[Journal, February 1960]

21 Feb. [1960]

Diving with goggles, flappers and snorkel at Point Jerningham. The water is misty but clear down underneath. Among the small fish. If I were drowned and floating, they would nibble the flesh away. I brought a sea-egg out and gave it to J. It moved in my hand, walking on its spines.

Stones, light and water, preach peace. We are incapable of entering that primitive obedience. J.M.’s son is a potter in his teens. Bringing form to what is formless, bat at the wheel, his fingers clogged. J.M. like myself is tormented by the noonday demon.

Drove back along the waterfront. Clouds like towers in the pale night sky.

Baxter, Baxter, my enemy,
You worst one . . . of all things made,
Then I struggle and am not free,
With ropes of need you fasten me,
With my words you gag my mouth,
With deeds you murder me. . . .

The dilemma of faith: to live without joy, in the solitary cell of the heart, without God, though God only can deliver me. All roads out lead to torment. I must wait, a lifetime perhaps.

In this journal I will not set down anything for the sake of writing well; or anything that blabs out the evils best kept for a priest; or anything destructive of another creature’s . . . That is to run the risk of saying nothing.

The poems have dried up. I have one ill-made play to my credit. Yesterday I put aside for good that study of adolescence: ‘the torments of adolescent persons are threefold: unwanted solitude, ignorance of life, and sexuality without love . . . He did his time there . . . like those other children in the furnace of the Assyrian king.’ Perhaps. But this furnace of self-love is not extinguished after eighteen years, a moving, two Baptisms, and . . . Sweet Lady, you travelled to the heart of the Egypt of our prisons, and rejectedpage 413 nothing human, bring light to those in darkness . . .

Feb. 22nd: A dream from the old boozing days. A nurse from a hospital, herself a cripple. I took her in my arms and tried to comfort her. Two men were drunk in the house with me, and one of them was B—. He threw the crippled girl on her back on the concrete. I took a brown bramble (?) and broke his arms and legs. In revenge he began to break the ribs of one kitten with his fingers. I trampled on him with hobnail boots. He climbed into a truck with a notice on its door: Society for Undistributed Pronouns.

My dreams, when they occur, are full of executions, murders, rapes, exhumations. One just has to get hardened to it. An exact image of the soul: a nurse from a hospital, herself a cripple. Such dreams have their causes. Later in the day I went to Confession at the monastery. A slow-speaking, throaty- voiced priest. There was a mortal sin to confess. I had murdered Christ and buried him in the dunghill of my soul. Now he shines there, alive again. A sun resting on a dunghill. The terrible paradox of life in the Church: to put God into the hands and mouth and heart of a criminal hobo. Little Flower, daughter of God, Teresa of the Holy Face, obtain for me the gift to see that battered Face always, and only his eyes in the faces of men and women.

F— called on me at the office. I . . . how he stayed a day or two at my boarding-house room, the year I was away from J[acquie] and the children. Newly discharged from the asylum, with burnt places on his head from the electrodes. He brought a most hopeful and tender peace with him, like a gutted house bare to the sunlight. It comes from his carrying the visible marks of the Passion. Today he was troubled about his . . . and I think I was able to help him.

Then D— was at the midday Mass. I have to kneel down there like an animal, or a deaf and dumb child learning to speak. I am there in the darkness, and he is there in the light . . . Then he comes, the Child into the dirty stable, the Light of the world, the Maker of Sirius and Orion. And what he does with my soul I cannot say.

D— wants my friendship badly. But I have to refuse it often, because she comes there to meet me and not to meet him. I wish she would see I have nothing to give her or anyone. My first self is walled up in the soul, speechless and alive, while my second self walks like a ghost and does what has to be done. Love is death for me, because it takes meaning from him.

M— is back from Australia. She was afraid to go to Confession, but I met her in the coffee shop, and shocked her with some silly stories, and led her up to the presbytery. Like myself she suffers from the pains of the convert . . . I did the Stations of the Cross for her and C— and all of them. Then I stayed for the communal rosary . . . A girl came in and knelt beside me for a couple of minutes. Trim and slight and devout . . . Her perfume rose up to me, and I could not pray, except confusedly from the fringes of the flame. I was madepage 414 of dry, rotten tinder. That is what a man is. Dry grass.

J[acquie] would say, perhaps rightly, that M— or D— are not my business. And my boss would say that F— took me away from necessary work. So I have to go on being a thief. A schizophrene with an alcoholic memory. A creek running down from pool to pool. He doesn’t tell me what to do, but leaves me to make my own decisions. Who would put an empire in the hands of a child? . . .

23 Feb. There are mornings I wake now without any pain of soul or body. It is five years since I ceased to be a habitual drunk; two years since I was baptised a Catholic. Had my last drink the September before last – aromatic saki in a restaurant in Tokyo. K— was there, a Northcountryman . . . He had known Dylan Thomas in London. Dylan, son of the . . . pray for me. I have often prayed for you. Pray for me at the heart of the good fire.

Then there was E—, of the life labours. With the marks of old ulcers on her legs, from poverty as a child. Her father sold her into the job. I saw her share her rice with a younger girl from the street. With the tact and grace of perfect generosity. King and father, I see the suffering of your poor. In the chapel of the Columban fathers, . . . and drunk for hours, I let her ulcers tell me what I don’t know. . . . I learned that the body of God is the body of an Easterner. It is not what we are that prevents our becoming holy, but what we think we are.

