No doubt Bill has told you all about Tommy Ryan, and Bruce
Wadsworth, his friend, who is missing. In fact, he says you may be meeting Tommy. I hope you do. You can help him so much—more than you realize.
When I heard about Bruce, I felt miserable all day—though I barely know him: we’d met twice. He was crazy about old houses. I wanted him to see Marple, but he never got there.52
Twelve years last Monday since I met Heinz. He is so vividly with me, much of the time, that I’m surprised I don’t know, telepathically, whether he is dead or alive, somewhere. But I still mind where.
Have been quite busy in a literary way. The Gita translation is finished—part verse and part prose. I’m afraid the verse isn’t so hot—but the variety does seem to make the whole thing more readable. Then Aldous and I are writing a story we hope to sell to the movies. Prostitution? No—
it is rather good, and the kind of story which is best told as a film. I’ll let you know more about this later. Thirdly, there is a story I began to write last year, and have just reopened, about working with Viertel at Gaumont-British. This is quite a problem: it has to be written as historical fiction, and should be called: “A Tale of the ’34,” or some such title.53
Viertel himself left for New York last night. He has written a play about the Nazis—at the cost of Herculean snortings, groans and carpet-pac-ings—and now he hopes it will be produced. My fear is that he will be too late. Such things are so quickly out of fashion.
Auden is well, busy teaching and writing. He just sent me a most curious production—a commentary on “The Tempest,” in poetry and prose.
Haven’t had time to digest it, yet.
Paul Cadmus you would like, I’m pretty sure. But I can’t say I know him awfully well. He is gay, affectionate, talkative, intelligent—but there is a mysterious part of him which sometimes paints a picture of a massacre, a riot or rape, so hellishly ugly and perverse, that one doesn’t know what to say or do, except vomit. On being expostulated with, he obviously doesn’t understand why he does it himself, and talks unconvincingly about being influenced by Bosch, etc. The rest of his work is represented quite well by the drawing of me and the picture he sent you.
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Is civilisation really decaying—or is it that, as we get older, we notice it more? The pre-1914 was an obscene mess, in a different way. And as for the 20’s!
I am much worried by the news of another bad raid on London. It’s so impossible to evaluate these things by the newspaper. Do take care of yourself.
Very much love, as always, and to Bob,
Christopher
* * *
[May 2?–9, 1944]
[Patterdale, Westmoreland, England]
Dearest Christopher,
I take up, to answer your letters of March 16 & 28, the pens of Dorothy Wordsworth and Canon Raunsleigh: that is to say, I am in the Lakes, and it is raining. It did not do so for the first days of my visit, and I had a very good time alone, walking slowly all day without fatigue. It is the first time I have been out of the London area for 2 or 3 years. Travelling is so awkward that one needs an incentive, and this was found in a lecture I undertook at Glasgow. I am at Patterdale, the head of Ullswater. It has been a lovely change from Surrey and London—the last named looks a dreadful muddle. Bob was in some bad raids—he wormed his way into a cake of rubble whose plums were human beings, cut through the back of a wardrobe, handed out the dresses, cut through the front, handed on [out?] morphis-pills from a doctor whose hand showed through the floor, and extricated an old lady and carried her in his arms to safety, and she calling on Holy Mary all the time. I took Robin a fortnight back to Natasha’s [Spender’s wife] recital. He sat between me and Joe, was very good and sensible over the music and shook hands or bowed to what is left of the Bloomsbury elite—Beryl de Zoete and Sybil Colefax-Wraiths54—offered toffee to Elizabeth Bowen, and had popped into his own mouth a spoonful of demerers [?] sugar by Stephen to steady his nerves. The concert was a success—lovely Schumann, smashing Ravel. Beethoven less successful. Oh and that reminds me, I have a bone to pick with the C sharp minor quartet—
easy enough, for it consists mainly of little bones. I cannot believe that this scrappy self-willed dispirited stuff contains the secret of happiness, and expect it was an extra piece of naughtiness on B’s part that made him say so.
It is so dark that Christopher Wordsworth can scarcely see the paper.
The sky is lighter than the earth, so a cloud must have set down on us. I am the only guest in the hotel which I first visited nearly 40 years ago, and it hasn’t much altered, except to become more comfortable and to send a pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 126
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grandson to Rugby.—Ought one, by the way, as one gets older, to fling about such unreturnable weights as “nearly 40 years ago”? It is a moot point, and I haven’t found a ruling. I want to be thought young, and for very good reasons. Yet I combine this wish with the heaving of silencers.
The truth probably is that neither youth nor age are bad, so one wobbles between them.
Oh the mists are lifting! May Hutchinson can see Helvellyn quite well.
Coleridge, who should have gone up it today, would be better for a little Landanum;55 disordered stomach; too much exercise? Too much food?
Landanum not to be had. I return to London tomorrow, and shall post this letter there, and perhaps add something to it when I have seen Bob. I don’t think I can write austerity stories. I did finish the memoir, rather against the grain, and the result is wry and peeved. I have now heard from Bill
[Roerick]. An interesting letter, but he makes no reference to any person, thing, or incident in this country, although he was here several months. Is this “American” or is it Bill? And does one rally him on it?
I think I shall go to the Post Office, and buy some chocolate modge[?], against Southey’s advice. It is strange that you and I should be writing in sceneries so different from each other and from ourselves—you amongst carrots and rattlesnakes, and I in this slightly holy upland of the English-speaking people. I wish we could meet. Could it have been a cousin of yours whom I saw in a shop in Shere? I know you have an aunt there, and he was rather like you to look at: very young: you would know him—if he exists—as a child.
I have been broadcasting on books that have influenced me. Bob said
“Don’t forget the negative ones” and this panned out well
NO
YES
The goodness of St. Augustine
v. Blake’s
The cleverness of Machiavelli
v. Voltaires’s
The indignation of Swift
v. Samuel Butler’s whose Erewhon I
was specially considering
The strength of Carlyle
v. Sophocles’ in the Antigone
I agree with all you say about love when I read your words, but never manage to think or feel clearly on the subject. Has love an antithesis?
Would its antithesis be hatred? I agree one can’t determine to love. But I think one can determine to realise other people exist, and if one succeeds love may come easier. Of Heinz I have often thought, and have looked at photographs of him and Bob grinning at one another on that Dutch railway car. So you have known him since March 1932. I met Bob in 1930—also March I pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 127
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think—it was the Boat Race Day. The two often occur to me together. I often expect you will meet H. again—the ordinary earthly meeting—and I am glad on that account that you didn’t stay here, as on other accounts.