Eve he arrived angry and cold - we had to go up to my cold room and work through it again, got nowhere - I'd had an angry telephone call too, telling him that I felt as though I'd been backing up in front of his demands that I change, be less critical of him, I said I didn't think his feelings should be hurt because I don't think he's brilliant, at last all that is out, he read my journal, we raked through again and again the question of whether I think he's stupid, real changes in our way of being together already taken for granted. New Years night, he ended up staying in my bed with a bed in the next room made up and ruffled, we made love but I became suddenly lost, sad, estranged, and only wanted him to hold me, so that when I got back into bed with him in the morning he was sharpened to a point and ready to explode - we had tea, rode the subway, bought my boots, played ignorant French Canadians, looked for movies, decided not to go to the country village because it was 6s each way, went into two different restaurants and left each, too expensive, too little time, bought bread and ham, pears and grapes, brazil nut chocolate and ate them in Captain Nemo and the Underground City, necked - I stared at his profile when the movie was dull, eyes innocent as a seven year old's, young fine nose, sloped chin, hair falling sideways because of the way I cut it, I was in love with his face, once on the street I pulled him into an alley, covered our heads with the cape and kissed him while people going past giggled. His face in the movie makes me want his child. Movie over we went to Bunje's and talked in a back burrow, about living together. He went to the Open Space to act, I sat in the Italian restaurant eating apple pie and coffee, then soup and bread, reading Bradbury, until Ian came back, finished my soup. We went home on the tube, ate, he played some very good piano, we talked about Karsh and Maria, went to bed and I got very excited. When I took off my clothes to step into bed he was watching, smiling, from the kitchen doorway, came to the bed and took back the covers, unrolled me, looked at me, touched me, smiled (Mae West - "Is that a pickle in your pants or are you glad to see me?"). On the tube today he said "I'm very happy being with you here at this moment on the tube." Humble summary: something's growing quite fast and yet very securely, that beautiful hard-soft loving oversensitive selfish generous boring inspired passionate honest treacherous courageous timid boy, I'm really beginning to love him, really, without reservations I've had about other people; what does that mean for my arrogance and freedom? The same, and more than ever? I think I know something. Iffley Road January 5 [letter] I'm in Oxford, sitting in Olivia's bedroom in my sleeping bag, both heaters on, electric and paraffin, the room beginning to warm. Beyond the frosted window are Oxfordshire hills, a clear sky, snow, red morning light on hills, bare trees, roofs, and the tangle of back gardens below. Don is in Canada for Christmas, coming back tomorrow. I'm in Oxford to see her for a few days clear of our men who distract us from each other when they're there. O started a new job yesterday, some kind of research job in publishing. While she's at work I study in the bedroom with the door tight shut because the rest of the flat is see-your-breath cold. Birds outside. It's early in the morning because I get up when she does to keep her company. We both came on Sunday, she from Wales where she had been for Christmas week and I from London. Coming to Oxford on the train is always a magical mystery tour: you go to Paddington Station in London, a wide low building with ten tracks of train coming right into the waiting room, such as it is (eleven little pews on the platform), and above it all a Victorian glass roof dirty from smoke and steam. You step into the train and it begins to move backwards into the railyard; you come into daylight and are surrounded by cranes and skeletons of new apartment blocks - for half an hour you move through slowly dissolving city into slowly accumulating green country. On Sunday I took the 4 p.m. train - there's one every hour, this little country is all packaged together by hundreds of trains constantly running - in a state of wild-peaceful happiness that transformed everything I saw. There had been a frost in the morning which had not yet melted - no snow. Everything was beautiful - thrown-away window frames on the embankment frosted on frosted glass, cottage roofs in white rectangles in the country, the high delicate silver street lamps in Reading like stripped-down Lombardy poplars in rows along the streets, towering above the buildings. It grew darker, a pink sky, a thin fog coming in low to the ground, the Oxfordshire hills appearing, silver canals with a thin coating of ice, our faces reflected on the inside of the train windows as it grew darker outside, the man across from me looking as happy as I was, sitting re-reading a long long airmail letter someone had written in tiny square letters with drawings in the margins. My head was full of Ian, my whole body was shining. It takes a little over an hour to go to Oxford - the hour is always a daydream - I bring a book and sit with it on my lap unlooked at as I glimmer out the window smiling vaguely outside, broadly inside. Oxford - little country town station, a doubledecker bus that drops you in the midst of the colleges, the spires, walls, windows, spikes, peaks, points, towers, gateways, of the Oxford colleges which are built to look like castles and manor houses. Iffley Road, Olivia has just arrived, complaining inventively about trains and dogs and grandmothers and grandfathers and dreading her job and drinking tea. Sunday January 11 [journal] Antecedents - my anger in the kitchen - "Do you think I've influenced your thinking in any way?" "I suppose the honest answer to that is no." My long bitter plaint above the sink, "What do you know of my thesis, of what I'm thinking? If I've thought of something, if I'm turned onto something, I have to write something about it or save it to talk to somebody else ... that's alright, I don't mind that, but let's not go on about it's me who's unaccepting and uninterested and reactionary and dogmatic!" He disappeared. I went upstairs after him and he was sitting at his desk. "Why do you go away the minute it's me who has a grievance for a change", my voice shaking with anger, surprisingly and pleasantly. His answer that he had nothing to say that I couldn't distort in that frame of mind. "If you feel that way you should go home" - and as I gathered up my things, "... I said maybe you should -" and I, "Maybe I should," exit, downstairs, out, and a very rapid very self-righteous step down Lonsdale to Portobello. At the corner his shoulder pulling into view out of the corner of my eye like a truck about to overtake, almost noiselessly, until I'd turned the corner onto Portobello Road and he asked if I needed some money. On up Portobello, middle of the road, Saturday market people, someone unpacking candles. "Can I suggest we go for a walk and try to talk about it?" Grumpy yes