12 May

12 May 1920

2 Portland Villas, Hampstead - London

[. . .] Here's a small letter I had from Eliot. He and Murry meet very often. I have asked them both here for Thursday or Friday evening. What will they be like, I wonder? The grey door of my room keeps on
opening and opening in my mind and Mrs Eliot and Eliot enter. I can't see her at all - only something slightly conscious and over confident. . . Jones is in a hovering mood - very unsure. She brings one flowers that simply droop and hang their heads with soft sentiment. And I say I only like hard bright round flowers with straight stems. I can't bear those curving lan¬guid creatures. So they go into her room. Poor Jones. I am so horrid.
Men come up in the evenings - immense men about 7 or 8 foot high. They sprawl on the sommier, lounge on the little couch, take chance shots with the cigarette ash and never reach the inside of the fender. They boom: ‘It's impossible to write now a days. For there is nothing to write about. The artist must be at one with his times. There must be, as there was in the 18th century, a rich, leisured, cultivated public who understood the artist. You can't pretend that anything happens now a days. It's impossible. An artist can't cut himself off from his times and what has he got to hang on to now a days? The short story is either over or it's not going to be written in our time . . . One has the impression that each gentleman has a large loaf of household bread and is cutting you off and handing you large chunks on the tip of - such a dreadfully blunt knife. [To Sydney and Violet Schiff in Collected Letters, 10 May 1920]