‘Books—books—books,’ said Helen, in her absent-minded way. ‘More new books—I wonder what you find in them …’
*
‘Novels,’ [Rachel] repeated. ‘Why do you write novels? You ought to write music. Music, you see’—she shifted her eyes, and became less desirable as her brain began to work, inflicting a certain change upon her face—’music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much’—she paused for an expression, and rubbed her fingers in the earth—scratching on the match-box’.
*
What novels do you write?’ [Rachel] asked.
‘I want to write a novel about Silence,’ [Hewet] said; ‘the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.’ He sighed. ‘However, you don’t care,’ he continued. He looked at her almost severely. ‘Nobody cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, made it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,’ he indicated the hotel, ‘are always wanting something they can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one……