to the still impersonal shoulder. Holland Park, a fence, the tree where we stopped last fall. (On the road - "What are you accusing me of?" "Egotism." "Why do you think I've been trying to find out how we could communicate better?" "Because you want to be goddamn admired.") Image - Ian standing in front of me, beside the wet black tree trunk, blue jacket, fur vest, light blue shirt, white undershirt, hair new-washed over his eyes - long, furry, green-blue - hands in his pockets, looking sturdy and balanced as always (like his galloping on the beach with Cocoa at Rest Bay) - smiling slightly, I suppose a little treacherously. Both of us wanted to go our separate ways home with our little fragile bridge that might be half-false, but it seemed a betrayal of insincerity to say so. He did, nevertheless. And we parted with a peck at the Notting Hill Gate tube station - he crossed, waited for traffic, did not look back. I walked as far as Warren Street with an almost empty head. I've put the image in because it was almost too beautiful to believe. Sometimes I don't believe I have a connection with him at all. It is so precarious that it's easy to believe I won't for long. What did we agree? That we have trouble partly through his fault as well, that he goes into monologues (which bore me and leave me out), that he doesn't draw me out, that he's interested in getting from me something which doesn't interest me (facts), and that he isn't interested in what does interest me (my style of thinking, my way of being a person, my aesthetic eye as opposed to what I might know about aesthetics). We went through the reverse at Porthcawl. I'm in separate minds now - sometimes I find him really untreacherous - he says what he thinks. At other times I think there are areas in which he doesn't want to know what he thinks. On the train a week ago, that daylight-into-dark two hours between London and Iffley Road, I loved him with my whole heart; I wanted to bring him out like a blooming tulip tree, not only now but happily ever after; I wanted to care, meditate, watch, plot, become, for his becoming as for my own. I believed in his instincts, his honesty, energy, ambition, his beauty, his universal healthiness, his idealism, his practicality, his music, his self belief, his sex, his temperament - everything I suppose but what he wants me to believe in, his abstract theme-devoted didactic simplifying style of thought. Just as he does not believe in or even perceive my style of thought. People when they love each other and want to make a unity in order to deal with the world more rather than less honestly should believe in each other's perception and conception because it is trusted as an extension of their own. But whose thinking have I ever trusted? Greg's in detail and in taste, but not in scope - he's too passionless and too unambitious. Peter's generally, but not where it concerned me - also in some ways I don't trust his assumptions or his objectivity - he wanted too badly at that moment to rescue his life. Frank's I did as long as it stayed within very close limits; when he went outside them he chilled me with his ignorance and prejudice. Father's not at all. Olivia's sometimes to a surprising extent but sometimes not at all: her perception delights me and then her descriptions confuse me. Patricia's within the boundaries of her chosen limits, but her limits are womanly and optimistic, again - she just wants to live well and kindly. Ian's - I don't trust it because it doesn't have my aims. Don's - and this is the sad, private, 'maybe' that I'd like to be rid of - by now I'd really like to be rid of it, honestly and finally - I think I believe that Don at his best has the same vague (therefore powerful?) aims I have and the ability to seek them up to and beyond my limits. I'm not sure - perhaps I'd find him too cautious, too cagey, too wary to think with me in complete good faith, perhaps he'd keep reservations with me as he does with O; but maybe, maybe he'd trust me as an equal and generously genuinely come with me, chase me, to our own frontiers so that we as one-in-two could be more than our two separate selves separately pursued. Because only that justifies giving up the lonely pursuit of ourselves separately? BUT is there any pursuit of myself, unless I'm challenged? I know I have to have rests from Ian - simply to get away from that other ego clamouring for reassurance and threat in just the right combination. I pity Mother her marriage to a man she can't talk to; I contemplate 'marrying' a man I can't talk to. (But I at least like his being if not thinking, which is more than she can.) Back to the subject - if we live in step for a while will we come to think in step, Ian and I? Is it possible? (If not, can we justify being lovers in every other way, camped around our private abyss? Well, pit. Justify! - can we manage to? I remember how Greg and I came to think more and more in step - but something essential was still missing. That both makes me hopeful and unhopeful. And I remember constantly all the ways in which Ian is irreplaceable: that's sincere - I mean irreplaceable, unique, a Platonic fit - Chris talked of how we look for someone who with us will make one whole, and of how we find more or less perfect fits in some parts of ourselves which do not fit in others. How do we know when to give up? Is the strangeness, otherness, reduction, necessary as part of us? Footnote - the Raymond Williams quotation pg 48: 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. Against that, put Ian's methodological belief in behavioral engineering - if we change our tactics toward each other we may be able to communicate. (In some ways we have been talking better lately but "Every time this happens it's as if a nail is driven deeper - in that sense it's worse every time" he said.) But he doubts it too - "We shouldn't have to try so hard; maybe there's something essentially different about us." His two piles of leaves - me, that he can't get at - and him, that I can't get at. Trying to build a bridge - if only we could because he could arrest me (I touch Peter in most of my important thinking about men now, he'd be glad? sorry to know). If only we could. All we need to know is whether our whole selves can shift to overlap just enough or whether they're too foreign. We should know now - I think we could work quite hard if we knew. I suppose we must assume that they can or that effort is more important than the waste of our energy. Must we assume? Why must we? Quite arbitrarily we could stop now, long for each other for a while and begin again. As arbitrarily we could swear a bond, literally or metaphorically, and soak our energy into that free-arbitrary commitment. Do I want a child because it is something absolute, something I have to choose only once in my life, something that is chosen completely without responsibility for its qualities? - ie when it's born it has no qualities other than existence, mineness, and needs which become my responsibilities? Can I be happy enough and human enough to care for a child? What will I do about its father? Sontag's son - what sort of relationship is