. . . sloth, incapacity to do a good day’s work. Confusion and tension. One just has to plough on slowly through the day. Temptation to daydream. Daydreaming about God is still daydreaming. That is where J[acquie] rightly rebukes me. Inch by inch I am sorting out the Seminar report. Letters, manuscripts, the whole swag of an uncorrupted life. Is it a cross or a self- made burden of sin?

J[acquie] rang me up to get seats at the ballet. If I don’t write down the simplest instructions I can’t remember them. ‘Go to the confectionary shop at the Opera House. Find out when they are selling seats; whether they are selling reserved seats or just tickets; whether they are selling seats on Friday morning for the Saturday performance.’ J[acquie] keeps me from falling apart and slowly counters the hobo instinct of revolt and flight. She knows me through and through. Holds up a steel mirror to my faults. Chesterton could not get out of the bath without his wife’s assistance. We would like to offer him to our wives; but they know we are donkeys. God gives us the wives we need. A gadfly for the sullen ox. . . .

J[acquie] is a good wife. Astringent and utterly . . . My movements away from her are movements away from the bare centre of reality. . . .

No Communion today because I had to meet M— at 6 – and now at the Arts Centre, where J— was bringing the car. Loitering in a bookshop . . . the few minutes of the Mass. I stayed till the Consecration and asked Him topage 415 enter my soul by another road. Hunger.

G— looked well, eight months pregnant, in her red dress. She like J— is made of the true steel. M—’s . . . his sports. I told him it looked like an old . . . Our myths set a man at ease, but not the best way. We ate salads and curries, and M— talked to me about his new play. It may be on the stage soon.

I am stuffed in the belly of the UNESCO whale . . . blotting paper, dry inkwells. Harmless but deadly. Old father Abraham, bring this Lazarus care. Angel of my nativity, spirit of the river, spirit of the future, bring me a little water. In the tin mug of a Delhi leper, where I once dropped a quarter rupee. Water the ashes well.

Alcoholism is a strange demon: a kind of tertiary syphilis of the soul. An alcoholic hates life because he can’t handle it. Everything he touches burns him. He wants to escape into . . . childhood; and the only way he can do it is by killing himself with grog. But it doesn’t work. If he goes into a Catholic church and uses his eyes he would see God Himself moving in a terrible, staggering procession around the walls. In the Stations of the Cross he would see his own destiny. To fall and rise and fall and rise and keep on moving to the end. . . . God may move him directly if he submits his life and will to Him. Yet even if he never learns what is required of him, he will be protected from habitual evils, because he is helpless, and God protects the helpless. I saw Dusty in the Hot Dog, full of meths, very dirty, and his eyes bright and staring. He smiled, and accepted a meal, and talked naturally. He has only half a stomach left. The man inside the husk is (I think) . . . than a child. . . . I don’t think one’s love can be mistaken: he is carrying a cross of sin, the heaviest of all to carry. . . . But when the demons (the Law’s sergeants, or the younger ones, detectives) look for his soul they can’t find it. It has escaped all justice, human and divine, and is hidden in the dead pierced heart of God.

Our bed of flowers
Surrounded by the lion’s den
Is made of peace . . .

Some may think it [strange] to apply the words of St John of the Cross to a metho; but they have never met D—, and perhaps do not look far into the meaning of absolute poverty. . . .

M— is a convert of long standing, and tries to take the new arrivals under her wing. There is a trace of the schoolteacher in her approach. Once I thought I should obey her; but now I obey only the priests who counsel me and the voice of my own conscience. She is sad and fearful (I think) for my salvation. The truth is that of human attachment. In Protestant life each person finds a model among ministers, or doesn’t find [one], or a third finds a guru. It leads to conflict and the loss of liberty. We Catholics have a need of that substitute obedience. This, the religious obedience to a Superior, is the anvil on whichpage 416 the soul is forged; and among the laity, obedience to a confessor or spiritual director. Father J— was my spiritual director till he went down South: a logical, rigorous Irishman. ‘Obey the Church implicitly in matters that require obedience’, he told me – ‘in other matters use your own reason and judgment without timidity.’ He [found] me guilty of long-standing anxiety. . . the fatal legacy of ten years of Anglican pseudo-obedience. M—, bless her, will not lead me back to it by love or marriage or prayer.

24 Feb. . . . Trying to get a can of peaches at the fruit mart for J[acquie] to bottle. I am too late with it . . . and J[acquie] was rightly angry. It is difficult to know one is a fool and admit it and accept a fair rebuke. People are so made that they do not consider any rebuke fair. Tomorrow I must take the peaches back to exchange them or get the money refunded. That will be another hoop to climb through. Factors that make me foolish – an alcoholic memory, fear of admitting I am a mug, and the . . . to use my own judgment. A man hates being a fool more than he hates being a sinner: that is our . . . pride. I used to blame poor J[acquie] for telling me off, as any wife has a perfect right to do. Now I take it, acknowledging it is just, but still don’t like it. Let me remain a fool, dear Lady, but ask God to take my sins away.

J[acquie] is tough, like many holy people. She never gives me sympathy in hangover, knowing it would only increase my self-pity. Bit by bit I am learning her spirit of detachment. She belongs to the daylight, and I to the night. It is strange that I should be the Catholic, and she the undenominational Protestant. She deserved the Faith more; maybe I needed it more. I have never known her to tell a deliberate lie. There is a photo of her at fifteen or so, standing on a verandah, on one leg, like a bird about to fly. There is a diamond purity deep in her heart, now as then, which I did not . . . till I came to Our Lady. I judged it to be cold; but it is hardened in the fire of the spirit. She often sings in the house now. . . .

1960 (214)