With Iris, one did not suspend, even at a cocktail party, the usual artifices of society. All was understood, or seemed to be, which is exactly the same thing. We talked about ourselves as though of absent strangers. Then: “Have you known Clarissa long?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I met her only last winter.”
“Then this is your first visit here? to the valley?”
“The first,” she smiled, “but it’s a little like home, you know. I don’t mean Detroit, but a memory of home, got from books.”
I thought so too. Then she added that she did not read any longer and I was a little relieved; somehow with Iris one wanted not to talk about books or the past. So much of her charm was that she was entirely in the present. It was her gift, perhaps her finest quality, to invest the moment with a significance which in recollection did not exist except as a blurred impression of excitement. She created this merely by existing. I was never to learn the trick, for her conversation was not, in itself, interesting and her actions were usually calculable in advance, making all the more unusual her peculiar effect. She asked me politely about my work, giving me then the useful knowledge that, though she was interested in what I was doing, she was not much interested in the life of the Emperor Julian.
I made it short. “I want to do a biography of him. I’ve always liked history and so, when I settled down in the house, I chose Julian as my work.”
“A life’s work?”
“Hardly. But another few years. It’s the reading which I most enjoy, and that’s treacherous. There is so much of interest to read that it seems a waste of time and energy to write anything ... especially if it’s to be only a reflection of reflections.”
“Then why do it?”
“Something to say, I suppose; or at least the desire to define and illuminate ... from one’s own point of view, of course.”