An analysis of the making of [my first short story, 'Raspberry Jam'] may suggest some of the ways in which a novelist unconsciously comes to make one moral statement while supposing that he is making another. The story, the first fictional work of my life, was written in feverish excitement in one day. I proposed earlier that the present book should contain no estimation of my own work, but I pause to say that the failure of English masters, at all the schools I attended, to give me any comprehension of the purpose of punctuation is splendidly evident in that story. It tells of a boy of thirteen, the lonely son of conventional, self-centred upper middle class parents in an English village. He has only two friends in the village: two old sisters of gentle birth, now impoverished, drunken and the subject of village scandal. While an adult group at his mother's house gossip about the two old women, ostensibly asking whether they are suitable friends for the boy, Johnnie returns in his mind to the episode that, unknown to his family, has brought his friendship with them to an end, a terrible and traumatic episode for him. The two old women had invited him to tea. When he arrived they were clearly half-tipsy and they plied him with drink. They then brought in a bullfinch—'the prisoner'—and tortured it to death in front of him. The act, of course, though to the boy it is just an incredible horror, is in fact a culmination of rising paranoia produced in the simple, imaginative, generous old women by the narrow-minded malice, jealousy and frightened detestation that their originality has aroused in the village. The irony is that in their drunken craziness they destroy their friendship with Johnnie which alone gave any natural play to their generosity and childlike imaginative needs, perhaps destroy for ever the innocence of the boy himself.

When I wrote this story I saw the two old women as the embodiment of that saintliness which the mediocrity of the world seeks to destroy; by this reading, their craziness and their destruction of their young friend's peace of mind is not their 'fault' but that of the world which has failed to cherish them. Yet, as I have subsequently thought of the story, I have felt this to be a disturbingly illogical pattern, at variance with the shape of the story as it unfolds. I see now that what the story says, as opposed to what I thought I was saying, is that those, who like my old women, seek to retain a childlike (childish) innocence, and in particular a childlike (childish) ignorance, however 'good' their conscious motives, will inevitably destroy themselves and in all probability those they love. It is not insignificant, perhaps, that Johnnie, who at the age of thirteen might reasonably live in a world of childlike (childish) fantasy, is shown, without my realizing it as I wrote, using this fantasy to protect himself from the reality of his parents' demands upon him to grow up—although their conception of growing up, of course, is an inadequate one.

The character was drawn directly from myself as I had been at that age, but I felt only sympathy with my childhood self as I wrote, and did not notice the sting in the tale. Further, the old women, intended to strengthen the concept of childlike (childish) goodness, but really undermining it, were taken from two old women I knew much later in my life, at the age of twenty or so. And with these women, far from successfully creating an imaginative bond, I rather seriously failed to make any rapport at all, whereas a brother of mine was beloved by them. This was the brother next to me who at the age of thirteen had endured his nose being put out of joint by my unexpected birth. He was a saintly and exceedingly selfless man, and I only fear that the old ladies' preference for him showed a greater insight than I granted them; for in real life I regarded them not as receptacles of sanctity, but, like the village in the story, thought of them solely as a crazy nuisance, the more crazy since they did not respond to my charms. I seem in fiction to have righted any disappointment I may have felt by making them the intimates of my own starved affections at a much earlier age.

Such falsification in fact, unconscious at the time of writing (I had no conscious memory of the old women and was only vaguely aware that Johnnie came out of myself) suggests the way in which fiction can be constructed out of protective falsehood. The moral truth of the story was still deep in my unconscious; the conscious mind was soothed with fact unconsciously rearranged to propose a more flattering, untrue moral thesis. But the shape of the narrative defies this falsification.

