Hundreds and Thousands (30 page)

Such nerve-pinching decisions about what one shall keep and what throw out! Your hand poises there over the garbage pail, weighing the article in decision. “Wretched old trash, I’ve housed it long enough. Still — I don’t know if I should; maybe it would come in handy; after all, it doesn’t take much room. But why clutter up with such stuff? Come to think of it, though, probably this year I will need it.” The yawning garbage can
doesn’t
get it, and it starts on another twelve month round of rust and cobweb accumulation.

I cried over one letter today. It was from a pretty young married woman, and she loved me then and had great faith in my work, and I said to myself, “Was her faith justified?” Had I made good? I felt a blighter and cried a little. You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put
more
into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.

SPRING AND SUMMER 1935

The house is as clean as a new-laid egg. And now, oh horrors, an exhibition! I hate the publicity, but deep down I have felt for a long time that it was my job to do this particular thing. I am so selfish and no good and there’s all the people who love painting and haven’t any chance and here am I greedily hoarding up thoughts and things that are not mine — only lent to me. If the others get anything out of them then it is up to me to hand it on. Perhaps none of them will come. That will be dull and flat and worse. I don’t particularly want the idle rich, the people who are always catered to in art establishments, here. I want the people who think and feel, not the ones who flatter and lie and spoon out the correct things to say. A college teacher said, “Well … I don’t know … of course the idea is nice … but I doubt the students would want to come if the working class were specially invited.” Let them stay away, then, and read their art books and go to the Arts and Crafts shows. They don’t care for the real of art, only for the fashion and the correct jargon.

Today was the second day of the public exhibition in my downstairs flat. I showed a group of old Indian pictures, thirty in number. A lot of people came yesterday and were appreciative and interested. Today the thing drags. Quite a few have been but they were smart-alecky and priggish. A prim young photographer came. He shot out a camera and without a by-your-leave signified his intention of photographing
me.
“I prefer not,” I said very firmly. Then his wife or sister or female relation of some sort said, “Have you done it?” “No, she won’t have it.” He smirked and I glowered and I saw his finger straying to his camera. I think he had come intending to photograph
ad lib
and I sure wasn’t going to have it, not without a by-your-leave anyhow.

Stacks more people have been, some very appreciative, some very stupid. I am tired, tired. There has been a surprising lot of people but the interest has centred more on the historical than on the art side. I feel very old. I wish the work was a million times better. I wish, I wish, I wish. People were very genuinely interested, I think. So many said they were glad they had come, it was very worth while. So I think it was.

Now the third exhibition is hung, my modern landscapes and modern Indian things, which look somehow lacking and dark. Maybe I am tired and that’s the reason. How completely alone I’ve had to face the world, no boosters, no artist’s backing, no relatives interested, no bother taken by papers to advertise, just me and an empty flat and the pictures. Two men helped me to hang the first and last show. I did the other. It is surprising to
me as many came. There were several withered little old men and women trying to paint a little, now that the hustle of their family life has eased off for them. They’ll never do anything much in this life to show, but who knows but the start of thinking about these things here will help them in another world. I do not perhaps mean really to paint there but to see God’s beauty, if we paint it maybe with different pigments. I don’t suppose painting or singing or playing are really what matters but the expressing of the realization of God in all and everywhere.

I READ FLORA “D’SONOQUA’S CATS
.” She found a
great
many faults in it. Most of them I agreed with but some I did not. The thing I had struggled hardest for she did not see, made no comment on, so I suppose I had not made it the least bit plain. In hanging the show too, the man looked disapprovingly at “D’Sonoqua and the Cats.” “What’s the meaning?” he asked. I just gave a sort of a laugh. “Oh, there’s a story,” I said, but I did not tell it. He would not have understood. And after, I brought out another canvas and took her away. I think the story and the picture were special things experienced by me and I must put them away. I don’t know anybody I could talk it out with. Perhaps I could have once with Lawren, but I am not sure he would have understood, and now that intimacy of our life work is all gone too, door shut, windows barred, ways parted. So be it! One
must
learn that one’s own two feet are made to stand on and that one cannot use others as props and crutches. How extraordinarily alone everyone is! Each one walking along his own path to the one gate through which every one goes alone. Art and religion are alike. It doesn’t matter what our sect or what our method, the one thing that matters is our sincerity.

Today’s show was horrible and has left me tired out and exceedingly depressed. Have been diving down to see why. Quite a few came, some who had been to the other two exhibitions. There were the usual “babblers,” little people who felt that they must say stuff, and fluttered away and left nothing said. There was not an artist among them. The artists have ignored the show except little Lee Nan. He understood more than all the rest and I felt nearer to that little Chinaman in understanding than to all those others.

