Summat missing

Thursday, April 9th., Les Sablons.

A great Spring day today. Also yesterday. Sofia, a friend of ours, wrote the other day that "Spring had sprung" and she was right. I walked to Fontainebleau and back yesterday morning and wrote 2,000 words of novel in the afternoon; mainly background detail! This afternoon we had tea in the garden - first reflection of the year outside.

Finished Merrick's "The Actor-Manager" in twenty four hours. This is praise of it. The interest keeps up but the book ends abruptly, and unreasonably, long before the story is finished. I find it remarkable that so few authors really know how to finish a book. It is undoubtedly a good book but rather monotonous in colour and movement, and practically no backgrounds in it at all. As for scenic effects, whether of town or country, scarcely an attempt. It is excellent so far as it goes; but it lacks. It lacks the romantic feeling , or summat! I know that many authors see character as the focus of a novel and regard background detail, what I would call context, as of secondary importance. Not me. Not when I write or when I read. I find a richly described background essential for thorough immersion in a novel. And I don't think a character is separable from their context in a novel, or in life.

Getting on

Friday, April 7th., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

The end of winter was very sudden last week. On Tuesday last week was the worst blizzard for fifty years, in which our car got smashed up against a tree that had fallen across the Colchester road. Snow, slush etc. very trying. And then on Saturday the sun was very hot, and the roads full of flying dust. Just like summer even to the East and North-East winds.

I really 'got on to' the first scene of "Carlotta" play on Wednesday.

In the meantime I have been reading Conrad short stories. "Youth" excellent. It evidently comes from the heart and is perfectly convincing. Then "The End of the Tether". Probably the second or third time I have read it and likely to be my last. As I get older so it becomes more and more poignant. I don't think I could bear to see Captain Whalley decline again. It is a tragedy in the real sense of the word. A masterpiece in my view. When I am drawn into a story by a writer of Conrad's genius I realise anew just what a miracle literature is. I hope that somewhere, at some time, someone has felt the same having read a work of mine. If so, my life will not have been wasted.