Free Adeline by Norah Vincent Page A

to control.
    “It is what I began somewhat shallowly, imperfectly in
Dalloway
,” she says. “It is everything of the world that I wish to convey in a work of art, if it can be conveyed—though I am not at all sure that it can be. Still, I must try. I must keep on from where I began, invent and reinvent a method, a new composition that can communicate this vision.”
    “You think now that
Dalloway
is incomplete, then?” he asks, a little foolishly. In the past, she has cuffed him for asking these kinds of questions, because she has seen that he was merely using them as drags. But mercifully, this time she accepts it.
    “Yes. I do.
Dalloway
was a start, but I didn’t carry it off. Lytton said as much when he read it, and I was grateful for his honesty.”
    “What did he say, exactly? I don’t recall.”
    “He said that it was very beautiful, but that the events and the people, Clarissa in particular, did not quite stand up to the language or to the ideas that I had put into their heads. He thought that perhaps I had not yet mastered my method.”
    “And you agree?” he asks. This is another patent stall, but again, she seems content enough to answer.
    “Yes, though I did not know how much until this morning.”
    “I think you should bear in mind,” he says, “that Lytton can be rather shallow in his tastes. He does not have the stamina he once had to linger in the depths. He prefers high drama to contemplation.”
    As Leonard comes down from the ladder, he adds, “
Dalloway
is profoundly psychological. I am not surprised that Lytton did not have the patience for it.”
    This appeal to her vanity has its usual effect. As he lowers himself onto the grass, he can see that she, too, is easing down into the talk.
    “Yes, perhaps he didn’t,” she says, “and on the whole I agree. I am generally disinclined to take his criticisms of my work entirely to heart. But in this case I think he was right, and what’s more, it didn’t bother me much to hear him say so. Given my usual sensitivities, I think that means something.”
    “Yes, I suppose it does. You are never this sanguine about reviews.”
    She has taken out her tobacco—a good sign of the desired shift in her mood—and is rolling herself another cigarette. She concentrates on this, tightly packing the moist shag, frowning as she considers what he has just said. She shoots him a mildly testing look over the top of the roll as she licks and seals the paper, but says nothing. This, too, is an encouraging sign.
    “You know,” Leonard ventures, more confidently, “it strikes me that you are touching on cosmology here, and that it is Newton, perhaps more than Freud, who is leaving you dissatisfied.”
    “How do you mean?” she asks. Her tone now is almost demure.
    “Well, Newton’s is the insufficient universe you have described—the one symbolized by your looking glass—rigid and superficial, the picture of discrete entities obeying laws.”
    He is still standing on the grass next to the stepladder, but he has put away his shears and taken out his pipe, which he is now packing and preparing to light.
    “Yes,” she says patiently. “Go on.”
    “Well,” he resumes, putting the pipe in his mouth and striking a match against the tree. “Is that not your objection to Freud as well? The superficiality of his vision? Or did I misunderstand?”
    He holds the match to his pipe and begins to puff, his eyebrows rising inquisitively from behind the column of smoke.
    “Old astronomy, old art, old medicine,” she asserts, driving home the previous point, but with much more control. “They are the same blunt instruments. We are here now, modern man, looking into the enigma of the self, and Freud offers us only egos and ids. We are searching up and out, seeing through, seeking our glimpse of the unfathomable, and this . . . scatological charlatan . . . is telling us to look down, between our legs, where, he assures us, all the truest answers are to