Correspondence – Page 35

To H.Williamson (btd.) 2/4/28

If you send them; but do discount my opinion. The Arab business was a freak in my living; and if I did the wonders they ascribe to me, then it was wholly by accident, for in normal times I’m plumb ordinary. I don’t believe the yarns they tell. Only it seems unseemly to refuse to accept public opinion about itself.

I wonder what you will do about money. Tarka will not have made much, & the more carefully you write the less you are likely to earn. Do you notice how the writers who are very widely sold are so often careless writers? Dickens, in blinking off David and Tolstoi, and Balzac: though Balzac rewrote all his revisions up to a fifth draft, but he wasn’t thinking about their form, so much as at the trends & the characters in them. I wish I could think clearly enough about all the writers in the world, & see if it’s more than blind chance which makes one seem good and another bad: if only there was an absolute somewhere of the final standard by which everything could be measured. At present we have ever so many surveys of literature: but they aren’t so much surveys as sentimental journeys across it. For a survey you must have a measured basis: and instead of that we have just opinions & opinions.

My brain is like a damp sponge, so I’m going to stop. After I’ve read the Old Shag I’ll send you a proper letter, if I can.

Yours
TEL