"I don't know," she said, "but he would be wrong about Jean. Wrong about you. Wrong about me. Wrong about Princess Kouragine, and wrongest of all about Netty Lennox. Perhaps his instincts as an artist are right. I think people's books are sometimes written by someone else, a kind of planchette. All the authors I have met have been so utterly and completely wrong about everything that stared them in the face."
I asked whether she liked his books.
Yes, she liked them, but she thought they were written by a familiar spirit. She couldn't fit him into his books.
"Then," I said, "supposing he wrote a book about Miss Brandon, however wrong he might be about her, the book might turn out to be true."
She didn't agree. She thought if he wrote a book about an imaginary Miss Jones it might turn out to be right in some ways about Jean Brandon, and in some ways about a hundred other people; but if he set out to write a book about Jean it would be wrong.
"You mean," I said, "he is imaginative and not observant?"
"I mean," she said, "that he writes by instinct, as good actors act."
She said there was a Frenchman at the hotel who had told her that he had seen a rehearsal of a complicated play, in which a great actress was acting. The author was there. He explained to the actress what he wanted done. She said: "Yes, I see this, and this, and this." Everything she said was terribly wide of the mark, the opposite of what he had meant. He saw she hadn't understood a word he had said. Then the actress got on to the stage and acted it exactly as if she understood everything.
"I think," she said, "that Mr. Rudd is like that."
I asked Mrs. Summer if she knew Kranitski.