Opposite Contraries (8 page)

Uncle Raja left a letter for me. In it he said this, “The Lord bless you and prosper you in every way and give you much of his joy and peace in the creative work he is using you to do. He is life, light and liberty.” Perhaps then he did realize I was struggling really for something definite. I am sure I shall paint deeper and fuller for this experience and when I have let Christ fully take me for his own. In speaking of this opening up of oneself to let Christ in, Uncle Raja said it is the same way with human love. You know how you say, “Here I am, all of me, come in to every corner of me, here I am,” so you should feel letting the Christ into your
heart and life, open up feeling and shut him out of no corner.

I have written to Lawren and told him about things, I think he will be very disappointed in me and feel I have retrograded way back, fallen to earth level, dormant, stodgy as a sitting hen. I think he will hardly understand my attitude for I have been trying these three years to see a way through theosophy.
He, Fred and Bess all tried to help me and wanted me to get it and become one of them.
Now I turn my back on it all and go back sixty years to where I started, but it is good to feel a real God, not the distant, mechanical, theosophical one.
I have read
The Sadhu
, Uncle Raja’s book. It is beautiful and simple. Anyone could understand. Theosophy is so vague and whirling, just ordinaries cannot get that.
I am wonderfully happy and peaceful.
Dare I really let go? Has Christ come in to stay?

Last night I learned that dreadful horrible thing about poor Lizzie. I am glad she has told us and asked us to help. She is such a good soul! I just can’t bear it. Those are the places Christ helps. He did last night.

God, God, God! Oh, to realize so completely that you could utterly let go and passionately throw your soul upon the canvas.

I think it’s this way. don’t hunt out big people. Let them hunt you, if you are small ones, because maybe you can help them a little.

I am an expectant mother making clothes for the baby that is coming. Whether I feel like it or not I must paint every day, so that when the child comes, I will have something to clothe her in. Suppose she came and I had nothing ready and my body had to go naked and died of exposure and cold? It behooves me to make them fine and careful, these coverings, that my child may not be dressed in sackcloth and slovenly workmanship and people will laugh and turn away from the ugly thing. And
oh, if it were stillborn — if the idea I have been searching for for so long materialized in my mind and I let it die there and did not bring it further with expression, but, idle and indifferent, let it fade and dwindle prematurely, that would be worst of all. The idea is God. Our part is to nourish and mother the idea, love it, cherish it and in due time produce. [. . .]

I have heard from Bess and Fred about my stories. Bess gives them but passing mention and goes on off up into theosophy. Fred tries to give me a straightforward honest crit. Both think my material good but my approach and construction
very
bad. I worked hard on these things but evidently to little purpose. Fred’s exposition is not very illuminating. I think I must leave writing alone. That is, I must write for the bottom drawer, that’s all, just to elucidate things for myself and ease up one’s burstings, thoughts that press you too hard. Yet I wanted to show the animal side. Fred says why not let the animals autobiograph [and tell their own story]. That’s twaddle. Animals do [not] expound except by their reaction on us.

I was wrong, unjust from soreness.
Fred’s crit is fine, and kind too. He was honest with me and, oh goodness, how few people are! It’s a compliment when people don’t think you want “eye wash” as Fred calls it. He says there’s too much
me,
too much
originality
(I suppose he means
striving for effect,
I did not know I had done that). I’ll at them again and try and unify and concentrate and build to a pyramid and unhitch my horse and put him before the cart and cast out
me
and seek to find expression for the wordless subtlety of the beasts. He says I must live
and experience my stuff. Heavens! I thought I did. They swamp me at times but I haven’t got connection between the thing and its equivalent in words.
Gee whiz! Just the same as in painting, just the same as in our religion; our profession and our action don’t hitch up. There’s a gap. I’ve written to Fred and I’ve told him about my going back to Christianity; that’s off my chest. Our letters are all so full of work and theosophy. He and Bess and Lawren have been very good when I was in the dark heap; they’d like me to have seen things in the light of theosophy, and I thought I wanted to too, but it goes round in circles and makes you giddy and doesn’t lead you, a sort of endless voyage with God always way way beyond catching-up distance. Just stern inexorable law without the love of a
real
Jesus Christ to bridge the gap; only a cold example. Christ is not a sinner’s saviour. I have been reading
The Sadhu.
I love the Christ he shows. I want him for my own.

The snapping of this theosophy bond will make a difference to my beloved friends in the East. They all do so believe in its teachings. I wonder if it will cut me completely adrift from them. But I am glad to be back again and have peace in my heart. Alice is much interested in Raja’s message also. That and this dread thing hanging over Lizzie’s head is bringing us closer together.

[…]
I went to wish Lee Nan Happy New Year. He is a funny little fellow. His place was so spick and span. He gave me some fearful sweetmeats — salt and bitter — and a Chinese orange, all pith and withered. He had a new picture. A large Chinese girl semi-nude with chrysanthemums behind her. I thought she was horrid, a mixture of English and Chinese mongrel painting. If he would only stick to his own fine way that has
such charm, but he wants to learn the English way. You can’t discuss clearly with him because of his poor English. I am so much more at home talking of his Chinese things than his English ones. I can unreservedly admire them.

[…]
Miss Auld’s art lectures at the Empress are good. She knows a lot and speaks well and looks fine. Her head shape and the way her hair fits on and is piled at the top back and on her forehead is nice. She spouts for nearly two hours with no notes, but — I sleep solidly the last third of the lecture. It’s too long, especially for history. I like
is
of things more than
has been,
though I s’pose it’s the has beens that make the is. Some of the slides I got great joy out of. Where you see the spirit of the painters shining through, that’s more than hearing about them. What you hear may be true or not. The historians garble, may dilute or bloat the man, but [it] is the spirit of him that comes out in his painting, there [are] no frills or lies and no juggling. It is there or it is not there. It is what was in the man.

