[Postcard from Lyme Regis]
31st January
Dearest E –
Presume you’ve heard about Auden and Isherwood going off to America. Father is over the moon, as you can imagine. Proves that the younger gen of leftie writers has no spine. It is rather feeble of them, don’t you think? To flee when we need writers, poets, men and women who can make sense of the world. I was reading Auden after you left. I thought: a poet is a stranger who knows one’s secrets.
One of daddy’s friends suggested I take the seaside air for my asthma. It’s frightful here. The unanimous elderly, wandering along the front as if they might walk themselves away from death. Luscious to see you at Xmas. Do come back more often.
Brisk, deep-lunged oodles,
Anna xxx.
Faber & Faber
24 Russell Square,
London, WC1
4th February, 1939.
Dear Esmond,
I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. I’m very much aware that you’ve been waiting for a reply and it is inexcusable that it has taken us these months to come to a decision.
I’m afraid the war passages haven’t much improved as far as I can see. It’s as if, as soon as Hulme crosses the Channel, a veil comes up over him and your ability to feel your way into his experience evaporates. It’s really very sad. I showed this to Tom Eliot — to make sure I wasn’t being blind — and he agreed wholeheartedly. It’s difficult for a writer your age to capture something so raw, so violent, so far outside his own space. Has your father read it? What does he think?
There’s also the problem of a certain resistance within some parts of the company to publish an author so closely associated in many minds with the Fascists. Things have changed in the national atmosphere since I first read In Love and War. Since we became aware of the horrors executed by the National Socialists, the bloodiness of Mussolini’s regime (so wonderfully set out in Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara — have you read it?), it feels like a madness to publish a novel which — if we look behind the curtain of the fiction — is the elevation of a Fascist (or proto-Fascist) to a position of mythic heroism.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. You’re still very young and do please send me your work as it develops.
Sincerely,
Richard de la Mare.
Via dei Forbici, 35c
Firenze
17.2.39
Dear Esmond –
A thousand thanks for your visit. I know that Ada put you up to it, and I know what a miserable and pathetic creature I must seem, but to have had everything ripped away from me like this— My good friend Friedrich Kriegbaum, from the Kunsthistorisches Institut, visited the night before last and I could barely stand to have him in the house. ‘The annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ It is shameful. It is as if I was walking in darkness and suddenly a light of impossible brightness has been shone upon me. I am blinded again, but this time it is the force of the light that has taken away my sight.
I’m not sure what will happen to me, Esmond. I wrote some ill-advised letters in my madness. I wrote to Il Duce himself, I wrote to the German Consul, I think I even wrote to Herr Hitler. If the worst should occur, look after Ada for me. Her mother has travelled north to stay with relatives in Switzerland. I’m determined not to be chased out of this city I love, but I may have little choice in the matter. I couldn’t bear it if my idiocy should lead to something awful happening to Ada.
With my apologies for my weakness and stupidity,
Guido Liuzzi.
Telegram: 7/4/39
Anna condition serious STOP At John Radcliffe seeing specialist STOP Your mother with her STOP Will keep you posted STOP
[Various invitations to concerts associated with the Maggio Musicale: Beethoven at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Tosca at the Teatro Verdi (sponsored by Piaggio), Bach at the British Institute, a string quartet hosted by Bernard Berenson at I Tatti.]
He sits in the grand drawing room at Berenson’s house, I Tatti, and tries to concentrate on the music. It is Haydn and the string quartet is very good, but he is thinking only of Anna. It was clear she was fighting at Christmas, desperate not to let him see her discomfort, and by the end of his visit was snatching gulps of breath, slinking off for rests in the early afternoon, pausing in the middle of their conversations to collect herself. He wonders if perhaps she might come out to Florence to join him. But war feels so close, so inevitable.
Ada is beside him. She’s wearing a dark green dress, long earrings with jade stones. Her pale arms grip the chair beneath her as she sways to the music. She hums so softly that only he can hear. When the movement finishes, she turns to him, clasps her hands to her chest and begins to applaud.
Welsh Frankton
Shropshire
26th April
Dear Esmond –
Anna is back home. It seems as if it was a false alarm, or that the treatment at the John Radcliffe worked. Sorry if my telegram alarmed you. She’s rather frail, but she’s being a good brave girl. Rudyard has been wheeling her around the garden in her bath chair — it’s bloody sweet, really.
Looks like another war is inevitable. I read a historian in The Spectator who has identified only twenty-nine years since the Roman Empire when a war wasn’t being fought somewhere in the world. We lurch from crisis to crisis and we learn nothing from history.
You asked in your letter what I could tell you about the last war, the first war, as I suppose we should learn to call it. About Hulme. I’m glad you’ve stuck on with your novel, sorry that Faber turned it down. (Perhaps we could set up a Fascist Press — not a bad idea!) Hulme was a brute, a gent, a genuine conservative. He was a bloody good friend and I was undone when he died. As for my war, it was a nightmare, but the worst part is that nothing since — not politics, not sex, not hunting, nothing — has lived up to it. The real horror, Esmond, is that I’m not still there, that life will never have the same sheen, quite the purpose it had in those days.
If you ever find yourself fighting, remember this one thing: anger is stronger than fear. It was only years after the war ended, when I stopped being angry, that I began to feel afraid. Remember that and you’ll make a fine soldier.
Give my regards to Goad.
Your mother sends her love,
Your father.
Tombland,
Norwich.
23rd May ’39.
Dear Esmond –
Sit tight! I’ll be back at the end of the week when we can put our heads together and try to work out what this all means. In the interim you should be in loco presbyter, helping the lame dogs over stiles. Remember: we’re not at war yet. Mussolini is a strong, fine leader and we’ll have to trust that this Pact of Steel he’s signed with Hitler is a piece of political theatre.
The funeral was as funerals are: dispiriting to see the reduction of a fine life into so many platitudes. I read ‘This I know: that my avenger lives’ from the Book of Job. Stood a few hairs on end. Sad to say goodbye to mother, but all flesh, etc.
If anything comes up, ask Goad.
Best of British,
Bailey.
He is lying back in the pool at L’Ombrellino, looking up through the leaves of the camphor tree. He’d come up to check on the place for George and Alice Keppel, but the walk up the hill was so tiring, the abandoned rooms of the villa so stuffy and smothering, that he’d run past the box hedges of the upper terrace, down the steps and between the two dodos before he could think, shedding his clothes along the path as he went.