Suits me

I met Grant in HMV at one o’clock.

He was quiet and morose and didn’t say much, only brightening for a little in a second-hand clothes shop where he bought a shirt. I bought a couple too. In Suits Me we were greeted coldly with the comment “You’re always coming in here but you never buy anything, do you?” so we left for cups of revolting coffee in the Metropolitan up Grafton Road, another brilliant place, full of people and life.

I’m in better spirits tonight than I have been for quite a while; Lee rang while I was out so I’ve just rung him back and I’m meeting him in Easterby at eleven tomorrow.

I got a breathless and almost manically cheerful letter from Shelley today, full of the joys of her “one great social whirl” as she puts it. It was good to hear from her . . .  I think my cheerfulness springs purely and simply from getting out more recently. However much I pretend to favour solitude I’m essentially a social person—I need other people, even though I think everyone of us is quite alone and that it’s useless believing otherwise.

We can laugh and talk and get close on a social level but there’s always that last insuperable barrier which makes us ‘individuals’ in the truest sense of the word. Two minds can’t truly, fully commune because each is locked forever in the white prison of the skull. “Imagination is a monastery and I its monk.” Our tools of communication, especially the written word, are miserably inadequate at bridging the gap.

But I’ve written this down in a sort of remote objective way because tonight I feel content for once, and the morning is something to look forward to.

I stayed away from the box in the evening as Mum, Dad & Nanna P. watched another brutal and bloody war film, The Iron Cross. The house was filled once more with the sounds of gunfire and the shouts and screams of the dying.

I can’t stomach all the violence. I know it’ s only make-believe but this death and destruction is all the more terrible to watch because of it really did happen. I saw only the final credits, a quote from Brecht telling people not to celebrate at the death of one madman for “the bitch is in heat again . . .” Mum thought the film was good—but horrible—and Dad enjoyed it too, but I don’t think he really understands what the anti-war side is getting at. With him it’s simply an intellectual impossibility and as he talked about the film afterwards he just dwelled on the drama of the battle scenes and the military reasons for Hitler’s failure.