| london volume 1 part 5 - 1970 february-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Monday February 16 [journal] Our wide new room has already seen one alienation and a reconciliation, a ceremonial cup of coffee, some pride, contentment, one evening with birds dropping out of the sky into trees on a hill across from us, a jet, a ridge of clouds, lights coming on, pale colours, the gravestones on the hillside, a black and white garden below. Sweeping off the wrapping mats, scrubbing the underside of the sink, looking out of our windows, talking halfway across the room, the moment when Ian picked up the carpet brush to help. Our dinner at Brenda's, with Greg and I talking suddenly about whether or not life is meaningless, me trying to find Greg's young face beneath his older face and his beard and his long hair. (Ian comes in now with books from the hall, he's excited about what Roy has stacked in the halls, on window ledges.) Everydayness. Greg said something about Victoria - "She was always saying things people didn't want to hear at all" and I realized he'd respected her in a way I'd never been interested to realize - good. All this - the room is still full of it. Cold. Motorcycle. Bus. Black hat. Carsch. Brenda's strange profile and buxom bustle. My blank-eyed monologue about integrity, Ian sitting in the corner. Purple candle, bookshelves. Sunday, 23 February [letter] We've lit a purple candle to go with our two plum-purple walls - we've cut down the legs of one of the tables and Ian is sitting on it playing my guitar, improvising something Indian on the five good strings - we've made a bed on the floor, blue, white, yellow, pink, ivory against one of the purple walls, with a big white paper pumpkin lamp above it - there's the bookshelf, a chest of drawers, a table, that's all - Ian's built a desk into the bathroom closet, all elaborate shelves, fit exactly into the space behind the sink. My laurel tree on the windowsill. A wind chime I made out of broken green glass bottles is clinking very quietly in a draught. One of the purple walls has silver chains flickering down from the ceiling, paper clips joined end to end and very pretty. My pebbles and a bit of Porthcawl bone are sitting on the windowsill, for a special reason, which is: the window is placed so that, sitting on the bed, we can see clouds and birds, airplanes, tips of trees, a gold-stone church steeple, all colors of sky flying or floating - the window frame is like a movie screen, a rectangle full of movement - the stones on the sill are a form of stillness to hold up to the movement. This week we hope our piano will be moved in. There's a space just right for it between the two windows. Guitar, mandolin, books, two vases of red anemone-like flowers called ranunculus, straw matting, bits of paper with writing begun on them. Various sets of scruffy boots. In the other two bedrooms on this floor are Paddy and Roy, both South African emigrées, black and battered (Paddy) and white and sad (Roy). Paddy's very quiet, we see little of him. Roy is a charming enigma: he doesn't work, only walks on the Heath, cooks, reads, listens to records, talks. He's very intelligent, intense, courteous - his house is full of books about religion, politics, philosophy, poetry, art. He gets up early, goes to bed late, seldom brings friends here, gets up in the morning looking exhausted and opaque as though he's been wrestling with angels. When we talk to him for a while his eyes clear. He talks about his childhood, about dreams, about things moving outside the window. He knows how to use silence powerfully, and when he does talk half of it is poetry. I think he has some experience with psychotic breakdown - he's the sort of person who lives right on the edge of normal structured existence. Sometimes he looks tormented, at other times he smiles his sense of harmony toward you. Saturday February 28th [journal] I wonder if living with Ian will dry out my journal. Thursday's talk with Roy and Friday's with Don and Olivia make me remember what it was for.
