8 September 1930 – 14 September 1930

I will signalise my return to life—that is writing—by beginning a new book, and it happens to be Thoby’s birthday, I remark. He would have been, I think, 50 today. After coming out here I had the usual—oh how usual—headache; and lay, like a fibre of tired muscle on my bed in the sitting room, till yesterday. Now up again and on again; with one new picture in my mind; my defiance of death in the garden. But the sentence with which this book was to open ran “Nobody has ever worked so hard as I do”—exclaimed in driving a paper fastener through the 14 pages of my Hazlitt just now. Time was when I dashed off these things all in the day’s work. Now, partly because I must do them for America and make arrangements far ahead, I spend I daresay a ridiculous amount of time, more of trouble, on them. I began reading Hazlitt in January I think. And I am not sure that I have speared that little eel in the middle—that marrow—which is one’s object in criticism. A very difficult business no doubt to find it, in all these essays; so many; so short; and on all subjects. Never mind; it shall go today; and my appetite for criticism is, oddly, whettened. I have some gift that way, were it not for the grind and the screw and the torture.