7th April, 1954

She asked me if I had kept notes of the ‘experience’. Now she has never, not once, in the last three years mentioned the diary; so she must have known by instinct I had not kept notes. I said: ‘No.’ ‘You have kept no record at all?’ ‘No, I have a very good memory, though.’ A silence. ‘So the diary you started has remained empty?’ ‘No, I stuck in cuttings from newspapers.’ ‘What kind of cuttings?’ ‘Just things that struck me — events that seemed important.’ She gave me the quizzical look, which said: Well, I’m waiting for the definition. I said: ‘I glanced over them the other day: what I’ve got is a record of war, murder, chaos, misery.’ ‘And that seems to you the truth about the last few years?’ ‘Doesn’t it seem to you to be the truth?’ She looked at me — ironical. She was saying without words that our ‘experience’ has been creative and fructifying, and that I am dishonest in saying what I did. I said: ‘Very well then; the newspaper cuttings were to keep things in proportion. I’ve spent three years, more, wrestling with my precious soul, and meanwhile …’ ‘Meanwhile what?’ ‘It’s just a matter of luck that I haven’t been tortured, murdered, starved to death or died in a prison.’ She looked patiently ironical, and I said: ‘Surely you must see that what happens here, in this room, doesn’t only link one with what you call creativity. It links one with … but I don’t know what to call it.’ ‘I’m glad you aren’t going to use the word destruction.’ ‘All right, everything has two faces, etc., but for all that, whenever anything happens anywhere that is terrible, I dream about it, as if I were involved in it personally.’ ‘You have been cutting all the bad things out of the newspapers and sticking them in your diary of this experience, as an instruction to yourself of how to dream?’ ‘But Mrs Marks, what’s wrong with that?’ We have reached this particular deadlock so often, neither of us tries to break it. She sat smiling at me, dry and patient. I faced her, challenging her.

9th April, 1954

She said to me today as I was leaving: ‘And now my dear, when are you going to start writing again?’ I might have said, of course, that all this time I’ve been scribbling off and on in the notebooks but that is not what she meant. I said: ‘Very likely never.’ She made an impatient, almost irritable gesture; she looked vexed, like a housewife whose plans have gone wrong — the gesture was genuine, not one of the smiles, or nods, or shakes of the head, or impatient clicks of the tongue that she uses to conduct a session. ‘Why can’t you understand that,’ I said, really wanting to make her understand, ‘that I can’t pick up a newspaper without what’s in it seeming so overwhelmingly terrible that nothing I could write would seem to have any point at all?’ ‘Then you shouldn’t read the newspapers.’ I laughed. After a while she smiled at me.