Interns

I had never heard of an intern until the news of what happened when Bill met Monica came out.  Then I realised that I had been an intern too.  After three years at Cambridge I wanted to extend the illusion and live in London where all my friends were going to seek their fortunes.  My father had a word with the manager of a factory in Battersea and soon I was enrolled there for work experience.  That was my cover but what I really wanted was a flat, a silk dressing gown and an affair with an actress.  The flat should have been in Mayfair but was a basement in Holland Park and the dressing gown, made of post war silk, soon showed signs of wear becoming almost translucent.

Why can't the English write about love?  'They order these things better in France' where the tradition of  the art of fiction flows strongly from Stendhal and Balzac to Flaubert and Proust and that is without stopping at other stations on the way.  I believe it is due to the fact that English novelists have been too much concerned with social reform whereas their foreign competitors in fiction were concerned with producing works of art.  Dickens was the most conspicuous of them, constantly falling into a swamp of sentimentality.  Perhaps Lawrence came close to hitting the target.  He certainly tried.  But sadly the English remain in the second division, outpaced by the French, the Russians and the Americans.  How lucky we are to be able to read them in translation.  But the English have always excelled at poetry and that is their greatest achievement.