FROM AN AUTUMN JOURNAL
25
phrase even makes sense-in domesticity. For the most part, indeed,
I would guess that an unpremeditated acceptance of the ordinary
responsibilities of life is rather more conducive to good writing or
good any kind of art than a principled self-protection or self-culti–
vation.
This is really what the Leavises are saying to Bloomsbury. And
how Bloomsbury hates them for saying it, and the modern world for
~
urgently pressing the issue. The SitwelIs, for instance, whom I
met but once, struck me as gasping with the effort to breathe their
accustomed air and yet at the same time accommodate themselves
to the contemporary atmosphere. Wernet at tea, Edith Sitwell sitting
most appropriately in a high-backed Elizabethan chair. She was
very grand and unutterably despondent, it seemed to me. Yet she
worked hard, every minute of the social occasion. I was watching
her twirl the pound of amethyst she wore for a ring and asked to
feel it, to see if it was as heavy as it looked. As she handed it to me
she remarked that it had cost but a few pennies, adding gratuitously:
"How else could I afford it?" I could wish for her sake that she
had not felt it necessary to add this proof of our common humanity.
J.,
by the way, the other day took the volume of Edith Sitwell
recordings, "Fac;ade," from the record cabinet and played the first
side over and over again, rather beyond my endurance. I reread
Osbert Sitwell's little historical sketch on the cover of the volume,
in which he describes the first performance of his sister's readings,
some twenty-five years ago. He reports that Noel Coward was so
shocked he had to leave in the middle of the show. But how does
he know it was shock and not boredom? How persistently these
people who so depend on their breeding cling to the pleasures of
outraging public taste!
October 28
Last night I listened to McCarthy on the radio. Though there
was nothing in his performance which should have surprised me,
I found myself quite unprepared for the fact that he was a person
rather than an idea. I suppose I should have been even more upset
if
I had been seeing him on television. This concretization of a po–
litical attitude in a specific person turned out to have just the oppo-
