Therapy

do. “I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that whatever I do, I’ll regret it. If I write Priscilla out of the script, I’ll regret it, if I let someone else do it, I’ll regret it. I’ve been reading Kierkegaard,” I added, thinking Alexandra would be impressed, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps she didn’t hear: she blew her nose just as I said “Kierkegaard.” “You’re prejudging the issue,” she said. “You’re setting yourself up for failure.”
    “I’m just facing facts,” I said. “My indecision is final, as the man said. Take last weekend.” I told her about my vacillation over attending the recording session.
    “But you did stick to a decision in the end,” Alexandra observed. “You went to the studio. Do you regret it?”
    “Yes, because it put me in the wrong with Sally.”
    “You didn’t know at the time that she had invited those neighbours round.”
    “No, but I should have listened when she told me. And anyway I knew she would disapprove of my going to the studio for other reasons, like the road conditions — that’s why I rushed out of the house before she had the chance to talk me out of it. If I had given her the chance, I would have finally got the message that the Websters were coming round.” “And in that case you would have stayed in?”
    “Of course.”
    “And is that what you wish had happened?”
    I thought for a moment. “No,” I said.
    We both laughed, rather despairingly.
     
    Am I really in despair? No, nothing as dramatic as that. More like what B calls doubt. He makes a distinction between doubt and despair. Despair is better because at least it entails choice. “So then choose despair, since despair is itself a choice, for one can doubt without choosing to, but despair one cannot without choosing to do so. And when one despairs one chooses again, and what does one choose? One chooses oneself, not in one’s immediacy, not as this contingent individual, one chooses oneself in one’s eternal validity.” Sounds impressive, but is it possible to choose despair and not want to top yourself? Could you just accept despair, live in it, be proud of it, rejoice in it?
    B says there’s one thing he agrees with A about: that if you’re a poet you’re bound to be miserable, because “poet-existence as such lies in the obscurity that results from despair’s not being carried through, from the soul’s constantly shivering in despair and the spirit’s being unable to gain its true transparency.” So it seems you can be shivering in despair without actually choosing it. Is this my state? Does it apply to script-writer-existence as well as poet-existence?
    Philip Larkin knew all about this sort of despair. I just looked up “Mr Bleaney”:
     
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
 
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
     
    It’s all there: “Shivered... dread... I don’t know.”
    What made me think of Larkin was a report in the paper today that Andrew Motion’s forthcoming biography will reveal him in an even worse light than the recent edition of his letters. I haven’t read the Letters and I don’t want to. I don’t want to read the new biography, either. Larkin is my favourite modern poet (about the only one I can understand, actually) and I don’t want to have the pleasure of reading him ruined. Apparently he used to end telephone conversations to Kingsley Amis by saying, “Fuck Oxfam.” Admittedly, there are worse things than saying “Fuck Oxfam”, for instance actually doing it, like the gunmen in Somalia who steal the aid intended for starving women and children, but still, what did he want to say a stupid thing like that for? I took out my charity cheque book and sent off fifty quid to OXFAM. I did it for Philip Larkin. Like Maureen used to collect indulgences and credit them to her dead granddad. She explained it to me one day, all about Purgatory and temporary punishment — daftest stuff you ever heard in your life. Maureen Kavanagh. I wonder what happened to her. I wonder where she is now.
     
    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
     
    Wednesday 3rd March, late. I met the squatter in the entryway tonight. This is how it happened.
    Amy and I went to see An