Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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He was a better man than I, one who had made the most of his gifts. He was a scholar and he may have been the only adequate apology for leisure and social injustice, but he had shut himself into an ivory tower. He had no first-hand knowledge of what the rest of us might think, for he was removed from contemporary care by a comfortable income and by a succession of easy, uneventful years, until his ideas were as unconnected with reality as the furnishings of his study. In spite of all his research I could not help suspecting that he was incapable of understanding the spirit of his own or any historical epoch, because he had not lived in his own generation.

"Now you and I," he said, "you and I who write ..."

He meant it in the kindliest way, pointedly including me with himself in a high brotherhood, but I found myself resenting it. He had been permitted by good fortune, or by faulty economics, to have the leisure in which to accumulate a number of facts. He had collated his notes on those facts and put them into a book. He was like one of those experts, whom any amateur could have knocked flat in twenty seconds, busy criticizing a fighter's technique from a safe seat at the press bench. He was speaking of creative writing, intimating that he, too, was a creative writer.