8 March 1937 – 14 March 1937

Oh the relief! L. brought the Lit. Sup. to me in bed and said It’s quite good. And so it is; and Time and Tide says I’m a first rate novelist and a great lyrical poet. And I can already hardly read through the reviews: but feel a little dazed, to think then it’s not nonsense; it does make an effect. Yet of course not in the least the effect I meant. But now, my dear, after all that agony, I’m free, whole; round: can go full ahead. And so stop this cry of content and sober joy. Off to M.H. Julian back today. I use my last five minutes before lunch to note that though I have slipped the gall and fret and despair even of the past few weeks wholly today, and shan’t I think renew them; I have once more loaded myself with the strain of Three Guineas, at which I have been writing hard and laboriously. So now I’m straining to draw that cart across the rough ground. It seems therefore that there is no rest; no sense of It’s finished. One always harnesses oneself by instinct; and can’t live without the strain. Now The Years will completely die out from my mind. Car mended. But rain pouring.

I am in such a twitter owing to two columns in the Observer praising The Years that I can’t, as I foretold, go on with Three Guineas. Why I even sat back just now and thought with pleasure of people reading that review. And when I think of the agony I went through in this room, just over a year ago . . . when it dawned on me that the whole of three years’ work was a complete failure: and then when I think of the mornings here when I used to stumble out and cut up those proofs and write three lines and then go back and lie on my bed—the worst summer in my life, but at the same time the most illuminating—it’s no wonder my hand trembles. What most pleases me though is the obvious chance now since de Selincourt sees it, that my intention in The Years may be not so entirely muted and obscured as I feared. The T.L.S. spoke as if it were merely the death song of the middle classes: a series of exquisite impressions: but he sees that it is a creative, a constructive book. Not that I’ve yet altogether read him: but he has pounced on some of the key sentences. And this means that it will be debated; and this means that Three Guineas will strike very sharp and clear on a hot iron: so that my immensely careful planning won’t be baulked by time of life etc. as I had made certain. Making certain however was an enormous discovery for me, though.