‘When you’re young,’ said C’s wife, ‘you really believe that two people can make some kind of dream together; but you try it, and you get older, and you come to realise that all there is is you, finally.’

What is the point of this diary? There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.

The play veered between being really funny and wallowing in embarrassing sentimentality. ‘There’s nothing wrong with sentiment, as long as it’s not masquerading as real feeling,’ said Professor Maxwell at Melbourne University twenty years ago. But in this case it is masquerading. Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.

In the magazine the subs once again make me look an idiot. All my jokes cut out, the tone violated, the central argument truncated. I cry over it. I feel like resigning. I’ve felt like this a hundred times before and haven’t done it. Oh, if only I knew I had a grant I’d tell the National Times to cram it.

I watched the beginning of La Règle du jeu on video. It’s marvellous but I’ve never been able to sit still long enough to get to the end. Renoir’s love of people, that unfashionable thing: the sense of a rich, three-dimensional, teeming life away there beyond the flat screen and spreading out from it in all directions. A kind of fizzing and bubbling that goes on. Everyone busy living.

I made a plan: in the mornings I’ll try to write my book, and in the afternoons I’ll work on the translations of the Malraux programs for SBS. I started this morning at 8 am. I loved it in my room, quiet all around, barely even properly light. I rewrote Vicki and Elizabeth, the very beginning of the book. I worry that I ought to pour out a whole draft and then go back and rewrite. What I do is write a page, then fix it up straight away and go back to the beginning to see if everything fits. So my progress is slow. But the work is solid. After lunch I sat at my desk with the big dictionaries, the mild afternoon sun on my back through the window, and wrestled away. Writing in the morning is battling through jungle. Translating in the arvo is riding along a flat country road on a bicycle.

The only way I can keep a rhythm going is to keep off booze, go to bed early, and not drink too much coffee. 8.30–12.30 work on novel in office. 2.00–4.00 translate at home. 7.30–10.00 read Vogel Award manuscripts at home. Most of them are unbelievably terrible. One was like a black hole in space: all my energy was sucked into it, it drained and sucked and gave back no spark. It scared me.

I’m worried about art, what it’s for, whether what I do is any use to anyone, whether I’ve been kidding myself all these years that I’m any good at it, that I’ve got anything at all to offer the human race, whether I should just chuck it in and look for a job.

I don’t enjoy the way the therapist fixes me with her unblinking gaze. She seems to want to urge me to undertake a search and reconstruction of myself such as the one she herself is attempting. When I think of her ugly clothes and the quite stunning, almost deathly ugliness of the inside of her house I shiver. She is trying to get me to face the most difficult area in myself. I don’t have the courage to do it. Not now, anyway. Thinking about it is like contemplating a mountain range in winter.

If I were a man of a pre-feminist generation, with a wife to provide my meals and clean my house and bring up my children, perhaps I would have a free mind for the large thought, the unlimited plan; and free time for night work, for hours without the necessity to think ahead about trivia—will we have veal for dinner or will I send the girls out for Lebanese take-away? Will the dog be lonely all day? Why didn’t I defrost the fridge before I went to the market? Or is my mind slack and small for other reasons?