(#ulink_731d5ebb-2e6c-5971-b4d7-aca89fda18e3) wh. I had read in the very old days—pre-Wynyard
(#ulink_0a20c118-e029-514c-8611-cb45a1fdbd0f) and quite forgotten. I think it the poorest Scott I have yet read, tho worth reading. What really gave me most pleasure was to meet your quotation (in the Capt. Clutterbuck epistle) about the paradise of half-pay and the purgatory of duty. Lord—I wish you were out of the latter this moment. 2. The Abbot- originally read at the same time. This is much better, and I should put it fairly high among the pre-17th century novels, wh. as a whole I find inferior to the others. Still, it shares with Rob Roy the rare advantage of having a natural and even pleasant heroine. Finally The Antiquary for about the fifth time, wh. I have almost fixed on as the Scott novel.
(#ulink_4bad3da7-788c-50b2-8584-c275e72a0e82) I have read it so often that I do not remember at which reading I ceased to regard Mr. Oldbuck as ‘a character’ and began to think him (as I now do) simply the one sensible man in the book, living as any rational man would live if he were given peace.
I wonder, supposing that the P.O. is working when this reaches you, would you mind letting me have a cable to say that you’re alright? Unless, of course everything is quiet by the end of the next fortnight. It would really cheer us up immensely.
I shall resume proper letter writing with the rest of my regular routine as soon as I get back to work. For the moment this is the best I can do. With best wishes, brother, for a speedy removal of your person to some quieter area.
Yours
Jack.
P.S. Your pictures have come. I think hanging them is the safest method of storing them and I shall do so as soon as I am about again: till then I have refused to have them unpacked.
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[The Kilns]
Feb 21st 1932
My dear W–
Since I last wrote to you, four or five days ago, we had two communications from you. First, a message by Bibby Wireless which took exactly a fortnight to reach us. As this is much too short a time for anything but telegraphy, and much too long for any telegraph (wireless or wiry) I don’t know what to make of it: but I’m inclined to think that you expected it to reach us sooner and that its actual date of arrival does shew some dislocation of services. Thanks for sending it. The re-assuring view of the crisis is quite obviously untrue by now, whatever it may have been when you sent it; but thanks all the same.
Secondly, I have had your cheering letter of Jan 14th—‘cheering’ for giving one some conversation with you, though of course it bears not at all on the source of anxiety. I must confess I have imbibed enough of that rather specially shabby superstition which cries ‘Touch wood’ etc, to shudder when I read your proposals about walks in Ulster etc. In fact I have two unpleasantly contrasted pictures in my mind. One ‘features’ the two Pigibudda with packs and sticks de-training into the sudden stillness of the moors at Parkmore.
(#ulink_97778f24-ef87-5fe5-95c3-ec5333aeaee7) the other is of you progressing from the Bund to Gt. Western Rd. with an eye cocked skyward, just in the old French manner, curse it, and ducking at the old Who-o-o-o-p-Bang! Like Boswell, on that perilous crossing in the Hebrides, I ‘at last took refuge in piety: but was much embarrassed by the various objections which have been raised against the doctrine of special providences’.
(#ulink_82e85644-c988-58fd-9a0b-982cee33bb00) Unfortunately I have not at hand the work of Dr. Ogden in which Boswell found this difficulty solved.
(#ulink_6d2ccc8e-20b3-54d3-9251-e4c1f5299a6f) I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it,’ then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever—to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train?
However, in spite of this discomfort, I cannot help joining you in your day-dream of a Parkmore walk. That is partly because I am now back in bed (nothing serious, just a slight re-rise of temperature owing to having tried to get up too soon). Do you find, during the endless afternoons of a week in bed, that one’s imagination is constantly haunted with pictures of seacoasts and cliffs and such like? Mine has been specially busy with the walk you suggest. I think it would be better to go down to the coast by the second of the two glens to Cushendun (not Cushendall) after a glance down the first, which is better as a view than as a route. The impressive simplicity—one huge fold of land-which makes it so good a view would make it a little monotonous for footing: the other is a perfect paradise of ups and downs and brawling streams, little woods, stone walls, and ruined cottages. The next days walk—on North with Rathlin in view—I did an hour of with Arthur last summer, and it is even better than you can possibly imagine if you haven’t done it. The lunch problem is a pity: but one can never be utterly stranded in a country full of streams—spring water being not only better than nothing with which to wash down a man’s victuals but better than anything except beer or tea. It is the dry dollop of unmitigated sandwich on top of a waterless chalk down in Berkshire that really spoils a day’s walk. But perhaps this is enough of the day dream—the other picture begins to bother me.