Implicit in this first story also was the observation of the English social scene as it had changed since 1939. This social aspect coloured the larger part of the stories that I wrote for my first two books in 1949 and in 1950. I was struck then by the fact that a mild social revolution had taken place in England overnight, although its novelists had not yet noticed this. Readers and critics alike responded to this aspect of my stories. Indeed it earned me a reputation for being a 'social satirist', which seems to me only an aspect of my writing. The stories had indeed a sort of à la page assessment that 'placed' many things in the new English society that had not yet been mapped. I think that I could not have done this if I had not come from a family and a social background that was so essentially a part of the older disappearing England. The very small-scale rentier and professional group to which my family belonged had no place in Labour's England and was subsequently to prove the most expendable element of the Tory Party's supporters when the Conservatives began to convert social-welfare England into an affluent opportunity society. My attitude to this social revolution was inevitably ambivalent, my affections often in conflict with my reason; this is reflected in the stories. Yet I doubt if I could have imagined fictions concerning this social change with any intensity, even though the world of my family was condemned by it, had I not myself been forced at that very same moment to make a similar change-over from long preserved childhood ways to some acceptance of an adult world.

Beneath many of these stories, most of which bear a far more social-seeming surface than the first story, 'Raspberry Jam,' that I have analysed, there lies the same attack on the falsity of preserved innocence or ignorance. This false innocence is embodied in the heroes and heroines and in all these characters I believed as I wrote that I was describing true simplicity. It would be tedious to detail other examples in addition to the old ladies of 'Raspberry Jam,' but for those interested I would point to Vi, the night club pianist in 'The Wrong Set,' to the young civil servant hero of 'Crazy Crowd,' and to the haunted lady of ''A Little Companion.' I do not, of course, say that the social statement in these satirical short stories is not rightly the centre of interest. Nor would it be true to say that the conflict between emotion and reason embodied in the social aspect of the stories is altered by the personal conflict that lies behind it—my affection and dislike for my youthful self about equalled the affection and dislike I felt for the dodo classes I described—but I emphasize the personal impulse here because I know that without it I should not have written the stories at all, and I also believe that it is this underlying personal motive which injects into them the fierceness that is their strength.

A change comes with the title story of my second book, Such Darling Dodos. This story more openly lays a charge against the preserved innocence of the genuinely good, but blinkered, left-wing don and his wife. I had become by then somewhat more conscious of my hostility to cherished illusions, at any rate in the political sphere. Yet in a way, too, once more the attack shifts to a new, deeper, unconscious level. It is clearly in this story no longer possible to judge on a purely social level. If, for the moment, the sympathies of the educated youth of England have swung against the left-wing causes of Priscilla and Robin (ironically at the moment of Labour's triumph at the polls), no reader (and certainly not the writer) can suppose that these causes have become the less worthwhile in themselves. This is not, as my earlier satire on the nouveau pauvre or the lumpen-bourgeoisie, an attack on false standards, but an attack on insufficient standards. Robin and Priscilla lack some deeper personal convictions, some poetry to illumine them when history has temporarily turned against them. Even so Robin is given a dignity superior (though no more touching, I think) to the 'pluckiness' of the nouveau pauvre. Yet in the long run, for all their superior intellect and better morality, my new liberal targets had failed to realize themselves quite as much as the raffish flotsam of The Wrong Set. This attack on insufficient good-works liberalism was to be the conscious theme of the play I wrote called The Mulberry Bush with an equally dignified target—the Padleys. . . .

What of the context in which [the themes of my short stories and early novels] were placed, from what part of my life have I taken the material of my fiction? Often, as in 'Raspberry Jam,' the events from two parts of my life fuse to make one imaginative whole. I have already suggested, in the case of this story, why these two episodes should have been brought together. In these early stories, in any case, I found material by deliberately surveying my youth and adolescence, by using the incidents that I recalled and mingled in order to reflect ironically upon the position that the middle classes had reached ten or twenty years later. Typical of such stories is 'Saturnalia,' a potpourri of hotel types, assembled for the servants' ball on New Year's Eve 1931. The story somewhat confounded American critics, since the idea of a mixed servants' and guests' dance is a typical product of British class snobbery. American status snobbery finds, no doubt, other occasions, office parties for instance, which indeed have become more typical in an England now more committed to a status society. I chose 1931 deliberately both for its direct reflection upon the relations of the classes in the opening years of the depression, and for its ironic reflection in contrast with the changed position of 1947 (the year in which it was written) although overtones of the future are present in the story as they were in 1931.