that? She's alive, she's well, she's intelligent and she does her best not to set boundaries on her intelligence. How does she live? It's possible then? Can I choose it? Am I wrong to continue to want my Platonic match? Do I in fact want it? I'm happier than Ian about partial relationships. But will any man ever feel at home with my partial commitment? Any man who's ambitious? Already I've pivoted a little with Ian, I've rocked - is there a tension like a spring pulled that will snap me back to where I was before him? Is that my real dogmatism? If it exists is it my only possibility for being someone important? Vaguely I believe that we can only be great or remarkable or valuable by pursuing ourselves, working out of our strongest patterns in some sort of Hegelian spiral. I in my chaotic aesthetic way, Ian in his dogged conceptual way, Greg in his lazy kind intellectual way, Olivia in her hysterical way, Don - I don't know. Obviously we learn from each other. But is what we learn, the ways in which we badger each other, essential or peripheral? Does it distract us? Why when we came back together yesterday in Holland Park were we so uncertain, unjubilant? Monday January 12 [letter] A week later, back in London - I came back on Wednesday after having a few hours with Don just as he arrived back from Canada very happy with his holiday (snow, his little sisters grown up, his parents treading more tactfully around sore areas than usual, skiing, the sound of Canadian voices talking Canadian trivia) - he had seen Peter (met him for the first time) in Kingston long enough to gather that he's harassed and not very happy - also he brought my guitar along for me since it was too fragile to ship - seeing Don is always a special pleasure - talking to him is such a relief and such an exuberance because I never have to explain things to him and can expand to my furthest extensions - no scaling things down or simplifying them or translating them into intelligible language - he's always ahead of me. We've always been special to each other, but before it was secretly - he didn't want Olivia to be threatened by it and my pride wouldn't let me admit it. Now we've decided that secrets on the long run are more corrosive than real expressed shared feelings and we are simply, admittedly, euphorically, best friends. Olivia does feel threatened and mistrustful, although I've told her I have no intention of 'getting' or 'having' him, but that will have to work itself out somehow, as it will. Olivia isn't yet completely herself after her breakdown - she has little confidence in herself, she's struggling to do things which are easy for other people, like earning a living and managing to get to work on time. She's not as clear and strong about attacking the resistances and selfishnesses of other people (like me!) as she used to be; now she tends to hide her grievances and they have to come out indirectly, when she's drugged. She still takes tranquilizers and three or four powerful sleeping pills at night - when she takes them she loses her inhibitions and talks very freely, but unfortunately she soon begins not to be intelligible because the pills dissolve away her logic. I'm not a good person for giving other people confidence - if I try it tends to come out patronizingly - and we aren't communicating very well now, but Greg is very good to and for her and they've become quite close. She doesn't like being married but does like Don, and that's one of her worst dilemmas now. I don't know what she can do either. She sees herself as being partly traditional in that she needs and wants to be looked after and partly the new woman (and she takes me as an example!) who is independent, tough and free. She knows she'll have to compromise but hasn't been able to work out the terms of the settlement with herself - she hasn't been able to decide how she wants to live and yet feels that she must decide soon. That's D and O. Greg is well, working, wealthy (the Canada Council has renewed his doctoral fellowship) and contented with Brenda. He's finding London a feast too - I had lunch with him at LSE this afternoon and we had a long catching-up talk. You talked about groups - oddly, all of us have strong interconnections with each other singly, but there's no group. We none of us like seeing each other more than one at a time, all sorts of discomforts and jealousies come in. The one 'group' I have and enjoy is Ian's flat - his two roommates, Marie and Jeremy, and he; and I fit in quite well - we had a group Christmas dinner that was very close and family-like, far more so than the one Ian and Olivia and I had in Wales. I think I'd rather live in such a group than privately with one man. One thing that bothers me in what you say about Derrill is that if he is genuinely and generously interested in sensitization, trust, awareness, group-consciousness, love, freedom, etc, it's all wrong of him to be disappointed with you for relaxing into him and the group and being less self reliant. He set up this situation for exactly that and if he's sincerely disappointed that you profited by it he should re-think his ideas about what he wants people to be. I really dislike him you know! He doesn't seem willing to accept the consequences of his actions. I've always had a feeling about him that's a little like hair standing up on the back of my neck - a strong feeling that the only way to be admired by such a person is to be tougher than he is and make him hurt a little. A cynical device but one that I know works, perversely, with certain kinds of tough egotistical power hungry people who won't realize that it takes a lot of strength to relax into dependency. My psychological summing up of Derrill would be that he somewhere very private scorns people who are hungry for him or depend on him because he thinks they are fools not to recognize him for the unperfect unamazing person he is. That's an in-sight although not a very profound one; I've recognized that in me. You're not like that, I don't think; Greg isn't either. But many high-powered people are and have to realize their own and others' treachery before they can begin loving effectively and reciprocally. There's some more polemic for you, not that it can be any comfort to you. You know (and I know and others know) that you are still the 'beautiful person' he first saw and you know that relaxing didn't make you less so, because it was an extension and expression of what is beautiful in you. I think I'm emotional about this because it reminds me of my first and second year when my very proud and fierce and solitary and ambitious self relaxed into Olivia and then tried to relax into others. It feels like a loss as well as a gain: I was never sure whether it was a loss or a gain; now I think it was a gain but it certainly sometimes felt like a loss! But luckily Olivia didn't abandon me when she'd relaxed me - she was more consistent than Derrill in spite of being a relatively amateur (but very skilled) relaxer. Oh M - here it's time for me to catch the bus downtown and I haven't told you yet all the really interesting things, like my family that I live with, like my Christmas