But we’re so horribly dependent on external stimuli. . . . I scream at my energies like a sergeant major, trying to force them to form into ranks and concentrate for an attack; they’re a sloppy bunch, and they refuse to stand together; they lounge around in corners of my being, smoking and telling dirty stories. The threat of death gets them together all right.
What, then, is the answer? I know of one answer: we have to get used to using a lot of energy, to driving ourselves. Greene’s priest, about to be executed, reflects that it would have been so easy to be a saint. Well, it is easy. Yet this tremendous dullness blankets us.
The will is the compeller of destiny. Merely for the will to spring erect and want something is enough to set the wheels into motion. If we all realized this, we might will more. What deters us is the possibility of wasting our efforts. Kafka manages to catch an extreme sense of this waste of effort, this lack of connection between effort and achievement, so that whenever his heroes set out to do something, it never gets done; he is abnormally aware of the feebleness of the human will-power (this doesn’t make him a good writer; I can’t stand him).
The good moment comes when we ask clearly: What do we want, and how can it be achieved? Then we are in motion as human beings ought to be in motion all the time, every moment of our lives. We should encourage ourselves to ask, ‘What do I want?’, to encourage the imagination to take greater and greater leaps into possibility. This is what human life ought to be; not this everlasting drifting and marking-time. After writing these words, I look out of my window at the people in the street, and the sense of irony invades me: that is, the disparity between what should be and what is. I can see something of what the human race is capable of. I am not speaking about the superman; all the talk for and against the superman is balls, missing the real point. I am talking about human engineering. I am evolution made conscious. I am trying to help life forward, or ‘in its struggle upwards’. I look at these shabby people walking past; they are nice enough, most of them good, decent human beings—remarkably decent considering the circumstances they live in; it’s amazing there aren’t more criminals trying to get their own back on life. But they aren’t good enough. Why are they like this? Is it all a part of ‘God’s will’? No, I can’t believe it. Evolution is doing its best, in its fumbling way; it has taken a lot of trouble with the human race. Every one of us is more complex than a thousand electronic brains. But some of its best ideas have cancelled each other out. Civilization, language and science were some of the best ideas it ever had, and they had poised man on a springboard from which he could become anything, a kind of god. But before man can go any further, he needs to develop a quite new faculty—the faculty I am trying so painfully to develop, sitting in front of this typewriter for days, a new way of grasping life. They say that certain fishes have nerves in their sides that register the pressure of every current that flows against them, so that if an enemy comes, they can sense him by the changed pressure of water long before they see him. Well, this is what we all need, a new sensitivity to living. It is not simply a more analytical approach to life, although that is a great part of it. These people in the street all take life as it comes. Tonight they feel drunk and happy; in two days’ time, they might be completely miserable; but they never try to connect the two states, and ask which was the ‘right’ reaction to life, or how far either of them is right. They crystallize their conclusions about life in a few convenient rules of thumb—a stitch in time saves nine, never say die, no use crying over spilt milk, and so on. They live from minute to minute, learning almost nothing. We must develop a type of man who carries analysis in his sides, like the nerves of the fish. He will overcome this immense obstacle to the human race, this original sin, this indifference threshold. The problem of why we die must be attacked as scientifically as any other problem of civilization. We developed the long-playing record because it was inconvenient to put a symphony on records that play for five minutes per side. We must develop the long-playing life, because it is almost impossible to do anything worthwhile for evolution when the side comes to an end every seventy years. At the moment, this is unthinkable because people get fed up even with their mere seventy years. Even Shaw declared that he was tired of life and wanted to die. So the first problem is the conquest of boredom. For there will be no point in living longer until we can also live more powerfully, until my brains no longer feel like treacle when I get up in the morning and my body refuses to obey my mind, and my consciousness is like a pond that has been stirred up by cattle drinking and stamping in it. My mind is clear tonight because I’ve changed my lodging and have been stimulated by the change. But I must learn to make my consciousness clear at will, learn to defeat this sleepiness.
Nov. 6th.
A few of the disadvantages of this place begin to appear. I seem to have a madman below me who is a musician of some kind, and he plays the piano at all hours. At first I enjoyed it—he played a Beethoven sonata—but after twenty-four hours of the racket, even the singing of angels would become intolerable to a writer who wants to concentrate. I finally went downstairs and banged on his door, meaning to ask him politely if he could restrict his playing to the daylight hours, or at least stop before six in the morning. However, the playing went on, and no one came to the door, so I can only presume he’s deaf. I have played my gramophone at top volume for hours by way of getting my own back, but to no effect. The only thing that occurs to me is to give a noisy party here that will go on all night, and make sure that everybody dances. When he protests, I can offer to do a deal!
The main problem with this place is that it hasn’t got a phone, so I’m more or less out of touch with Gertrude and Caroline unless I go out and phone them.
Anyway, I have a suspicion that Caroline is having an affair with someone at her school. Madeleine makes sly references to ‘Peter’ and Caroline looks annoyed.