Nevertheless the stories never came to me by selection from a past lying open ready as a book from which to take appropriately didactic selections. Most of these short stories came from a remembered phrase or word that in retrospect seemed to have a curiously ironic ring. For instance, The Wrong Set stuck in my mind because it had been used by a Church of England dignitary to describe the world in which his daughter, to his great distress, was moving. As she lived in the eminently respectable British South Coast town of Bournemouth, I had been puzzled. But it later emerged that to his horror she had become friendly with 'Chapel people'. The anecdote and the expression became a part of the stereotyped private language which I shared with my friends. There was a legion of other such phrases and stories which circulated in my family circle. It was such expressions, with their ironic overtones transposed into quite other scenes, in part derived from other areas of my experience and in part purely imagined, that were the starting-points of stories. Such established private jokes may be a very powerful source of imagination, for long use has made all their overtones familiar. They are, so to speak, the personal epics from which more sophisticated literature descends. Their dangers, either of a preserved nursery immaturity, or of a failure to generalize that condemns the work to coterie communication, are obvious. Much of the 'provincialism' of the English novel derives from this, but so also does its strength, its unstated tensions.

The hotel world of my childhood had been the foundation of these early stories. One by-product of this hotel world appears in what seems to many modern critics the neo-Dickensian caricature of my characters, for the inhabitants of those Kensington hotels tended towards the eccentricity that comes with penurious old age. Such a larger-than-life picture of human beings is inevitably the child's one; in my childhood it was in great degree objectively justified. It was certainly reinforced by my days much later as Deputy to the Superintendent of the British Museum Reading Room. But it is not only the scale of many of my characters in the stories that disturbs my readers, it is also the tone of their speech and behaviour. All writers know aspects of life that they take very much for granted, that yet to their readers appear peculiar, special. Of such a kind, I think, is the pervasive raffishness that hangs around many of my earlier stories and novels. It is the more peculiar, or, at any rate, unacceptable to respectable middle-class readers, because these raffish characters lay claim to, indeed can claim purely by class, social positions and ranks that the middle-class reader prefers to associate with less vulgar, less meretricious, more disciplined, more 'responsible' morality. I suspect my experience of a middle class with its skeletons taken from the cupboard and exposed to public exhibition is not so special as people make out. It reveals a truth about the between-the-wars English middle class when the sanctions that made for Victorian hypocrisy had weakened. At any rate it was my experience from my family, which was strongly reinforced by the atmosphere of my hotel childhood.

To this I can directly relate, I think, one of my greatest difficulties of communication. Vulgarities, lack of discrimination, weaknesses, which appear to me widespread and no more than venial beside the real wickedness of life, so disturb and repel readers that they seem unable to exercise charity toward 'such unpleasant characters'. I have noticed that quite discriminating readers have supposed me to have a puritanical revulsion from the human body, because, for example, in my earlier stories some of my characters spit when they talk or suffer from blackheads. It is rather that my strong sensual pleasure in physical beauty makes me acutely aware of whatever diminishes it. I think that such ways of looking at people, of expectation of human behaviour, remain, even though judgements and understanding may mature or change. That I grew up in a world where the discretion with which the English middle classes once disguised their grosser failures had largely broken down through the desperations of genteel poverty has probably given my picture of middle-class life a permanent colouring.

Finally with this hotel life I should connect one of the chief preoccupations of my earlier work, of the short stories. I mean the ambiguous tone, somewhere between satirical and admiring, with which I describe the resistance of many of my middle-class characters, particularly women, to economic and social decline and the empty disappointment of a life that is going downhill. I suppose that this portrayal is deeply embedded in my attitude to my mother, whose life, to say the least, was hard and heartbreaking. This courage, to which the period and class English expression 'pluck' most satisfactorily applied, commanded my deep admiration and compassion; nevertheless it also commanded my irony because it is associated with assumptions of class superiority, and indeed expectations from society, that reveal both an implacable fear and hatred of the poor and a snobbish envy of the rich. If, throughout my childhood, I knew my mother's 'pluck' to be what stood between us and disaster, I also knew it to be the chilling barrier that cut us off from happy communication with others. We could not know the A's because they were common, we must not know the B's because we could not pay back their hospitality. My mother clung to her 'class' as the only sure rock of a shipwrecked existence.

