Journals, 1966-1990

Part One Oxford 63 Fillebrook Avenue, Leigh-on-Sea, 11 September 1949 This so dull life, mingled with hate and annoyance and pity. No attempt here at method or speed. The housework drags on all day - cleaning, hoovering, dusting, making beds, sewing, washing-up and so on. No one ever sits down before suppertime. It is wrong, but the smallness of the rooms and the house is so noticeable now. The nursery stuffed full of things, always untidy; the dining-room dark and gloomy - only the lounge is tolerable, and one never lives there. The cloistered life with no one to talk to, no one to laugh with - here I am like a hermit, and quite unnatural. An absolute craving for new faces, new meetings, new places. I would tell them so much, but a curious obstinacy prevents this. Always an air of mulish hostility. 24 September Two beautiful things. A big, spacious sunset sky - elegant and not ostentatious, but curiously in the east, to the west nothing but a bank of low, dark clouds. The end of a Spergularia in the microscope - like a minute green saturn.1 A tiny shining ball with a ring of gauzy skin around it. Also the sails of some Thames barges half-hidden by mist. A curious thing. About to throw a piece of screwed-up paper into the yellow jug which serves as waste-paper basket, I said to myself, 'As much chance as you have of being genius.' It fell into the jug without a murmur, a 20 to 1 chance, at the least. Another day of silence, listening to other people's trivialities - a dreadful hour at night when all the completely banal information gained from a visit of relatives is repeated and reviewed. Two mathematical impossibilities I should like to see. One, a graph of the words spoken by me each day over a year - the rise and fall would be eye-opening. Near zero here, and normal everywhere else. Two, a count of words spoken by my mother and myself - David and Goliatha! The visit by unknown relations is frightening, slightly, to the ego, and being. I feel awkward, not because I feel superior, but because I feel that they feel I am. Probably oversensitivity. But they are definitely not at home with me. Trying to get at oneself is a continual unwrapping - each new skin decreases steadily in beauty and value after it is exposed. Always the seed of truth, the maximum fulfilment of self, appears to be just beneath the next layer. Plainly there is no end to this unwrapping, but the sensation is damping. Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature - a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: 'To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.'1 True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism. 25 September 3 a.m. Beautifully played New Orleans jazz, with clarinet in low register, and very jazzy tuba and cornet. Bessie Smith singing. This sort of stuff has in it the germ of music that will last. Op. 55. Splendidly vigorous, with some of the secret lyricality of the last quartets.2 Writing fever. Can't get any university work done. Full of ideas for 'Cognac' and full of frustration at not having the time to do them. 'Cognac' must aim at being popular, with art overboard. The idea came all in two hours last night and this morning. 30 September Another appalling half-hour of talk. When screaming was close. Talk of the utmost banality, on prices of mattresses, on Mrs Ramsey's daughter who marFowles, John is the author of 'Journals, 1966-1990 ', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400044337 and ISBN 1400044332.