Activity

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…

Reread my screenplay. The last section is dreadful—a post-mortem feeling. R came over to E’s for tea. Her light presence. We talked about standards in art, what it means that her mother likes Pro Hart, whether aesthetics is separate (as a study) from ordinary life. Whenever she’s with me I feel che…