His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world.
The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot.
I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. I smell heliotrope I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth-I write ceaselessly. Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon.
Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I see nothing especially lovely about it.
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