16 November 1931 – 22 November 1931

Here I will give myself the pleasure—shall I?—of copying a sentence or two from Morgan’s unsolicited letter on The Waves:— “I expect I shall write to you again when I have re-read The Waves. I have been looking in it and talking about it at Cambridge. It’s difficult to express oneself about a work which one feels to be so very important, but I’ve the sort of excitement over it which comes from believing that one’s encountered a classic.” I daresay that gives me more substantial pleasure than any letter I’ve had about any book. Yes, I think it does, coming from Morgan. For one thing it gives me reason to think I shall be right to go on along this very lonely path. I mean in the City today I was thinking of another book—about shopkeepers, and publicans, with low life scenes: and I ratified this sketch by Morgan’s judgment. Dadie agrees too. Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style! To be noted, as curiosities of my literary history: I sedulously avoid meeting Roger and Lytton whom I suspect do not like The Waves. I am working very hard—in my way, to furbish up two long Elizabethan articles to front a new Common Reader: then I must go through the whole long list of those articles. I feel too, at the back of my brain, that I can devise a new critical method; something far less stiff and formal than these Times articles. But I must keep to the old style in this volume. And how, I wonder, could I do it? There must be some simpler, subtler, closer means of writing about books, as about people, could I hit upon it. (The Waves has sold more than 7,000.)