The days here are all alike. They are remarkable to me only for my failure or non-failure to work at my novel. We live on microscopic scraps of gossip. Everybody exhaustively discusses every remark made or alleged to have been made by every body else. Favourite topics are: The erotic performances of the poultry and their results. The Price of Food. Action of the Bowels. There used to be several Greek boys here, as sort of servants, but pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 26
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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
they mostly stole or developed venereal diseases, and now there is only one.
The nights are quiet but the days are deafening—the hack-saw rasping of the cicades [sic], the quacking of the ducks and the demoniac yelling of the Greek masons, who yell louder and louder as the sun gets hotter. The house really is nearly finished at least.
Do write again soon. God knows, my letters aren’t worth answering, but write in human charity.
By “impure” books I meant adulterated books—just as jam is adulterated or milk. A good example which I read the other day is Susan Glaspell’s
“Ambrose Holt & Family.”10 Have you read it? It all starts off so genuine.
And then, suddenly, half way through, one gets a curious whiff. Only a whiff. And yet, all the time, Miss Glaspell is being so charming, so entertaining, that one hardly likes to say anything and at length can only very diffidently suggest: I say, do you think—er, I mean, is this quite all right . . .
? But the whiff gets stronger and stronger, until, at last, the whole fraud is exposed, and one sees as plain as daylight that the book isn’t what it’s pretending to be, or what the publisher says it is inside the cover—Albatross Edition—but merely a description of some of the effects which the authoress would like to produce, and can’t.
Heinz has begun to sing: “Good bye, my Bluebell”—all the English he knows—so, I must stop.
Can’t you send me the dialogue between the porter and the passenger?11
Yours ever
Christopher Isherwood
* * *
[September 22, 1933]
West Hackhurst,
Abinger Hammer,
Dorking.
Dear Isherwood,
You did give me a turn over the German book you so kindly lent me. I sprang out of bed, certain I had lost it, but a book which had been called overnight “Toadstools of the British Country Side” turned back into it as I touched it, so I live. Another cause for my optimism—more solid than my great thought of the week which you saw in the Observer and which must have come out of a rather bitter article I wrote against the public schools, attacking General[?] Sir Archibald Montgomery Massingberd, Lord Goschen, the Rev. F. C. Day and others by name.12 At least I can think of no other source.
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THE 1930s
27
[typed addendum on back side]
22/9/33
Exactly. Have let this lie about for weeks[,] only just returned your book, done nothing about seeing whether your German friend can stop in England. I’m very sorry. I want to see you as soon as you can manage it. I am just going to the Woolfs for the week end (Monks House, Rodnell, Lewes), and a line there at once would catch me. I expect to be in London Monday evening. Could we meet then, or could we lunch Tuesday? Please communicate if this reaches you, and when I get your communication I’ll wire definitely. You know my London address—26 Brunswick Square, W.C., telephone Terminus 5804.
EM Forster [signed]
* * *
17-2-34
West Hackhurst,
Abinger Hammer,
Dorking.
Dear Isherwood,
I am coming up Tuesday evening. Could you come round to 26
Brunswick Square at about 9.0? Or I could meet you elsewhere. Send me a line here and if Tuesday does not suit you please make some alternative suggestion.
I shall like seeing you, and I like calling you Isherwood. This cataract of Christian names—Tombobblewalterall—too often disappears into the abyss.
I am trying to read “Behind the Smoke Screen” for review purposes13, but simply haven’t the pluck. It is rather humiliating. I don’t think any one could possess social nerves today, unless he was a fool or a communist, and I am too intelligent to be the first, and too old to be the second. All that I can do is to work out a new private ethic which, in the outbreak of a war, might be helpful to me. The individual is more than ever the goods.
Yours ever,
EM Forster
I am O.K. personally, as we call it.
* * *
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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
S.S. Zeelandia
April 5 [1934]
Dear Forster,
This is just to let you know where I am. In a fog, as a matter of fact, hooting somewhere off the Isle of Wight. We are trying to get near Southampton, to take on board a Mr. Abercromby, about whom Heinz and I indulge in the liveliest speculations, as he is also (as the neat little card on his cabin door, next to ours, informs us) going to Las Palmas. We arrive there on the 12th. Not very thrilling, but it ought to be warm and nice, and all the really interesting places are so expensive. As for Tahiti, there was no time to catch the boat. It left on Monday from Marseilles, and the French authorities demand the most complicated formalities. Our address will be: c/o Banco Hispano Americano
Las Palmas
Canary Islands
Do send me a line. I have just read The Passage to India again, in the Albatross Edition. If I were a parish lady I should say: “I want to thank you for writing it”—because I really feel just like that. I hadn’t read it for ten years, nearly—when it first came out—and I see how it has influenced everything I feel about novel writing. That picnic. I could hardly go on reading. It was like the most delicious sweets. I was afraid that one of them must be nasty, because the others were so succulent. But they weren’t, and I finished the box.
Well, if I go on like this, I shall make you blush.
Anyhow, do write soon. I feel as if you were with us on this ship.
I hope you’ve been seeing Viertel.14 I’ve never known him to be so excited about meeting anyone. “He has wonderful eyes,” said V.—and added anxiously: “He is not living like a monk, I hope?” No, I answered, I believed not.
Yours ever
Christopher Isherwood
* * *
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The Woolf ’s. Rodnell. 7-4-34
Dear Isherwood,
I was very glad to hear from you and learn that you are both in the same boat. It all sounds nice. Grand Canary will be warm if clear, and I wish I was in Mr Abercrombie’s pyjamas. Here the cold is incessant and I am irritated at being left so much “to myself ” in the various short visits I have been paying. First there was a preparatory school in Dorsetshire for Easter where my host was either fomenting the toes of the little boys, or at Church, or thinking about Rudolf Steiner while he put all the wrong letters into the wrong envelopes and had to write them all again. Then, near Salisbury, was Stephen Tennant, sick and unable to be in the room with his guest for more than 20 minutes twice a day, and covering his eyes with a bandage when he drove to town, in case the scenery made him giddy. And here, with less excuse, I think, are the W[oolf]s, who read, Leonard the Observer and Virginia the Sunday Times, and then retired to literary shanties to write till lunch. At least L. has just come out, but I, piqued, continue my letter to you, and he, not displeased, cuts the dead wood out of a Buddleia with a small rusty saw. No doubt I am exacting or deficient in resources, but I am fed up with these two-day visits where I am left to myself. It’s a bit of sham modernity, like the silent greeting. When I entertain—but I get out of that by never being able to entertain. When you entertain—but you can get round that by suggesting I “join” you somewhere sometime. That’s quite different, and possibly always better.