Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Caroline Gordon belongs to the generation of writers who spent at least part of their youth in Paris. The gods of the nineteenth century had fallen, but these young people found another: Art. Like most gods, Art had many guises, and was sometimes called Poetry, sometimes The Novel, and sometimes Modernism. Art had innumerable prophets, but in its...