Mr Munting, who spent the Christmas season with his family and in the company of his fiancée, not returning to town till the 15th of January, has handed to me the only letter which he received from his friend during this period.
26. Harwood Lathom to John Munting
Polperro 4th Jan., ’29
Dear Munting,
How are you? And how did the season of over-feeding and Christian heartiness leave your soul? Did honourable love survive the domesticities? If so, I swear that you and your intelligent young woman are either gods or beasts. Gods, probably — with that dreadful temperateness of the knowledge of good and evil, seeing two sides to every question. You will analyse your bridal raptures if you have any, and find the whole subject very interesting. You will have, Heaven help you! a sense of humour about the business, and your friends will say how beautiful it is to see such a fine sense of partnership between a man and woman. A copulation of politic tape-worms! But where is the use of being offensive to a man who will allow for my point of view? I hate being allowed for, as if I were an incalculable quantity in an astronomical equation.
Having (thank God!) no family, except my aunt at Colchester, I escaped good King Wenceslas and departed for Paris, where everything is jejune enough, and the weather just as snow-bound and bitter as our own happy island, but where at least the stranger is not sucked into the vie familiale. I found the Harrisons dismally vegetating in a highly respectable Anglophile hotel, and toted them round the usual stale shows, getting my pleasure from their naïve enjoyment. Or, at any rate, from her enjoyment; the old boy was as peevish as ever, and brought the blush of shame to my cosmopolitan cheek by walking out of a cabaret in the middle, trailing his wife and friend after him in the approved barn-door style. Being too wrathful for speech, I said nothing, and had the pleasure of sitting out a family row in the taxi afterwards. La belle Marguerite was actually quite as shocked as he was, poor child, but thrilled to an unregenerate ecstasy nevertheless. She has the makings of a decent pagan soul if one could teach her. However, I needed to do no teaching. His vulgar disgust (with which, if he had had the elementary tact to leave her alone, she would have agreed) drove her into an excited opposition, and she argued the point with an obstinacy and wholeheartedness which it was a pleasure to listen to. I wouldn’t be appealed to — I didn’t want a row, and besides she will learn nothing except by arguing it out for herself. In fact, I apologised and said, in effect, that an artist became rather blind to the properties, legs, as the bus-conductor said, being no treat to him. In fact, I controlled myself marvellously, and — went away and walked about in a fury all night!
After that we did picture-galleries, and I had to listen to Harrison’s lectures on art. Never have I heard — not even in Chelsea — so much jargon applied over so grisly a substructure of ignorance and bad taste. The man ought to be crucified in the middle of all his own abominable daubs. You would have enjoyed it, I suppose, or made copy of it.
We saw the New Year in with dancing and the usual imbecile festivities. Mrs H. thanked me with tears of excitement in her eyes — it was pathetic — like giving sweets to a kid. Even H. was a little moved from his usual grimth. I procured him a partner — no! I didn’t hire her, I knew her — a decent little soul who used to live with Mathieu Vigor and is now, I believe, Kropotzki’s petite amie — and she trundled him round in the most amiable way. He emerged from the fray quite sparkling (for him!), and solemnly led Madame out for the next dance! That didn’t go so well, because he found fault with her steps, so I pushed him back on to Fleurette, who could dance with a kangaroo, I think, clever little devil.
I crossed on the 2nd, and came down here for warmth and sunshine (what a hope!). The place has been ruined, of course, by ‘artistic’ tourists, and is lousy with Ye Olde Potterye Shoppes. The brave fishermen dangle around in clean blue jerseys and polish up the boats in the harbour, while they long for the film-season to start again.
I shall be back in Bayswater some time next week. I hope your sense of humour is feeling robust, for I am in a foul mood and nothing pleases me.Yours ever, Lathom
27. John Munting to Elizabeth Drake
15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater
[The opening sheets of this letter are lost, but the date is evidently some time in January.]
. . proofs coming along at express speed, I am enjoying a magnificent illusion of importance and busy-ness. The novel will be out before the Life, which is being held up considerably by copyright bothers over the plates. All the better, as it is a mistake to bung two books out right on top of one another.
I am feeling a great deal more sympathetic with Lathom just now. The earnest Harrison has transferred his attentions, for the moment, to me, because, as a literary man, I can, of course, tell him exactly how best to prepare his fungus-book for the press. He comes teetering in at my busiest moments to discuss points of grammar. I tell him my opinion and he contradicts it at great length, pointing out subtleties in his phrasing which I have not grasped. At length I either tell him that his own original idea expresses his personality best, or fall back on The King’s English if the error is really too monstrous to let pass. This works all right for a time, and he carries the book off with much gratitude — returning later, however, with the demurrer to Mr Fowler carefully written down on paper. I once made the foolish suggestion that he should write to Fowler and thrash it out with him direct; this was fatal, as I had to listen to (a) the letter; (b) the reply; (c) the rejoinder — so I now fall back as a rule on the phrase about expressing personality. There was also a dreadful day when a water-colour picture of fungi came out too green by three-colour process. Lathom and I suffered dreadfully over this abominable toadstool, and were at length forced to go out and drown the recollection in Guinness.
All the same, I try my best to be helpful, because I am the only person who can enter into Harrison’s interests, and he has really written a very entertaining little piece of work, full of odd bits of out-of-the-way knowledge, scraps of country lore and queer old-fashioned recipes and things. He must have made extraordinary good use of his holidays, and there’s not a plant or animal in the country fit for food that he doesn’t know the last word about. He has made a wonderful collection of botanical diaries, which ought to be of considerable scientific value, and he brings a really scholarly mind to his rather unscholarly subject. His water-colours, though too prim considered as pictures, make really rather attractive book-illustrations, and his drawings of plants and fungi are beautifully accurate in line and colour — far better than the stuff you find in the usual textbooks. And, indeed, the vagaries of the three-colour process are enough to make Job irritable. I told him that he should take as his motto for the book the famous misprint in the Bible, ‘Printers bave persecuted me with a cause’ — which pleased him.