It's partly for the sake of conversation, which is magic, and for the sake of silence, which is even more magic. Some people know how to use silence, and they have a special power; they hold people by the taut thread of their choice of not speaking, and make their breathing, their little shifts, their posture inescapable, like jerks on the thread. Frank could do it, Paul was learning, I feel it myself sometimes although it now has to be catalyzed out of me by people with whom the tension exists already. I think. But I can play it for power. [This passage was concealedly about Roy.] Wednesday 5 March Peter's letter makes me gleeful and joyful. The Portsmouth house and its garden with Sarah and Rachel and lovely long necked stiff necked careful beautiful graceful Marilyn Cox and Peter all together. "Joan of course is crushed in many ways, but offers love and pity for David and lends blankets to us." Peter has his Foxy, who's cherishable in all ways, and the two children he has coveted all along. It reassures me, makes me feel that Peter's longing, rebellion, loneliness, confusion, refusal, can be rewarded at the end, makes me courageous, because maybe it is possible, maybe it's possible. It makes me stern about recognizing my mis-matched wrestling confused love of Ian. When I said "I'll miss you" to his back in the dark last night, once again, he said "I think you'll be really disappointed if I don't go." "Half will, half won't." "Which half will?" "The half that isn't getting anything done." What I've tried to tell him about my real treachery to him being the divided-off self that wants to be alone is true. We struggle so much to get to our peaceful moments. This morning I interrupted him by incorrectly finishing a sentence for him. When I persuaded him to finish it anyway, he said "I wanted to say that I like you." "Some," I said involuntarily and he slammed out. I resent his resentments, his tempers, his grievances, his cold silences, his accusations, because they distract me from other things, they make me live looking at him not out from beside him (like Don and Olivia who force each other into a contracted space where they stand chest to chest and knee to knee hardly able to see over each other's shoulders). I want my flirtations with other people, Buddy Hardy, Don, Claudia, Roy, because they're outward looking, they're energetic, they make me feel strong and they leave me generous, where the struggle with Ian, with people who are too close and too important, leaves me exhausted and mean. Ian says this sort of flirtation is only threatening if it makes me break off from my togetherness with him and out of a clear definition into singleness and separateness. But I think singleness and separateness must be essential to real and good flirtation - Don's sad uneasy beaten eyes last weekend seem to confirm that. They felt like mine do sometimes now, and like Ian's sometimes in Porthcawl. "Even if we are a mismatch I really cherish you." I love having him there, I like him, I respect him, he amazes me, he scolds me; I love lying in bed watching him dress, being amazed that I can touch him if I like. I love his barometer eyes that change colour with his mood. I trust his honesty not to try to lose us in a fairytale where we can't recognize ourselves. Most of his criticisms of me are accurate. His emotional subtlety amounts to a kind of genius. When we're at peace my whole self becomes soaked with tenderness for him. He can make me more helplessly loving, during those moments, than I've ever been - when he does I'm wild and reckless and I don't want anything else, I'm really home. But to do anything else I have to contract back into myself and become stiff apart from him. It's hard to be half-stiff half-soft, it's confusing. Is that why it is difficult to live together? We could work out some way of alternating, but it isn't likely partly because he believes people should be really together all the time, partly because, I think, he really needs to go away and seek his fortune by himself and become sadder and more confident before we could love each other without so much trouble. I think he will leave. I know I can take it because I can contract back all the way into the loneliness that makes me work. (If he asked me to ask him to stay?) On Sunday night I knew I wanted him to stay. Rather, I didn't know anything - I followed myself at a distance and saw that I wanted him to stay, I discovered it. "Quarrel with a thought because it is not her own." Do I do that? Upstairs - wind scraping around the corner, horn music coming up the stairwell, one side of the steeple iced over, my coffee-nervous stomach worrying about Ian because he's gone out without a proper coat and with his eyes registering slate grey. Where is he? A door opens in the hall, but it isn't ours. Where is he? D and O were here for the weekend, pleasure and exhaustion, Carmichael walking downhill on Swain's Lane in the bronze officer's greatcoat, black hat with poison green scarf and his hair puffing out from under it, he the young Beethoven and O the young Eeyore, flapping down in the turquoise cape and a dark green stiff man's hat we found on Chalk