If it is the sort of story I think, I think it oughtn’t to have gone to such lengths right away. As it is, the opening and the closing exercises vary too little, and there is scarcely anything extra left for Leonard. I would have been sketchier and more restrained earlier. But there, I may not have got your intention or the nature of the life you wish to describe. It may have been this absence of progress that made me feel sad as I left the fireside and went to open an exhibition of pictures by Mr Mukul Derz. I certainly found no progress in them.
It is difficult to tack on personal scraps when one has been concentrat-ing on a single thing and that such an unusual one. I am well. May is well.
Bob better but still far from his old self. I spent the New Year with them.
Christmas at Aldeburgh. Tomorrow I am televised on the subject of the Cambridge Humanists, next week I go to Oxford to see the premiere of a Passage to India.37 However that: enough. Close below me I see a spot that must have come from butter, and will stop.
With much love
[unsigned]
* * *
[postcard]
King’s College Cambridge
[postmark: April 19, 1961]
Just to thank you for your card and to say, yes, I am only just out of hospital, though feeling unharmed. I look forward to seeing you and Don a bit later on.—Love to both—
Morgan
Wednesday
* * *
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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
[postmark of postcard: Cambridge, June 3, 1961]
Behold my bird and with what curves about Coventry [the “y” connects with his drawing of a bird] it greets your suggestion[,] but I must check them until I have spoken to Bob (on Saturday) and May (on Sunday). 11
Salisbury Avenue is our address there and I should be there through the coming week.
* * *
Monday [June 5? 1961]
11 Salisbury Avenue
Coventry, Warwickshire
Dearest Christopher,
Can you and Don come up here on Tuesday the 13th or Wednesday the 14th, take a morning train[,] let us know when it arrives, and if Bob does not meet it then take a taxi up here from the station, and be with us for lunch? Sightseeing can occur in the afternoon.
Did you know that Heinz and Gerda arrive in England on the 24th, and will be staying in my Chiswick flat?
Hoping to see you here next week. Let me know date as soon as possible.
Love from
Morgan
* * *
King’s College Cambridge
March 25[,] 1962
Dearest Christopher,
I didn’t come off with your book,38 and this day, the first of British Summer Time, brings me warmth enough to say so. I read it all through and bits of it again and again, and with varied pleasures, but the final union was withheld. I tell myself it’s because I’m too old, but that’s priggish, and am inclined to another explanation—also personal—which is that I didn’t want Christopher or his variants to guide me through a book by you any more. He had done all he could for me already. I wanted a yarn less conditioned by him. I had other reservations—my failure to be interested in Paul being one of them, in contrast to the immense interest he arouses in other readers, e.g. Joe. And connected with Paul no doubt, I don’t feel I’ve had a look down there and come back. The hole in my flooring must be somewhere else in fact.—This reaction to a guide (or, to put him less crudely, to pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:57 PM Page 161
THE POSTWAR YEARS
161
a continuous presence) has come to me when reading other authors: e.g.
Conrad with his much slighter employment of Marlowe. I don’t always find him a help towards the matter in hand. And your matter is important and enormous.
I have been behaving very well to everyone lately, it seems to me, and your remarks on the perils and punishments hanging over those who thus excel their friends fall on me with particular poignancy. What have I been doing in the literary way may perhaps be enquired. Well a box has just been presented to me by the Public Trustee (How obtained? through good behaviour of course), and in it are papers relating to my g[rea]t g[rea]t uncle Robert Thornton who went to the bad in 1814[,] fled to France, and thence to Lancaster[,] Pennsylvania, where he can be traced up to 1820. On this date he closed his account with his solicitors and it is their box that has just come to me, in the arms of a Mrs Jackson. He is said to have died in 1826.
I hope to get to London later in the week, to see six Buckinghams, two Harewoods, and the retrospective Keith Vaughan exhibition.39 I wonder whether there will be anything in it as good as the picture you gave me. I have been looking at it a great deal lately, and meditating on the Heroic Nude, of which it is a specimen. K. V. achieved some in an earlier period, they say. So did Michelangelo. Most nudes are defenceless and either sen-suous or sexless. The heroic nude avoids all three weaknesses.
Here Ted Gillott has looked in with an American of three years old, and I have walked them down to the lodge. No, the cold is still icy and of a bitterness. No heart can yet flow in it. What a good thing I did not discover this before.
Back in room, and love from
Morgan
* * *
April 6 [1962]
145 Adelaide Drive
Santa Monica
California
Dearest Morgan,
Thank you so much for your letter. It was sweet of you to trouble to write about my novel, especially as you didn’t much care for it. I’m sorry, of course, but not entirely surprised. There is a part of me, of my literary and personal character, which is very far from what you are and stand for, pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:57 PM Page 162
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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
which is perhaps one of the reasons why I love and admire you so much! I don’t mean by this that I am apologizing for myself or even for the book. It said exactly what I intended it to say, and now I feel a lot better. My next will be quite different, and no doubt, to some extent, the likers and dislikers may change sides over it.
Joe Ackerley’s being here made us both—and indeed also Gerald Heard, Chris Wood, etc—wish sadly that you had come with him. What a joyful get-together that would have been! But Joe has told us a lot about you. He also mentioned a story you have written I long to see. And how fascinating the Robert Thornton papers sound!
I hope you enjoyed the Keith Vaughan show, but hope also that you will decide you like yours at least one of the best.
We have had wretched weather, but now it is fine and hot. Don is working hard. His struggle is to make himself paint. The Slade planted a seed of guilt in his heart about drawing. He feels he should do both. He will probably have a show on Long Island in the middle of the summer and he as arranged for a show here in the autumn. I’m in a whirl with teaching, trying to finish the Ramakrishna biography—which, entre nous, is becoming a labor of sheer willpower, and not very sheer, either—and planning a new short novel. I fear that “Christopher” may rear his head again, but perhaps only a few inches above ground.
I think I told you in my last letter how much Don enjoyed the New York production of Passage to India. It seems to be doing well? My only hope is that it will do well enough to go on tour and come to us here, because I greatly fear I won’t get East to see it. I’m tied down to teaching until June, anyhow.
Don is out, but I can take the responsibility of sending you his love.
All mine,
Christopher
* * *
December 13 [1963]
145 Adelaide Drive
Santa Monica
California
Dearest Morgan,
At least, this year, my birthday wishes to you won’t be late! I am writing this early because I am about to take another plunge into the Orient—