For once Mrs Harrison has taken a firm line with him and refuses to speak to him. It is a very uncomfortable situation for me, and I am feeling very unwell. All my insomnia has come back, and so has the uncontrollable longing for shrimps. It is very tiresome and disappointing.
Mr Lathom has been perfectly sweet about it all. He went in to see Mr Harrison when the uproar had calmed down a little, and finding it impossible to move him, gave way gracefully. I was determined to do my best to make it up to him, so I went up and said how sorry I was, and added that I insisted that he should do exactly as he liked with my own portrait. He could show it anywhere he chose, I said, even if he liked to call it Portrait of a Middle-aged Spinster. He laughed, and said he wouldn’t think of calling it anything of the sort, and he certainly wouldn’t show it if I would rather he didn’t, and I said I was determined he should show it, whatever it turned out like. So he said, very well, that was a bargain, then. So we have begun the sittings. I am rather nervous about the result, because as you know, I always photograph very badly. But then a photograph cannot show the animation of the face as a portrait can, and people have so often told me that my animation is what gives character and interest to my looks. I hope it will be a good likeness — perhaps you will say that if it is it won’t be an attractive picture, but Mr Lathom seems very keen on it, so perhaps it will turn out better than you, with your sisterly prejudice, might expect.
I am very tired with keeping the pose — I sat for two hours this morning and again in the afternoon — so I hope I may get some rest tonight.
The scarf will be finished tomorrow, if I can get the right shade of silk for the fringe.Your affectionate sister, Aggie
22. John Munting to Elizabeth Drake
15a, Whittington Terrace 1.12.28
Beloved Bungie,
Here we are again! Back home and full of beans and fit to face anything, even Lathoms and Milsoms.
By the way, I’ve got to take back what I said about Lathom. I’ll forgive him anything for being such a bloody fine painter. My God, he has made a fine thing of Mrs Harrison — old Halkett would grunt in his funny gruff way and say, ‘It’s a masterpiece.’ He wants to send it to the Academy (where it would probably be the picture of the year, if the Committee didn’t hang themselves in their own wires under the shock of seeing a decent bit of painting for once) — only, of course, those imbecile women have made a hash of it and put Harrison’s back up. Blether, blether blether — rushing at the poor man with chatter about newspaper sensations and standing under my portrait on opening day, blah! blah! before the poor man had finished reeling under the impact. Row, of course. I told Lathom not to be a silly ass, and to go and apologise quietly to Harrison afterwards and tell him there wasn’t any slightest intention of showing it against his wishes. If he uses a little tact, the old boy will take it for granted three months hence that the thing is going to be shown and imagine he suggested it himself. I’ve got Harrison fairly well sized up, but his wife is a silly egoist, and Lathom has no practical sense at all as regards human relationships. Anyway, I hope the thing will be there, because I’d like you to see it. It’s really first-rate. And revealing, my God! only Mrs H. doesn’t see that, and I don’t think Lathom realises it either.
I’ve had a letter from Merritt — he ‘has read the book with much interest and would be glad if I could find time to call and discuss it with him at my convenience’. First time anybody’s even offered to discuss it. I suppose that if I will consent to cut out all the ‘advanced’ passages, and ‘brighten’ the style and give it a more ‘satisfactory’ ending, he will consider doing something with it. Well, he won’t get the chance, that’s all.
Thank heaven, the Life is practically finished with. I’m thankful to get rid of it. It has led me into reading a lot of scientific and metaphysical tripe which is of no use to anybody, and least of all to a creative writer (a fact I have taken delight in rubbing in, in the course of the work!) And the further you go with it, the worse it gets. Lucretius could make great poetry out of science, and Bacon got some good work in on it — and even Tennyson could screw some fine lines out of an unsound theory of evolution and perfectibility and all the rest of it. But now, oh, heavens! after the bio-chemist, the mathematician. What can you make out of the action of the glands of internal secretion upon metabolism, or Pi and the square root of minus one? Despair and a kind of gloomy grubbiness, that’s all. I’d rather have a Miltonian theology to make poetry of than all this business of liver and gonads and the velocity of light. Perry the parson gets out of it by pretending that the Catholic Church knew all about it from the beginning, and that inaccurate theological metaphors can be interpreted as pseudo-scientific formulae, which is a lie. The origin of life is our great stamping-ground for discussion. You can’t make life synthetically in a laboratory — therefore he deduces that it came by divine interference! Rather an assumption! But, after all, he is little worse than the man of science. ‘In some way or other, life came,’ they say. ‘Sometime, somehow, we may learn how to make it.’ But even if one could learn to make it, that doesn’t account for its having arrived spontaneously in the first place. The biologist can push it back to the original protist, and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch the real question of why or how the thing began at all. The astronomer goes back untold millions of years and ends in gas and emptiness, and then the mathematician sweeps the whole cosmos into unreality and leaves one with mind as the only thing of which we have any immediate apprehension. Cogito, ergo sum, ergo omnia esse videntur. All this bother, and we are no further than Descartes. Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn’t matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.
I wish I had Lathom’s robust contempt for all this kind of thing. His attitude is that bio-chemistry cannot affect his life or his art, so let them get on with it. I am tossed about with every wind of doctrine, and if I’m not damn careful I shall end by writing a Point Counterpoint, without the wit. You can’t really make a novel hold together if you don’t believe in causation.
Said a rising young author, ‘What, what?If I think that causation is not,No word of my textWill bear on the nextAnd what will become of the plot?’
Perhaps this accounts for my never having been able to produce a book with a plot — except, of course, the one Merritt wants to see me about. And that was a sort of freak book.