14 August 1933 – 20 August 1933

And owing to Sir Alan Cobham’s flying and Angelica and Julian and fetching the boat I had another headache and bed and didn’t see Ethel, but heard her voice and have 6 pages on the subject this morning, and didn’t see the Wolves and am out here again* rubbing at The Pargiters and thinking Oh Lord how am I ever going to pull all that into shape. What a tremendous struggle it’ll bel Never mind. I want to discuss Form, having been reading Turgenev. (But how my hand trembles after one of these headaches—can’t lay hands on words or pens exactly —the habit has been broken.) Form, then, is the sense that one thing follows another rightly. This is partly logic. T. wrote and re-wrote. To clear the truth of the unessential. But Dostoievsky would say that everything matters. But one can’t read D. again. Now Shakespeare was constrained in form by the stage. (T. says one must find a new form for the old subject: but here, I suppose, uses the word differently.) The essential thing in a scene is to be preserved. How do you know what this is? How do we know if the D. form is better or worse than the T.? It seems less permanent. T.’s idea that the writer states the essential and lets the reader do the rest. D. to supply the reader with every possible help and suggestion. T. reduces the possibilities. The difficulty about criticism is that it is so superficial. The writer has gone so much deeper. T. kept a diary for Bozarov: wrote everything from his point of view. We have only 250 short pages. Our criticism is only a birds eye view of the pinnacle of an iceberg. The rest under water. One might begin it in this way. The article might be more broken, less composed than usual.