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more writing for one thing. I am very glad to have done that Lowes Dickinson book.
We will talk about January when you return. Have you been reading anything to speak of? I am just finishing Anna Karenina, which I never got through before. I do not think it is very good—except for the balancing of the two couples, which is certainly marvellous. Any other writer would have had to tether them into their position with a few strings, but Tolstoy leaves them to float naturally in his air. I can’t think of any other novelist, dramatist, etc. who could do this. It’s neither a plan, nor is it a happy chance. It’s something for which there’s no word in criticism. I didn’t even know Tolstoy could do it—I don’t remember anything of the type in War and Peace—and in this respect A.K. has been a great pleasure. But the characters are not really masterpieces, Anna has been much overpraised and Kitty’s nothing at all. And what’s still more disappointing and surprising to me, the sense of family groups—so overwhelming in W. & P. and so desirable here—never gets conveyed. Perhaps all the characters ought to have been introduced as children.
However, that’s enough for Anna. She has taken even more room than Peter Scott’s geese geese geese, and I don’t know whether you’ve read her or want to.
What I did mean to say, when I asked you whether you were reading, was to ask you whether you were writing. I was looking forward to your novel so much.22 However, if you can’t get it down it can’t be helped. I don’t suppose it matters. It’s much better not to write under the tyranny of time.
“This, this, have I achieved before civilisation crashes”? No, no—I feel advancing at this point to some Grand Pronouncement. However, it will not come. I must knock off and write a line to Bob, who is at this moment—which is midnight—driving about a mystery car with a wireless set inside it to detect “crime.”
Please give kind greetings to Heintz if you are with him. I shall send this to Wm. Plomer. He may know your whereabouts.
Yours ever
EM Forster
* * *
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THE 1930s
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From next week:
Tenerife. August 26 [1934]
c/o Banco Hispano Americano
Las Palmas
Canary Islands.
Dear Forster,
We arrived back yesterday from a tour of the smaller islands to find a stack of post, including your letter. I was most interested in the pamphlet you sent. I knew about the Sedition Bill, of course. And had heard a good deal about the Council for Civil Liberties23 from the Week. What I didn’t know was that you were at the head of the troops. May you lead them to victory. How entirely I understand what you say about the alternations between fuss and calm. Alas, with me, it’s nearly all futile fuss. My conscience pricks me, and I feel like leaving for England by the next boat: To do . . . what? And, if so, what is to become of Heinz, whose relations now more or less openly beg me to keep him out of Germany? We think his father must be in some kind of political trouble. Probably, I shall compromise by settling in Copenhagen, fairly soon. Meanwhile, I have finished my novel; which is less a blow for anybody’s freedom than a home-made jam-pot grenade flung rather wildly in the direction of Berlin. I can’t even throw straight; and am lost in admiration of your marksmanship in the G.L.D.
book,24 which I have now read four or five times, and like better and better.
Do you know, I have never read a word he wrote, apart from your quotations? When I’m in civilisation again, I shall try to get the International Anarchy. I think that’s what I should best like of his, just now.
Can one help your Council with money? If so, I’ll send some.
What is your next book going to be? I’m starting on a write-up of my Berlin diaries. They ought, at least, to form quite an interesting set of illustrations to a serious work on Fascism. I have learnt far more about what
“educated” Nazis think since I have been here, than I ever did in Germany.
Most of them are school-teachers who have never read any history.
The trip to the smaller islands was enjoyable as far as we two were concerned, but it filled me with despair. There they are, in the middle of the sea, with their wonderful ravines, full of palms and muscatel grapes. And on them are thousands of inhabitants of both sexes; the younger ones with very beautiful eyes. And it is all dead, dead, dead. It is how our civilisation may be after the next war. On Gomera, the night before we arrived, five young men had gone into the church, collected armfuls of those stiff gor-geous little dolls, Christ, Maria and St Cristobal, and burnt them on the beach. They were now in the lock-up, but to be released [the] next day.
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Nobody seemed to care much, either for or against. The young men belonged to a club which calls itself Socialist. It was all rather depressing and a bit pathetic. Comic relief was provided by two of our fellow-trav-ellers. We met them first on the boat going across to Hierro. The more conspicuous wore a khaki uniform, puttees down to his bare ankles and sandals. When the boat started, he exchanged his solar topee for a smart felt hat. We hadn’t left the harbour many minutes when he handed us his card.
It was headed: The Spanish Explorer-Captain, Don Ramiro Sanz. Who has travelled for eighteen years on foot from Alaska to Cape Horn. Beneath was a picture of the Captain, in white uniform and Nazi boots, armed with a rifle, a cutlass and a revolver. On the other side of the card, was a posed picture against a studio background of two fat girls, obviously whores, dressed in the alleged costume of the Andes Indians. We were requested to contribute a trifle to the Captain’s travelling expenses. Presently another traveller appeared; a young Hungarian in a very smart flannel suit. It appeared that he also was in the same business, and that, by an unfortunate chance, both explorers were now headed for the same island, which could hardly be expected to provide funds for more than one of them. The Hungarian told us a good deal about his profession. He wasn’t exactly a beggar; in that he didn’t, for a moment, pretend that he was starving, or even short of money.
It appears that, especially in Spanish peasant districts, this attitude is quite fatal. You must be boastful, affluent and aggressive. “Look what they gave me in El Pinar” is the right note to strike. If they are very stingy, you say:
“This village is full of Arabs.” On arrival in a village, the Hungarian would go straight to the mayor and demand five pesetas. He almost invariably got it; indeed, he looked upon the money as his absolute right and perquisite.
“I’ve got three mayors to go and collect from this morning,” he remarked, as though he were the gas-man. When I asked where the money came from, he replied vaguely that he supposed it was taken out of the taxes. The Spanish Explorer-Captain collected not only money but rubber-stamp-marks, in his autograph album. Anybody who had a stamp would do; most of them were from grocers and chemists. On Hierro, he got a poem as well, dictated by a village poet, who was blind, to his “secretary.” From the very little I could understand of Spanish, it seemed remarkably good satire: “Oh thou,” it began, “who hast travelled the Earth from the burning Equator to the freezing Pole, and art come at last to the door of our insignificant hovel . . .
” The Captain had to admit, however, that business on the island had been comparatively poor. The Hungarian cleaned up the chief village and then left for the next island, to pick that bare before he arrived. Apparently, there are dozens of these people in Spain, most of them foreigners. The most successful is an Englishman, who travels with a very large dog.
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