3 December 1934 – 9 December 1934

Isn’t it odd? Some days I can’t read Dante at all after revising The Ps.: other days I find it very sublime and helpful. Raises one out of the chatter of words. But today (doing the scene at the Lodge) I’m too excited. I think it a good book today. I’m in the thick again. But I will stop at the end of the funeral scene and calm my brain. That is I will write the play for Christmas: Freshwater a farce— for a joke. And rig up my Contemporary Criticism article; and look around. David Cecil on fiction: a good book for readers, not for writers—all so elementary; but some good points made, from the outside. I’ve done though with that sort of criticism. And he’s often wrong: gets W. H. wrong, I think; wants to have a profound theory. We—Bloomsbury—are dead; so says Joad. I snap my fingers at him. Lytton and I the two distractions. Poor Francis* lies in a hotel bedroom in Russell Square this rainy morning. I went in and sat with him. Quite himself with a lump on his forehead. And is aware of it all. May die under another operation, or slowly stiffen into complete paralysis. His brain may go. All this he knows; and there it was between us, as we joked. He came to the verge of it once or twice. But I can’t feel any more at the moment—not after Roger. I cannot go through that again. That’s my feeling. I kissed him. “This is the first time—this chaste kiss,” he said. So I kissed him again. But I must not cry, I thought, and so went.