May 1936.

I will read you a poem, Clifton’s wife said, in her formal voice, which is how she always seems unless you are very close to her. We were all at the southern campsite, within the firelight.

I walked in a desert.
And I cried:
‘Ah, God, take me from this place!’
A voice said: ‘It is no desert.’
‘I cried: ‘Well, but -
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’
A voice said: ‘It is no desert.’

No one said anything.

She said, That was by Stephen Crane, he never came to the desert.

He came to the desert, Madox said.

July 1936.

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.