Class and Snobbery Theme Analysis

The only times I didn’t have nice dreams about her being when I saw her with a certain young man, a loud noisy public-school type who had a sports car. I stood beside him once in Barclays waiting to pay in and I heard him say, I’ll have it in fivers; the joke being it was only a cheque for ten pounds. They all behave like that. Well, I saw her climb in his car sometimes, or them out together in the town in it, and those days I was very short with the others in the office, and I didn’t use to mark the X in my entomological observations diary (all this was before she went to London, she dropped him then). Those were days I let myself have the bad dreams. She cried or usually knelt. Once I let myself dream I hit her across the face as I saw it done once by a chap in a telly play. Perhaps that was when it all started.

She often went on about how she hated class distinction, but she never took me in. It’s the way people speak that gives them away, not what they say. You only had to see her dainty ways to see how she was brought up. She wasn’t la-di-da, like many, but it was there all the same. You could see it when she got sarcastic and impatient with me because I couldn’t explain myself or I did things wrong. Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

I don’t hold it against her, she probably said and did some of the shocking things she did to show me she wasn’t really refined, but she was. When she was angry she could get right up on her high horse and come it over me with the best of them. There was always class between us.

She just looked at me.

“Ferdinand,” she said. “They should have called you Caliban.”

Power. It’s become so real.

I know the H-bomb is wrong. But being so weak seems wrong now too.

I wish I knew judo. Could make him cry for mercy.

Upstairs, bedrooms, lovely rooms in themselves, but all fusty, unlived-in. A strange dead air about everything. Downstairs what he (he would) called “the lounge” is a beautiful room, much bigger than the other rooms, peculiarly square, you don’t expect it, with one huge crossbeam supported on three uprights in the middle of the room, and other crossbeams and nooks and delicious angles an architect wouldn’t think of once in a thousand years. All massacred, of course, by the furniture. China wild duck on a lovely old fireplace. I couldn’t stand it, I got him to retie my hands in front and then I unhooked the monsters and smashed them on the hearth.

That hurt him almost as much as when I slapped his face for not letting me escape.

I’m so superior to him. I know this sounds wickedly conceited. But I am. And so it’s Ladymont and Boadicaea and noblesse oblige all over again. I feel I’ve got to show him how decent human beings live and behave.

He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.

7. But you don’t compromise with your background. You cut off all the old you that gets in the way of the maker you. If you’re suburban (as I realize D and M are—their laughing at suburbia is just a blind), you throw away (cauterize) the suburbs. If you’re working class, you cauterize the working class in you. And the same, whatever class you are, because class is primitive and silly.

Between them Caroline and M have every quality I hate in other women. I had a sort of despair for days afterwards, thinking how much of their rotten, pretentious blood I must have in me. Of course, there are times when I like Caroline. Her briskness. Her enthusiasm. Her kindness. And even all the pretentiousness that’s so horrid next to the real thing—well, it’s better than nothing. I used to think the world of her when she came to stay. I used to love staying with her. She backed me up when there was the great family war about my future. All that till I lived with her and saw through her. Grew up.

I felt sorry for Caliban this evening. He will suffer when I am gone. There will be nothing left. He’ll be alone with all his sex neurosis and his class neurosis and his uselessness and his emptiness. He’s asked for it. I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.

I hate them. I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and the mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren’t ashamed of being dull and little. I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie.

I have not made up my mind about Marian (another M! I heard the supervisor call her name), this time it won’t be love, it would just be for the interest of the thing and to compare them and also the other thing, which as I say I would like to go into in more detail and I could teach her how. And the clothes would fit. Of course I would make it clear from the start who’s boss and what I expect.

But it is still just an idea. I only put the stove down there today because the room needs drying out anyway.