“I went nearly mad with responsibility and the awfulness of discovering the way words express almost nothing at all.”
“It’s not quite so bad as that. You’ve come on no end though, you know. The last two or three have been astonishingly good. You’re not creative. You’ve got a good sound mind, a good style and a curious intense critical perception. You’ll be a critic. But writing, Miriam, should be done with a pen. Can’t call yourself a writer till you do it direct.”
“How can I write with a pen, in bed, on my knee, at midnight or dawn?”
“A fountain pen?”
“No one can write with a fountain pen.”
“Quite a number of us do. Quite a number of not altogether unsuccessful little writers, Miriam.”
“Well, it’s wrong. How can thought or anything, well thought perhaps can, which doesn’t matter and nobody really cares about, wait a minute, nothing else can come through a hand whose fingers are held stiffly apart by a fat slippery barrel. A writing machine. A quill would be the thing, with a fine flourishing tail. But it is too important. It squeaks out an important sense of writing, makes people too objective, so that it’s as much a man’s pen, a mechanical, see life steadily and see it whole (when nobody knows what life is) man’s view sort of implement as a fountain pen. A pen should be thin, not disturbing the hand, and the nib flexible and silent, with up and down strokes. Fountain pen writing is like ... democracy.”
“Why not go back to clay tablets?”
“Machine-made things are dead things.”
“You came down here by train, Miriam.”