Still—on my central problem, which I must pursue in spite of these stupidities: why is the human memory so short? There is more truth than we realize in the Victorian cliché about ‘counting your blessings’. I suppose the life force wants us to be perpetually unsatisfied, to get the maximum of work out of us. It’s like a man who climbs a mountain because he hates the plains, but every time he sits down for a rest, he discovers that the ground is still there, right below him, and that it rises, like the sea.
It is easy to over-simplify this problem. Blake says that we must ‘love without the help of anything on earth’. This is nonsense. Certain things are necessary. We have to breathe, we have to eat and drink. I would find it appallingly difficult to love without books and music, although I daresay I could force myself.
But we need to develop a kind of spring-mechanism about reality, so that we can withdraw and then return with greater force. If my head is held under water for two minutes, the air tastes incredibly sweet to me when I can breathe again. If I hear no music for months, a Beethoven symphony can seem almost unbearably satisfying.
The mind is the ‘spring’ that could hurl us back at the things we love so that their impact continues to be intensely satisfying. If the mind could be used properly, our love of life could be intensified tenfold. Unfortunately, the mind is a feeble spring that seems to be unable to move the weight of our emotions and reactions.
Yes, the strength of the mind must be intensified. At present, it is like a tiny engine in a monstrous and heavy car. We need artificial aids to keep up our appetite for life.
Later: When I had written the above lines, I decided that I needed the artificial aid of a bottle of beer to wash down my lunch, so I went down to the pub on the corner. There I ordered a cheese sandwich and a Mackie. Sitting in the opposite corner, I noticed a man and a woman who immediately interested me. The man was obviously Jewish, wore very shabby, dark clothes, but had a good face—big forehead, the bulging eyes of a crank or an artist, weak mouth, yet something strangely attractive about him—perh
aps because he reminds me of a picture of Mahler. The woman was delicious, but I can’t describe her, except that she was dark, looked tired, and was obviously a great deal younger than the man. I found her so delightful that I kept watching them. They were eating sandwiches, and both drinking half pints of beer. Usually, I don’t notice people, but I suppose the woman attracted me. From watching them, I gather they are either lovers, or married; he kept smiling at her with a kind of pity, then reaching over and touching her hand. Then he’d forget her and go off into abstraction; then, when she spoke to him, look at her as if he was surprised she was still there.
I finished my beer at about the same time that they did; as they got up, I also got up and followed them out. Then, to my surprise, they stopped in front of my door, and began searching for a key. I came up to them, and produced my own key, and asked them if they were trying to get in. It turned out that they live underneath me! I said: ‘Oh, you’re the man who plays the piano all night?’ He smiled, as if I was paying him a compliment, but she looked embarrassed, and said she hoped it hadn’t kept me awake. I am always a coward in matters like this; I said no. By this time, we had reached their door, and they went in. I’m glad now that I didn’t start a quarrel with him.
No doubt they will turn out to be a couple of bores with commonplace minds. Still, she’s delightful. I’d like to get to know them. . . .
Nov. 7th.
Gertrude came over to see me last night, and the evening turned into something like a quarrel—the first we’ve had. I’m not sure what she has on her mind, but I don’t really care. Possibly she thinks I moved here to avoid her—or perhaps she suspects I still see Caroline. She was curious about this journal, which I carefully locked away when she arrived. I told her I was writing a novel about sex, and she immediately said she thought I was far too interested in sex. I suspect Brother Robbins has been preaching at her again. I didn’t feel like arguing—it would be pointless. I refused to go back to Hampstead with her, we had a meal in a café across the road, and hardly spoke. Afterwards, she said she had to get back home, and drove off. I was feeling pleased about this. I’d detest hurting her and making a move to break with her, but if she wants to cause the break. . . . Just as I was about to go on writing, she came back in tears, said she didn’t think I cared about her any more, and I had to soothe her. Naturally, we ended in bed. When she left at about two in the morning, I sat looking out of the window at the street lamp and thinking: ‘Fool, fool.’
But I tried explaining to her that I can never look at sex as she does. For her, sex is either ‘lust’, and therefore wicked, or an expression of a lifelong devotion. I don’t care much about either. Lifelong devotion is all very well, but what does it matter when it means only a relation between two inefficient machines, both condemned to death? I have been reading Wells’s Star Begotten today, and it strikes me that I am a ‘Martian’—one of those people who just don’t seem to feel and think in the categories that make other people feel comfortable (Camus wrote about the same idea several years later, but not nearly so excitingly as Wells). It annoys me to feel that I haven’t yet started living, simply because I don’t know where to start untangling the mess of human life. I cannot understand why it doesn’t worry other people. I feel like a motorist who notices a strong smell of burning and a grinding noise from inside the engine, and I want to stop the car and have a look. But everybody else drives along happily, ignoring the smell of burn and the grinding, apparently feeling that everything is as it should be.
Hence my absorption in sex. Because there are rare moments—not necessarily at the moment of orgasm, but often throughout the whole act—when the burning stops. Or, to change the metaphor, when some slight adjustment seems to set the whole being in tune—like turning the knob on a radio and suddenly getting a station with absolute clarity, without interference. This is what Yeats means:
‘What were all the world’s alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn, in Helen’s arms?’
