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Rainer Maria Rilke in one of his letters says: 'Ultimately, each of us experiences only one conflict in life which constantly reappears in a different guise.' With Marion Milner this 'only one conflict' has expressed itself in 'the deliberate endeavour to find a way of coming to terms with daily life which began when I started keeping a diary in 1926, and has continued during nearly twenty-five years of living.' She has recorded it in a trilogy, A Life of One's Own, An Experiment with Leisure, and On Not Being Able to Paint. Joanna Field is a pseudonym.
In this review we are concerned with the latest volume: On Not Being Able to Paint. This reports on the evolution of the æsthetic interest and the vicissitudes of psychic creativity in the author's search to live with the whole scope and depth of her sensibility. And like all spiritual odysseys there are no dramatic events to startle or grip one's emotions. The drama lies essentially in the quiet outflow of a sensibility that batters down its own confines of established thought and perception, to unfold an emergent richer texture of feelings, through nimble antics of hand, eye, and emotion. The inner intensity of living pervades the written text just as it seethes in the accompanying drawings. The æsthetic experience is vital, liberating, and full of joy. But it is not a mood of gaiety imposed from without and bolstered up with didactic attitudes of mind. The abandon and vagrant delight of the author's mood is a very welcome experience in our times when everyone is set on saving every one else's soul. The earnestness that stabilizes this mood derives authentically from a pictorial realization of 'the inner brooding quality of nature'.
The reviewer can only exhort all, especially psycho-analysts, to read and re-read the book. Only a passionate attitude of surrendered attention will yield rapport with it; because the author's humility is such that one's pride of intellect can easily skate through the book w