in Wales (which was how I spent the £7 from you, and very well too) and most and especially about Ian. Your long letter was a nice one - they're always there when I wake and come down to breakfast, sitting on the hall table, plump and familiar. Tuesday 13th of January [journal] Shame. The Biafra pictures in the Times, Biafra surrendered today. Long struggle with Ian last night, walking back to Notting Hill gate from Nash House. (When I stopped, turned toward the wall and cried, he said, "I wish we were like Hugo and Josefin." "I know." "Is that why you're crying?" "Yes.") The mile to Knightsbridge alienated us more and more. We stopped at the Bistingo to have late supper, became tough, pulled ourselves together, agreed that we wouldn't go out with a whimper. At the flat he took my boots off, held my feet on his lap, read Mother's letter. I wanted to sleep, as a means of fleeing, "I want to lie beside you and go to sleep with my hand on you and soak you up all night, and in the morning I'll be alright." He was horny, went upstairs to work. When he came down I was asleep, dreaming butterflies and falling hoops. He began to pester, "Do you like feeling me?" "I like knowing you." "But you don't like feeling me?" and he began pacing and shifting so that his hostility came into my dream as a feeling that he might kill me as I lay asleep. I was bruised, unwhole, I wanted tenderness not invasion, but finally, when he'd come to lie beside me again I thought angrily - well, alright, let's knock him out and have some peace at least - and I put him into me - he said "Are you feeling anything? If you aren't feeling anything I'll stop," but my anger, doubt, loss concentrated me into sex as aggression against him. We were ashamed. He said he'd lost respect and would have to kill a dragon. I said I'd lost respect but not in an important way. I said I had a lump of doubt, loneliness, that had not gone away, later when we had found our way back together. I said that I had a deep feeling somewhere that what it meant was that he didn't really give a damn of any kind. I was ashamed for him and for myself, for having given in to his childish fuss. "I really do care for you, do you believe that?" "It would be nice if we could take that for granted." We were working ourselves up, we were tired, we always feel the precariousness of our relationship. He invades me, he tests me, I think how peaceful it is at home; he says that we need to live together. When we're tough we like each other. I feel as if I have to work hard for his respect but I have to soften for his real tenderness. We betray backwards and forwards, we're unified so seldom, we work so hard. I'm ashamed when I long for my peacefulness because I know I don't really want it. I'm still physically exhausted and a little nauseated, and my feeling of shame is partly that exhaustion and nausea. I suppose Peter was right - people have to build their relationship bit by bit. But the magic, where's it to come from even when the various truces are made? What do we need each other for? Do we need each other enough, even? He said he couldn't imagine what it would be like living without me now. I can imagine. But I think my imagination may betray me. How long will we have to struggle hand to hand like this? Is Greg's laziness the only key to our times of peace? Now it's no longer the being in love stage, it's the first year of marriage stage, no boundaries set, chaos; but he feels it too. What can we make? How can we live? Peter's failure scares me, I can commit myself to Ian for a given time, I can live 'as if' and see if in fact - I value him, I love him, I think he's an equal, he doesn't want me to be nice to him, neither of us like this grown-up relationship - I wish it were two years old and we could look at it from inside. Later - I sound so idiotically fearful. What do I have to lose? It isn't as though there were one right way in my life that I'll miss. I have everything I need to live. Why can't I be alone when I'm old? My fearfulness is conventional. Why don't I let go? Idiot child. Mother knows better. January 14th Having slain my dragon with a smile and a flourish of self confidence, I go back to myself and come up with a future which is more real and particular than any I've thought of since I worked on the apricot line at York Farms Sardis - BC, somewhere with woods around, rain, mountains, fern, sand, a clearing, a couple of long houses, a cookshack, a sandbox, a huge Bible camp stove, my two children and others who 'belong' to other people, a tin deux-chevaux, a projector, a camera, a piano, a house still being finished, wildflowers, a garden, two horses, somewhere a seacoast, a SENSE OF HUMOUR, a greenhouse, drawings, flatbread made on the stove and dripping butter, wild animals, a bookshelf, things read aloud and shared, things remembered and written, loneliness, a teaching job three days a week in Vancouver, my country for years, trips out, camping, rock collecting, visit Patricia, Paul coming to stay. Writing that begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Hash, records, living with people in a civilized way, but no fictions. Freedom and joy. No fear.
20 January Working backwards: letter from Don, "very dear indecipherably deciduous elp" - lovely, impenetrable, may be mad? Quickly writing down the image of Don in Oxford - late afternoon sun through the bedroom window, Don sitting on the bed with it strong on half his face: tanned transparent thick skin, red hair in curls, one eye transparent to its mushroom-gill sea-bed, the other in shadow, green sweater: colour close-up, dark background, an expression of intelligent smiling self consciousness, himself deliberately concentrated in his eyes and mouth. (Then we jumped up and down on the bed.) Nabokov's Speak, Memory read on the tube and while waiting makes me smile, has made me buy two notebooks - the first Ian and I turned into a mutual book for ditties, messages - makes me see films differently. Here is Your Life, new Swedish film (Troell), seen at the Place tonight. Very strong, shapeless, long series of things in a boy's life from 15 to 17 - not as good as 10,000 Suns because shapeless, but very good cin-e-ma. Ian. Friday, Saturday - feverish and tractable, hot body (hungry nevertheless!) and worrying rustling heavy breathing - great tenderness, a less restless affection - meals, steak on Friday, a little piece cut three ways - Ian's jealousy of Jeremy; the laundromat - he stalked out, and he came back. Sunday - I began to be afraid because it seemed that my feeling for him, my cherishing, was more urgent than his could be for me - I found myself thinking of marrying him, not sensibly or reasonably, and not really meaning marrying but simply wanting some big wild impulsive important way to claim him or affirm us. After the session at the Electric I played coy to express my vulnerability-pride and pranced for him, and he liked it. Yet when we lay in bed I could not be rid of my feeling of rawness - I said I wanted to be, like a stone, or a chestnut just fallen still covered with spines, to sleep so that I could stop feeling raw. I said I wanted to lie quietly