, in general, found it difficult to write
of places under too immediate an impression - the impression that prevents
standing off and allows neither space nor time for perspective. The image has
had for the most part to be dim if the reflexion was to be, as is proper for a
reflexion, both sharp and quiet: one has a horror, I think, artistically, of
agitated reflexions.
    Perhaps that is why the novel, after all, was to achieve, as it went on, no
great - certainly no very direct - transfusion of the immense overhanging
presence. It had to save as it could its own life, to keep tight hold of the
tenuous silver thread, the one hope for which was that it shouldn't be tangled
or clipped. This earnest grasp of the silver thread was doubtless an easier
business in other places - though as I remount the stream of composition I see
it faintly coloured again: with the bright protection of the Normandy coast (I
worked away a few weeks at Êtretat); with the stronger glow of southernmost
France, breaking in during a stay at Bayonne; then with the fine historic and
other psychic substance of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a purple patch of terraced
October before returning to Paris. There comes after that the memory of a last
brief intense invocation of the enclosing scene, of the pious effort to unwind
my tangle, with a firm hand, in the very light (that light of high, narrowish
French windows in old rooms, the light somehow, as one always feels, of style
itself) that had quickened my original vision. I was to pass over to London that
autumn; which was a reason the more for considering the matter - the matter of
Newman's final predicament - with due intensity: to let a loose end dangle over
into alien air would so fix upon the whole, I strenuously felt, the dishonour of
piecemeal composition. Therefore I strove to finish - first in a small dusky
hotel of the Rive Gauche, where, though the windows again were high, the days
were dim and the crepuscular court, domestic, intimate, quaint, testified to
ancient manners almost as if it had been that of Balzac's Maison Vauquer in Le
Père Goriot: and then once more in the Rue de Luxembourg, where a black-framed
Empire portrait-medallion, suspended in the centre of each white panel of my
almost noble old salon, made the coolest, discreetest, most measured decoration,
and where, through casements open to the last mildness of the year, a belated
Saint Martin's summer
