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me do. Instead I devised a compromise which has been very well thought of, but I have not the patience to write it out for you. Indeed I will stop for Charles Mauron is taking this to the post. Please write home. I really have no reason for not coming, but I am unequipped and slightly imbecile. I am determined—and few things stop one when one’s determined—to spend next January out of England, and if you are within reach and sitting anyth[?] still I should like to join you. Bob has been ill—I forget whether I told you that—but now he is better. It’s partly he who keeps me hanging about near home. My remembrance of the past and my sense of the future have made these present years and days seem very exceptional.
I am reading J. Romains Hommes [de] Bonne Volonté16 which I meant to quote somewhere in this letter, but [the] letter has to go as I’ve already told you once.
Best love,
EM Forster
* * *
c/o Banco Hispano Americano
Las Palmas
Canary Islands.
May 28 [1934]
Dear Forster,
Thank you for your letter. I am very sorry you aren’t coming, though I hardly expected you would. Certainly let us be together next January, if we are both alive and at liberty. This is a time when I want to see as much as possible of all my few real friends. We must get together more, prepare some kind of defences, consolidate. At least disaster isn’t coming upon us suddenly this time, as in 1914. We all expect it, so we ought to behave better. I doubt if we shall.
I have just finished your book. It moved me very much. You make me see him, or imagine I see him, very vividly.17 Today we have been in the mountains and I have thought about you and Dickinson all day. I feel I understand your books so much better now. There is so much in your generation which my generation just dismisses stupidly and hastily, because it seems quiet and dull and we are all, or most of us, little Macbeths who have killed Duncan and have to go on murdering and murdering. And when one of us does turn academic, he is usually so shallow and tidy and anxious. I wish there was more of your own life in the book, and I suppose you wanted deliberately to keep it out.
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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
My own novel doesn’t get finished and changes its form daily. I read chiefly books about what is going to happen in Europe and study maps.
Then, when I have supped full with horrors, I terrify the unfortunate Heinz. Still, there are brighter moments. It is sometimes so beautiful here.
It would be strange, but not inconceivable, to live in Las Palmas always. A few of the inhabitants are charming civilised human beings. They sit out under the palm trees until two o’clock in the morning talking about painting, or meet in each others’ rooms to listen to the Kreutzer Sonata, like undergraduates. And they are gay and gentle. There is one boy of eighteen, a sculptor, who is a genius, I think. I have photographed two of his figures and will send them to you if they come out well. He is very quiet and shy and has epileptic fits.
Please write again soon. I like getting your letters. Let me close with a fashion note from the Daily Palma Post (Palma in Mallorca; no connection with us)[:]
“Anne’s beach wear hinges on shorts, which are shown for use in the sea or on the promenade back of the water’s edge. The close-fitting bathing-suits are also shown for the benefit of those who feel the need of the most revealing attire.”
Best love,
Christopher Isherwood
[handwritten addition]
I quite forgot to tell you about our only female friend. Her name is Leonora Pohly. We met her a month ago, wandering about the mountains at sunrise with her arms full of flowers. She has red poodle hair and a blunt nose like a dog, and is covered with freckles. She comes to see us every day and we have got quite fond of her. During the war and the revolution, she was one of the imperial gardeners at Potsdam. All the proper gardeners had gone to the front, and a most weird collection of cranks, cissies [sic] and mental deficients were wandering about the greenhouses, composing poems on the plants. One of them said to Pohly, speaking of an unusual wallflower: “It is dark as the ebony writing-table of a misunderstood woman.”
Pohly rendered us one signal service: she got the German Consul here to change the profession in Heinz’ passport. Up to now it has been: manser-vant—a fatal word largely instrumental in all the trouble we have had. Now it is: Language Student—the Consul’s own, extraordinary choice. He might as well have written: Archdeacon. However, now that Heinz is a language student, he has decided to learn languages—any languages; the more the pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 35
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better. He stops guests in the corridor and says, beaming all over his face, in Spanish: my friend is very ill. This is so far his only Spanish sentence. It gives rise to misunderstandings, as you can imagine.
* * *
9-8-34
West Hackhurst,
Abinger Hammer,
Dorking.
Dear Isherwood,
I was very glad to get your letter and feel that there is a sort of alliance between us. Let me know when you get to England—you may even be there already. Some of your news was good. I do hope that Heintz will have no further trouble with the customs. Yes—let’s hope that if there’s a crash we shall all behave well, but I do not even know yet what “well” will be. It is all so inconceivable. I work up into a fuss about it for a little, and then calm down, write the Book of the Abinger Pageant,18 go in a char[-]à[-]banc to Oxford with eighteen policemen on Bank Holiday, prepare to entertain Mrs Myslakowska, who tried to seduce me in Cracow two years ago in order to get rid of her husband, and is now in England.19 Then I get fussed, and contribute Notes on Passing Events to the newspapers, which you would easily follow if I sent them to you, or go on a deputation to the Attorney General in connection with the Sedition Bill.20 I think it is sensible and suitable, this alternation between fuss and calm, and I gather you are practicing it yourself. It is the right conduct for our time—better than all calm, and far[,] far better than all fuss. But if the war started, I don’t know what would be right. The very meaning of words would change, and
“war” [would] be the most meaningless of them all.
I meant to write you a letter full of news, as you might like some, but it all boils down to my having a certain amount of trouble at home, and very little elsewhere. Next week I shall go to town to see Bob. The week after he will stop with me at my flat. The day after that (Aug. 22nd) I go to Falmouth and pay a visit to the Hilton Youngs. I have known H.Y. a great many years and am fond of him, and I get on with her. Her son, Peter Scott, is rather an enigma, a toad without a jewel perhaps, though a pleasant toad.
He paints pictures of geese, pictures of geese, pictures of geese, pictures of geese, and no sooner has Sir Philip Sassoon or Mr Amery21 opened them than he has painted still more pictures of geese. He has also written a short story about a crane, which is rather on my mind, as I have lost it. However, that is surely enough about Peter Scott. I expect to be quite comfortable down there, but not to stop very long. I would rather like to start some pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 36