By the way, if you get through this damned battle next door to you, it will have had one incidental advantage-that of having made me very familiar with Shanghai. I could now draw quite a good map from memory: certainly could get in Chapei Station, Gt. Western Rd, Trinity Cathedral, Cathay Hotel, the Creek, Hongkew fairly correctly.
I thoroughly agree with your revised proposals for the Lewis papers. If you remember, I was always to this extent opposed to your first scheme, that I wanted all letters put in together in their chronological order so as to secure the va-et-vient
(#ulink_b94d44d6-7ac4-5495-a631-63266c53c626) of actual intercourse, whereas you wanted A’s letters in a block, then B’s letters in a block. But your new idea is better than either. How far will you extend it? It seems to me that all good traditional information (e.g. ‘I thought your father would have gone wild’) now can and ought to go in: and I am not at all sure that the contents of P’daita Pie
(#ulink_fed6e68e-5d69-574d-a21c-da57245f49cf) should not find their place in the main narrative. Many pages of Boswell are just such ‘pie’ mosaiced into the biography. You see how impossible it is not to be always counting on the future and then being always pulled up by recollection of those shells and made to feel that any such counting is a positive tempting of fate. However, what is one to do.
I shall make this a short letter and try to send you another short one soon, because whatever you say, it is quite obvious that mails are not safe. How can they be when any boat coming up that river may stop a Chinese shell? I was much taken by the photos of the model railway—though his wall-painting scenery seems to have left some problems of perspective unsolved. I doubt if I should care for a toy of that kind now: toy country would be my fancy—i.e. where you wd. have country as a background to a railway, I should have railway as a feature of the country. Perhaps some such complementary difference was already present in our own humbler attic system. But a man could have great fun, you will allow, landscape-building on that same scale. Indeed I fancy you could produce something of which the photos would really deceive.
I wonder how I shd. enjoy a performance of The Count of Luxembourg?
(#ulink_7e1cc7a4-2212-5f79-a5f3-7f2d5b7cbeb1) I hum over to myself Rootsie-Tootsie and As they pass the gay cafes and of course remember, in a way, all the same things as you: but probably with quite different emotions. I see now that my enjoyment of musical comedy in the old days, though quite real, was largely ‘caught’ from you-or rather from the fashionable world of 1912–14 of which you were in my case the conductor: and it has all passed without going deep enough to make the real remeniscent feeling as they do in you. The sound that I get in our room in college when I pull the study curtains (that unique nimble) releases memories that ‘come home to my business and bosoms’ as the musical comedy tunes do not. Contrariwise, my old Wagner favourites, which are still startlingly evocative for me, wd. probably now not be so for you.
This, by the bye, shows the absurdity of the statement often made ‘Well at least a man knows when he’s enjoying himself’. I thought I liked the musical comedy tune in my musical comedy period just as much as I thought I liked the Wagner tune in my next period. Memory shows that I was mistaken. And why should I remember with such delight sitting with you near that fountain on the high Holywood Road that summer evening during the great Row—and remember with such complete coldness going to The Arcadians.
(#ulink_25714f9b-5d9e-59ba-ae9a-e03db1330909) The first seemed at the time a most miserable, the second a most pleasurable evening: but the first has ‘kept’ (as they say of meat) and the second has not. Still, I wd. willingly go with you to one of the old musical comedies if the chance came our way.
It is a springlike evening here—all the birds twittering—and I am beginning to be tired of bed. I am certainly tired of novels and must get something nutritious fetched from college to morrow. I’m not at all sure that I shan’t, after your remarks, have a cut at the Georgics.
(#ulink_24e21a3d-dbb7-5b72-8ceb-15b5c3c5e924) I need not urge you to look after yourself as well as you can. I suppose you are wearing tin-hats—alack the day! All send their love
Yrs
Jack.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Feb 1932
My dear Arthur,
I have been laid up with flu’ for over a fortnight or I shd. have answered you before. As you preferred my last letter to my previous ones, and also took longer to answer it than ever, I suppose if I want a speedy answer to this I had better write a letter you don’t like! Let me see—I must first select all the subjects which are least likely to interest you, and then consider how to treat them in the most unattractive manner. I have half a mind to do it—but on second thoughts it would be almost as big a bore for me to write it as for you to read it. How exasperating to think of you being at Ballycastle with an unappreciative companion, in bad weather, and a lethargic mood: it seems such a waste.
