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Letters between

Forster and Isherwood on

Homosexuality and Literature

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Letters between

Forster and Isherwood on

Homosexuality and Literature

Edited by Richard E. Zeikowitz

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letters between forster and isherwood

on homosexuality and literature

First published in 2008 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.

Companies and representatives throughout the world.

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60675-3

ISBN-10: 0-230-60675-X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: August 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

All letters by E. M. Forster are reproduced with permission from the Society of Authors as agent for the Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge.

All letters by Christopher Isherwood are reproduced with permission from Don Bachardy.

Cover drawings of Forster and Isherwood drawn from life by Don Bachardy.

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For Don Bachardy and James White

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The

1930s

The War Years: 1939–45

The Postwar Years

135

Biographical Glossary

165

List of Correspondence

173

Notes

179

Bibliography

193

Index

195

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Acknowledgments

I thank the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (CUNY) for a generous grant that enabled me to travel to Cambridge, England. I also thank the Huntington Library for a one-month residency fellowship. I was able to examine and transcribe the letters at both King’s College Cambridge and the Huntington Library with the help of the very knowledgeable and friendly staff. I thank Patricia McGuire, the archivist at King’s College, who was always very attentive to my needs. I also thank Peter Jones, the librarian of King’s College Library, for his assistance in obtaining permission to publish E. M. Forster’s letters to Christopher Isherwood. I am indebted to Elizabeth Haylett of the Society of Authors for granting permission on behalf of King’s College, Cambridge. I am grateful to Sue Hodson, the curator of the Isherwood papers at the Huntington Library, for her enthusiastic support for this project. I also thank the staff of the reading room at the Huntington Library for their assistance.

I wish to express my gratitude to Chris Suggs, the former chair of the English department at John Jay College, CUNY, for his support. Without the one-semester release time I would not have been able to complete this project in a timely manner. I also thank Steven Kruger, Michael Shugrue, and James White for their support and encouragement.

Lastly, I would like to thank Don Bachardy for graciously permitting two drawings he made of Forster and Isherwood to be reproduced here.

As far as I know, he is the only artist to have drawn both Forster and Isherwood.

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Introduction

In the fall of 1932,William Plomer took Christopher Isherwood to meet E. M. Forster for the first time. Isherwood had long been an admirer of Forster’s work. The two writers belonged to two different generations: Edward Morgan Forster, born in 1879, came of age during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods; Isherwood, born in 1904, was a member of the post-World War I generation.1 Each, too, was in a very different stage of his writing career. Forster was the author of several highly regarded novels, particularly Howard’s End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), and was well established within the literary circles of the time. His professional acquaintances and friends included Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group. Isherwood had just completed his second novel, The Memorial, which reveals stylistic influences from Forster. Forster had read the novel, liked it, and expressed a wish to meet the young author.

Isherwood recalls his admiration for Forster and excitement at meeting him that day: “It was tremendous for Christopher. Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master. In other people’s books he found examples of style which he wanted to imitate and learn from. In Forster he found a key to the whole art of writing. . . . A Forster novel taught Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up the pen.”2

Often looking back at that auspicious meeting and Forster’s kind words about The Memorial, Isherwood would say, “My literary career is over—I don’t give a damn for the Nobel Prize or the Order of Merit— I’ve been praised by Forster! ”3 Isherwood also had a great deal of respect for Forster as a person. On a visit to Forster in 1947, Isherwood reflects that he was in awe of Forster not merely as his literary master but also because “Forster demanded truth in all his relationships; underneath his charming unalarming exterior he was a stern moralist and his mild babylike eyes looked deep into you. Their glance made Christopher feel false and tricky.”4

While their professional relationship was one of mentor and disciple, their personal relationship was cemented by an equal caring for one another.

Forster was loyal to his intimate friends and expected the same from them.

Isherwood was indeed loyal throughout the thirty-eight years of their friendship.

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The letters are a personal record of these two writers’ lives, both profes-sionally and personally, over a period of more than thirty years. The sub-stantial number of letters exchanged during the increasingly turbulent years of the 1930s reveal how Forster and Isherwood each came to grips with the rise of fascism in Europe and the threat of war as both writers and human beings helplessly caught in the midst of a world on the brink of disaster. On a more subtle level, the letters tell two parallel but very different stories of love and devotion between each writer and his respective male partner. The letters of the war years juxtapose the strikingly different worlds in which Forster and Isherwood were living: London and its envi-rons during the Blitz, and the southern California community of exiled writers and artists, respectively. Each friend informs the other how his life—and view of life—is being shaped by events, whether unfolding within his midst or thousands of miles away. The postwar letters, although sparse, particularly after the early 1950s, record moments in the later careers of the two writers, such as Isherwood struggling to find a new voice in his novels, one that treats homosexual characters more openly and Forster embarking on new projects and fitting himself into the role of elder statesman. In these later letters, the two friends also continue their ongoing conversation to find a suitable ending for Forster’s ground-breaking but yet unpublished novel, Maurice.

