I wonder if a p.c. reached you, or will reach you: it was signed by Bob, May, Leo, Tom, William, Joe and self in my flat, and took you our love. “If that door would only open and Christopher come in!” said Bob, but it was a good party otherwise, and the biggest I have ever given—Margery Wilson, John Simpson’s idiot’s sister was there too. I had made an effort and asked Leo up for two nights from Dover, and he made a greater effort and accepted, and Joe invited Tom. Leo & Tom also managed to get down here to lunch with my mother. They were fairly well and very nice.
The friend I miss even more than you is Charles Mauron for the reason that he is working out, in his blindness and the darkness of France, some connection between mysticism and aesthetics with the help of Chinese pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 118
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philosophy: I should be able to absorb this, I think, better than I could absorb the connection you are working out, with the help of India, between mysticism and conduct. (Heavens what a sentence! Quite Geraldean in its elaboration and misleadingness.50 It makes me say, incidentally, that I like Charles better than you, which I don’t, and that I absorb connections, which I can’t). Returning to you, thank you very much dear Christopher for the account you give of your ritual. That I do follow, for I know that the universe is a queer place and that ritual is a way and perhaps the best way of acknowledging this. What I don’t follow is your belief that when you are in trouble, as you soon may be like all of us, God will help you. You may be right, of course, but I can’t imagine the belief. It is too far beyond my powers, and I can’t connect it with ritual.
I still dispose my time between here and London, and make new acquaintances still, mostly of foreign nationality. I keep pretty well—staler and older, but managing to blame both these defects on to the war. Bob looks older too. I shall get Christmas meal off their goose I hope. Robin is learning to play chess.
With love as ever from
Morgan
* * *
1946 Ivar Avenue.
January 22. [1944]
Hollywood 28. Calif.
Dearest Morgan,
Thank you for your letter. I am very glad to hear that the food parcel (and Bill Roehrich) arrived in time for Xmas. I would give a good deal to have seen you all at tea at the Ritz—or is the Ritz not ritzy any more? Yes, indeed, I got, and shall treasure, the signed postcard from your party. I thanked you for it, I’m pretty sure, in one of my letters, so fear this can’t have reached you. It is hard to know just how much gets through nowadays—except to Mr Norris, who always begins: “I received your letter of August 1st on November 23rd. Cannot understand this delay. My letter of March 4th to you should have arrived, but you don’t mention it. Please let me know about this at once . . . ” and so on. In fact, most of his letter is usually taken up with discussing when and why and how the last one will, did, could, or should have arrived. His conversion to Catholicism—a theme before which Balzac himself might hesitate—is still only referred to somewhat obliquely. Do you ever see him now?
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I was also much pleased to have a copy of Stephen’s new poems among my [C]hristmas mail. They are very interesting, I think; though I didn’t altogether follow the philosophy involved. Nor the exact tone of voice in which the title “spiritual exercises” was used. Ironical? Apparently not. S.
inscribed my copy “from the untransformed Stephen,” which also needs some explanation. I have written to him, of course.
I gave your address to “Pete” Martinez, the Americo-Mexican boy whose memoirs Lincoln Kirstein wrote in “For My Brother.” I hope you will meet or have met him. He is something quite special—one of the really unique people I have known. He may have left by now, however.
You say you “can’t imagine” the belief that God could help you. But if
“God” is inside you, surely there must be some way to contact him, and surely contacting him would be “a help”? I don’t have to tell a person like yourself that there is something inside you infinitely greater than what you ordinarily think of as Morgan Forster. As a matter of fact, you have asked Its help dozens of times—whenever you sat down to write anything. No artist can possibly doubt that this power exists, can he? Aren’t we just misunderstanding each other in a purely verbal way?
I suppose one could argue that this power only exists in each individual for certain purposes, or to a limited extent. And of course there is still the problem of “evil” which Buddha refused to solve, and which [C]hristianity solves much too glibly. And the equally mysterious problem of “grace,” or whatever you like to call it. Any theory can be exploded, because all intellectual truth is only relative. But I come back to the empirical. Aren’t you, in practice, aware of this power? And how do you explain the saints? There are an awful lot of them. And such different temperaments. Are they all crazy, or mistaken?
You say that Mauron is working out a connection between “mysticism and aesthetics” and that I am working out a connection between “mysticism and conduct.” But I’d say they were three corners of a triangle: or maybe it is a much more complicated figure. They all confirm each other on different planes. What is conduct, anyway? Behaving as if some set of values were true. And by behaving in this way you actually make them true.
But, conversely, if you believe in a certain set of values, the appropriate conduct will follow. (I think the above are some of the most risky general-isations I have ever made: but you will perhaps get something from them impressionistically, at any rate.)
Did I tell you in my last letter how much I admire William’s autobiography?51 My Mother sent it me for Christmas. Am now just starting Willie’s The Razor’s Edge, but can’t say anything yet. At any rate, the subject is interesting.
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This weekend I saw, for the first time, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
Do you know it? It’s still wonderful, in spite of the fascist racial nonsense about negroes. There’s a kind of Tolstoyan simplicity in the contrasts: the two schoolboy friends from the North and South who meet again on the battlefield and fall dead in each other’s arms; and the Southern colonel coming home from the war, and the killing of Lincoln, and the attempted rape and suicide of Mae Marsh, and Lillian Gish’s romance: everything told like a story to a child, without any impressionism. And subtitles like: “True to the stern code of her Father’s honour, she sought refuge within the opal gates of death.” (Why opal?) The movies have lost all that lyrical quality now.
Aldous told me this quotation from D.H. Lawrence which I didn’t know: “The dark stinging centrality of the duck on the muddy pond.”
Mother, I’ve been stung by a duck! A good entrance-line for a character in a play. In fact, the Nobel Prize should be awarded to anybody who could write a play in which this seemed quite natural.
Must stop now.
Very much love to you as always, and to Bob,
Christopher
* * *
West Hackhurst,
Abinger Hammer, Dorking
10-2-44
Dearest Christopher,
The enclosed will partly explain itself. I have quickly become attached to Bill [Roerick], and am distressed that he is likely to go to Africa very soon.
I would have liked much more talk with him: when people have so much charm I am never content until I have got to the bottom of their charm.
Something solid underlies it, I doubt not, but want to know. Such heaps of lovely things you have sent me— two parcels, not one, arrived and at our party we had sandwiches made with your butter, ham and sardines. Robin was very good, sat on bed sorting stamps, then played chess with me. Bill and I lunched in town next day, and he sang two lovely folk songs as we walked round Leicester Square. What a turn for evil civilisation has taken.