A Notable Woman. Jean Lucey Pratt
it’s my home, not yours.’
I try to keep within her narrow tracks, and then, because I am thinking of the next chapter of my book, I leave a door open and am a monster of selfishness. If Leslie and Ivy had not been through all this also I shall begin to believe I am. I don’t deny I am careless and even selfish, but I could prove she were more so if selfishness is lack of consideration for others. How very deliciously dramatic it would be if I could say, ‘Then if I am such a disturbance to you in this house, where I was born and which is mine legally, I must go to live with Gus. He has been asking me to for months. And you will have the pleasure of knowing you have driven me to living in sin.’ I wish I were big enough for that.
Friday, 8 November
Last night a very tired editor told the Tomorrow Club something of his problems. He was Mr Vallance of the News Chronicle. [He spoke of how] advertisements have tremendous influence on the daily paper. Advertisers of pills and toothpastes are the most powerful group in existence in England. Offend them and half the paper’s revenue is forfeit. The paper cannot refuse their advertisements although they know the majority are quack medicines and a danger to public health.
And this was amusing: reader-interest of the popular paper has been categorised as that which appeals between the knees and the neck. Above the neck interests and opinions differ widely, but the appetites of mankind are universally similar. Sex, death, food. Too dismally true.
Thursday, 28 November
I am almost converted to Socialism by a letter of Gerald Gould’s in last week’s New Statesman. I have always had leanings in that direction, but weight of family feeling and insufficient knowledge has kept me vaguely Conservative. I voted obediently for the National Government because Daddy insisted that I should, I had not arguments to support contrary opinions.69
But I believe eventually we shall achieve economic freedom for the masses, which is the Socialistic aim. And I approve of it unreservedly. As Gould says, ‘It does not worry me that you have a bigger income than I have, but it worries me to death that so many people are underpaid or on the dole … and I believe that ultimately freedom is the one thing that matters.’
I think a great many honest people are struggling hard to achieve this freedom for everyone in the economic sphere, and I believe eventually they’ll win. We have such excellent tools – clean streets, tidy houses, orderly shops, comfortable theatres and cinemas, facilities for every kind of amusement and intellectual pursuit, museums, colleges, schools – the haphazard list is endless. And the material is there, good material, silks and cottons, steel, concrete and brick. But we don’t know how to use it. We distort it, ruin it, degrade it, and there is ugliness everywhere.
But you cannot aim at health, you cannot aim at beauty. But you can aim at the conditions which produce health and beauty.
Friday, 29 November
Wembley. I come home from a lecture by Stephen Spender on Poetic Drama, loathing the suburbs. And I wake up on a fair morning, glad to be here and disinclined to go again to London this afternoon. But this, I know, can never be the centre of my activities. I am right in loathing the suburbs; only if I fail shall I be forced back to them. I must make my own centre.
T.S. Eliot surprised me. All distinguished people surprise me when I see them. I expect them to appear in halo and cloak, but they never do. I expected Eliot to be taller. He seems such a very tired scholar – one never suspects him of being a poet. Spender is surprisingly young. He went to UCS. I read his account of it in Graham Greene’s The Old School. Pooh went to UCS, but I don’t expect he knew Spender.70
Wednesday, 4 December
I don’t know whether my artistic consciousness is particularly low this afternoon (i.e. I am ready to accept anything without criticism), but I think I have just read the best article about money I have ever come across, by James Hilton in Good Housekeeping.71 Or is this the view of all sane, intelligent humans?
‘The real advantage money confers is the power to ignore it in the daily traffic of life. I believe that money and more money for the most of us is a good thing, and that far more lives are ruined by having too little of it than by having an excess. It is the possession of money that enables you to put money in its proper place, which is a secondary place.’
The great point in dealing with money is to get value, and the way to do that is to form your own private scale of values, and to watch that it is kept quite independent of fashion and prices. Do I want a new, patent, self-acting chromium-plated, electrically operated cocktail shaker to save me from one of the few forms of physical exercise that can be performed in the drawing room? I do not. Does it matter to me whether Mr So and So has one, or whether (as I am assured by all the advertisements) all Mayfair has one? It doesn’t.
Tuesday, 10 December
Have just hit on a brilliant solution of my difficulties. I will look for a small unfurnished room near Charlotte Street, at a minimum rent, which I can use for work and work only. Shall live with Gus at 109, but shall keep all manuscript and temperaments at the ‘office’.72
Friday, 13 December
I have been feeling spasmodically very foolishly subjective and sentimental about the departure of the Pooh family. Having the Brat about the place has made me want one of my own desperately. I get very melodramatic to myself over the sensation that I am never to have any. It is expected of me as a natural sequence. The next event in the family, Jean’s wedding, how very gratifying. ‘In three years’ time,’ said Ethel to the baby yesterday, ‘I expect you’ll come back to find Auntie Jean pulling on the pants of her own little baby …’
Saturday, 14 December
I do hope this awful feeling of loneliness will pass. I hope it is only subjective, due to stifling influences at home. What is there to keep me at home? Except that I love my father. I love him. But then no one could help loving my father. As Nockie says, it is no credit to Ethel that she is devoted to him. And because of that (and partly too of fear) I have kept quiet within his house. I have climbed down, have tried to meet them on their own level, and what is the result. I am ignored. I lose touch with my friends in town, and here no one cares a damn what I do. I climb down, I climb down. I discuss the weather and menus and listen to family scandal without controversial comment. I have no rows with my family. I am not turned out of the house, but when I am here everybody seems to be wondering why I’m here and why I don’t go. It hurts. I am like a plant trying to find some suitable corner in which to grow and having to uproot myself perpetually.
Friday, 17 January 1936
I had my hand read the other day by a Europeanised Indian at the Caledonian Market. Usually palmists leave me sceptical or despondent and I try to forget what they have told me immediately. But this man seemed to be reading my mind rather than my hand.
‘You might seem to have a bright and happy disposition,’ he said, ‘but actually you are easily and often depressed because you are of an impulsive and highly sensitive nature. You feel that no one understands you. By the end of this month things will be much better for you. At the moment you are in an indecisive state of mind.
‘Early matrimony is indicated. Possibly this year. It will be a good thing for you. You will be happy, so long as you have courage. You are not financially embarrassed, and although money is not your ambition, you will prosper. You will always be surrounded by the elegances and graces. The next three years will be especially prosperous – 1939 will be an excellent year.’
12.
Like a Knife, He Said
Sunday, 19 January 1936 (aged twenty-six)
I have a small room in Howland Street and am moving in on Monday with folding chair and table, books and pen etc. Next week I hope to begin work in earnest.