and form a skin on myself like hot milk or soup. He said I must not be afraid and held me between his legs with my head against his abdomen as he sat leaning against the wall, and his arms around my head - exactly right. But he was horny and wanted to escape my refusal by going to sleep; I felt lonely and wondered whether he felt resentful. But kissed his shoulder and went to sleep. In the morning we wake, turn our faces toward each other on our single pillow, smile, say "Good morning." [undated letter] This time, happy notes on a trip - not Wales, but last weekend's slither into the south of England and back. Ian's friend Mark is the son of a big company executive who has a London flat and a country house, and a lot of money. Mark has just come back from Canada and is staying at the country house - he and a girl called Ruth are working together making beautiful leather clothes which they can sell on Portobello Road in London - both are longhaired temporary dropouts who have their first degree and are taking a rest before going back for postgrad. We'd been invited to visit for a while, during the week when most of the family is in London, but we both have classes until Thursday evening. Directly after my afternoon film last Thursday we rushed to Waterloo Station (there are about five different central stations in London, with trains going in different directions) - flat long shed-like buildings, Victorian-built, with dirty glass roofs waving low above our heads and the trains like this [zigzag sketch] - the trains nose in almost to the back of the station with platforms separating them like long shelves - a big draughty open space, trains pulling out and coming in, people getting off and others getting on at the same time. We ran to the far front end of the train and managed to find seats with a table between us - Ian had just given a paper and was feeling prickly and estranged - in order to get any work done we try not to see each other during the week, and so when we meet on Thursdays it takes us a day to get used to each other again, and it's hard work - but as the train moved farther and farther into the country, as the ugly tired commuters got off and left the train empty, and as it grew darker, we got within speaking distance of each other again - finally we found an empty compartment, pulled down all the blinds, and necked, so that when at last we arrived at Gillingham, Dorset, we were messy and happier. Small station, typical country England wooden lean-to-like building with a ticket taker and a crowd of cars waiting to be driven home by people who'd gone up to London for the day - a small curly-headed woman at the door waiting for someone - we looked around for a taxi - the woman called across to us, "Is it for the Elliotts at Stour Provost?" It was - we got into the back of her car - cold and raining, very dark - and drove four miles through high hedges that let us see nothing of the countryside - we had to pass through East Stour and West Stour before at last we came to Stour Provost - in the dark, driving on those winding blind narrow roads in the rain, we seemed to be travelers in a story, arriving by night in a strange invisible country. Our taxi woman pointed out the geography of Stour Provost as we came into the village - a line of cottages on either side of the road, church and churchyard on the right, turn the corner, more cottages, general store and post office on the left, then a gravel road uphill branching in the dark - Mark come to greet us at the door, high-strung laugh and a lot of curly hair - his mother tall and thin with a tiny narrow sinewy face like a greyhound, large dark eyes, matching sweater and skirt, pretty hair, a very upper class accent - a big almost American kitchen (you can't know what that means unless you know the shoddiness and ugliness of most English kitchens - a real rich house kitchen is more or less equivalent to the ordinary suburban bungalow kitchen in America) - and then - low doors into the old part of the house - rust red carpet, low beamed ceiling, fireplace as big as a bed, the whole room crooked and bulging, uneven under its white plaster like a burrow scooped out of the hill - a 15th century farmhouse kitchen is what it used to be and it's still full of odd crooked cupboards with mysterious uses - one a salt cupboard maybe, one hiding the baking oven and another even crazier with part of its paneling eaten away by termites (?) - all the beams above the dining room table also quite ragged, some shaped into curves by ship builders (the beams used for building were mostly driftwood), one with a chunk eaten out by ship's beetles - leaded windows set deep, and crooked, into the wall - cuirasses hanging on the wall, old drawings, bits of queer treasure lying about - and on the windowsill, in a big glass bowl, a real pot pourri. I always wondered what they were when I read the word in novels - it's just a bowl of dried petals, leaves, rosebuds, pale bits of fragile stuff lying in a heap - you put your nose to the edge of the bowl, or stir with your fingers, and there's a strong oily smell of flowers, hay, summer, a kind of slow spray of scent, very rich, especially wonderful when you come in and smell it in the dark. I didn't see all this at once, because there was another room beyond that, a hallway with a huge front door, a row of bottles and glasses, a curving iron back staircase, more rust red carpeting, more cuirasses, more drawings, an agate egg in a thunderegg nest on a hall table, books, finally a little paneled study with deep chairs, another fireplace, a stereo, Ruth cutting out a pair of white sheepskin pants. Monday [journal] Lele [?] came for dinner, Greg, Brenda, Alan Bitz, Wilkinson, Ken Menzies. Ian at the end of it was "devastated"; I think he felt as I had the night before and wanted to hold him child small in my arms like a bundle and rock him. Instead I kissed his shoulder and we went to sleep. Today, Tuesday, I came home. The movie. Nabokov. Don's letter. My room. The laurel tree growing slowly, leaning toward the right but subtly balancing itself by the curves of its three stems and the sideways poke of its top leaves. Hanging over the window, my silver chain belt, the Indian corn necklace from Don, the red ceramic beads, in a rich row. The mirror, and reflected in it Porthcawl and Tintagel pebbles, and the Porthcawl bit of bone like a Henry Moore. The green gin bottle with withering stalks of iris leaves. That's the windowsill - and untidy piles of books and papers. The red towel table covered with papers. Mandolin and guitar on the couch, sleeping bag, boots, Bertrand Russell hanging crooked under the closet mirror. Maps of England, Wales and Sweden behind me. The memento mori over my left shoulder. Dancers, faces, an Elizabethan Lady Jane on turquoise blue with a Turkish carpet under her feet, the Pierrot blue-painted face of a New Guinea tribesman, another Sunday Times cover. Next to the Dreamer Picasso, a page of Biafra photographs from the Times. The fur hedgehog from Olivia crouched on the table beside my book. Thought of Olivia, Ian, Greg, Don, Mother, Paul, Judy, Patricia, my unmade