This is Installment LXIII of Transgressions
November 18, 1935, Monday
Election weekend—pouring rain.
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Clay’s friend Champernowne (another mathematician from King’s) says that Watt definitely has gone over to the Conservatives. Can that be true??It seems very unlikely, but it explains the way he’s been acting lately.
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November 23, 1935
The topic for the day is if a dictatorship of the Right is bad for the arts, is it possible that a dictatorship of the Left would be good for the arts, and if so, why??Haxton argues that the Church was a dictatorship at certain moments when great art was produced, and therefore it should be possible to have great art under the dictatorship of the proletariat. But wasn’t the Church a dictatorship of the Right?
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November 27, 1935, Wednesday
?A cold day with frost, but sunny.
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December 4, 1935, Wednesday
I picked up the new number of New Verse, which includes a wonderful poem by Auden, “To a Writer on his Birthday.”?First “Our hopes were set still on the spies’ career . . . And all the secrets we discovered were/Extraordinary and false”?then “Greed showing shamelessly her naked money/And all love’s wandering eloquence debased/To a collector’s slang.”?Showing shamelessly her naked . . . money.
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Phipps says that I’m to play my new Dietrich records only once each on any given day.
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December 7, 1935
On the difference between the drawings and the paintings of the same artist:?Watteau’s drawings are, according to Haxton, “realistic and bourgeois,” while the paintings reflecting “compound classes”(?) are Rococo. Guardi shows a realism of subject matter, alongside stylization in the drawing.
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Hoare and Laval have endorsed Mussolini’s demands in Ethiopia. So much for the League. (Watt says that Hoare has (had?) an American mistress who was part of a group of literary lesbians in Paris and somehow connected with “your millionaires” the Guggenheims. I don’t see what that has to do with Ethiopia, unless there are copper mines there.) An organization called For Intellectual Liberty has been started in Bloomsbury as a companion to a French anti-Fascist group. E. M. Forster, Henry Moore, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. P. Snow are involved. Perhaps there will be a war between the Italians and the English and French intellectuals. After all, Spender gets excited about “The essential delight of the blood . . .”
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December 11, 1935
I showed Fiona some letters from one of those running controversies that English papers seem to specialize in. This one is about the advantages or disadvantages of allowing schoolgirls to be caned by their teachers. Apparently they are told to bend over a desk and lift their skirts to receive their punishment. Fiona was very amused. “Oh no, Sir, not the cane again . . . again,” she said, lifting her skirts and bending over my desk.
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December 14, 1935
I mentioned to Fiona that Auden says that there are two kinds of art:?escape art & what he calls “parable art,” that is “art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred & learn love.” Fiona argues that in these times they are the same thing, that the art we need, “if we need art at all,” is an art that teaches hatred, hatred of oppression and privilege. The problem, she says, has been that the Liberals and the Social Democrats don’t know how to hate. “They think it better to be decent & dead. As in Vienna. As in Berlin.”
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December 19, 1935
I’m feeling better for the first day after a week in bed with the flu. I’m to go down to London tomorrow.
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December 20, 1935
Jack took me to the smoking-room of the House of Commons. It was full of old boys sitting round tables and drinking whisky, laughing and shouting at the top of their voices as if they were in a pub. He said there are various committees about, discussing arrangements for when the war starts, “but you wouldn’t know it from that lot in the smoking-room.”
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I saw the exhibition in Soho Square called “Artists Against War and Fascism.”?There was a wonderful Pissarro. I then went around the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street with Haxton. He likes the Cocteau drawings, not for the drawing itself,?but as “Statements About Character.”?Derain, on the other hand, he says, is just a salon painter. The gallery rooms are quite plain:?painted white. It is run by a friend of Haxton called Douglas Cooper—a very noisy person wearing very noisy tweeds.
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We then went round to Zwemmer’s, where I screwed up my courage and asked to borrow a small Leger print. After a word from Haxton they let me have it until June.
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December 22, 1935
Watt’s London place should have one wall removed, like a theater set, so that one could see what goes on as bedroom doors opened & shut. People go up and down the stairs making way for others on the way down or up, everyone jumping in and out of bed & then casually standing around talking about scandal and politics. This afternoon I went there with Fiona. We were talking with Watt about Spain when a young public school boy came in. Edmund immediately stood up, kissed the boy on the lips and led him off to his bedroom. Just as they disappeared Edmund said:?“Why don’t you two use the room next door??It’s empty at the moment.”?
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We went into the room, which is just big enough for the bed & a bureau. We could hear everything that Edmund & his boy were doing, which was exciting, in its way. After a bit we achieved an intricate position that Fiona likes. I sat up with my legs stretched out in front of me. She lowered herself onto my cock, facing me. We then both lay back, our heads on opposite ends of the bed, taking care to remain coupled, while engaging in a forward & back motion. It was just about at that point that Edmund opened the door. He stood there, naked, aftercome dripping from his still half erect cock, silenced for once, then starting to laugh:?“Is that how you people do it?”?Too entangled to do anything else, we also laughed.
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And then to dinner at Gennaro’s restaurant in Soho. Not bad.
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December 25, 1935
Another elaborate Chalmers Christmas, this year in the middle of a huge gale.
Jack told stories about his friends the Romillys, with whom he had dined at their house in Gower Street (near Euston Station, which is rather out of Jack’s territory). Ivor Romilly is now Secretary of State for War, but not at all as stuffy as that would imply. Jack says that Romilly has had a long affair with an American called Rose Hayes, which is apparently allowable because her husband is busy with other women. The story is that one day she (Rose) and a friend had followed her husband to a brothel and, with the aid of a two-way mirror, “watched him performing with a whore.”??
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Sibyl Romilly, as an actress, is used to such things (affairs and such, not private performances in brothels), according to Jack, and is rather amused by Rose.
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A very long way from Vermont.