This 'pluck' I met in the greater part of 'the new poor' ladies (as they would have called themselves) that I knew so well in my youth. It is impossible to say how far such a quality can have a general significance sufficient to make it a subject for serious literature which is not purely social satire. I am inclined to suppose that the social trappings here are enough superficial to allow the underlying emotion to reach a reader unfamiliar with the social scene. However the ambiguities in this moral courage that I had observed as a child affected me enough to become a central theme in my novel The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot. Here I have tried to explore the general moral validity of what I have observed in a particular class by making my central characters, Meg Eliot and her brother, conscious critics of their own courage in face of disaster, and by contrasting them with various types of 'plucky' middle-class women of a more conventional, unselfcritical kind. I have also tried to extend my communication by making my heroine as little familiar with the small hotel world which suddenly confronts her as most of my readers must be. Nevertheless I owe the moral theme—can someone be courageous in sudden adversity without bitterness, without losing their compassion, without losing their humanity?—to these hotel ladies, and I believe it to be one rich in overtones. I offer the case as one example of how novelists—even, I suppose, the nineteenth-century giants who could command a far wider social experience in a far more compact society than any of us can hope for now—have to seek means to generalize and extend the emotions that they know only in more narrow contexts of class or nation.

However, increasingly as I wrote these early short stories, these aperçus, derived from the ironies of private language and the disordered philistine middle-class world in which I had spent my youth, began to prove less satisfactory to me, as did the short story form with its snap ending echoing the ironic title. As I have already suggested, my own personal dilemma, the attack upon contented innocence, that unconsciously lay beneath these social stories was sharpening into the conflict between the twin necessary hells of society and solitude to which the blinkered innocence had to awake. This presented itself to me in two main theses, adumbrated in certain short stories, but demanding, I knew, a fuller treatment.

It is clear to me that as my underlying themes developed so my memory was forced to move on to a later section of my past life in order to find the right stimulation. Stories like 'Fresh Air Fiend,' 'Crazy Crowd' and 'Et Dona Ferentes' still challenge blinkered innocence and still satirize the middle classes; but the blinkered innocent is no longer a child, like Johnnie in 'Raspberry Jam,' or uneducated like Vi in 'The Wrong Set'; he or she is now a more intellectual person although often without self-criticism. On occasion, even, as in what I believe to be my best short story, 'A Visit in Bad Taste,' the fake innocence becomes instead a calculated refusal of imaginative compassion: the sister who can find no place for her vulgar ex-convict brother disguises her selfishness neither with false simplicity nor with thoughtless amorality but with deliberation masked as a superior realism, a refusal of sentimentality. Yet apart from its move towards a more intelligent, cultivated, self-inquiring anti-heroine, this story's theme was not developed in my later writing; perhaps because it was successfully realized in the shorter form.

'Et Dona Ferentes' and 'Fresh Air Fiend' directly pose the evasion of personal relationship by cultivated, liberalminded people, and also the absurdity of those who think that such delicate situations can be resolved by honest and frank broadsides. This difficulty was to be developed in Hemlock and After (where Bernard and Ella Sands represent the two opposite poles) and in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (where Gerald Middleton unites more subtle conceptions of both approaches in a single person). The more complex note of the novels, however, was imposed upon me as I increasingly felt that the depths of this chasm between the liberal intention in personal relationships and its actual failure were to be found neither in falsely innocent evasion (Ingeborg Middleton), nor even in concern with the externals of tolerant acceptance masking a deeper self-deception (as with Bernard Sands), but in the existence side by side of constant intellectual self-inquiry and emotional blindness (Bernard Sands, Gerald Middleton, Meg Eliot); leading me in the end to the tragic paradox that the self-knowledge necessary to bridge the chasm is itself the agent of the stultified will (Simon Carter, the anti-hero of The Old Men at the Zoo.) An allied but less fruitful, more simple theme was adumbrated in Such Darling Dodos where liberal beneficent public activity is contrasted with failure in private relationships. This was extended in my play, The Mulberry Bush, some part of the failure of which may lie in the fact that I had already solved the artistic presentation of its essential theme at least adequately in the earlier story. In any case, it is a theme that has probably been artistically solved once for all by Henrik Ibsen.

