‘I sometimes think the world is divided into people who survive from their own inner strength and those who have to latch on to others to survive.’ —Elizabeth Jolley, interview in Good Weekend
A visit from Mum. Terrific strain I’m under, when she and I are with other people. When we’re alone I can submit to this vast, slow, stunning stream of monologue and apply as little of my concentration to it as I need to (about fifteen per cent) in order to remain calm. Yesterday she talked so much…
The end of the movie. Who can help me with this? I groaned all day and then at 5 pm something happened. Strange power and freedom I experience, when I start to invent. It has its own logic. I feel my way along some kind of dark thread.
At E’s I opened the balcony door. A wind rushed in and blew my screenplay system cards all over the floor. I saw at once that this was a sign: that having used the cards to show me the order of the (hopeless) third draft, I had been allowing that order to dominate my rewrite.
Melvyn Bragg interviews Saul Bellow on TV about The Dean’s December. Bellow grandly puts shit on sociologists, psychologists and criminologists for their failure to cure what’s wrong with society. V gives an admiring cheer. I am disappointed and say little. ‘I think,’ says V, ‘you weren’t very inte…
