How are things with you? I see your Irish autobiographer was duly translated[,] published and praised.5 I wish I could read him, but I shall do so as soon as I’m back in England. I would leave this place tomorrow but have spent so much money getting here that retreat is not easy. I believe I really shall settle down in England this time. China reappears on the hori-zon, however.
I think very often about you and our day in the country at Charlton’s.6
Also about that manuscript.7 How I wish you’d publish it. I think it would do good. I am so utterly weary of these impure books. They are like the salt pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 23
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mixed with sugar which we’ve unfortunately had to eat for the last week, owing to a slight mistake on the part of the cook.
I stopped this letter for five minutes in order to torture two blood suck-ing flies to death. Living here has made me fiendishly cruel. We are always murdering some insect or animal. I feel like Macbeth. This—by the way—
is another thing I can’t quite reconcile with the classics. The Greeks simply revel in and feast on cruelty. Or is this a mere tourist’s impression?
Please write to me. Nobody ever does, it seems. I need a letter a day to keep the horrors away.
Yours ever
Christopher Isherwood
* * *
16-7-33
West Hackhurst,
Abinger Hammer,
Dorking.
Dear Isherwood
I am so very pleased to get your letter and reply at once. I did reply at once to your post-card too, as you will see from the enclosed, but you will also see why it was never finished. And perhaps this letter will be as dull. Yet I have a feeling to the contrary and will at all events not wait until tomorrow to make sure.
Do I know Greece well? I should hope so. I was there in 1903 and have not been there since. I got tuned[?] up [boarding school slang] by a modern Greek who stole another archeologist’s coat before we landed and said I had given it to him. For I was an archeologist in 1903, just as I was a surgeon from 1915–19 in Egypt, and a physiologist in 1924 at Stockholm and an ethnologist for 1927 in Africa. What remains, however, to our present purpose is a remark made to the surgeon by Cavafy, who was himself an official in the Third Irrigation Circle and a great poet. Cavafy said “Never forget about the Greeks that we are bankrupt. That is the difference between us and the ancient Greeks and, my dear Forster, between us and yourselves. Pray, my dear Forster, that you—you English with your capac-ity for adventure—never lose your capital, otherwise you will resemble us, restless, shifty, liars . . . ” Which is an answer of a sort to your question. And I think that both the cruelty and the exaltation of cunning could be paralleled in the 5th century B.C.
My own questions are of a different type and vary in vulgarity from
“Who are you with?” to “Where does the money come from to build a pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 24
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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
house?” You need not answer any of them when you write but I do hope you will write. I am still in England and still unable to decide whether she is good or evil, but at the moment of writing occupied in loving her and in wondering how you could have left the zinnias and the gooseberries, which I have just gathered, for your goats and their flesh. The bother of talking and of moving increases as I get older, so I would rather talk English to Bob even though my mother does think his voice common, and he drives round the western counties by him in a car, advancing to be sure into Wales, but retreating from it on the grounds that it was un-homey, and that the Welsh did not wash. We were away for a fortnight, and how, life being like this, any of these questions ever will be decided I can’t see. I mean I look back in my own case on a constant alternation of emotions about England. Europe and anti-Europe. I wish I felt that “old experience might attain to something like prophetic strain.” Then one could know whether to live here or abroad in time.
Of the people you met that day at Esher,8 our hosts are much as usual.
Joe Ackerley is back for a holiday in France, and Dawkins is taking one in Greece at the beginning of August. I don’t know whether you wish him to be given your address. I shall give it him if you say, but not otherwise. Bob I have mentioned and also myself. I have just been to Cambridge but find it rather queer. I can’t tell you how glad I am you liked my book [ Maurice].
Yes, if the pendulum keeps swinging in its present direction it might get published in time. But the more one meets decent and sensible people, of whom there are now a good few, the more does one forget the millions of beasts and idiots who still prowl in the darkness, ready to gibber and devour. I think I had a truer view of civilisation thirty years ago, when I regarded myself as hiding a fatal secret. Though I am of course much more civilised myself now than I was then, and so are we all, those good few of us who count.— What do you mean by “impure books”? I daresay I agree, but don’t just know what you mean.
I anticipate to be here or in my flat till the end of the year. Now do please write. I will send you Twenty Years a growing9 tomorrow.
Yours ever
EM Forster
* * *
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July 22 [1933]
L’ILE ST NICHOLAS
CHALIA
BEOETIA
GREECE
Dear Forster,
Thank you very much for your letter, which came as a consolation this morning after three postless days—the village shop keeper had gone away to a feast in another village, so we couldn’t get at our mail. Thank you also in advance for Twenty Years A Growing. It will probably arrive soon. I am longing to read something other than detective stories. Why are detective stories almost always so badly written? I suppose because they’re mostly by maths masters at Public Schools. I am making a collection of phrases from them. The best so far is: “He bestowed upon her what was intended as a confidential embrace.” Pleasing also, because utterly cryptic, is: “He was a decent clean living type of young chap, though his behaviour at times left something to be desired.”
The island is leased by a friend of mine named Turville Petre. His is the money which will pay for the house. He knows P[ro]f[essor] Dawkins and extends a hearty invitation. The best way to reach us—as I think I told you—is to take the train to Chalkis. Other inhabitants of the island include a German Communist named Erwin Hansen, who cooks. He has known Turville P for a long time, and took this opportunity of escaping from the Nazis. There is also a German working boy of eighteen named Heinz Neddermeyer. He is not the one who was ill. The one who was ill came to an end. It had never really been a success. He is now in happier financial circumstances and, seemingly, much better. If you wade through my next novel, you will gather a good deal of information about him and our relationship. As for Heinz, I hope you will see him, because I plan to come with him to England in the Autumn. The obstacles to my doing so are purely external—I don’t know how easy or difficult it is to get permission for a German to land, or how long he would be allowed to stay. Do you happen to know anything about this? My great problem at the moment is where to live. I ask nothing better, temporarily, than to stay in England, if we’re both allowed to.