children, invocation like bedtime prayers: Father, Marytka, Peter, Peter Dyck, Jenny and Joan, Marie, Mr Mann, Bill benefactor, Ian. Madeleine. Monday January 26 Don in the Makaris leaning back in his chair, turning his face away, because there were tears in his eyes, saying "I wish you wouldn't tell me parables" when I told him about Mike, Christmas morning, the poem returned; "He couldn't find a way to live." The ducks in St James Park, swimming underwater and coming up unwet, the pigeons looking like fish in their high watery root branches. Weekend with Ian, a battle, I'm tired, the struggle to get into synchronization, his flights and mine, his need for reassurance, my need for reassurance, my advances and retreats, our misunderstandings, our flickerings fading and growing more intense, our near-misses near reconciliations, hurt, defeat, impatience, longing, mistrust, courage. A conversation in which he said I would destroy myself - I went down to the bathroom to run a bath - he came in and sat on the floor and we agreed that each of us feels that the other does not recognize his essence, his core, his metaphysics. That made us feel hollow, and we sat apart with our knees under our chins. But we were together in our recognition of the hollow feeling - warm water, light reflections on the porcelain, Ian's eyes searching my face (how different he looks than he did when I met him). On Saturday night when we had put Olivia and Don to bed in our corner we lay down to sleep on the mattress in the hall; I held him very tenderly, I cherished him; what I didn't know was that Ian had again decided not to go through with it; we went into a kind of screen-door half-sleep, I quite peacefully and Ian -? In the morning we had to whisper our way through another bramble forest. When D and O left we went upstairs and lay down together and eventually made love - we'd put a radio on either side and lit a candle, we were in a nest in candlelight, cold air catching at us under corners of the blanket. As we moved together very gentling a thin strong line of grief began in me, grew, climbed like an orgasm, and I began to sob, holding Ian's back under my hand quite tightly, flat, tears running out of the corners of my eyes into my hair, and being swallowed, my mouth full of tears, open, my face held stiff like a mask, I felt as though I were lying flat on water, each sob running through me like a wave - it was complete grief, loose, sloshing in all the cavities of my body. Ian lay over me, held me, called me; I realized as I held him, with my hands flat on his shoulder blades, that I was giving him my grief, making a gift of it to him. Finally he said "At least give me your eyes." I cried out "I want so much!" and suddenly he put his face on my neck and began to sob. I sprang back into myself, to be able to hold him. Tight rough sobs, and when he turned his face, red drowned eyes, tears on his moustache, a drenched face. "Oh God." "I want to die." "What's happening." It was frightening, awesome, beautiful - we had given each other one of our hardest gifts, we'd given it because we could not help it, we had held each other, we had seen each other into it and carefully out of it. We felt it as a sacrament, a revelation, celebration - it felt holy and we must surely be different after it. We remember it. But again after the Electric I was sore, frightened and watchful of his pockets of resistance ("Signs that I am not completely conquered, you mean?") - this morning when I was leaving he was sore. We shouted at each other over delicious breakfast. He smashed his hard-boiled egg and I had to giggle when he took a spoon to it. (He said "One thing about Leslie, she knew how to lay herself on the line, she knew how to come out of fights without malingering.") I began to cry again, "I can't do it, I'm not strong enough, or wise enough, or smart enough. It's so hard and so painful, and there are so many other things in the world that are wonderful and that we don't see when we are struggling with each other." He played me Ellie in Spring, a very short tone pome, made me see, on the screen, myself at seventeen leaping over logs in the rainwet bush completely happy feeling the sharp world around me. He's intelligent! I was proud of him this weekend. Our rule - that we must try not to be afraid? Yes, surely. Also we have agreed to be strong enough to part if we make each other more miserable than happy, we'll both agree and not chop each other's heads off by leaving. We want a lot. Ian knows how not to compromise it. That makes me confident. I'm happy, behind my haggard face. I love him; I'm going to find ways to lay myself open if I must and still be strong. Our revelation yesterday awes me as I remember it - what does it mean? Like a burning bush, what does it mean, our unity in grief? I think it's a good omen, but it's ambiguous. 28 January The trouble with all this sadness and struggle is that it has already been charted and turned into art. The only original thing to do, with real charting-making value, would be to try something unobvious, a gamble on one style of life. It occurred to me that I could legally change my name, to "Makepeace" for instance. The conventional ideals are too badly, or well, understood; their failures are all comprehended. It's stupid to be their victim. One must be really eccentric. But one has to do it with élan, and if one finds oneself remarking that élan is necessary one probably hasn't got it. IS IT POSSIBLE TO CHEAT? [undated letter] I've just come home from a weekend at Ian's, very haggard and bone-tired, and have found your letter on my table, and after laughing in the kitchen a little with Sheila (who said kindly "Where do you disappear to, to come back looking so haggard?" and gave me some leftover supper) am going to write you a slightly less-chinup-than-usual letter. My reaction to the news of Frank's child was to burst into tears. I had been thinking of Frank on the bus tonight.
Robert Frost - memorized at eighteen, in Mrs Wold's pink bedroom, and still coming in useful. Olivia and Don came to London this weekend. Olivia went to see Greg; Don and I sat on the sidewalk in front of the duck pond, looking at the ducks and talking about houses, what it's like when you feel like an egg or a stone, how branches look like roots and birds look like fishes. I told him the story of Mike's coming to see me last Christmas morning and of the poem he sent back just before he was committed for the first time. Don said, with a funny smile and with tears in his eyes, "I wish you wouldn't tell me parables like that." I've put all this down to show how kindred we feel, how at home, how much ourselves and how much our best selves. We're friends; we believe in each other; we don't want to have or own or keep each other, we're just grateful that the other exists. But: Olivia and Ian wanted to talk about my relationship with Don - because they want to know what it is, what it means, whether they're threatened by it - and so we had a group session sitting on Ian's living room floor. Exhausting, sad, and not very useful. Olivia is very jealous, and put us to a third degree; I