One theme that surfaces subtly throughout all three periods of the correspondence is each writer’s life as a homosexual in a society where one could not openly express one’s sexual preference. During the 1930s, Forster and Isherwood were both in committed relationships with younger men of the working class: Forster with the policeman, Bob Buckingham, Isherwood with Heinz. Both situations had their complications. Isherwood and Heinz were on the run from Nazi Germany; Forster was involved with a married man. Although Bob’s wife, May, was Forster’s rival for Bob’s attention in the beginning, over the years he actually became close friends with May and an uncle figure for their son, Robin. The letters offer many clues that Bob regularly spent the night at Forster’s flat in London and refer to occasional weekend trips they took together to the continent in order to visit Isherwood and Heinz. Yet Forster and Isherwood are both reticent—in their letters at least—about intimate details. One needs to coax out details from between the lines.

Nicola Beauman maintains that Bob was “the great love” of Forster’s life.5 Although normally reserved in his letters to Bob (of which more than one thousand exist!), on the eve of prostate surgery, Forster reveals his love for Bob and the suggestion that the love is reciprocal: “I feel gay and calm, but have an open mind as to whether I shall get through or not[.] I don’t pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 3

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say this to anyone else, but I love you too much to say anything but the truth. I don’t feel afraid of anything and it is your love that has made me be like this.”6 One catches a hint of this love in an uncharacteristically gushing remark Forster makes to Isherwood after dryly listing upcoming events on his engagement calendar: “and the evening after that will be best, for Bob comes.” Although Forster does not actually live with Bob except for the nights they spend together in Forster’s London flat and the occasional trip abroad—such as when Isherwood arranges for them to stay in the “Royalty Bedroom” when they visit him in Brussels—the letters suggest that Forster and Bob were a “couple” parallel to that of Isherwood and Heinz (who were in fact living together). Forster and Isherwood both regularly close their letters with, respectively, love to Heinz or Bob.

Isherwood never openly describes his love or affection for Heinz in his letters to Forster in the 1930s; yet it is implied in his desperate search to find a country where he could live with Heinz in safety. He envisions an ideal life with Heinz in Portugal: “I think we might quite possibly settle in this country if we can find the right house and if Heinz can get a reasonable assurance that he will be allowed to stop here indefinitely.” The intensity of Isherwood’s bond with Heinz during turbulent times—times that eventually overpowered their efforts to remain together—is revealed in several entries Isherwood writes in his diary after they are separated. Two weeks after Heinz’s arrest in Germany, he reflects: “At first I didn’t think about Heinz at all. Or tried not to. I felt like a house in which one room, the biggest, is locked up. There, very cautiously, I allowed myself to think of him in little doses—five minutes at a time: then I had a good cry and felt better.”7 Then, from the distant perspective of five months: “Never to forget H. Never to cease to be grateful to him for every moment of our five years together. Never to cease to hope that, somehow, some day, all will be well. And yet to find a real warm decent relationship for myself—something not of the same kind, but really worthwhile.”8 After losing Heinz, Isherwood had a series of relationships—some lasting several years—

which he alludes to in his letters to Forster, but he was not to find another long-lasting relationship until he met Don Bachardy in 1953. On the other hand, Forster’s relationship with Bob survived the war and another twenty-five years until Forster’s death.

Forster’s unpublished novel, Maurice, completed in 1914, is an ongoing topic of conversation in the letters from the 1930s through the 1950s. In the spring of 1933, Forster gave Isherwood the manuscript to read. Although some of the antiquated euphemisms, such as “sharing” for “sex,” embarrassed him, Isherwood felt nothing but admiration for Forster’s brave effort.