These lines have always moved me. We contain within ourselves power to overcome all the degradations and irritations, to leave them behind as finally as an adult man leaves behind mumps and measles. The sexual act is an insight into power, a kind of invitation to greatness.
We know nothing about the movement of destiny. We are still children in the science of living. We live clumsily, by rule of thumb, wastefully, wasting ninety-nine per cent of our time and energy. And yet that moment ‘on a golden bed’ promises a new kind of man.
It is true that sex cannot always bring this revelation. Yeats is right—it comes to a Paris who has gone to a great deal of trouble to get Helen into bed, to a Faust on his first night with Margarite. I suppose we take sex too casually. But sex is an act of magic, an incantation of the unseen, the strangely intelligent and patient forces of evolution.
Later: The business of the man downstairs becomes more intriguing. I have discovered his wife’s name—Diana. This doesn’t suit her, as she doesn’t look in the least like a queen and huntress, and isn’t fair either. She has the loveliest eyes I’ve ever seen, and a curious, pointed little chin. I went out shopping half an hour ago, and when I came in, found her sitting half-way up the stairs massaging her eyelids as if she felt dizzy; a monstrous box of groceries—mostly tins—blocked the stairs. I asked her if I could carry it, and she looked worried and said she could manage it. I asked her if she felt all right, and she said yes, she’d found the box rather heavy. I found her quite stunning—she’s the type who immediately arouses my protective instinct. I think she must have noticed this, because she looked embarrassed and tried to let me past. I insisted on carrying up the box anyway. She stood outside her door, key in hand, waiting for me to go, as if she was afraid I might see the inside of her room, so I came up. When I’d been in here five minutes, the woman from the flat above came down to ask me if I had a shilling for her meter (I think she really wanted to have a look at me)—a pleasant old thing whose husband works in the market; when I gave her the shilling, she stood at the door and talked, and told me that she thinks the man downstairs is mad. She also hinted at something else—I don’t know whether she meant drug addiction or simply alcohol, and I didn’t want to press her. Apparently my neighbour is called Kirsten, and makes a living doing something or other for a music publisher. His wife has to go out to work to keep them going—she works in a small hosiery place in Sidney Street. She also hinted that the wife has admirers—I don’t know whether she meant that she’s actually unfaithful, but the old lady seemed to imply that she wouldn’t blame her, since the husband is dotty. But she said that Kirsten thinks himself a great composer, which arouses my interest.
Nov. 7th.
Letter from Caroline this morning, explaining that an actor wants to marry her; she says that she would rather marry me, but that she doesn’t feel she should pass up this opportunity if I don’t want to.
Nov. 8th.
Caroline came over last night to explain why she has to break with me. She seems to have an absolute obsession about getting married. Some small-part film actor has fallen for her. I told her that it would be insane of me to marry, since I haven’t enough money for both of us to live. She immediately said that she wouldn’t mind working. I was forced to do a noble act—tell her I couldn’t stand in her way, etc. Finally, she said good-bye, and said she’d keep in touch, and went. I got undressed for bed. Two minutes later, she came back, took off her coat and dress, and climbed into bed, saying: ‘Oh, well, I may as well stay till morning.’ We had such a splendid night that I felt like asking her to jilt the actor and marry me.
Still, she’s gone now, and I feel rather pleased—I don’t know why, because I was fond of Caroline, and expect I always shall be. There’s something rather brave and decent about her. But Hesse is right; there’s a magic in each new beginning, and in
most ends too.
Oh damn all this stupidity. What do I care what impression I make on people? It’s because we waste our lives caring about other people that most of us remain morons. The only thing I care about is this problem of consciousness. One of these days I’ll crack it, learn to increase my consciousness as easily as I can turn up the flame of an oil lamp.
Later: I have just spent an evening with my mad composer and his wife. He’s far more interesting than the old woman gave me to understand. I was playing the Martinu Fifth Symphony when he knocked on my door and asked me what it was! I invited him to come in and hear it. He obviously didn’t much want to—seems very shy. But I let him listen without trying to make conversation, and he insisted on hearing it all the way through.
I should mention that I had seen his wife, earlier in the day, walking along the Whitechapel Road with a flashy man in tweeds—looks like a bookmaker. I presume this is one of the ‘admirers’ the old woman talked about. When she saw me, she looked embarrassed, and looked in the opposite direction.
Anyway, the husband vanished after I’d played him the record, hardly bothering to say thank you. I began to see what the old woman meant when she called him eccentric. I was just about to start cooking my supper an hour later, when someone knocked on my door. To my surprise, it was the wife. She explained that her husband wanted to know if I’d like to join them for supper. When I said I’d be delighted, she looked embarrassed, came into the room, and then asked me if I’d mind not mentioning that I’d seen her with a man today! I assured her that I wouldn’t dream of it. She then started to explain to me that nothing was ‘going on’, that the man is an old admirer who won’t leave her alone, and that she simply doesn’t want to worry her husband. But she looked so guilty as she said it that I found it hard to believe her. But she added: ‘You see, my husband is a very talented man, and I don’t want to distract his mind from his work.’ I suspect she is a little resentful about having to ask me to supper, but I was too curious to get to know them to refuse.