The Collector - Страница 28

And there is the fact that he is a good painter, and I know he will be quite famous one day, and this influences me more than it should. Not only what he is, what he will be.

I remember later he said (Professor Higgins again). You don’t really stand a dog’s chance anyhow. You’re too pretty. The art of love’s your line: not the love of art.

I’m going to the Heath to drown myself, I said.

I shouldn’t marry. Have a tragic love affaire. Have your ovaries cut out. Something. And he gave me one of his really wicked looks out of the corners of his eyes. It wasn’t just that. It was frightened in a funny little-boy way, too. As if he’d said something he knew he shouldn’t have, to see how I would react. And suddenly he seemed much younger than me.

He so often seems young in a way I can’t explain. Perhaps it’s that he’s made me look at myself and see that what I believe is old and stuffy. People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

But G.P. has. I didn’t recognize it as fresh-green-shootiness for a long time. But now I do.

October 24

Another bad day. I made sure it was bad for Caliban, too. Sometimes he irritates me so much that I could scream at him. It’s not so much the way he looks, though that’s bad enough. He’s always so respectable, his trousers always have creases, his shirts are always clean. I really think he’d be happier if he wore starched collars. So utterly not with it. And he stands. He’s the most tremendous stander-around I’ve ever met. Always with that I’m-sorry expression on his face, which I begin to realize is actually contentment. The sheer joy of having me under his power, of being able to spend all and every day staring at me. He doesn’t care what I say or how I feel — my feelings are meaningless to him — it’s the fact that he’s got me.

I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn’t mind at all. It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.

He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.

What irritates me most about him is his way of speaking. Cliché after cliché after cliché, and all so old-fashioned, as if he’s spent all his life with people over fifty. At lunch-time today he said, I called in with regard to those records they’ve placed on order. I said, Why don’t you just say, “I asked about those records you ordered?”

He said, I know my English isn’t correct, but I try to make it correct. I didn’t argue. That sums him up. He’s got to be correct, he’s got to do whatever was “right” and “nice” before either of us was born.

I know it’s pathetic, I know he’s a victim of a miserable Nonconformist suburban world and a miserable social class, the horrid timid copycatting genteel in-between class. I used to think D and M’s class the worst. All golf and gin and bridge and cars and the right accent and the right money and having been to the right school and hating the arts (the theatre being a pantomime at Christmas and Hay Fever by the Town Rep — Picasso and Bartok dirty words unless you wanted to get a laugh). Well, that is foul. But Caliban’s England is fouler.

It makes me sick, the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.

G.P. talks about the Paris rat. Not being able to face England any more. I can understand that so well. The feeling that England stifles and smothers and crushes like a steamroller over everything fresh and green and original. And that’s what causes tragic failures like Matthew Smith and Augustus John — they’ve done the Paris rat and they live ever after in the shadow of Gauguin and Matisse or whoever it may be — just as G.P. says he once lived under the shadow of Braque and suddenly woke up one morning to realize that all he had done for five years was a lie, because it was based on Braque’s eyes and sensibilities and not his own.

Photography.

It’s all because there’s so little hope in England that you have to turn to Paris, or somewhere abroad. But you have to force yourself to accept the truth — that Paris is always an escape downwards (G.P.’s words) — not saying anything against Paris, but you have to face up to England and the apathy of the environment (these are all G.P.’s words and ideas) and the great deadweight of the Calibanity of England.

And the real saints are people like Moore and Sutherland who fight to be English artists in England. Like Constable and Palmer and Blake.

Another thing I said to Caliban the other day — we were listening to jazz — I said, don’t you dig this? And he said, in the garden. I said he was so square he was hardly credible. Oh, that, he said.

Like rain, endless dreary rain. Colour-killing.

I’ve forgotten to write down the bad dream I had last night. I always seem to get them at dawn, it’s something to do with the stuffiness of this room after I’ve been locked in it for a night. (The relief — when he comes and the door is open, and the fan on. I’ve asked him to let me go straight out and breathe the cellar air, but he always makes me wait till I’ve had breakfast. As I think he might not let me have my half-hour in midmorning if he let me go out earlier, I don’t insist.)

The dream was this. I’d done a painting. I can’t really re-member what it was like but I was very pleased with it. It was at home. I went out and while I was out I knew something was wrong. I had to get home. When I rushed up to my room M was there sitting at the pembroke table (Minny was standing by the wall — looking frightened, I think G.P. was there, too, and other people, for some peculiar reason) and the picture was in shreds — great long strips of canvas. And M was stabbing at the table top with her secateurs and I could see she was white with rage. And I felt the same. The most wild rage and hatred.

I woke up then. I have never felt such rage for M — even that day when she was drunk and hit me in front of that hateful boy Peter Catesby. I can remember standing there with her slap on my cheek and feeling ashamed, outraged, shocked, everything… but sorry for her. I went and sat by her bed and held her hand and let her cry and forgave her and defended her with Daddy and Minny. But this dream seemed so real, so terribly natural.

I’ve accepted that she tried to stop me from becoming an artist. Parents always misunderstand their children (no, I won’t misunderstand mine), I knew I was supposed to be the son and surgeon poor D never was able to be. Carmen will be that now. I mean I have forgiven them their fighting against my ambition for their ambitions. I won, so I must forgive.

But that hatred in that dream. It was so real.

I don’t know how to exorcise it. I could tell it to G.P. But there’s only the slithery scratch of my pencil on this pad.

Nobody who has not lived in a dungeon could understand how absolute the silence down here is. No noise unless I make it. So I feel near death. Buried. No outside noises to help me be living at all. Often I put on a record. Not to hear music, but to hear something.

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I’ve become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I’m not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything’s quite normal. It’s like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

October 25

I must must must escape.

I spent hours and hours today thinking about it. Wild ideas. He’s so cunning, it’s incredible. Foolproof.

It must seem I never try to escape. But I can’t try every day, that’s the trouble. I have to space out the attempts. And each day here is like a week outside.

Violence is no good. It must be cunning.

Face-to-face, I can’t be violent. The idea makes me feel weak at the knees. I remember wandering with Donald somewhere in the East End after we’d been to the Whitechapel and we saw a group of teddies standing round two middle-aged Indians. We crossed the street, I felt sick. The teddies were shouting, chivvying and bullying them off the pavement on to the road. Donald said, what can one do, and we both pretended to shrug it off, to hurry away. But it was beastly, their violence and our fear of violence. If he came to me now and knelt and handed me the poker, I couldn’t hit him.

It’s no good. I’ve been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can’t. Writing here is a sort of drug. It’s the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote about G.P. the day before yesterday. And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn’t understand. I mean, it’s vanity. But it seems a sort of magic, to be able to call my past back. And I just can’t live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

I’ve been thinking today of the time I took Piers and i Antoinette to meet him. The black side of him. No, I was stupid. They’d come up to Hampstead to have coffee and we were to go to the Everyman, but the queue was too long. So I let them bully me into taking them round.

It was vanity on my part. I’d talked too much about him. So that they began to hint that I couldn’t be so very friendly if I was afraid to take them round to meet him. And I fell for it.