He reflects later, “the wonder of the novel was that it had been written when pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 4

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it had been written; the wonder was Forster himself, imprisoned within the jungle of pre-war prejudice, putting these unthinkable thoughts into words.”9 Isherwood was honored that he was chosen to respond to it on behalf of his generation and recalls the scene where he was to give Forster his verdict on the novel—a scene that cemented Forster and Isherwood’s personal relationship. Isherwood recreates the scene: “My memory sees them sitting together, facing each other. Christopher sits gazing at his master of their art, this great prophet of their tribe, who declares that there can be real love, love without limits or excuse, between two men. Here he is, humble in his greatness, unsure of his own genius. Christopher stammers some words of praise and devotion, his eyes brimming with tears. And Forster—amused and touched, but more touched than amused—leans forward and kisses him on the cheek.”10 To Forster’s fear that the novel might seem dated, Isherwood replied, “Why shouldn’t it date?” Soon after this meeting, Isherwood proposes that Forster rewrite the ending so that Maurice and Alec, instead of separating, settle into a permanent domestic relationship. But Forster, who, after all, came of age in the late Victorian to early Edwardian era, replies in a letter: “I daren’t thus instal them, no, not even under a hay-stack.”

Five years later, Isherwood rereads the novel and gushes in admiration for his mentor and friend: “have finished ‘Maurice,’ and am in a state of reverence which even my most irreverent moments of you do nothing to dispel.” Isherwood himself was struggling with how to present homosexual characters in his fiction. Looking back at Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood realized that if he had made the narrator, William Bradshaw (Isherwood’s two middle names), openly homosexual “[t]he narrator would have become so odd, perhaps so interesting, that his presence would have thrown the novel out of perspective,” taking attention away from the title character.11 He thus opted to keep the narrator’s sexuality ambiguous both in this novel and in Goodbye to Berlin.

The young writers of the post-World War I generation resented and even hated the older generation whom they blamed for the recent horrific war. Forster, however, escaped the wrath of the younger generation and his novels were regarded as “modern.” Isherwood describes Forster’s “tea-tabling” technique, through the voice of Chalmers in his autobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows: “The whole of Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers’-meeting gossip. . . . In fact, there’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones.”12 Forster was also respected and befriended by others within Isherwood’s circle, namely W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 5

INTRODUCTION

William Plomer. But Isherwood’s relationship with Forster was the most complex, one that was a combination of awed disciple, naughty son, and devoted friend. Throughout the 1930s, Isherwood kept Forster abreast of his current writing projects, writing in late 1932 that he was working on

“an indecent bumptious stupid sort of novel about Berlin which I fear you won’t like.” Thirty years later he would no longer feel it necessary that Forster approve of his work, but at this stage in his writing career he sought Forster’s praise.13

Like other writers of his generation, Isherwood was keenly aware of the growing menace of Nazism in the early 1930s. In “The Lost” Isherwood sought to portray some of the people he had met during his years in Berlin who were living in the shadow of the Nazi threat.14 Though he was not writing a political novel, he was offering an interpretation of Berlin society in the early 1930s. His diary records are “The link which binds all the chief characters together is that in some way or other each one of them is conscious of the mental, economic, and ideological bankruptcy of the world in which they live.”15 Although Isherwood abandoned the project two years later, characters such as Mr. Norris, Bernard Landauer, and Sally Bowles were to fill the pages of his two famous Berlin novels, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (U.S. title, The Last of Mr. Norris) and Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1935 and 1939, respectively.

In 1934, Isherwood was also collaborating with Auden on a play, which was eventually titled The Dog Beneath the Skin. It makes a tentative antifas-cist statement but is not really a political play. Jonathan Fryer notes that the play “is very much a child of its time, urgent in its anti-fascism and aggressive in its overt suggestion that such things might also take place in England . . . yet its political position is not so clear-cut, its ardour for the left-wing cause ambiguous.”16 Part of the problem was Isherwood’s and Auden’s reluctance to embrace a political cause—even when they had a personal antipathy to fascism. Fryer suggests that in Isherwood’s case, “his artistic temperament and interests would always prevent him from being a political mouthpiece.”17

Though he worked quickly with Auden on the play, Isherwood was finding it difficult to work steadily on his novel. He was traveling restlessly around Europe with his young German lover, Heinz, trying to find a country where they could settle together. In May 1934 he wrote to Forster, “My own novel doesn’t get finished and changes its form daily. I read chiefly books about what is going to happen in Europe and study maps.” Forster, meanwhile, attempting to emerge from a dry spell, was beginning a new project: a biography of his Cambridge friend, the historian Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who had recently died. He confesses to Isherwood, “It’s pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 6

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so long since I’ve written a book that it feels like opening a tomb.” Although each writer keeps the other up-to-date on his latest writing project, the letters become increasingly personal and intimate. Isherwood’s letters to Forster from 1933 to 1937 are a travel diary of beautiful places inhabited by odd people. He entertains his mentor-friend with descriptions of mysterious ship passengers, Germans in the Canary Islands who “bow from the waist and say ‘Permit,’” and Portuguese workers who sing loudly as they work. And wherever Isherwood and Heinz are, he coaxes Forster to join them for a visit, in one letter giving him rather hilarious directions of how to reach them on a remote Greek island.

