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opened a button-through dress to display to Mrs Smith a pu rple and ch oc ol at e and gold series of lumps and sw el li ngs across her breasts and belly. Mrs Smith's own life made no sense to her without art, but she was disinclined to believe in it as a cure, or a duty, or a general necessity. Nor did she see the achievement of the work of art as a paradigm for the struggle for life, or virtue. She had somehow been inoculated with it, in the for m of the novel, b ef ore she as a moral bei ng had had anything to say to it. It was an addiction. The bright bo oks of life wer e the shots in th e arm, th e warm tots of whisky which kept her alive and conscious and lively. Life itself was related in co mplicat ed ways to this addicti on. She often asked herself, without receiving any satisfactory answer, why she needed it, and why this form of it? Her answers would have appeared to Joyce, or Mann, or Proust to be fr ivo lou s. It was be caus e she had be com e sens uously 3 excited in early childhood by Beatrix Potter's sentence structure, or Kipling's adjectives. It was because she was a voyeur and liked looking in through other people's windows on warmer, brighter worlds. It was because she was secretly deprived of power, and liked to construct other worlds in which things would be as she chose, lovely or horrid. When she took her art most seriously it was because it focused her curiosity about things that were not art; society, education, science, death . She did a lot of research for her little books, most of which never got written into them, but it satisf ied her somehow. It gave a temporary coherence to her perception of things. So this story, which takes place on the day when she decided to com mit hersel f to a long and com plicated novel, would not have pleased her. She never wrote about writers. Indeed, she wrote witty and indignant reviews of novels which took writing for a paradigm of life. She wrote about 4 the metaphysica l cl austro phobia of the Shredded Wheat Box on the Shredded Wheat Box getting smaller ad infinitum. She liked things to happen. Stories, plots. History, facts. If I do not entirely share her views, I am much in sympathy with 68