Farm Road. Ian in a whole series of postures of withdrawal, sitting on the floor, lying with his back to me, Sunday morning sobbing in the bathroom. Sunday afternoon's fluctuation between sad exhaustion and acute joyful love for both D and O. Yesterday (Monday 9 March) euphoria, glittering kinship, running in front of buses (galloping), sure of not being hit, the high flying certainty, everything in my mind making sense because it seemed to have been tried out and to have stayed true and steady. I'm heading back to last September's sense of my own perversity, lack of fit; Ian pushes me, demands to know how I feel, worries at me, questions, pesters. (Last Friday - my birthday - we lay on our backs on the snow in a golf course on the way to Betchworth, faces to the sun - I played with my amber bole, ball, looked at the grey blue bleached landscape that existed when I opened my eyes - and then ended up crying noisily because it was my 25th birthday and I was overcome by the fatigue of battling Ian's moods - which changed his mood and made him make me laugh about how much I cry.) Don asked me why I let Ian's 'identity crisis' exhaust me as much as it does. I found myself saying "Because half the things he accuses me of are true." I ride up and down so unaccountably. Yesterday in the afternoon I was physically elated so that I ran up Kentish Town's broken escalator. After Ian sawed at me last night with his eyes shining hostility like a tiger's I was eroded to the thickness of tissue paper, limp and crushed. How could we live, what do I want? A heath with friends around it that visit but who never visit me? To be all alone? To cultivate glamorous tangential friendships that exist as possibilities only? To be both alone and with, breathing out of one into another? I'm uneasy with this journal now, Ian's reading it puts it against me, evidence for his side, and it's too explicit, stumbling, simple minded; and I'm self conscious. 12 March Ian left last night and I'm hollow. The great barebellied Heath, spindly benches scattered at the top. Lack, sore, hollow, tight, anger, stupidity, this morning's red sun and cold early morning, Judy Collins too sharp to bear, freedom, lack, calm, pain, screeching quietly, myself tasting bad, Peter again, stupidity, blindness, lack, loss, stupidity. On the telephone I said "I just want to say that I'm stupid and I'm sorry." "Is that all you want to say?" "And I miss you," long silence, breathing, "I miss you really terribly." "I'll write you a letter. Goodbye, Ellie." It brings us so close to the bottom of the barrel - I want to flirt with it, but I don't want to live on it. Half past eight and dark - Today's long sour empty stretch makes me humbler, makes me say "How could I have lost touch with your pain, your self? How could I have lapsed away from you? How could I not have known what your dancing was? How could I have needed my own surly privateness more? Have you spent your day thinking about the nature of man, with the same sour stomach? I tried to sleep, and when I opened my eyes it was dark. The blank windows frighten me, I can't think why I wanted to be alone. Was it just for pain, like this? Why did I never understand the meaning of what you say, where was my uncantankerous ear listening for the you in your formulations and your struggles? Will something in you eventually stop and turn back to me like a tide, with all yourself pulled after it? My mind keeps going back to your two days desolate love of me, whatever it was or whatever it meant. I feel that wherever you are at this moment you are very cold and resolved; your relief at escaping from this pressure keeps you cold and determined. My attempt to reach you this morning made you contemptuous. I feel as tho', to shelter you, I would have to be all wise, full of generous accurate impulses like a mother, not my opaque argumentative unquiet self. Like Judy I suppose. ("You're better at seducing than at keeping.") My feelings of emptiness, stupidity, density, sourness, all add up to a very quiet and humble sense of love. When I looked for us in the early part of the book I found a surprising lot of love, how much we've grown into one another. He's only lately begun to hate me; at the same time approximately that he began to want to say that he loved me. What does it mean. The house is full of sharp sounds that all seem to be someone coming, great empty rooms full of pain, my whole tension, questions, love. Where was I? Why wasn't I wiser? It's as though he's died, incredulous sense of loss, guilt, love, disbelief in one's earlier complacency. But he hasn't died, he's gone away because my 'indifference' was unbearable to him, because he felt a strain as intolerable as I do now, because we got lost in ourselves. Somewhere in the back of my mind something repeats foolishly "You're twenty five." People who don't preoccupy themselves become very sad. My reference points are all around my Heath - Peter, Don, Greg, maybe Roy, Olivia. A community of pain that Ian's only begun to know and may not have to know. My failures accuse me and say he's done himself right. But that guilt is unreal and untrue because I could and can