That is an analogy -Į is the old woman Laura was in love with for thirty years. That I wobble so that if I’m not careful, I’ll fall It is rather as if I were on my bicycle - bicyclingĪlong merrily, and then a car passes too close, so Whenever we hear from Laura, we enter into the plangent yearning of the life un-lived, as only the poetic, and the diary writers, can describe: ‘How I wish I was Barbara Windsor.’ And she is a master artist of the misery of low self-confidence. The material business of everyday life has to be seen to. Only stopping for meals or a walk as I used to.Ī pity that I can not allow myself to do that now. Would like to enter into it again and write, write, write O glorious blaze of the imaginative world! ‘I who am always young will inevitably be old.’ Laura, (that is the diarist’s name), has the true, tortured soul of a creative person. (Although at an estimated five million total words, it certainly is a compendium.) There is poetry in the way she writes about herself. The diary is not a mere compendium of misery. That particular devotion lasted thirty years. In her adolescence she fell in love with a pensioner who seduced her by playing a Beethoven sonata, and who then berated her endlessly about being useless and a failure and unloved.
She’s a failed librarian who ended up working as a live-in housekeeper for a bully. We have potentially been gifted a great diarist of the twentieth century.īest of all, our diarist is not a politician, a gossip, an author, a socialite, or any other sort of extroverted lackey on the social merry-go-round. The journey from the young magical vibrations of ambition to the bleak imprisoned despair of late middle age rivals Larkin’s letters. And not just in material terms: she never lived up to the deeply held visions she had of herself as an artist (written, musical, visual). A diarist whose life was a colossal failure.
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