I have said that this new development in my imaginative interest drew its material from a different phase of my life. The world of my family and of the small hotels was essentially the world of the comedy (and of the pathos) of manners. Contrasts of behaviours, slang, modes and idées reçues of the various older generations of a section of the British middle class actively in decline, and of the younger generations conscious of this decline, were the points of interest that the world of my childhood presented to the aware observer. The strength of the stories I wrote about them lies perhaps in the deeper, more sympathetic overtones of wasted talents, lost hopes, unrealized dreams that I inevitably imparted to a picture of people I knew so well, a world to which, after all, I owed my existence. But the new themes that were developing could not be adequately fed upon this material. I sought for a more apparently coherent, more self-conscious world of middle-class values—one, perhaps, that I could take more seriously, both in love and hate, than the philistine bourgeoisie; one that would offer both more sympathetic and tougher targets than those 'natural' innocents—drunk majors, 'fast' middle-class ladies, amateur pros (off tarts), sugar daddies of male tarts, and so on—that were my first targets, all people for whom I had emotional sympathy, but no intellectual regard.

I found my new targets—and thus attacked my own fostered innocence more deeply—in the world of cultured, upper middle class supporters of Left Wing causes, the well-to-do Socialists of the 'thirties. It is often said that these people no longer exist in post-war England. I do not believe that this is true, although, of course, the emotional (and just) source of their political allegiance has been removed with the disappearance of gross economic indecency; such as remain show up less in a more affluent and, superficially at any rate, more liberal-minded society. The old pre-war upper middle class Left, however, was a more homogeneous body, although it contained many different strands, and was not, as it is often represented now, a simple offshoot of what is called 'Bloomsbury'. But whatever the road by which they came to the Left, these professional or business families shared many of the same virtues and defects. They had, I realized about 1950 or so, to share both in the triumph and the failure of Welfare England. It had also become quite clear that they were rapidly proving as much out of touch with the new postwar England as the more stupid middle-class 'dodos' I had satirized in the earlier stories; indeed at certain moments they have been more out of touch. I tried now to place this whole middle-class Left world. In doing so I was dealing with a group of people to whom I had more intense intellectual loyalties, and emotional ties less atavistic no doubt, but to all my conscious sense at least as strong as those that bound me to the world of my family. The change, of course, pressed upon me in two ways, as a change of artistic concentration no doubt must do—in the constant presence of the 'idea', of all that generally connected with the strengths and weaknesses of a class dedicated by ethical duty or intellectual belief to bringing about the end of its own supremacy; but far more than the 'idea' was the constant crowding into my memory of the people and places in my life connected with that idea. I found it, in fact, suddenly difficult to remember my childhood, almost impossible not to recall my late adolescence. The progression copied life, for when my mother died in my fifteenth year I sought and in some degree found substitutes for her affections among the mothers of my friends. These families, unconnected but not wholly dissimilar, differed from my own by being more cultivated, richer, more elegant and, above all, more liberal politically. It was they who, altered indeed out of all recognition, became the centre of my attack upon the deficiencies of a liberal socialism to which I still give my own moral and cultural allegiance. This attack reflects my slow and gradual realization of the many evasions, the failures of imagination and the coldnesses of heart, that marred the ideals of the families of my adoption. It is perhaps a more killing attack than the blunt sallies of my early stories against the Kensington of my childhood, but then disillusionment with an environment one has chosen is more bitter than the natural and inevitable reaction against the environment into which one has been born. The atmosphere of these families (and especially of these mothers) of my adoption was at its fullest in Hemlock and After, but still hangs over Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, although in the main the characters and incidents of that novel are more completely touched by fancy and, where taken from life, come from more various parts of my experience than in my earlier novel. With my last volume of short stories, A Bit Off the Map, and the novels that have followed it, the need to regroup the events of my childhood and adolescence seems to have been worked out; the themes of my nervous crisis—the unthroning of innocence, man's two hells—also reached their climax in Mrs Eliot and have given way to other themes less apparently connected with my life, or at present still too close to me to yield to my analysis.

