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seem very interested in me."
    "I am. I am interested."
    "But why?"
    "I’m sorry. Do you mind all these questions? Am I being rude?"
    "No. But it puzzles me. Why should you bother yourself with what I think?"
    "You’re—a—Person who Matters."
    (Is there mockery in the words? It is difficult to tell. I must be careful.)
    "I see."
    "To be frank, your personality obsesses me. I feel I must try to understand it. There’s some sort of answer there."
    "Answer? I don’t understand you."
    "It’s difficult to explain myself. But often I feel this with people. I am obsessed with their personalities for weeks or months or years on end." (Why do I instinctively think of Miss Forsdike?) "I suppose that’s why I want to be a novelist."
    "But why my personality? Is it so very strange?"
    "No—o." He is doubtful. "I really can’t tell you why one personality should obsess me and another not interest me at all. There was a man at the bank who was had up for kleptomania and self-exposure. I suppose the majority of people would consider him an ‘interesting’ personality. But no—I couldn’t interest myself at all in him. And yet I had known him better than anyone else there."
    "That’s hardly flattering to me."
    He laughs, then looks serious. "You see, I know that your character is vitally important. I know that, I am certain about it. It has an enormous, a profound interest, for me. But why this should be so I can’t say. And this ignorance in its turn intensifies my obsession. I want to find out. Curiosity. Nothing is stronger."
    "But you really cannot see why I interest you?"
    "Partly, yes. You’re a military genius—one reads that in the papers and one believes it to be true. I think you’re a great man. But that doesn’t entirely explain it. Your life is a sort of myth. If one could see the implications of the myth, one would understand much. But the myth is powerful whether one understands it or not."
    I think: "He is talking nonsense." I feel suddenly irritated. Myth, personality! He is worse than Miss Forsdike!
    I say: "Yes, I think I see what you mean."
    "Do you? Do you really? I didn’t imagine that you would... Take the Oedipus myth. That story has obsessed generations of poets—and not poets only. It has had a universal application. But it is only in the last forty years that Freud has come along to explain it to us."
    "And I am a myth?"
    "I think so—yes. One can’t be sure."
    I rise to my feet: "Can you swim yet?"
    He shakes his head, smiling: "Not yet."
    "Well, I’m going in again."
    Sting of water, washing all his nonsensical theories out of my head.
May 26th , 1937
    Cauldwell has been here for three weeks now, and still I feel that I do not know him. He will never betray himself—while I have been stupidly indiscreet. Why, why? He is the only person to whom I have told so much—apart from S. N. G.
    He never comments: perhaps this accounts for my candour.
May 27th , 1937
    We take the little steamer up to Stoke Gabriel and then walk back. Another lengthy conversation. I am talking to him about the visit to Germany when, suddenly conscious that he is staring at me, I ask: "Do my views shock you very much?"
    "I try not to be shocked by them."
    "But not very successfully?"
    "As a novelist, I tell myself that I must not be shocked by them—and I think I succeed. But as an individual..." He shrugs his shoulders. "It’s very difficult, you know—this separating of the novelist from the individual. But it must be done. Sometimes I feel that I am two people—the commentator and the participant."
    "You have strong views about your functions as a novelist?"
    "Certainly I have strong views as to what my personality as a novelist should be. The trouble is that my creative ideal can seldom be reconciled with what I actually am. Hence this feeling of being two people. Ideally, the novelist should be shocked by nothing: he should examine, he should explain; he should never pass judgment. But as an individual I