I thought we had talked about Naomi Mitchison before. I have only read one (Black Sparta)
(#ulink_dcabb14c-b770-56a7-a9eb-f1a0c66a983a) and I certainly agree that it ‘holds’ one: indeed I don’t know any historical fiction that is so astonishingly vivid and, on the whole, so true. I also thought it astonishing how, despite the grimness, she got such an air of beauty—almost dazzling beauty—into it. As to the cruelties, I think her obvious relish is morally wicked, but hardly an artistic fault for she cd. hardly get some of her effects without it. But it is, in Black Sparta, a historical falsehood: not that the things she describes did not probably happen in Greece, but that they were not typical—the Greeks being, no doubt, cruel by modern standards, but, by the standards of that age, extremely humane. She gives you the impression that the cruelty was essentially Greek, whereas it was precisely the opposite. That is, she is unfair as I should be unfair if I wrote a book about some man whose chief characteristic was that he was the tallest of the pigmies, and kept on reminding the reader that he was very short. I should be telling the truth (for of course he would be short by our standards) but missing the real point about the man-viz: that he was, by the standards of his own race, a giant. Still, she is a wonderful writer and I fully intend to read more of her when I have a chance.
I am so glad to hear you have started Froissart.
(#ulink_7102948b-1fd7-5f7b-809a-d402891664f3) If I had the book here (I am out at the Kilns—only got up yesterday) we could compare passages. What I chiefly remember from the first part is the Scotch wars and the odd way in which just a very few words gave me the impression of the scenery—the long wet valleys and the moors. How interesting too, to find how much of the chivalry in the romances was really practised in the wars of the period—e.g. the scene where Sir Thing-um-a-bob (you see you are not the only one who forgets things) espouses the cause of the lady of Hainault. Or again, at the siege of Hennebont (?) where you actually have a lady-knight fighting, just like Britomart in the Faerie Queene.
To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder-considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books—why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.
By the way, when you ask me to ‘pray for you’ (in connection with Froissart) I don’t know if you are serious, but, the answer is, I do. It may not do you any good, but it does me a lot, for I cannot ask for any change to be made in you without finding that the very same needs to be made in me; which pulls me up and also by putting us all in the same boat checks any tendency to priggishness.
While I have been in bed I have had an orgy of Scott -The Monastery, The Abbot, The Antiquary and the Heart of Midlothian
(#ulink_e737b614-4d04-54f0-a366-3942f5ab3b4d) which I am at present in the middle of. The Monastery and Abbot I have read only once before—long, long ago, long before you and I were friends—so that they were the same as new ground to me. Neither of them is Scott at his best—the Monastery indeed is about the worst I have yet read—but both are worth reading. The Antiquary I have read over and over again, and old Oldbuck is almost as familiar to me as Johnson. What a relish there is about him and his folios and his tapestry room and his paper on Castrametation and his ‘never taking supper: but trusting that a mouthful of ale with a toast and haddock, to close the orifice of the stomach, does not come under that denomination’
(#ulink_37340e3d-b3a2-529c-aea3-99a63d07ce5f) (How like my father and his ‘little drop of the whiskey’).
I think re-reading old favourites is one of the things we differ on, isn’t it, and you do it very rarely. I probably do it too much. It is one of my greatest pleasures: indeed I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. Do try one of the old Scotts again. It will do admirably as a rest in the intervals of something that needs working at, like Froissart.
There has been a good deal of snow during my illness. Where I lay in bed I could see it through two windows, and a bit of the wooded hill gradually whitening in the distance. What could be snugger or nicer? Indeed my flu’ this year would have been delightful if I hadn’t been worried about Warnie, who is in Shanghai. When there is something like this wh. forces one to read the papers, how one loathes their flippancy and their sensational exploitation of things that mean life and death. I wish to goodness he had never gone out there.
Do try and let me know when you are coming to London and when there is a chance of your coming here. Otherwise you know what it will be: you will turn up unexpectedly on some day when I have 15 hours’ work to do, and I shall be angry with you and you will be angry with me, and we shall meet for a comfortless half hour in a teashop and snap and sulk at each other and part both feeling miserable. Surely it is worth while trying to avoid this. Give my love to your mother and to the dog. I hope we shall have some famous walks with him
Yours
Jack
