of these scrawls of notes and sometimes incoherent words—even by the thousands of crude drawings, swift designs which he scrawled down in a thousand towns and places, to get the texture of a wall, the design of a door, the shape of a table, even the sword-cut on a man’s scarred face—because in all of these shells and splinters that were thrown off from his tormented and uneasy brain the terrible Faustian fever of his tortured spirit was evident—no better image of his life—the life of a young man of that period—of modern man caught in the Faustian serpent-toils of modern life—can be given than the splintered jottings in these battered little books afford.
Here, then, picked out at random from the ferment of ten thousand pages and a million words—put down just as they were written, in fragments, jots, or splintered flashes, without order or coherence—here, with all its vanity, faith, despair, joy, and anguish, with all its falseness, error and pretension, and with all its desperate sincerity, its incredible hope, its insane desire, is a picture of a man’s soul and heart—the image of his infuriate desire—caught hot and instant, drawn flaming from the forge of his soul’s agony.
Monday, November 17, 1924: Worked over 5 hours up to present (9.40) Cigarettes and coffee—Very tired.
Tuesday: Worked 4 hours yesterday. Very tired today only an hour—more tonight—
Wednesday: Good week’s work last week—Four or five hours’actual writing every day—I may succeed ultimately because I’m not content with what I do.
I was born in 1900—I am now 24 years old. During that period I think the best writing in English has been done by James Joyce in “Ulysses”—I think the best writing in the ballad has been done by G. K. Chesterton in “Lepanto.” The best writing in sustained narrative verse by John Masefield—particularly in “The Dauber,” “The River” and “The Widow in The Bye Street.” Who produce copiously—Arnold Bennett—The best practitioners of the Essay—Belloc—the most gigantically thorough realist—Theodore Dreiser—The most sparing selection and unfailingly competent—Galsworthy—The best play for Poetry—“The Playboy of Western World”—The best journalist—Sinclair Lewis.
The critic with the greatest subtlety—T. S. Eliot—The critic with the greatest