discovered that she's been interpreting all my actions since coming to England as malicious. She remembers me saying things I certainly never said. She misremembers, she misconstrues, she looks for spite where only carelessness existed, she watches me sullenly when Don is anywhere around, I can't do anything right because to try to draw her out is patronizing and to ignore her is more spite! And all of this began when O discovered (I told her) that ever since I've known Don (six years ago, longer than O in fact) I've thought him the most exceptional man I knew, and both he and I have always felt a strong, unstated because understood, kinship on a 'metaphysical wavelength.' Don is having a difficult time finding a way to live, because he is exceptionally intelligent and very intense and has a fierce longing to do something he can believe in. Because of that passionate (yes really! with him it's an accurate word) assumption of kinship he often writes me when he's in what seem to be desperate times. But at the same time Olivia is his chosen life and his responsibility - he's said so both to her and to me. Still she bitterly resents the fact that he can and wants and needs to be something with me that he can't, now, with her, even though his commitment is to her. (You understand all this, the sadness, the in-some-ways hopelessness, of divided loyalties.) The one accusation she makes which is true, is that given a choice, I'm more likely to be loyal to Don than to her, because I believe in Don in a way that I do not believe in her, simply because of a bent in myself. So she says the friendship is over; and I think it might be. That's sad. Why do people have to be absolute to each other, all or nothing? What crazy ideal are we scrambling for? Is it impossible? If it is, I wish we could know from the beginning and not have to find out by experience - because no experience is ever final, maybe next time it will be perfect. If it is impossible, that perfect loyalty, perfect kinship, perfect freedom to be all you can be - is anything worth working at? Sometimes the answer is obviously overwhelmingly yes, those days when we feel really loved and really loving and consequently intensely ourselves and right in the world. Other days, pathless woods, cobwebs, struggles, tears, loneliness, a huge undigested lump of desolation in the pit of the stomach - with the same person, because of the same person. You've guessed that I'm talking about Ian now; have you also guessed that I haven't yet told you about him because I'm never sure that by the time you got the letter we might not have violently gone in separate directions? Ian. Just turned 23, so nearly two years younger than me. A Scot from Edinburgh whose father was a major, I think, in the British Army, and whose mother was an excellent pianist who married instead of making a career, and who has ever since been rather sadly (I gather) devoted to being a good mother and wife, and who seems to have been a very loving mother. The father seems a strange disappointed man, very 'manly' and strict, but bitter. Ian is the youngest of the three, and was a golden boy in the family because he was athletic, talented and gregarious. When he was about twelve he won a music scholarship (for the 'cello) to a public school - something which, in Britain, is the key to entry into the upper class and therefore tremendously important. He was at public (boarding) school until the end of high school - it was a total institution and he loved it and was good at it - excelled at sports, singing, piano, 'cello and clowning - had the sort of close friendships which are unique to English public school boys, I think, friendships almost like love affairs, with jealousies, secrets, all the usual trappings of love. Then he went to Canada, Queen's, for university - intellectually he was a late developer, and it wasn't until university that he woke up and became interested in books, theories, words. As a result, even now that he's doing an M.Sc. in sociology, he's intellectually unsure of himself. He's intelligent, he's a quite wide-ranging and enthusiastic and original thinker, but he isn't as brilliant as he wants to be, and he has a lot of learning to catch up on. So he's unreasonable and prickly on the subject of his own intelligence, and is always watching me for signs of not respecting it enough. And I'm not easy to impress, having such a swollen confidence in my own intelligence! Trouble. He plays piano, brilliantly I think - he doesn't need piano music so he improvises, and he can play almost any sort of music faultlessly, straight out of his imagination - jazz, blues, Chopin-like emotional music, Mozart-like playful music, all beautifully, fluently. When he begins to play I feel as though I'm floating or flying in his mind, because his music is so precise and exact an expression of himself. Sometimes we sing together, sometimes I drum on my knee to give him a beat, sometimes his roommate Jeremy and he and I have sessions of singing and playing and drumming. I really love his music. I've missed singing. He's beautiful to look at - drooping eyes that are stone-green with abnormally large pupils, a mound of soft hair, sideburns and a moustache, a little boy's nose, a long battered chin and a funny mouth, a perfect delicately made hard body, a completely misleading look of arrogance, constant gracefulness. Looking at him moves me and surprises me all the time. He's loving, tender, affectionate, but also jealous and possessive and egotistical. He says he wants a total relationship in which we share everything, live together, work together, do everything together, need no one else, trust each other completely. You'll know that isn't quite my idea. He doesn't like my argumentativeness or my independence or my dogmatism. I don't like his jealousy or his dogmatism. But sometimes I love him with my whole self. In some ways he knows how to hold me better than anyone ever has. In some ways I enjoy living alone too much. But men are important - impossible to imagine living without that danger and intensity of struggling with the male personality. It's a mess but I'm determined not to be its victim and may have to discover a completely eccentric way of living. Dear M, can't you think of my letters as a natural thing, like rain, which comes or doesn't come, but mustn't be worried about? I can't write people when I don't have a real sense of them, and when I'm so distracted by violent emotions and/or work and/or happiness I can't have a very real sense of people who aren't directly in my way. You understand that don't you? Do you want boring duty letters? Here's another fragment letter - Ian's been dealt with, Wales next time hopefully. Work is good and plentiful. I'm doing a morning a week drawing, since it is an art school. Winter's nice here. Spring begins in Feb here - there are trees blooming in St James Park. 2nd of February [journal] Rain noisy outside, Mark crying, a letter from Bill and one from Estall, my steady feeling of Ian, elation and certainty, something, I'm disconcerted and thrown, yet I feel suddenly solid in tradition: I'm what's called 'in love,' I think of