PEOPLE IN PARIS
317
of his article into French, so there was no more trouble about it. He wrote
to me, "really intolerable language. Times Lit. Sup. all the filth of
dead idiom."
After all this correspondence and long manuscripts, I never got what
I wanted-a poem by Ezra Pound or a part of the Cantos. In spite of his
derivativeness, his false erudition, false virility, and deplorable politics,
Pound is a very fine poet, one of the best.
•
Virginia Woolf's beauty was of such rare distinction that it made
other people look like cart horses. The curve of her mouth was playfully
malicious, essentially aristocratic. She was full of vitality, flatteringly
interested in anything that concerned one-what one was doing, what one
had read, "tell me about new French novels," "what made you a socialist?
I am too, but one must have one's ivory tower as well." The last time I
saw her was at a party at Susan Lawrence's, the Labour M.P. Virginia
Woolf was dressed like a clergyman's wife at a garden party, with a straw
hat pushed on the back of her head. Yet she was the most beautiful woman
in the room. She had the style of her own prose: brilliance, wit and vision.
I told her that I would rather have written
The Waves
than any novel I
knew. "Yes, I liked it," she said. Of the author of a pretentious and
rather bogus mystical novel, we were discussing, she said, "He is the
spiritual God·child of Mrs. Humphrey Ward." The first time I met Vir·
ginia Woolf was at Edith Sitwell's flat in about 1926.· Their two profiles,
talking together, were unique. Edith Sitwell looked like a legendary figure
in a 13th century tapestry, her long Gothic fingers seemed to weave poetry.
•
There is something eminently Victorian about Julien Green and his
sister Anne. They lived in a beautiful but essentially nineteenth century
apartment looking over the Champs de Mars; the Southern flag hung on
the wall, looking rather worn among the paintings by Salvador Dali,
Christian Berard, Tchelitcheff and Berman. Julien Green used to slip in
during his sister Anne's teas. He always looked as if he longed to get away
and was only waiting for the moment when it was least impolite and least
perceptible to return to his own room. His was not the discomfort of
Andre Gide who felt out of place
dans le monde,
but rather the fear of
losing the atmosphere of his room which must have been peopled with
strange dark dreams-perhaps he would find that one of his characters
had disappeared while he was away.
•
I was staying for the weekend at Montmirail, the chateau of the
highbrow Edmee de La Rochefoucauld, among the guests was Andre
Maurois. I asked Maurois if he had read Virginia Woolf's
The Wa.ves
which had just appeared. Maurois answered in a superior voice, "I tried
to read it but could not go on, I cannot understand it."
"If
you read
it carefully a second time, you will," I said. Maurois was annoyed,
"It is not for that reason that one doesn't understand that sort of thing."
