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Gloomily coming into my bedroom I stump towards the bed and see the mess of New York Reviews beside it, and a copy of Joan London’s stories that are so beautiful, and I think, Whatever happens, I’ve got this one little power—I’m a writer. I can use everything that happens, I can use it and shape …

I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.

What am I setting up for myself, here? Some happiness, perhaps. I’m calm, and in good spirits, quietly, as if something important and good were about to happen. I’m not scared or nervous. I can’t even imagine it, how it will be, what it will look like, what felicities or clumsinesses either of us w…

After dinner the waiter brought L the wrong coffee, was corrected, went away. Time passed. He realised he’d been forgotten and from that moment the evening was lost. He went dark and stiff with rage. Anger spread into the air around him. A grille clanged down between him and the world. I panicked. …

V’s proprietary tone when he speaks of the high priests of European literature—‘Yes, they are peculiar titles,’ he says about Canetti’s autobiography—reminds me of the German poet who boasted to me about how he had once sat up all night reading Chekhov’s letters. As if no one else had ever done thi…