Ennui

Friday, September 2nd., Les Sablons.

I did no work since Monday.

On Tuesday I went to Paris. Lunch at Martin's (his cousin Eugene was there). I met Lee Mathews at Hotel St. James at 6.10. We discussed plays and his projects till 7.20. Caught 7.55 home, for  bread and milk at 9 p.m. I bought nothing.
See also, 'French excursion' - 
September 24th., http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/friday-september-24th.html

Couldn't work next day or yesterday. Not sure why. Sometimes one is oppressed by a sense of pointlessness; why make another effort, or even exert oneself to be pleasant? Fortunately, with experience comes the knowledge that the feeling will pass and life will resume its normal optimistic course. In the meantime go through the motions.
So, I resumed "Seeing Life in Paris" this morning, and did 1,200 words.
Yesterday afternoon I just did a New Age article. 

By first post I received news that Pinker could sell serial use of "The Honeymoon" toMcClure's Magazine for £200. I cabled to accept, provided dramatic rights not jeopardised.

Additionally for September 2nd., see 'Death by drowning' - http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/death-by-drowning.html

"Received a letter from my mother today (dated August 30th.) informing me of the death by drowning of my sister Tertia's fiance, Willie Boulton."

Home?

Saturday, September 1st., Comarques.

Comarques, where I lived for some years, is a Queen Anne House , in pale red brick, delightfully situated in a large garden in the country in a quiet corner of Essex. 

I once wrote to Mrs Herzog, an American friend, that "we now possess an early Queen Anne house near the Essex coast and in February are going to install ourselves there definitely for everlasting; our deaths will one day cause a sensation in the village which we shall dominate, and the English villagers and gentry will wonder, as they stroll through the deserted house, why the madman had three bathrooms in a home so small; they will not know that it was due solely to a visit to the USA ..."

Regrettably, my talent as a clairvoyant was not nearly as great as my talent as a writer!

Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken. The door at the rear of the house is covered by a moulded canopy
with an inscribed plaque reading ‘Enoch Arnold Bennett, Author lived here 1913 – 1921.

I took a month's holiday ending yesterday. We went to spend two days at the Schusters during it, and I saw the first batch of the American Army from the windows of the Yacht Club.

American soldiers in France 1918

During World War I, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France at the port of Saint Nazaire. The landing site had been kept secret because of the menace of German submarines, but by the time the Americans had lined up to take their first salute on French soil, an enthusiastic crowd had gathered to welcome them. However, the "Doughboys," as the British referred to the green American troops, were untrained, ill-equipped, and far from ready for the difficulties of fighting along the Western Front.

Health not very good during it, but a distinct benefit as regards the outlook on work actually in progress. I made some advance in watercolours, and more still in monotypes. 

One of my landscapes

I didn't read a lot. Hardy's "Pair of Blue Eyes", full of fine things and immensely sardonic. Last month I dined at Barrie's in London with Thomas Hardy and his wife. Hardy was very lively, talked like anything! He has all his faculties unimpaired. Quite modest and without the slightest pose. Later G.B. Shaw and the Wellses came and Hardy seemed to curl up from fatigue. He became quite silent. The spectacle of Wells and GBS talking firmly and strongly about the war, in their comparative youth, in front of this aged, fatigued and silent man - incomparably their superior as a creative artist - was very striking.

Also read Murray on Euripides - formless but gradually getting at something. 

Reminiscences of Tagore - good. 

"Duchesse de Langeais", quite a major work, which thoroughly held me.

La Duchesse de Langeais is an 1834 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and included in the Scènes de la vie parisienne section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. It is part of his 1839 trilogy Histoire des treize: Ferragus is the first part, Part Two is La Duchesse de Langeais and Part Three is The Girl with the Golden Eyes. It first appeared in 1834 under the title Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe) in the periodical L'Écho de la Jeune France.

<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Duchesse_de_Langeais>