“No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: `Great Heavens, did I write as well as that then?’ for the implication always is that one does not any longer write so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.”

From Ford Madox Ford, which I came upon this morning while visiting that Commonplacing Mecca that is Anecdotal Evidence. But it was Mr Kurp’s reflections later on in the same entry, on his own writing youth, that I found surprising and moving (The only other thing I’ve read last year by a writer on his own early writing that was as good is Garth Greenwell’s longer essay (sincerity without self-indulgence, self-scrutinising without self-pity) on writing his first novel in Bulgaria.

“When I speak of envying my youth, I mean my ignorance before the world and the craft of writing, and the momentum it produced. I was a college dropout with few prospects, scared and naïve, and having a wonderful time editing a newspaper. Apprenticing one’s self is risky, but I blundered my way into competence. To paraphrase the auto mechanic quoted above, “I really like writing.” In his final book, The March of Literature (1938), Ford described himself as “an old man mad about writing.” If envy can be benign, I’m envious of that young man who was mad about writing. In The Rambler #183, published on this date in 1751, Dr. Johnson refers to envy as “a stubborn weed of the mind.” My favorite flower is the dandelion.”