After breakfast he said he had to go out. He made a long detailed explanation of having to see some man in the film industry. I knew, because of the wooden obstinate look on his face, and because of the unnecessary complication of the explanations, that he was going to see Jane Bond, he had made an arrangement to see her when she telephoned him. As soon as he left I went up to his room. Everything extremely neat and tidy. Then I began to look among his papers. I remember thinking, without any shock at myself, but as if it were my right, because he lied, that this was the first time in my life I had read another person’s letters or private papers. I was angry and sick but very methodical. I found a stack of letters rubber-banded together in one corner, from a girl in America. They had been lovers, she complained he hadn’t written. Then another stack of letters from a girl in Paris — again, complaints that he hadn’t written. I put the letters back, not carefully, but anyhow, and looked for something else. Then I found stacks of diaries. (*14) I remember thinking it was odd that his diaries ran chronologically, not all split up like mine are. I leafed through some of the earlier ones, not reading them, but getting an impression, an unending list of new places, different jobs, an endless list of girls’ names. And as a thread through the diversity of place-names, women’s names, details of loneliness, detachment, isolation. I sat there on his bed, trying to marry the two images, the man I knew, and the man pictured here, who is totally self-pitying, cold, calculating, emotionless. Then I remembered that when I read my notebooks I didn’t recognize myself. Something strange happens when one writes about oneself. That is, one’s self direct, not one’s self projected. The result is cold, pitiless, judging. Or if not judging, then there’s no life in it — yes, that’s it, it’s lifeless. I realize, in writing this, I’m back at the point in the black notebook where I wrote about Willi. If Saul said, about his diaries, or, summing his younger self up from his later self: I was a swine, the way I treated women. Or: I’m right to treat women the way I do. Or: I’m simply writing a record of what happened, I’m not making moral judgements about myself — well, whatever he said, it would be irrelevant. Because what is left out of his diaries is vitality, life, charm. ‘Willi allowed his spectacles to glitter across the room and said …’ ‘Saul, standing foursquare and solid, grinning slightly — grinning derisively at his own seducer’s pose, drawled: Come’n baby, let’s fuck, I like your style.’ I went on reading entries, first appalled by the cold ruthlessness of them; then translating them, from knowing Saul, into life. So I found myself continually shifting mood, from anger, a woman’s anger, into the delight one feels at whatever is alive, the delight of recognition.