a particular man with a very conventional sense of pride, wonder, ownership. I'm held, by sexual magic, by his particular physical being, by his feeling, by his jokes. It isn't a conspiracy to flatter each other - all our crazy flickering coming and going, dramatic, demanding, feels like something to live around and make ourselves around. I'm surprised, dubious, but not really, only humourously, rhetorically. (Strikes me that the worst thing about my journals is their DH Lawrenceish humourlessness.) Anyway - for once on a Monday I've got no ambivalence to exorcise and no courage to screw tight, only a scary intense lot of happiness to report. Hitchhiking from Stour Provost, the New Inn at Amesbury, the walk to Stonehenge and the sculpture rocks, the evening in the pub sitting by the fire drawing plans for a house, the big bed in the room above the pub, laughing at me ("That's one of the things I like about you." "Yes, I think it is.") and then making love. When I was lying back with my arms behind my head, pink sheets and blankets pulled back, green bedspread, legs apart and uncovered to the knee, Ian (getting a towel from across the room) said "If you knew how incredibly erotic you look, all pink and black and white," and I had a vision of myself like something halfway between Matisse and Bonnard. He's very thin and rather grey, with his eyes large and shiny like a Dostoevsky young man. Breakfast by ourselves in a cheerful pub-like breakfast room, mushrooms, bacon, egg, fried bread, tomatoes, toast, tea, surly innkeeper's wife, children appearing at the door, scooped up and taken away - the piano in the room on the way out, Ian's session like a morning stretch, the house moving uneasily around it, up the street, the churchyard's broad front stretch, some stones like this [sketch] flat on the ground, crenellated low tower, inside, the organ, barrel vault painted blue, red, gold. We stood at opposite ends and sang to each other, sometimes with each other, glorious religious acoustics. Two ladies who came in looked no less oppressed because of our public ecstasy. The truck driver and our sense that everything was right in the world, freedom, jokes, us, our loving selves. Tuesday I'm thinking of moving to a room down the road, and I think I might be pregnant. Big white room with windows over Highgate Village, a sitting room downstairs like a tree house, red Moroccan blanket over the table, a big plant, Dylan on the record player as I came in, someone called Roy and an invisible person called Henry, a big room with a bathroom and an outside door, a bed on the floor and purple on the walls. Books, guitar, long hair, paraphernalia of our kind of people, round South African accent, uneasy manner still freak-easy. I can see Ian in it, and a big round belly as well - one or the other I suppose, not both. Walking back tonight, evening orange over the railway valley's debris and reflected in rain puddles, I thought - well, if it's there, I won't do anything to stop it, conceived on that Sunday night it would have to live, no destroying it. Thinking of a new house and of myself as a new house, I feel elated - if you're there, kid, you can know that today I chose you, or rather recognized my having already chosen you mysteriously sometime last week. I won't unchoose you. 11 February [letter] Wednesday morning dreams - a long trip to 'Georgia,' trains, old fashioned compartments, looking out the windows at towns, stops in motels, with someone, maybe Judy; then much later myself telling or writing the journey, trying to recall it, not certain whether the journey I was recalling came from an earlier period of sleep or whether I had never dreamed it of itself. A wide river or sea, we walk into it to pick daffodils growing far out on long waterlily stems; it's night and we're walking a long pier further up the banks, a speedboat goes by without lights, very fast on the black water, several young men standing in it facing into the wind, one in the back begins to sing and I begin to sing in harmony, calling after him, our voices don't move away from each other but remain even when he's past - I'm singing very beautiful harmony to a song I don't know, then other voices of invisible people downshore join in, I'm moved. A bag of green glass, when I open it, green stones strung into a necklace, beyond it, more, amber-colored, very beautiful, I'm surprised and again, moved. In Ottawa, I go to a business building, computers, see Leslie of Lawford's office, come in, say hello - a face close-up, someone I half recognize staring at me, then Don in the far corner looking younger than he is, coming to greet me. Olivia shows up! But, since we all intend to go our different ways, she leaves - Don says "But I must take off the afternoon and show you that child" - we go into a place that looks like our seashore again, we climbed it, part of the rock was striated in many colours, when we climbed over it the colour came off on our hands like chalk, someone had covered huge areas in red, white, blue paint in swirling designs, when we came to the top, to a small pocket, we found that we could make the whole mountain dip and buck like a loop-the-loop by leaning very slightly to one side or the other, we were delighted. Woke from my happy dreams to go back to Life Against Death. 12 February [letter] Waiting for the shoe man to finish re-heeling my boots (same problem as ever) because it's snowing (third time this year) and wet, I've reread one of your old letters, the one where you talked about how my men have all been "intense, introverted, egotistical maybe, but fascinating." Shortly after that I sent you a description of Ian which makes him sound exactly the same! You must have chuckled. I can picture your February, Sexsmith School with students tramping in snow, the smell of the halls, the bells, your pigeonhole with this letter sitting in it, the fields and highway you can see from the windows, the cold, steam blowing up from cars' mufflers. I haven't seen any of that sort of winter this year because even when it does snow it is half-hearted sleazy snow that knows it will be mush before morning - strangely enough the only place where snow is real is in the parks - there's something about bare ground and trees that holds the snow and keeps it snow. I had an odd little echo of the Peace River Country last night. The telephone rang and a masculine voice said "You don't know me but I'm a friend of ..." in a Peace River Country accent. (Yes I'm surprised too, but there really is such a thing.) It was Judy's Andrew who's been in London for some time but has only now managed to trace me past Greg's two changes of address. I'm going to meet him this afternoon if he doesn't get lost in the blizzard. In the middle of February, England's begun to bloom, crocuses and snowdrops on the lawns, tiny blossoms in St James Park at the warm edge of the duck pond. On Monday I'm moving; I'll have to write you a just-moved-in-new-life-begun
letter as usual. It's a room just downhill from Makepeace Avenue - new address
is: Flat 7 Heath Lodge, 4 St Alban's Road, London NW5.
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