I thought I could now see more clearly his reasons for doing so, though these might or might not be a good reason for wishing that it might be published now. The publisher was Rupert Hart-Davis, and his reader David Garnett, who had written to me— I have read A Garden of Trees with interest and despair. I think it is a failure and that publication in its present form would be a mistake. The action is always excellently written and alive; the conversation generally bad and dead. Of course belonging to such a much older generation I am not the most sympathetic reader. But I should like to discuss it with you. I had of course been disappointed, and had argued. Now sixty years later I was feeling I could understand what he meant about the conversation being dead. At the time of writing, 1949-50, I was in my mid-twenties, and had had a bad stammer since childhood. This had often held me speechless while I listened to what seemed to me to be the often inane conversations of others. As I grew up the chattering political and social world seemed as a whole to be inane; and I wondered if speech might not be part of the curse acquired by humans when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden—or when they descended from being apes in the trees, or whatever.