If, as I suggest, my early life had been exhausted as a source, I have to ask myself why certain events should apparently have played so little part in my writing. A good example is the death of my mother. In any event a mother's death is important to a son; my mother's death was very sudden, a culmination of her sad life, her strained relations with my father and, above all, happening as it did in a boarding-house which she felt to be a 'social come-down', a culmination of the genteel poverty and loss of privacy that had increasingly made her life miserable. Certainly this was how my brothers saw it and how I saw it at that time. I have tried to rationalize the absence of my mother as a character, and of her death as an incident, from my writing by supposing that this indicates how little important she was to me. Such a conclusion seems to defy all likelihood, and indeed it does not agree with the fact that throughout my life, although I think of her seldom, if I shut my eyes it is usually her image that comes immediately before me. What I have observed, however, in my writing is perhaps more interesting—deaths that are connected with hers occur in three of my stories, none of them part of my attempted major themes, none of them in my novels. The first, 'A Story of Historical Interest,' is an almost direct relation of my father's death, in which I have cast myself in the role of a daughter. My relationship to him was emotionally much that of the daughter he would have liked to have had. The father-daughter relationship is more conventionally acceptable to readers. However I was not aware of either of these motives when I transposed the sex. More interesting is the fact that I have transcribed the events exactly as they happened except for setting them in a small hotel with all the attendant humiliations of the proprietress's annoyance, legal regulations about dead bodies in hotels and so on. Now my father did not die or even come near to death in a hotel. My mother did die in a hotel. My distress at the time of her death, like the heroine's in the story, was aggravated by this circumstance, by similar humiliations. Removal to hospital to die is, of course, one of the stereotyped horrors of the impoverished middle class. Critics of this story have told me that the hotel scenes seem the most deeply felt, yet I certainly had no sense as I wrote it that I was introducing an episode from my mother's death. Indeed I was mainly concerned with the special distress we suffer when great public events overshadow our private griefs. My father died as Hitler marched into Prague. My mother's death in early 1929 was too early even to be overshadowed by the economic crisis.

Twice again, I think, my mother's death has entered my work by a side road. Each time it has been masked behind the death of my country landlady of 1949. In the first, a story called 'Heart of Elm' included in Such Darling Dodos, the incident is mixed with the account I received second-hand of the death of the matron of my school. The story is mainly concerned to contrast the natural acceptance (one might almost say welcome) of the death of an old servant by her mistress, with the overcharged grief of the adolescent children who do not want to grow up. My two fellow-lodgers pointed out to me when the story was published that they, who with considerable changes figured as the two children, were no more, probably less, sentimentally attached to our landlady, and were certainly less concerned to treat her as a surrogate mother than I had been. I had in fact once again unconsciously attributed 'plucky' life-loving acceptance of death to myself as in 'A Story of Historical Interest'. When I came to write a second time about the death of this landlady, I did so consciously and with what I have just analysed in my mind. This time the central figure of a television play, The Stranger, was a lodger, and his brutal treatment by the old woman's family after her death is shown as a direct result of his carefully fostered innocence. The fiction, being consciously related to the fact, was less indulgent to myself. My landlady's death had something of the same traumatic suddenness for me as my mother's. I opened the door of her cottage one Saturday afternoon to find her lying on the floor in an apoplexy from which she later died. But what strikes me most is the social element by which, in both stories, the deaths are given an extra pathos derived from the ignorance, simplicity and peasant wisdom of the dying woman. This element in 'Heart of Elm' is so marked that an American reviewer could compare the story to a satire on the relations of a Southern family with their old negro mammy. My landlady and, to a less degree, my school matron did have exactly these qualities; to herself and to most observers my mother was far from such a person, yet for me, even at fifteen, she had, through her disappointed shabby genteel life, acquired exactly this pathos. The altered social element stands, I feel sure, for those angers and reflections of her own sense of humiliation that I felt on her behalf at her death when the boarding-house proprietress and the other boarders treated it as something faintly demeaning to the name of the hotel.

