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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
I broadcast a good deal and read a good deal, and as for writing, if you can get hold of the December number of Horizon please read an article by me in it.23 You will then see where I stand—though it is much more a sit, modified by a very very slight genuflection.
I will leave this letter open till the morning. I am interested I should be right about prayer, I never minded it, and the Maharajah’s gay shrieks of
“Morgan—Morgan—don’t come nearer [. . . ?] this morning, please, I am holy” raining in my ears, even on that morning, as profound.
Very little gossip is obtainable here. Most people are segregated in jobs and there is very little entertaining, through lack of servants, food, and petrol. Stephen Tennant, once an enormous golden mountain, is still to be discerned above the rising waters, embanked by his bad health, and Bob and I hope to go there on Saturday for a weekend. That house, and John Simpson’s, are the only ones I get invited to stay at. Dear dear me, it is a solid overturn.
Well now I really must get to bed, and may even post this right away.
Very very much love from your
Morgan
[continuing on same sheet of paper]
W[est] H[ackhurst]
1-3-42
This did not get posted—indeed look at the date. The best of a letter in two sections though is that one can gossip a little—gossip, as opposed to narrative, being references from section to section. Well, we got our weekend at Stephen T[ennant]’s—Peter Watson, Connolly and Elizabeth Bowen were there too. All went well until the last evening, when S.T.
became annoyed because the boys would discuss a post-mortem and still more annoyed because he could not stop them, left up from the diner table, blew out the four candles which illuminated it, and rushed, switching out lights as he went, into his bed. We knew not what to do nor whither to turn.
Embassies were organised. Later in the evening he dressed and reappeared in the drawing room. So even in England the Private Life can still be led.
But I do not think it will be for long.
Bob loved your letter, said you were exactly the same, and it was exactly like you to pretend you were not, so as to give one a surprise on meeting. I think I am changing a little—not in affection, but three years of a war and such a war deform one’s mind. It is such an awful lot one has to understand, it is too much, and too much has to be suddenly scrapped.
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* * *
West Hackhurst
Abinger Hammer
Dorking
[early June, 1942]
Dearest Christopher,
I have just preached my first sermon, so as parson to parson may I tip you a wink? Perhaps you may not be in a position to return it, but we get the idea that everyone your side preaches sermons. Mine was on the occasion of the death of Ronald Kidd, the founder of the Council for Civil Liberties, and I took my text from Wilhelm Tell.24 It now serves as an opportunity to chatter to you. I think you wrote last. Life goes on as usual here. The most interesting thing I am doing—but I am afraid I shall discover nothing—is to look at St Augustine and his contemporaries, and ask them how they took their Landslide. But they are so different from us, that even when I can catch what they say it does not sound like wisdom. And I am looking for applicable wisdom. They are partly so different because they had a sexual conscience and not a social one, whereas it is the other way round with us. I am only just tapping the thing, though. I wish I had Gerald to direct me, though I suppose he would say I was wasting my time.
After the “Confessions” I am reading a little Claudian,25 and then thinking of the Tomb of Galla Placidia, which I saw at Ravenna once in tourist days.
It was certainly a very strange age, and even less of a piece than ours.
You will prefer some news of ours. The John Lehmann-Spender vista you know. Joe Ackerley is all right in his flat over Putney Bridge, where he has adopted a pigeon. William is still overworked at the Admiralty. John Simpson had not yet been called up, and stayed with me for a night in Chiswick last week. Bob is still spared to me and is rowing in a regatta this weekend. I think I told you he has burst into art (oils—of Amsterdam) and been hung. Robin, aged 9, is up for a few days, since London keeps quiet.
We went to a cinema and there was a film of Dover, showing that vaulted restaurant where we might all still be eating, and a travelling shot down the high street toward the church, where nothing seemed damaged. Robin scarcely remembers Dover. He is very good company, and will soon be going to a Friends’ Co-educationist school at Saffron Walden. As for new objects, the chief one is a young Chinese called Hsiao Chi’en. I wonder whether you have heard of him, or will; he has written “Etching of a Tormented Age,” which is about contemporary Chinese literature, and he is well acquainted with their new ambassador to Washington.
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I don’t much like this letter. It is of course not easy to write friends from whom one has parted for years. One sees and knows them as well as ever, but cannot believe they will hear what is being said.
8-6-42
Since beginning this a few days ago I have heard from Gerald, but it looks a stiff and misty letter and I have not yet coped with it. We get very provincial. Since the war started, I have not even seen the sea. Our lives are interned without being spiritual, and trying desperately to balance we get exalted and false ideas of America or Europe or China. I have violent longings for fragments of my past—mostly small pieces of scenery abroad, with blurred edges—and I reconstruct partings which I hadn’t at the time known would be for so long. One of the worst is the parting from Charles Mauron at Lausanne June 1939 when I scrambled into a silly mountain railway train, and he already almost blind.
Charlie (waiter Charlie), who was at the Trojan Horse near your house, has now gone to the Black Bug [?] at Nottingham. Victor’s is now absurdly expensive; none of us go there, and we learn from M. Victor’s confrères that it is his obstinacy. When in London I eat at the Club or at a Lyons Cafeteria, or Bob cooks down at the Chiswick flat, where we have accumulated some wine. I have plenty of money—partly because I broadcast regularly to India—and certainly it is a help. I wish I had hope, as well as tenacity and calmness. Sometimes I wish I had it [hope?] instead of them [tenacity and calmness?], for I have known the sensation in the past and it is lovely. The lights going up again, the Prince Baudouin running—one would die of such happiness.
I have just brought out my Virginia Woolf lecture. Harcourt Brace is publishing it your side. Have also been preparing A Passage to India for Everyman, with some notes, and with Peter Burra’s article on me as an introduction.
Would like to hear more about your work with “aliens.” I believe they are still unhappy over here, but we got Wolfgang (John Simpson’s friend) back.—Did Klaus Mann ever publish my article?
With love dear Christopher from Morgan
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As from:
9121 Alto Cedro Drive.
Beverly Hills. Calif.
July 8. [1942]
Dearest Morgan,
Such a nice letter from you, of the eighth of June, which I’m answering from the train, enroute for California and the above address. It is the house of friends and will always find me in the foreseeable future, so we’d better stick to it from now on. As a matter of fact, there has been a little spurt of news suddenly: two very descriptive letters, one from Tony Hyndman, who seems so happy and so admirably fitting into his new life; one from Benjamin Britten, who was fitting less well at the moment but very interestingly, because he could still hold England and the U.S. in some kind of relation to each other.