t the start of it, you know. I'm in no doubt
as to what you give me--it's a sense of trust. When I think about you, I
feel, 'Come, there is someone at all events who will try to understand me
and to forgive me and to share his best with me'--but even so, my boy, I
shall enjoy being alone sometimes. I shall want to get away from everyone,
even from you! There are thoughts I cannot share with you, because I want
you to think better of me than I do of myself. I suppose that is
vanity--but still old Wordsworth was right when he wrote:

"'And many love me; but by none
Am I enough beloved.'"

XXXIX

OF THE WRITER'S LIFE

I was walking once with Father Payne in the fields, and he was talking
about the difficulties of the writer's life. He said that the great problem
for all industrious writers was how to work in such a way as not to be a
nuisance to the people they lived with. "Of course men vary very much in
their habits," he said; "but if you look at the lives of authors, they
often seem tiresome people to get on with. The difficulty is mostly this,"
he went on, "that a writer can't write to any purpose for more than about
three hours a day--if he works really hard, even that is quite enough to
tire him out. Think what the brain is doing--it is concentrated on some
idea, some scene, some situation. Take a novelist: he has to have a picture
in his mind all the time--a clear visualisation of a place--a room, a
garden, a wood; then he must know how his people move and look and speak,
and he has to fly backwards and forwards from one to another; then he has
the talk to create, and he has to be always rejecting thoughts and
impressions and words, good enough in themselves, but not characteristic.
It is a fearful strain on imagination and emotion, on phrase-making and
word-finding. The real wonder is not that a few people can do it better
than others, but that anyone can do it at all. The difference between the
worst novelist and the best is much less than the difference between the
worst novelist and the person who can't write at all.

"Well, then, there is such a thing as inspiration; most creative writers
get a book in their minds, and can think of nothing else, day and night,
while it is on. The difficulty is to know what a writer is to do in the
intervals between his books, and in the hours in which he is not writing.
He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do.
He can't, as a rule,