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and feel very sorry for the boy. This much I will say, that now you know you can miscalculate you will be more careful another time. Have you to provide for him at all?
G. H. [Gerald Hamilton] whom I saw lately, spoke guardedly, that it to say, god how he chattered.
I am well, and until recently stable or impervious. But a couple of letters of George Thomsom have joggled me a bit—he hates my “What I Believe.”
Previous to that I had 3 lovely days walking in Dorset—all bread and cheese and beer and Bob. We went over Portland, then along the cliffs to Lakeworth and Cloud Hill and Wareham. We were both very happy. I have some other pleasures ahead if the weather holds. On Tuesday I go to Geneva to see the Prado pictures, on July 3rd to Glyndebourne to hear Cosi fan tutte and on Sept. 4th to Stockholm, to represent the P. E. N. Club. The Libel Committee continues to make progress.
I never travel, and am rather in a flutter over Tuesday. I would have come with you to America, I think, but was not sure it suited you and Wystan, and I have been too afraid to come since.
Am anxious for further news. Do hope you feel richer and happier. How did the bus tour go off?
With love from
Morgan
Do you know anything of an American dramatiser called Jo Eisinger?78 He has done A Room with a View, without permission. It does not look good and I am turning it down, but wish you were here to advise. Thornton Wilder is brought here by Lady Colifax to tea tomorrow.
* * *
[The following is typed at the top of the page:]
No, never heard of Jo Eisinger. Usually, these people turn out to be ambitious university students. But, for all I know, he may be the flower of the U.S. stage.
7136 Sycamore Trail.
July 3 [1939]
Hollywood. California.
My Dearest Morgan,
I was so glad to get your letter. Yes, of course I have behaved badly. Very badly indeed, but, I hope, quite straightforwardly—if breaking promises can ever be called straightforward. How like you to refuse to read my letter: pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 83
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I am very grateful for that. Really, if I’d known that it was going to be bandied round Cambridge, I’d have drawn up a proper document, headed: To Whom This May Not Concern. I would be angry with Burgess, but I am not in a position to be angry with anybody. It’s no more than I deserve.
Why didn’t I tell you all about it? Because I felt ashamed of myself. I am still ashamed; but don’t see that I could have acted differently, having got things into such a mess. The whole business was a problem of distance and money. I couldn’t afford to fly to England and speak to J[acky] personally, which would have straightened everything out, and left no hard feelings. So, I wrote. And all letters of that sort, however well expressed, sound brutal.
You are right to warn me to be careful in future; but don’t worry, I shall be. This time, I really have learnt my lesson.
The papers say there really will be war, this time: and here I sit, waiting for it to start. I still feel as I did when I wrote to you last, and as I shall continue to feel, I believe, for the rest of my life: that I have been absolutely wrong. Force is no good—even to achieve the grandest objectives. One’s enemies can only be won over [by] active goodwill. If you exterminate them, like bugs, the poison only enters into yourself, so you are defeated anyway. And a semi-victory is even worse. At a reptile show here the other day, I saw an elderly, dowdy spinster (of the type which usually fusses over dogs) stroking the heads of two big Indian cobras. She has kept poisonous snakes for twenty years, and never once been bitten. She can tame any snake in a fortnight. “You see,” she explained, “they know I won’t hurt them. So they aren’t frightened of me.”
Gerald Heard, our master and guide, is away just now. Huxley impresses me much less. He is a big aimiable [sic] cyclops, but he learnt everything out of a book. He just cannot stop quoting, comparing, annotating. And he has a rather sinister underlife of smart luncheons. Harvey goes to art-school five days a week, and is out all day. I take and fetch him in a very wobbly Ford. Our little house would amaze you. It is really beautiful—high up the hill, among woods. There is great deal of work connected with it, which keeps us both busy; and I am trying to write something about Ernst Toller. I have hardly any money left, and no job yet; though Mrs Viertel promises something as soon as Viertel arrives. He is in the train now. I am quite happy on the surface, or perhaps I should say under the surface: there is a layer of gloom about Europe which is likely to thicken. I still don’t really know what I shall do if war comes. Return, Wystan says, and nurse the wounded. But should we be allowed to? If only I hadn’t wasted all this time with the hate-brigade. When you start trying to think for yourself, every step is so painfully slow. I miss you dreadfully. More than anybody in England. And you would love it here. The country is so beautiful. And that pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 84
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great garden-suburb down in the valley doesn’t matter at all. It’s even convenient, for they have very good bookshops. The studios and their life is as remote as it is in London. If you’re not in it you never see it at all.
Wystan, in the midst of the greatest love of his life, is careering about the New Mexican desert. I think he is growing up very fast. Anyhow, his work gets better and better—really classic. In my little way, I think I am imitat-ing your curve. The war-silence is setting in, before, I hardly dare to hope, The Passage to India. But, alas, I’m not writing a Maurice.
All my love to you, and to Bob, and respects to your Mother.
Your erring
Christopher
I find I’ve said nothing about J[acky]. I wish I could do something to help. I paid, of course, for the Pittman School, which he should have finished by now. But the money was going through John Lehmann, and I gather that J. and John had had some kind of coolness or quarrel—anyway on J’s side. I wrote to John when I wrote to J. and asked him to stand by and help. Of course, I was and am terribly worried about how J. would take my letter. He seems to have run to Gerald [Hamilton] (Gerald wrote me) and told him everything. Gerald, no doubt, provided some worldly-wise comfort. But what is he going to do now? He has, or had, his old job at the hotel Goring. (This I heard before he got my letter). He had no need to take the job back, because I had asked John to provide adequate money for him to live on, as long as he was at the school. But maybe, owing to this friction with John, he didn’t go and collect it. There’s a great deal I shall never know.
I do think that, if you feel strong enough, it would be a very good thing if you talked to Jacky yourself.
Needless to say—if you ever do read that notorious letter—I wasn’t quite exact in what I wrote about my reasons for not wanting him to join me out here. I had to express things in Jacky’s terms. What I couldn’t explain to him—perhaps not entirely to anybody—was a feeling of utter spiritual impotence. I just suddenly knew that I couldn’t cope. I knew that, however much I dread loneliness, there is something inside me which has to be alone, and which wasn’t alone when J. was around. Heinz was different.
So is Harvey. Perhaps because they are foreigners. I don’t know. Anyhow, this all sounds rather tiresome when I write it down, like the sensations of a character in D.H. Lawrence.
The only thing that matters, of course, is that J. shall emerge from this business with the minimum amount of mistrust in the human race. That’s where you could help him, if you would. Most of the people he has known seem to have been such utter skunks.
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