Installment XXX of Transgressions
April 2, 1935, Tuesday
London, chez Jack. It is very cold outside, but, at Jack’s, unlike in my rooms in Cambridge, it is warm inside.
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I went round to Chester Square to see Watt, who is living there now, and found him with a friend of his called Reese (?). (The first name is Welsh and I can’t spell it—or even say it.)??Reese works at The New Rambler as an assistant editor. Watt was teasing him for selling out to the Tories. Reese said it was alright, they were paying him a salary of ￡500 a year for three days’ work a week. “Just as well,” said Watt. “You can do less harm at that rate.”?Reese apparently spends the other four days of the week juggling a long line of girl friends going in and out of his flat in Ebury Street, Victoria, just around the corner from Watt’s flat. He did have an interesting story about going to Berlin last year. He said that all the famous writers and such had disappeared & that the Socialists were reduced to scuttling between doorways. “It was a nightmare. The worst of all is that all human kindness had also disappeared. There was only madness.”?Germany??Land of poets and thinkers?
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Watt’s friend Barbara Rothschild was presented at Court the other day, wearing the Rothschild jewels. Watt thinks this is hilarious. He wanted to know if my cousin would wear the Rockefeller jewels to the White House. I told him that no one in my family would be caught dead in the White House under this administration. He thought that was hilarious, too. He’s been talking less about the Communist Party lately. He took a copy of The Magnetic Mountain that I was carrying and flipped through it. “Oh yes, Day Lewis’s Utopia:?‘Men shall know their masters and women their need,/Mating and submitting, not dividing and defying,/Force shall fertilise, mass shall breed.’?Sounds lovely, as long as one is one of the masters, right??That is, if one has the stomach for cunt.”?Then, giving me a long look:?“As you have, in the plural, I have heard.”
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Went up the Charing Cross Road & bought some magazines: ?Minotaure, The Burlington, etc. Then to the Leicester Galleries. It is just a shop with three small rooms. In the front rooms there was a mixed exhibition of young painters. In the back, wonderful treasures from Paris. There was a terrific lithograph by Picasso (bull-man and model) that would be perfect for the wall of my study. Not that I can afford it.
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A line of the unemployed, wearing their War medals, outside Buckingham Palace.
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April 5, 1935, Friday
Another snowstorm. So much for the cherry blossoms.
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I’m getting used to Watt. He is really quite decent. His rule is to make one pass—“to show what’s on offer”—and if there is no response, that’s that. But the number of men who do respond is quite prodigious!?He always has some new story about bus drivers or navvies (whom he pays for sex—“They need it, don’t they?”) or (public) school boys.
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Jack said that I should go to Heywood Hill’s as I “like to lurk in bookstores.”?It is on Curzon, next to Trumper’s (where Jack and his friends get their hair cut). There are two rooms on the ground floor, two or three in the basement, filled with books and people drinking tea and talking about books. I spent a couple of hours there, reading the shelves, drinking tea, finally buying a book by Louis MacNeice and a copy of New Signatures, by way of rent.
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April 8, 1935, Monday
Much rain.
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After preparing with a larger than usual breakfast, I slid into the Underground entrance near the Ritz and popped up at the Holborn station to go to the British Museum for a serous reconnaissance. Regretting that I had not worn rubber boots, I sloshed across the entrance court, gave up my umbrella, then, not having any particular object in view, I simply set off counter-clockwise. First, the Manuscript room, which is filled with case after case of historical autographs and manuscripts (Beowulf!). Then there is the King’s Library:??beautiful bindings behind glass and cases of early printed books. I’m afraid I preferred those that were beautiful to those of purely historical interest, which means that I spent more time looking at the Kelmscott editions than rarer things. Then back to the entrance (the King’s Library is more or less a dead end) to the Roman Gallery, which is for the most part a collection of marble busts of Emperors, and through it to the Graeco-Roman rooms. The second of these has the Discobolos and the Townley Venus. At this point I was simply strolling along, as if through a particularly exclusive graveyard monuments yard. Then there were the Elgin Marbles. I walked from one end of that gallery to the other, then back along the other side, then around again. I didn’t really see the point, aesthetically. They are terribly damaged. On the other hand, somewhat out of the way, there is a wonderful small temple with dancing Nereids, almost intact (except the heads), which is certainly the real thing. It was a shock to go from there to the Nineveh Gallery, the Nimrod & Assyrian saloons, as if into a museum from another planet—all those purple-black winged beasts with Semitic heads. Stumbling out through the Egyptian galleries, I found the refreshment room, not a moment too soon, and had a sandwich and cup of tea. Revived, I went back to the Egyptian rooms, then walked through the Elgin gallery again and left, saving the vases and coins upstairs for another day.
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It is all very impressive, but, on the other hand, it is simply a pile of loot of Empire, or Eliot’s fragments of a dying civilization, not a study collection.
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April 12, 1935, Friday
Rain and wind.
领英推荐
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Jack said that Livia would not allow me at dinner until I had my hair cut:?“Trumper’s,”?he said. Trumper’s, then, which is not at all like the barber shop in Woodstock. My usual awkwardness in a new situation:?how to get in the door, what to say (“Just a hair cut, thank you”), then the long quiet ceremony, the sound of scissors, the intimacy of the barber’s hands passing near one’s face, the warm soap and water and the unique sound/touch sensation of the straight razor on the back of one’s neck. Then the matter of payment & tipping, which I am sure that I got wrong. I stumbled out, smelling so strongly from Trumper’s perfumed waters and oils that I went straight back to Jack and Livia’s to bathe and wash my hair.
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National Gallery note:?Longhi’s paintings:?A young man at breakfast visited by a prostitute; masked people at the casino; mysterious activities in curtained alcoves, etc. Venice.
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April 14, 1935, Sunday
A rain storm.
Haxton says that I “should do something useful over the Long Vacation,” by which it turns out that he means I should go to Italy. I mentioned Longhi. “Oh, I’m sure Venice would do as well as Florence to begin.”
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Venice!?Florence!
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April 17, 1935, Wednesday
Clear, at last.
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Easter Term begins to-day:??once again taking my seat at the dining-table in Hall, just as if I had been part of this place all my life.
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Dot says I must read Problems of Soviet Literature, a collection of speeches from the Soviet Writers’ Congress.
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April 20, 1935, Saturday
Rain again, of course.
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There was a letter from Mother about the weather in Vermont (spring leaves are just out) and her bridge club. I wrote her about the weather here.
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Haxton’s weekly New Rambler essay covers an exhibition of French and Venetian 18th Century painting at the gallery of Frank Sabin. He calls Tiepolo’s work the last flowering of the Baroque and, aside from that, especially liked a “David Portrait of Mme. Tallien”.
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I’ve been to see Gow after all. He had invited me to visit him in his rooms last night at 10 p.m. with a few other undergraduates. Not the friendliest person in the world, but he has the most amazing collection of drawings by Degas.