only live my life as I'm in it. I wanted to stand back to back with him, as we slept back to back, waking together and going to sleep together. We need a commitment, but we both need to make it, not just me. Can I wait until he's hammered his core together? Will he remember me at all? I feel ready to sell half my soul if necessary. It's very seldom I have such a glimpse of the pain of existence. I don't want to live in it. Once I've seen it I want to rush back and build fences, saying "These are my fences, I built them." I want to live with Ian and make music with him and make love with him and draw him and laugh with him and come to know him as my closest kin, even where I've never had a closest kin. We've lived under such an ambivalence blanket, never saying 'yes' long enough to feel easy. I feel as though I've begun to understand that we must if we ever can find our way back, say yes, agree, for some real, safe, definite period of time. "Yes you are my man. I've chosen you because you're special. I'll try to fix myself on that. Let my flickerings exist with you not apart from you. Let my splintering search for sadness work outside the ring of us." A black book to exist beside the journal. And I still want to have his children. [undated letter] Your first letter addressed to Heath Lodge arrived through the mail slot this morning - as full of good sense and nonsense as usual. To begin with the nonsense*, M, don't you somewhere in the back of your head know that it's rationalizing foolishness to say that you approve of somebody but disapprove of some of the things they do? The things I do are me. Especially if the things you disapprove are things I approve in myself (if you disapproved things I did in spite of myself it might be different). And since the things you disapprove are things I very much approve you obviously do disapprove of me. And you also approve of me, contradictorywise, both at once. That's alright but in some ways it is inconsistent because if you really knew me you'd know that I could not be what you approve without also being what you disapprove - they are two sides of a single thing. To have a tamed, proper, married, decent, ladylike, considerate, settled daughter you'd have to throw away the intelligent, joyful, aware, hungry one - there's no getting around it, you can't have both. I can understand parents feeling that children are their 'another chance.' We are another chance, but we are our own chance - you have yours and you can't have ours and that's that. *Roy says to tell you that Chesterton says nonsense is an exuberant capering about a discovered truth - is that the sort of nonsense yours is? I propose a truce: I'll accept the fact that you and Father live as best you can on your own terms and you and Father accept the fact that I live as best I can on my own, ie I'll want for you what you want for yourselves (as long as it isn't me!), and you try to want for me what I want for myself. If we really could do that we could stop all this boring rhetoric and I could tell you about how spring's coming to Highgate Hill and about going to Edinburgh last weekend and about being friends with Olivia again and about charming Carmichael and tiger-eyed Ian and Greg the good (and his Brenda) and Roy, and the friendly ghosts living with us, including you. Andrew is nice. I took him to a film at the Slade and then Ian and I took him to Jimmy's for a Greek meal and we went to see DH Lawrence's Women in Love turned into a film. 3 April I'm doubling back into this old journal to talk about old events - Edinburgh, Ian's mother standing on the platform in her stiff coat, flat potato-oblong face, small eyes moving vaguely, a queer movement of her mouth, lower lip hooking out and back in a way that made her seem simple or crazy; walking shoes, thick patterned stockings, sturdy plainness. The girl in the photographs also big and plain, but animated - now a kind of blankness, especially when Ian's father is around, embarrassment at being noticed. Still, she said that at school she'd liked algebra, "Let x be the unknown. I thought God was like that, x the unknown." "People made God." I asked whether she thought she still believed what she believed then; she said yes, she thought she did believe more or less what she'd believed then. A photograph of her in Twelfth Night, as a handsome young man; stories of a house on the seacoast, a father who'd retired into golf and his second wife soon after she was born, an epileptic brother who kept them from being free children in the seacoast house she liked, an iron foundry inland, Margaret, governess in Germany, pianist with a strong back and hands, now moving sturdily, lightly, but sadly through that dark high-ceilinged Rome-cold flat with no piano, warning Ian to be nice to his father, "He's an old man and he's nearly blind," outside the door when we arrived. Married late, lost two babies in the high land of India, then Joy, bright small girl - South Africa and the war broke out, Robin was born but Major Brown didn't see him until they were back in England two years later, "He never liked Robin, I think I know why it was. He was two and he was in that age