THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
eyebrows and laughing, "I'm not aware of having written about Blooms–
bury, but you know one has to write such a lot these days.... " "Well,
then,
if
it's not you, it's Stephen." "Oh, Stephen! How like him. Still,
I can imagine nothing more charming than an essay by you, Virginia,
about Maida Vale." In some such way, William would tease her back,
and the rather edgy conversation would change. She would talk then
about writing, say suddenly: "How do you write, William?" "How do I
write?" "Yes. What do you do when you write? Do you look out of
the window? Do you write while you are walking in the street? Do you
cross out a lot? Do you smoke when you're writing? Do you start by
thinking of one line?" She had a technique of cross-questioning like this,
and would cross-question everyone, charwomen, bus drivers, newly mar–
ried girls, ladies in waiting....
When PIorner and I had both been questioned, we would ask her
about her writing. And perhaps she would come out with something
like this: "I don't think there's any form in which the novel has to be
written. My idea is to make use of every form and bring it within a
unity
which is a novel. There's no reason why a novel shouldn't be
written partly in poetry, partly in prose, and with scenes in it like scenes
in
a play. Before 1 die, 1 would like to write a novel which was a fusion
of poetry and dialogue as in a play. 1 would like to experiment with
every form that 1 can bring into the novel."
Then after dinner we would go down to the drawing room again,
and Virginia would smoke a cheroot. The conversation would pass from
literature to gossip about personalities, quite possibly to Hugh Walpole
the best-selling novelist of whom she was fond but whose character, made
up of a combination of impenetrable complacency thickly overlaying
unfathomable uneasiness (the complacency and the uneasiness existing
in
exactly equal proportions), fascinated Virginia. She was never tired
of
performing the miracle, only possible to her, of pricking through the
complacency to the uneasiness. By her cross questioning methods she
extracted from him frightful confessions, the comparative sales of his
novels and those of
J.
B.
Priestley, the awful story of how he had "made"
J.
B. Priestley and then been overwhelmed by his success, the still more
awful story of how he had sat up all night reading Somerset Maugham's
Cakes and Ale
and read the most cruel dissection of his own career in
the
portrait of the best-selling novelist, and then sat down and written
a review saying that it was the best novel of the year, the make of
Hugh's
car and its speed and performance, the fact that his chauffeur
had
a striking resemblance to Hugh, the exact weight of the paper being
stored
in
a warehouse by his publisher to print the novel which Hugh
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