There now! It doesn’t pay to try to be nice. Mortimer Lamb asked to come to the studio and I said, “I will try and be decent and amiable and helpful to him.” So I tried and I rattled out millions of canvases and sketches, which is hard, tiring work. Result —“I
have
enjoyed myself so much. May I look
again
before I leave,” says Mortimer. He’s all keen on having an exhibition of my stuff in London. (They’d never accept it.) “It’s a shame to think of you stuck out here in this corner of the world unnoticed and unknown,” says he. “It’s exactly where I want to be,” says I. And it is, too. This is my country. What I want to
express is
here
and I love it. Amen!
Mortimer Lamb seemed to feel my work quite deeply. He is an old man, did a little in his youth, and a lot of article writing on art etc. A funny old duck.

I’ve been reading Lawren and Bess’s letters over. They are both exceedingly nice. I wonder if theosophy and its distant beauty and its cold aloofness from life and humanity really satisfies them — serene and joyless — and vague. They feel it bigger and higher than Christianity.
[…]

Oh that flat tyre woman — I am like a dishrag today. She rolled back and forth over my naked body with her mindless tyres and jammed all the juice out of me. I was too tired for inspirational work so delved in the garden. Meant to take my lunch to the beach and work but was too fagged and procrastinated instead. Going down late afternoon. Empty and flat as “Jean Auld” herself. I made myself weed a path and card a box of wool. Ran down to Alice’s and encountered Una — after twelve years. I did not mean to run into her and wish I had not; was unprepared. The woman is ill. I’m sorry, but even so, can’t go back to
feeling
her a relation. She [missing fragment] when she wrote that letter hoping I would die — I did to her and deads are deads. I do not feel ill towards her, just dead. Could not kiss her. Could not be Aunt Millie, but I’m darn sorry she’s sick.

Una Boultbee is still in town and I have seen little of my sisters during her stay. They are crazy over this niece of theirs. So I am an outcast and orphan these days. Am I such a very jealous person? I do not think I care a bit that they like her so much but sometimes
I wish they liked me a little more. If I am sick, they are very good to me — duty — but [if] I am well I don’t count a row of peas in their lives [however] much they’d use the peas. Me they think only a painter. They are both so completely wrapped in their own affairs, other people’s children and other people’s ailments. If I go to them, all right — if I don’t, why all right with them too. Loneliness has bitten my very soul at times. If ever I have rebelled, they have called me selfish, so I have gone to the animals and the woods. They have been the real company, though I do love my sisters and ache for their fellowship. I suppose everybody in the world is lonely sometimes. Far be it for me to want to be cluttered up always with human society, that would be worse than being lonely,
far
, only it’s the perpetual aloneness that hurts.

[…]
I’ve been wrestling with the crow story. It came grudgingly and hard, as if the innards of the crow did not want to be exposed. I loved the crow and I say to myself, what do I want to show and say and express? Where did that crow and I touch? What good did I get from the crow, and what good did it do the crow kingdom that he lived intimately with humans?

A heavy fog hung around all day, and on top of the roof the din of reshingling. It seemed the nails were being driven right into my pate and when Wopper gave an incessant yap, I went down and spanked. After an early supper, the beach. Cold as the pole, steely blue sea and low sky, everything smashed flat and hard. I will work my sketch tomorrow as I did yesterday’s today. Got it stretched and aligned and then clothed it in paint ’til its fairness was smothered as a nun beneath her draperies. I would that my touch was not so cowlike. More tender and gentle, not slippery.

[…]
Why is Lizzie so intolerant of my deafness? She is always saying, “Why don’t you listen?” or that I am stupid. She doesn’t bother to speak clearly to me and is the most difficult of any voice I know to catch. I go down wanting companionship and come back nettled. That’s what’s weighed me down today. I went down to chat while they were at lunch and wished I had not. Now I must dive into the crow story.

Have finished the crow story, “Sandwich.” I wonder if it is any good. One thing I do know, I’ve sweated over it with all that’s in me.

[April 5 is the date in
Hundreds and Thousands
, but it is April 11 in the manuscript]
Lawren asked if he could see the “Cow Yard” so I posted it today. He will pass it on to Fred
. I told Fred and Bess about it before I told Lawren, but they have neither said to send it and they have not answered my letter. Bess is no good as a critic — not really helpful, but Fred is. He slashes and doesn’t care how he bruises or damages your conceit. Lawren is too kindly, doesn’t smack hard enough to be stimulating.
[…]

[…]
The little lily in my bedroom is such a joy. The bloom has passed its prime and is going downhill. Bess’s favourite flower and very typical of her — white, still, remote, a little hard and unyielding. Theosophists are a little
un
human. More like Calla
Lily than the Madonna, which is all curves and perfume. God, God, God. It is not religion we want, it is you.

[
…
]
Listening to Clem Davis last night gave me the woollies. What is one to do? Must they look continually at the awfulness and the dirt when they can’t do anything? Why not look at the unattainable loveliness of spring in its full beauty and put the rest from us — facing it when we must, trying to live our best always but keeping our eyes on the beauty, not on the horror, just as long as we can? Even when the horrors do roll over us, if we are full of lordliness perhaps they won’t crush so hard.

Now little journal — diary — whatever you call yourself, let’s see if I can clarify my thoughts a little through you, defacing your white surface to clean up some hazy muddle below the surface. This painting business and its aims. One thing’s sure, as in life, so in art: everyone has their own problems and they must be worked out by that person. We are all so terrifically alone in our big things: birth, death, religion, art. The other fellow can come with you to the steps, but you have to mount those steps and go in alone.