We gave another drinks party, talking about our real position and need for people; audience totally unresponsive, as usual, in fact probably internally agaces.
Fabian says: there is no way we can get our position across to the outside world. We will not get anyone to work for us who is any good except for a miracle.
How does he know that?
I knew, even before I was thrown out, that there was no sympathy being expressed for the predicament of outcast intellectuals, but I did not foresee that there would be none at all, in fact hostility as soon as people guessed at one’s true position.
So, no, I have never thought it possible for a person like me to have even a tolerable, as opposed to excruciatingly intolerable, life, outside of a high-flying career in a university. In exile from it I have never been able to contemplate earning money in any other way, and I have had to aim at recreating for myself conditions identical with those which I should have been having in the best sort of university career.
The first essential has always been to work towards the hotel environment of a residential college, plus administrative and secretarial facilities.
As this appears to be an immediate turn-off to people, we have to try to publicise ourselves as widely as possible, to find the very unusual, miraculous people who might actually want to help us. In this we are opposed by social forces which wish us to remain as inconspicuous as possible so that it remains maximally easy for our situation to be misinterpreted by the largest possible proportion of the population.
