The Collector

November 24th

I’m getting desperate to escape. I can’t get any relief from drawing or playing records or reading. The burning burning need I have (all prisoners must have) is for other people. Caliban is only half a person at the best of times. I want to see dozens and dozens of strange faces. Like being terribly thirsty and gulping down glass after glass of water. Exactly like that. I read once that nobody can stand more than ten years in prison, or more than one year of solitary confinement.

One just can’t imagine what prison is like from outside. You think, well, there’d be lots of time to think and read, it wouldn’t be too bad. But it is too bad. It’s the slowness of time. I’ll swear all the clocks in the world have gone centuries slower since I came here.

I shouldn’t complain. This is a luxury prison.

And there’s his diabolical cu

I spend hours lying on the bed thinking about how to escape.

Endless.

November 25th

(Afternoon.) This morning I had a talk with him. I got him to sit as a model. Then I asked him what he really wanted me to do. Should I become his mistress? But that shocked him. He went red and said he could buy that in London.

I told him he was a Chinese box. And he is.

The i

Battering his head on a stone wall.

I don’t want to die. I feel full of endurance. I shall always want to survive. I will survive.

November 26th

The only unusual thing about him—how he loves me. Ordinary New People couldn’t love anything as he loves me. That is blindly. Absolutely. Like Dante and Beatrice.

He enjoys being hopelessly in love with me. I expect Dante was the same. Mooning around knowing it was all quite hopeless and getting lots of good creative material from the experience.

Though of course Caliban can’t get anything but his own miserable pleasure.

People who don’t make anything. I hate them.

How frightened of dying I was in those first days. I don’t want to die because I keep on thinking of the future. I’m desperately curious to know what life will bring to me. What will happen to me, how I’ll develop, what I’ll be in five years’ time, in ten, in thirty. The man I will marry and the places I will live in and get to know. Children. It isn’t just a selfish curiosity. This is the worst possible time in history to die. Space-travel, science, the whole world waking up and stretching itself. A new age is begi

I love, I adore my age.

I keep on having thoughts today. One was: uncreative men plus opportunity-to-create equals evil men.

Another one was: killing him was breaking my word to what I believe. Some people would say—you’re only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn’t matter. But all the evil in the world’s made up of little drops. It’s silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.

I’ve been daydreaming (not for the first time) about living with G.P. He deceives me, he leaves me, he is brutal and cynical with me, I am in despair. In these daydreams there isn’t much sex, it’s just our living together. In rather romantic surroundings. Sea-and-island northern landscapes. White cottages. Sometimes in the Mediterranean. We are together, very close in spirit. All silly magazine stuff, really, in the details. But there is the closeness of spirit. That is something real. And the situations I imagine (where he forsakes me) are real. I mean, it kills me to think of them.

Sometimes I’m not very far from utter despair. No one knows I am alive any more. I’m given up for dead by now, I’m accepted for dead. There’s that—the real situation. And there are the future situations I sit on the bed here and think about: my utter love for some man; I know I can’t do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who’ll betray me. I feel it. Everything is tender and rational at first in my daydreams of living with him, but I know it wouldn’t be in fact. It would be all passion and violence. Jealousy. Despair. Sour. Something would be killed in me. He would be hurt, too.

If he really loved me he couldn’t have sent me away.

If he really loved me he would have sent me away.

November 27th

Midnight.

I’ll never escape. It drives me mad. I must must must do something. I feel as if I’m at the earth’s heart. I’ve got the whole weight of the whole earth pressing in on this little box. It grows smaller smaller smaller. I can feel it contracting.

I want to scream sometimes. Till my voice is raw. To death.

I can’t write it. There aren’t the words.

Utter despair.

I’ve been like that all day. A kind of endless panic in slow-motion.

What can he have thought when he first got me here?

Something’s gone wrong in his plans. I’m not acting like the girl of his dreams I was. I’m his pig in a poke.

Is that why he keeps me? Hoping the dream Miranda will appear?

Perhaps I should be his dream-girl. Put my arms round him and kiss him. Praise him, pat him, stroke him. Kiss him.

I didn’t mean that. But it’s made me think.

Perhaps I really should kiss him. More than kiss him. Love him. Make Prince Charming step out.

I’m thinking hours between each sentence I write.

I’ve got to make him feel that finally I’ve been touched by his chivalry and so on and so on…

This is extraordinary.

He would have to act.

I am sure I can do it. At least he’s scrupulously clean. He never smells of anything but soap.

I’m going to sleep on it.

November 28th

I’ve come to a tremendous decision today.

I’ve imagined being in bed with him.

It’s useless just kissing him. I’ve got to give him such a tremendous shock that he’ll have to release me. Because you can’t very well imprison someone who’s given herself to you.

I shall be in his power. I couldn’t ever go to the police. I should only want to hush it up.

It’s so obvious. It stares one in the face.

Like a really good sacrifice at chess.

It’s like drawing. You can’t nibble at a line. The boldness is the line.

I thought out all the sex facts. I wish I knew a little more about men, I wish I was absolutely sure, that I didn’t have to go on things heard, read, half understood, but I’m going to let him do what Piers wanted to do in Spain—what they call Scotch love. Get me into bed if he wants. Play with me if he wants. But not the final thing. I’m going to tell him it’s my time of the month, if he tries to go too far. But I think he’ll be so shocked that I shall be able to make him do what I want. I mean, I’m going to do all the seducing. I know it would be a terrible risk with ninety-nine men out of a hundred, but I think he’s the hundredth. He’ll stop when I tell him.