29 May 1933 – 4 June 1933

I think I have now got to the point where I can write for four months straight ahead at The Pargiters. Oh the relief—the physical relief! I feel as if I could hardly any longer keep back—that my brain is being tortured by always butting against a blank wall—I mean Flush, Goldsmith, motoring through Italy. Now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off. And suppose only nonsense comes? The thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence. One might introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues: must get the round, not only the flat. Not the theory only. And conversation: argument. How to do that will be one of the problems. I mean intellectual argument in the form of art: I mean how give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the form of art? These are rich hard problems for my four months ahead. And I don’t know my own gifts at the moment. I’m disoriented completely after four weeks’ holiday—no three—but tomorrow we go to Rodmell again. And I must fill up the chinks with reading—and don’t want to settle down to books—Well, now I have to go up to Murray about my dress: and there’s Ethel round the corner; but no letters; disorganisation from Whitsun again. I thought, driving through Richmond last night, something very profound about the synthesis of my being: how only writing composes it: how nothing makes a whole unless I am writing: now I have forgotten what seemed so profound. The rhododendron like coloured glass mounds at Kew. Oh the agitation, oh the discomfort of this mood. And I am at once called out to draw lots in our Derby sweepstake. No favourite this year, they say. Very well: the old Pargiters are beginning to run off: and I say oh to be done. I mean, writing is effort: writing is despair: and yet of course t’other day in the grilling heat at Rodmell I admit that the perspective—this I think was something like my profound thought at Richmond—shifts into focus: yes: the proportion is right: though I at the top suffer strain; suffer, as this morning, grim despair and shall O Lord when it comes to re-writing suffer an intensity of anguish ineffable (the word only means one can’t express it); holding the thing;—all the things— the innumerable things—together.