Very many thanks for your letter and for letting me see the five stories. I'd like immensely to talk about them a little. But you'll take what I say as workshop talk—will you?—as from one writer to another. Otherwise one feels embarrassed.

I think the idea in all the five stories is awfully good. And you start each story at just the right moment and finish it at the right moment, too. Each is a whole, complete in itself. But I don't feel any of them quite come off. Why? Its' as though you used more words than were necessary. There's a kind of diffuseness of expression which isn't natural to the English way of thinking. I imagine your great admiration for Tchehov has liberated you but you have absorbed more of him than you are aware of and he's got in the way of your individual page 221 expression for the time being. It's very queer; passages read like a translation! It's as though you were in his shadow and the result is you are a little bit blurred, a bit vague. Your real inmost self (forgive the big words but one does mean them) doesn't seem to be speaking except occasionally. It's almost as though you were hiding and hadn't the—shall I call it—courage?—of your own fine sensitiveness. When you do get free of Tchehov plus all you have learnt of him you ought to write awfully good stories. Pleasure gives one an idea of how good. There you seem to me nearly in your own stride. It is convincing. One believes in that little cat and its meat for breakfast; one sees your old chap wiping the glass case with his handkerchief; and one sees his audience turn and then turn back to him. I think this story is much the best of the five.

To return to your Russianization for a moment. It seems to me that when Russians think they go through a different process from what we do. As far as we can gather they arrive at feeling by a process of … spiritual recapitulation. I don't think we do. What I imagine is we have less words but they are more vital; we need less. So though one can accept this recapitulating process from Russian writers it sounds strange to me coming from your pen. For instance, in Going Home you get in five lines: “enthusiasm, doubtful, mistrust, acute terror, anxious joy, sadness, pain, final dissolution, filth and degradation.” Or (p. 2) “the unhappiness, the misery and cruelty, all the squalor and abnormal spiritual anguish.” Again, last page but one of The Sister, “futility, monotony, suffocated, pettiness, sordidness, vulgar minuteness.”

When one writes like that in English it's as though the nerve of the feeling were gone. Do you know what I mean?

I realise it's all very well to say these things—but how are we going to convey these overtones, half tones, quarter tones, these hesitations, doubts, beginnings, if we go at them dirctly? It is most devilishly difficult, but I do page 222 believe that there is a way of doing it and that's by trying to get as near to the exact truth as possible. It's the truth we are after, no less (which, by the way, makes it so exciting).