So much for examples of particular subjects and incidents which seem to derive directly if unconsciously from my life, or of incidents which perhaps were too traumatic even for unconscious use, but appear obliquely in my writings. More curious perhaps is the relation of an author's life to what can be called the atmosphere of his novels, the flavour given to it by recurring subjects, symbols and places.

If, as I suspect, the creation of atmosphere is the least reasoned, most unconscious and automatic part of a novelist's art, it is likely also to be the most difficult for him to analyse, even when the particular fiction is a completed work of art, removed from his creative process and, as happens with finished works, appearing to be no longer connected with him. For this reason the oddly assorted milieux, objects and activities which I have been able to assemble as recurring, or possessing an apparently mysterious stress or significance, in my novels are probably fewer than another reader could detect; indeed some of those I shall describe were brought to my attention by readers or critics. Such associative objects, too, come so easily as I write, play so little part in the conscious planning that precedes the writing of my books, that they remain, even reviewed in tranquillity, obstinately unsusceptible to analysis. Yet this very material which the author's conscious mind rejects is in great degree the most idiosyncratic aspect of his work, and it would seem desirable that he should throw what small light upon it he can, if only by describing its associations with his own life.

I shall start with gardens and flowers. Their recurrence in my work seems particularly to strike readers—indeed, for those unfamiliar with garden flowers, often to irritate them. Some part they play in my fictions is stated in the first short story in my first book, 'Fresh Air Fiend' (in the U.S. 'Life and Letters'). Miranda Searle, the embittered, neurotic but clever and once beautiful, aristocratic wife of Professor Searle, uses her garden as an exercise in thwarted power to decree that this plant shall be scrapped and that encouraged; it is also clearly her last desperate attempt at communication, for if she can no longer 'hear' people, she has a real feeling for the flowers she tyrannizes over. When I wrote this story I had never gardened, although it has since become my chief hobby. I had only one woman friend who was a devoted gardener at that time (1946). Had I been told then that she resembled my character Miranda Searle I should have rejected the idea, and so I think would others who knew her. Ten years later when my friend died she had become an unhappy neurotic not so unlike Miranda Searle. I should not scout the idea that I could have drawn a character in this apparently prophetic manner. I have known too many instances of such apparent prophecy to be sceptical about this aspect of character creation. Nor do I think that the phenomenon defies rational explanation. If a novelist has the insight to create a character by the fusion of two or three real people, or by a combination of observation and fancy, it does not seem improbable that he may be able, in the process of creation, to foreshadow in people he knows degenerations or changes of character that he is not consciously aware of at the time. In the case of Miranda Searle, I certainly had no conscious sense of drawing from my friend. The character seemed to me, as I wrote, a transposition into quite other circumstances of what I imagined Lady Ottoline Morell to have been, itself something quite imaginary for I never knew her nor at that time had met anyone who knew her. As to the effects on Miranda Searle of her gardening activities, these were to a large extent drawn from what I felt would be the influence, good and bad, that gardening would have on my character should I take it up as a hobby—something which at that time seemed quite out of the question. Yet I must suppose that the character was much more drawn from what my subconscious told me were the hidden qualities of my friend; for little though I may have had her in my conscious mind, she was my principal association in life with the activity I was describing; and this, despite the fact that she did not, like Miranda Searle, exhibit her desperate possessiveness in her gardening, but found in it her only release from the tensions of her egoistic desperately willed life.