“The bad habit of working late at night was growing on this young man. It is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound work is done only with a normal mind.
“He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and littering the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His was a messy genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a hair-line. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead dangled inside Achilles’s tendon when one held the string to the medulla of Annan’s stories.”
Our young man is undergoing a variety of interesting changes:
“Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes to which all young men are heir.
“And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.
“The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World.
“His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind—meaner conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all.
“Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which makes the imperfect more perfect, creates better than the materials permit, forces real life actually to assume and be what the passionate desire for sanity and beauty demands.”
There comes a time when Eris Odell says to Barry Annan:—
“‘I could neither understand nor play such a character as the woman in your last book.... Nor could I ever believe in her.... Nor in the ugliness of her world—the world you write about, nor in the dreary, hopeless, malformed, starving minds you analyse.... My God, Mr. Annan—are there no wholesome brains in the world you write about?’”