A Notable Woman. Jean Lucey Pratt
read it through once very hurriedly but it seems excellent.’ This is infinitely encouraging.
Thursday, 29 August
I am to meet Dick Sheppard next Wednesday. ‘We shall both be wondering what sort of person we’re to meet,’ he writes. ‘I believe you’ll be superb – from your letter you’re not dumb.’ Molly tells me he is now fully qualified as an architect. He is a cripple and was once in love with Molly. They trained together at Bristol until he came to the AA.64 But he met with an accident some time ago, which paralysed him for several months. He will never, I understand, have complete use of his legs again – and a very good athlete at one time. Tragic.
Friday, 30 August
Wembley. I feel on the verge of hysterics. I am in a state where everything at home irritates me to distraction. But I remain outwardly agreeable.
To lighten the hour I must note down the story Aunt Jane told me the other day. A collection of old maids were discussing their wills at a tea party. One, when asked, replied, ‘I have left my money to my two daughters.’ There was consternation. ‘But you’ve never been married, have you?’ ‘Oh no – but in my youth I was never neglected.’
A nephew in law once asked Aunt Jane, so she told me, ‘Aunt Jane, are you still a virgin?’ And out she came with the answer: ‘In my youth I was never neglected.’ Delicious.
Now I am going to be sordid and vulgar, to drag all my vulgarities firmly before me. With the names of the men I have known I could pen something so obscene and so exciting it would be the biggest bestseller on record. Those futile affairs of my youth … Arthur A., Gilbert D., a choir boy, a young waiter, Ronald on the Broads, F.E.S., Leslie J., Geoffrey R., Leonard W., Stanley B., David A., all the names collected from the Russian tour, Chris, Hugh P., Neville, John M., Neil A., Colin W. – oh it makes me feel quite sick, and I have forgotten half of them. This is what happens from being highly sexed, imaginative and timid. Damn good job I was timid too. But I am not so timid as I was.
Tuesday, 4 September
And now I have met Dick Sheppard. Interesting. We talked about everything and came to conclusions on nothing. I am passionately sorry for him but dare not allow him to see it. Vital, twisted, strong, impressionable, unambitious, morbid. We talked about perversions, sex, pregnancy, homosexualism, the bloodstream, death, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender, Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Donne, Webster, Marlowe, Corbusier, Paul Nash. Is interested in Communism, politics, crooked commercial gambling. The astonishing things he told me of the power of these big firms and the wretched use they make of it.
I like him. He is stimulating, amusing, he contradicts everything one says and himself. In the true modern tradition he believes in nothing and bullies convention. There is something fundamentally big and generous about him, yet one feels it is distorted – those terrible twisted legs have twisted his brain.65
Wednesday, 5 September
It occurred to me as I woke this morning that Dick was making an extra effort to appear interesting for my benefit. He moved around the room apologising at intervals for his lameness. Aunt Jane asked me this morning, ‘Did he make love to you?’ Really, she sometimes shocks me to the core.
The attitude he reflects is the fashionable one of ‘I hate the country, open fires and little children’ – a healthy reaction to the sentimental value of these things.
‘If you want to get your book published,’ said Dick, ‘you’ll have to be the publisher’s mistress. I shouldn’t think you’ll have much difficulty …’
And he tried to perform an operation on his pregnant cat with a knitting needle because he thinks she’s too young to have kittens (not while I was there of course).
He works for Louis de Soissons at the moment, and is living in one of the flats designed by him out at Larkhall.66 Dick condemns them heartily.
Sunday, 16 September
I have driven the Fiat to Wimpole Street and back, alone. Up the Harrow Road, across the Edgware Road and along the Marylebone Road, soon I shall be able to take that car anywhere anytime.
Monday, 23 September
The most extraordinary thing happened to me in the train as we neared Waterloo. I was finishing A Farewell to Arms (Dick Sheppard had read me fragments of it – he knows it, he says, almost by heart) and I had reached the description of Catherine’s confinement. I like this book immensely. It is written in a very hard, terse style I would do well to study. Catherine – I do not think I have ever disliked a character so thoroughly. She seemed to me completely impossible, until I came to the birth of the baby. Then I suddenly was Catherine; I was suffocating, dying with her. I had to close the book for I could not read further, the agony was too acute. I was nearly fainting, and then was sick, literally, out of the window. It was terrible; I could do nothing. At Waterloo the man opposite took my case down from the rack and asked if I would be all right.
I got into the Watford train and pains began, but at Kilburn Park it was all over. I didn’t tell my family, they would never have believed it was caused through the death of Catherine. But there can be no other reason. I was well: fed, warm, dry, and my period was over 10 days ago.
Thursday, 10 October
Gus positively brutal with Part One of my novel – how bad my style is, how poor my construction. I am in such a state of despair I could almost commit suicide.
Friday, 11 October
I am consoled. Herbert Read in his treatise on English Prose Style criticises a passage of Kipling’s in exactly the same manner as Gus criticises my work.
Friday, 25 October
Last night I went to a meeting of the Tomorrow Club on the introduction of Constance.67 Mr Adrian Arlington read a paper on School Stories. Mr Harold Raymond, a director of Chatto & Windus, was in the chair. An entertaining evening. I was interested to see a director of Chatto & Windus. Someone from the same firm came to the Bartlett School once, and in both I recognised the same quality: superlative culturedness. But I shall try Faber & Faber first: they might not be quite so alarmingly refined. I wonder, though, how far that refinement goes? What is Mr Raymond’s home like?
He rose last night and said he had been given the most astonishing piece of information. Eric, or Little by Little still sold at the rate of 4,000 (or was it 40,000?) copies a year. Who, he asked, was there reading it today? Who could there be possibly who took it seriously enough?68 But the effect of last century’s ideals die hard. Uncle Herbert and Aunt Mary Lucey send me an improving book every Xmas. I am quite certain they would have sent me Eric long ago if they thought I had not read it. It has suggested this to me: to attempt a novel of a girls’ public school; to question and criticise women’s education as has been done to men’s.
I shall go on November 7th to have a look at the editors of the News Chronicle and New Statesman.
Monday, 4 November
Pop was too sweet this evening. He was about to leave, booted and spurred, for a Masonic meeting at the Connaught Rooms at 4.55 p.m. ‘I am supposed to be there at 5,’ he said as he filled his cigarette case. ‘But I am making a point of being late. I have to be announced: “Worshipful Brother Percy Pratt, Assistant to the Grand Superintendent of Works, demands admission,” and everyone has to stand up for me.’
Wednesday, 6 November
How incontestably right Ethel always is. I have left my bedroom door open again. ‘Jean, how many times have I asked you to keep that door shut? I have only to ask you to do something for me and you forget it immediately. You are selfishness personified. I am an older woman and feel the