20–26 May 1935

Oddities of the human brain: woke early and again considered dashing off my book on Professions, to which I had not given a single thought these 7 or 8 days. Why? This vacillates with my novel—how are they both to come out simultaneously. But it is a sign that I must get pen to paper again. Yet at the moment I am going rag marketing with N. and A., who don’t come.

I’m writing at six on a Sunday evening, with a band playing and stopping and children shouting in a too luxurious hotel where the waiters bring one the menu and I mix my French scandalously with odd scraps of painfully acquired Italian. Still I can rattle off Gli Indifferenti lying on my bed for pleasure. Oh the loveliness of the land still here and there—for instance that first morning’s drive out of Rome—the sea and the lip of the unviolated land: and the umbrella pines, after Civita Vecchia: then of course all the intense boredom of Genoa and the Riviera, with its geraniums and its bougainvillea and its sense of shoving you between hill and sea and keeping you there in a bright luxury light without room to turn, so steep the vulture neck hills come down. But we slept at Lerici the first night which does the bay, the brimming sea and the green sailing ship and the island and the sparkling fading red and yellow night lamps to perfection. But that kind of perfection no longer makes me feel for my pen. It’s too easy. But driving today I was thinking of Roger—Brignolles—Corges—my word, the olives and the rust red earth and the flat green and the trees. But now the band has begun again and we must go down to dine sumptuously off local trout. Off tomorrow and home on Friday. But though I’m impatient for my brain to eat again, I can dally out these last days better than sometimes. Why? Why? I go on asking myself. And feel I could soon polish off those final scenes: a possible amplification of the first paragraph occurred to me. But I don’t want to grind at “writing” too hard. To open my net wide. It occurs to me, as we drive, how I’m disliked, how I’m laughed at; and I’m rather proud of my intention to take the fence gallantly. But writing again!