where they're always fussing." Photographs of Ian, well made thin gay little boy, always grinning in his photographs, the brave bright son the Major could be proud of, "His masters told us he didn't have an academic brain." Then the boy in the dress kilt, smiling, embarrassed, the long bumpy chin already there. Gullane, high bare sandy cliffs with concrete tank traps like sculptures set onto the point, where the Browns always came for picnics, the golf course beside it and a photograph of Ian as a junior champion pretending to swing in a rough area on the edge of the course. Camping with a trailer - "Those were the really happy days," said the Major. Other happy days were his soldiering days, horses, his father an army chaplain, handsome man in India surrounded by girls in ringlets and big-eyed boys, tents, but more often elaborate officers' messes with wine and the papers two weeks late (left open beside the breakfast plate by the black boy - they don't cheat, read only one paper a day). "Those were the really happy days," his happy days are completely over, he takes little interest in being flattered, his eyes are red wandering spots (Ian's green beautiful eyes with their huge pupils), unfocused, not seeming to be eyes at all; he's portly, he wears leg braces and can only walk slowly, he needs the bathroom to himself for an hour every morning, sometimes on sunny days they drive to Gullane, sit on the beach, walk a little; Margaret walks a great deal, but doesn't look as she walks. Two vacant spaces only really filled by anxiety or reproach - "Joy used to take such care of herself, she was always so pretty and neat. But then she went to London, she was never the same after that." "She was really something then, but she's finished now." Of Ian, muttered to the fireplace when he went to find his 'cello, "Poor devil." Ian in his purple sweater, shabby broken shoes, dusty coat - grey hollow face, beautiful hair, huge eyes blazing out of his gauntness (he became so thin to hold, so narrow and so light). We went out to the castle, to get out of the house, got to it in time for sunset, smoke rising from chimneys in the south, like Dickens' London, we were a little elated, went to Secret Ceremony which elated me even more, flew and whirled over the Meadows, Ian pushing me to feel it as something affirming us, myself pushing to keep it something related to the world, but playing along uneasily. We went home, Ian wanted to get into bed with me, I didn't, he went off in a sulk, in his father's brocade bathrobe, looking extremely beautiful - agonized and handsome, romantic, but silly - came back and complained, angry, went off again, I was annoyed. Sunday morning, climbed Arthur's Seat in the clear sun, the swans on the pool below, Ian and I rejoicing at our energy, leaving his mother sitting on a rock halfway up, his father stumping along the roadside for his exercise. Ian embarrassed in church by his purple turtleneck. Sunday curry, Major Brown called me Elfreda with some coquettishness revived from long storage since the days when he leaned forward with smiling intensity beside pretty young women in the backs of touring cars, but then sulking when I tried to draw out his wife. Ian at home angry, submissive, extreme, conciliatory, enraged, chafed by their pleas for short hair and decency. At the station saying goodbye to him, his mother said "Be sure to keep clean." Her letter encloses fifty pounds "since it is extremely important to my peace of mind to know you are neat and tidy." On the train, struggle to balance our mood, Ian reminded of his uncertainty, withdrawing, struggling, accusing. Toward London we were very tired, my back ached, we sat on either side of the table with our heads down and our arms around each other, sore and peaceful. Earlier I had been stroking him under my cloak and he finished it off while I held a newspaper and watched the man across the aisle pretending to read one, in the window beside our seat. I was ashamed of Ian's distorted face and angry that he was making me an accomplice. I was feeble and sick for two days, Ian looked after me and held me very gently, was a too-perfect mother, didn't harass me, loved me painfully and very tenderly, brought food. Roy was gone, didn't come home at night, I pretended not to listen for him, but we simmered in the tranquility of his absence. Wednesday he was home, we glimmered at each other in the afternoon and I went out to the library, came back with an armful of books proud to show, found Ian and Roy having a conversation about the 'situation', my stomach crunched. "Well yes, I do feel I might have something to lose but I think we should have it anyway." Ian complaining because our sympathies had polarized against him alongside each other - until he became pathetically angry and began to pace. I remember very little of the conversation, except Roy saying into the corner, "Of course we always think about possibilities" in a half despairing half throwaway mutter. Ian rushed upstairs and I went after him - he took the sleeping bag on the floor, I rolled up in the blankets with my head next to his arm, in a T. Silence. He announced that he was leaving