The sixth day of the exhibition is over, the whole thing done with. It has been far beyond my expectations in success. I imagine some two hundred people came, and on the whole were keenly appreciative and interested in the work, as was evinced in many of them coming two and three times. Today there were mostly the college students, boys and girls, a keen lot. The young folk like the modern stuff. The old folk shy and back, poor dears. It is a gulp to swallow after what they are used to. They can’t think of power or movement or bulk or light. They want little complete objects in paint put concisely before them telling a little story completely worked out and leaving no labour for their imagination. It made you feel so old when one and another would say, “What a lot of work.” Of course it is. Practically your whole life’s work was summed up and laid out on a platter before you, like a drowning man’s, and now it was up to you to kick the bucket, instead of feeling as I do that I want to begin all over fresh and hit out harder. You do not feel much interest in what you have done. It’s what you want to do that peps you up. I do think we all live so
much in the past instead of pushing further. The greatness of the Old Masters seems to me to be their sincerity in realizing their present, rounding it out and filling it in. I’m not a proper artist at all. To be that one should be in it body and soul, giving all your time and absorption, living above paint, above colour, above design, even above form, searching the spirit, centring the eyes just above the horizon, going out into pure being to
be
along with it. How can one explain that to people? It’s one of the wordless things and your spirit runs ahead of your hands and eyes that toil fleshily after, slow and clumsy. Poor soul, wrestling, striving to learn its lessons out of the old book of flesh, tossing the book impatiently aside — stupid dull print — and picking it up again to reread the words and get the sense clearer.

How tired one can get and not die! When the exhibition closed yesterday I longed to get to painting. First, however, the flat the exhibition was in had to be got ready for a tenant. The kitchen was peeling. I bolted out of bed this morning right on to the stepladder with a knife and those walls had to be scraped inch by inch. I did not give myself time to think. I said, “Put your whole zest into that, old girl. It’s necessary, so make it worth while. When it is all clean maybe you can paint.” Life is such a continual struggle inside.

Everything in life seems to contradict something else. If I was a real artist I’d let everything else go, but I can’t and don’t and so I’m not. Even today as I went to buy kalsomine, I met two people. So sorry I was out. Wanted to come to the studio. I said, “It has been open to the public two weeks. Now the exhibition is closed.” And that’s to be it, too. I’m not having my meagre
paint time pottered into by this one and that and have to haul out stuff. The man was forty-two years old and had just started to think about painting. The woman said he was a
genius
and should be encouraged tremendously. She begged him to show me the wonderful production he had done. He drew a dirty bit of lined writing paper out of his hip pocket, a mess in blue and red, and then fell into raptures about
her
work and what a genius
she
was. All this took place on the city street. I did not ask them over. I’m horrid. I ought to help beginners, but they do make such a mock-modest fuss about themselves.

Such sunshine is pouring over everything! Get anything between you and it, though, and it is very cold. While the kalsomine prepares I am bathing in the sunshine of the big east window. The trees are still open to let the sunshine pour through, just little blobs of transparent yellow-green. All the grand loveliness of the beach is waiting. The spring sky is high and full of movement. Steady, on with the job, old girl, so you can be free to go to it.

Since the exhibition I have been thinking a lot. People said, “Explain the pictures.” How could anyone do that? Perhaps I do not know any more than they. Why? It is not a definite set goal — sort of a groping, changing day by day and yet imperceptibly. If one wanted colour or design or form or representation perhaps one could explain a little what one was trying for, but how can one explain spirit? How can one find it or know how to look? The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.

Lunch on beach with Alice and a squad of youngsters. How that woman ever has the patience — day in, day out, year in, year out — and always amiable! We sat on logs and ate mutton sandwiches and bananas. The high clear heat of morning hazed over a bit at noon. After a big washing was glad to sit and sun in afternoon. Too tired to paint.

Letter from Lawren. Good to hear of his work again. It will be interesting but I can’t quite find the spirit in abstract. Maybe I am too earthy, but I want to seek out, to follow the spirit.

Spring sunshine and frosts are dickering over the garden growth. The flowers are tattered by the pushing and pulling back. The Empress conservatory is unruffled by extremes. The great ferns are sending out long, majestically curved new fronds and the cineraria, spiraea, schizanthus, begonias, callas and other things I don’t know are rioting gloriously. It is splendid to sit amongst them for a bit, and yet folk pass through with scarcely a glance.

I must pull myself together and start painting. I keep saying will I get this or that done up first and put off the more intense struggle of the higher work till things are more settled and the clutter of daily jobs is eased off a bit so my mind is clearer. I don’t know if that is best or worst for development. Is it because I am too orderly naturally to work in hugger-mugger or is it that my soul is more lazy than my body?

I wonder will we ever consciously look back and see the plan of things, the reason for this and that and the good of it? This
house — what a mixture of love and hate! What a dear house and studio and garden — as a renting proposition how beastly! Was this very thing needed for the good of my soul? Tenants, how I’ve
hated
the whole business of them — like a galling collar round my neck. Of all that have passed through my flats in twenty years how very, very few I have said goodbye to with regret. Some of the partings have been very ugly indeed, some bitter.