29 March 1937 – 4 April 1937

How I interest myself! Quite set up and perky today with a mind brimming because I was so damnably depressed and smacked on the cheek by Edwin Muir in the Listener and by Scott James in the Life and Letters on Friday. They both gave me a smart snubbing: E. M. says The Years is dead and disappointing. So in effect did S. James. All the lights sank; my reed bent to the ground. Dead and disappointing—so I’m found out and that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure. No life in it. Much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality of Miss Compton Burnett. Now this pain woke me at 4 A.M. and I suffered acutely. All day driving to Janet and back I was under the cloud. But about 7 it lifted; there was a good review, of 4 lines, in the Empire Review. The best of my books: did that help? I don’t think very much. But the delight of being exploded is quite real. One feels braced for some reason; amused; round; combative; more than by praise.

Another curious idiosyncrasy. Maynard thinks The Years my best book: thinks one scene, E. and Crosby, beats Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard—and this opinion though from the centre, from a very fine mind, doesn’t flutter me as much as Muir’s blame; it sinks in slowly and deeply. It’s not a vanity feeling; the other is; the other will die as soon as the week’s number of the Listener is past. L. went to Tilton and had a long quiet cronies talk. Maynard said that he thought The Years very moving: more tender than any of my books: did not puzzle him like The Waves; symbolism not a worry; very beautiful; and no more said than was needed; hadn’t yet finished it. But how compose the two opinions; it’s my most human book; and most inhuman? Oh to forget all this and write—as I must tomorrow.