but would stay until morning. A little talk, then a funny friendly peck-kiss on the cheek that surprised me. Later when I returned it, having got a friendly peacefulness back, he said "What was that for?" "Because I like you." "If we like each other let's go back to bed then." Uneasy waking night, him sometimes easy, mostly stiff beside me, fear and grief neighbouring me. (Like the other night when I ran after him into the rain, barefoot in my short dress. We walked back upstairs holding hands, I was shivering, very cold, we got into bed and I held him stiff in my arms while it stormed outside, glad to have got him out of it, feeling his longing to go in all his stiffness, lying half awake all night afraid he'd leave if I fell asleep, that dark and howling drumming storm, his slight body on my left side instead of the usual right, his straining away from me under the blankets, my feet cold and my right foot seized in a cramp, struggling to hold him tight. That morning he left, but while I was making coffee in the kitchen he phoned from the corner box. Roy got the phone and handed it to me - he met me in the caf' across the road and we sat side by side sharing his tea. We meekly agreed that he would come back to try again. Sunday night, Monday morning. Wednesday he left again, went to Brenda at night. Sunday we went to Edinburgh, I met him at King's Cross. (Roy's look on Wednesday night when I came in wet from walking on the Heath, with the may branch - a glance thrown across the room from the corner to the hall door, "I know you, I know where you've been.") Thursday morning, Ian packed. Walked downstairs. I walked beside him without saying anything, as far as the corner, crossed with him, stopped. He put his arms around me and we held each other, released each other - he turned and walked toward Kentish Town, I crossed the road to watch him - I've just now remembered that it was on that corner, by the buses, that I watched him walk away the day I met him, the same blue coat, the same sturdy walk, around the corner and out of sight. When he came back I was sitting on the floor among teacups showing Roy slides - he rushed upstairs, came down into the kitchen crying, rushed up again, I rushed after him, Sheila arrived with Richard and Mark, a walnut cake, Turkish coffee, and my letters. She took me into the kitchen for an explanation, Roy fled, Ian put her off, left, came back, left. She went home. I planted a note in I's belongings at the foot of the stairs, waited, rushed around, sat and watched him move them into the storeroom, watched him leave again, went upstairs to open my mail, found the $1000 in a check, went downtown, bought white iris and tulips in Mayfair, and an alarm clock for my new life alone, red and noisy; came home tired and feeling inelegant in the jeans I'd worn shopping, put on Ian's rugger shirt forgotten in my drawer and a velvet ribbon, felt dry, relieved, determined to be glad; sincerely glad but very tired, looked around to see what Ian had left behind, what he'd remembered. (In the morning, the Messiah and hanging out the window tossing my hair for Roy, sitting on the floor, sunshine, spring wind.) Was looking at a Roethke poem left open on the table (I cry, love! Love!) when Roy came in with Margaret - put the white iris and tulips into the sunlight on the white wall above the piano, drank whiskey, sat on the floor. Roy said "You're so beautiful" across to me, Margaret watching on the side. "What does that have to do with it?" "Everything. It has everything to do with it." When I fled upstairs, he came and found me in the washroom. Like Frank, head forward. "Go easy. I'm not very approachable now," as a plea for quiet to mourn in. "Yes, you are approachable" and he put his arms around me. Paddington, bike, truck, Oxford's gas fire. During the night I had dreamed that I received a letter from him saying simply "I love you." From then until now I seem to move very calmly, a little dizzily, half unconscious, only occasionally regretting my unlived mourning. When we came home from Oxford there was a long stemmed rose beside the
bed, a pile of notes on the chest of drawers, small signs of Ian's presence
(Canadian cheese uneaten on the kitchen counter) - things he forgot, his
trunks in the storeroom - sad gallant letters, like his voice on the telephone
calling from Victoria Station - "I'm here and I'm paralyzed because
I can't go, not knowing where we are." "Ian, this is very serious.
I'm probably going to marry him. He brings all my pieces together."
"I'm glad. Goodbye Ellie." The postcard from Switzerland, manic
and desperate. There are still little hands in me reaching for him, half-hatched
honorable fierce boy, moving laboriously to pace off an area he can be sure
of. A sideways slip and he's not there, not relevant, not dominating my
reasoning, not prying himself into my feelings to see whether they're safe,
not playing my desperate other in those difficult games of come and go,
not standing at the bureau putting on a shirt over his bare bottom. (Not
only an aesthetic exercise, also a moral one; strenuously.)
london volume 2
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