DREAMS OF A BOOK

(January 1941)

This race with time - who is going to win? There
are already 40,000 civilian casualties. The people downstairs,
turn on the radio of the radio-gram with a series of somewhat
out-of-date American swing records. Their little dog yaps and
they shout to one another through the rooms. Bee in the other
bed-room, across the hall-corridor, shouts across to me about
eleven, "cheer up, they usually stop about one."

I can not listen, I can not not-listen. If I could get
up and type in the middle of the night, I would do so. If I
read too late or type, my eyes are tired, blurred in the morning;
I can not read any more, I must read some hours every day, it
is food. But perhaps in all this turn-over, my nerves will turn
over, my eyes get a new strength. Anyway, I did get up and plug
my ears with wax and suddenly, the inside of my head was quiet
and I was listening as it were to snow falling. It was as
quiet as that.

I was happy, in a familiar dimension. So far, I have not
plugged my ears, not even in the worst gun-fire. It seemed safer
to hear what was going on, even though my head felt like an egg-
shell about to crack. We are tougher than we know. One ear
started to bleed, after one of the blitz-nights, but even so,
I could not bear to shut out sound.

2.

Now I believe, I will be able to plug out the sound with
the balls of wax; it will give me a new dimension. Doctors
advise us to do this; one doctor told me that he had the
greatest difficulty with his women patients, men would follow
his directions, but not one woman in ten. Early in the Blitz,
the government advised official ear-plugs. I bought these wax-
balls some time ago, but could never bear to use them.

My chief concern and worry is about my writing. I try
to go over the stacks and heaps of old MSS I have collected
and put aside, but I can not work any of it into shape; it is
to me, dead wood. If I am not blitzed, of course it may be in-
teresting, in some years time, to shape some of the old stuff,
but now it is, as I say, perfectly dead. I can not decently
bury it; I destroy certain papers, but then I say to myself,
after all, if I am blitzed, the house will go with me and the
stack of papers will go, too. This, that I now write will go
with it, and why does one type pages that only have the slight-
est chance of survival? I asked myself that, last night, with
that acute sense of silence.

Then, in that soft sound of silence, I asked myself again,
as I have a thousand times, why I should worry and what does it
matter? If I am blitzed, I won't care what people make of my
old pages and anyway they will be blitzed with me. But there
was another answer in that silence, as of snow falling on snow.

3.

I have had through the years, dreams of a book, a book
that I have written. But this writing would merge, like pic-
tures in a picture-book, into dreams. I have written down
some of those dreams, as they occurred during the years, but
I can't now (bacing with time) look out the old notebooks and
re-type the dreams. But the substance of the dream was the
book, over and over. But this book had to be alive, that is
what it was. The papers that I turn over, in the light of
that dream-book are dead. Pages I type at random, are not my
conception of a book. I must let go my critical faculty, I
can not afford to criticize or re-consider these words. They
are the words of the spell; no matter how haphazard, how
apparently unrelated, how profuse, how illogical, they are
the words that in a sense - this is what it is - keep me
alive.

Obviously, this book, this spell-book must be related to
my first book, my first spelling-book. The book to live, must
go back to the first book, the first spell or spell-ing. We
all forgot our first book. We went off at various tangents
and writing went dead. We must get back to the first spell-ing
book and the magic of making pictures in one's head before one
could spell. The real spell must relate and derive from the
pre-spelling book days.

----

4.

Now the girl comes in and we all have morning coffee
together. She was amused by a letter I had this morning.
"I think," George writes, "that she is marvellous; she wrote
me a delightful letter in which she said she was so thankful
she did not go to the U.S., that she realizes she is living
life with a big L. I think it is wonderful the way these
darling young things leap into the heart of the Fray, and it
is the duty of all of us old things after the Chaos of Peace
arrives to help THEM to form a world decent enough for them to
live in. The Old Predatory Spiders must be exterminated."