But always present like a dark cloud threatening to pour down on a sunny, idyllic picnic is the rise of fascism in Europe. As early as April 1934, Forster writes to Isherwood of the “coming smash” and resigns himself that

“nothing can be done.” Forster notes that those whom he admires feel the need “to do something,” but he only supports such action if one remains true to one’s character and is not playing the role of political activist merely to gain admiration. He thus never suggests that Isherwood should become more politically engaged. Forster himself was decidedly apolitical and even when war was imminent did not add his voice to those who strongly advocated fighting the Germans. Although not overtly carrying a political message, Isherwood’s works during this period are informed by the times. In August 1934, as he began the segments that will eventually become Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood reflects that “they ought, at least, to form quite an interesting set of illustrations to a serious work on Fascism.” The outcome is perhaps more in line with what Fryer writes about the companion novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains: “The background of the Nazi rise to power is succinctly and powerfully evoked, without ever directly intruding on the private drama in the foreground.”18

Isherwood’s placing of his story within a background of the rise of the Nazis in Berlin is in keeping with his relation to political developments of the 1930s. The fascist threat is the active backdrop for the drama of Isherwood’s life which was mainly concerned with keeping Heinz out of Germany and with him. His letters to Forster record his anxiety, fear, and desperation not about a future war per se but about the very threatening present situation he faces in his personal life—the fact that Heinz could any day be arrested and deported for failing to report for military duty in Germany. In the summer of 1936, after unsuccessfully seeking help from a famous Lisbon lawyer, Isherwood records in his journal: “I came out into the street feeling stunned. It was absurd, of course, to be so upset. What else had I expected?. . . Why shouldn’t H[einz] go back? Everything seemed to be slipping away down into a bottomless black drain. . . . So absolutely pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 7

INTRODUCTION

doomed did I feel—wandering up and down the hot sunlit streets.”19

Shortly after, still in Portugal, Isherwood writes Forster that “Every time the door-bell rings, we jump out of our skins and the postman is awaited daily like an executioner.” Isherwood’s fears are realized but not in the way he imagined. Heinz was arrested by the German Gestapo in Trier, Germany, where Isherwood’s attorney had instructed him to wait for a visa to return to Belgium. He eventually was found guilty and given a six-month prison sentence. His freedom would be denied for three additional years: one year working for the German government and two years military service.20

Throughout the 1930s, writers of Isherwood’s generation struggled with the question of how to respond effectively to the increasing menace of Fascism. In 1935, John Lehmann felt that “time was running out for a new world war”; He asks, “How to defend oneself, to be active, not to crouch paralysed as the hawk descends?”21 Stephen Spender, who joined the Communist Party in late 1936 and wrote articles for the party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, later reflects on his commitment to politics: “I was ‘political’ not just because I was involved, but in feeling I must choose to defend a good cause against a bad one.”22 Although Spender took on an active political role, traveling around England representing the anti-fascist position, in a letter to Isherwood he admits “I still secretly and perhaps exag-geratedly believe that a very good book about things one cares for is a potent instrument. And imaginative work is more important than one more voice added to a controversial babel.”23 While Spender’s “imaginative work” would not be overtly, or even subtly, political, Cecil Day-Lewis, who, like Spender, joined the Communist Party at this time, believes that a “pro-letarian poet” can play a direct role in politics: “To speak to the workers and for the workers he does not need, as bourgeois poets do, to learn a new tongue: he has only to make poetry of what is his native language.”24

Of course, simply writing politically engaged work is one thing; putting oneself in danger is another. As the drama of the Spanish Civil War was playing out, some of Isherwood’s friends and fellow writers of the post-World War I generation made their way to Spain. In early 1937, Spender, together with the writer, Cuthbert Worsley, traveled on a dangerous mission to Spain for the Daily Worker, to investigate the fate of a crew of Russian seamen whose ship had been sunk in the Mediterranean. It was believed that the men were being held prisoners by the (Fascist) rebels in Spain. A less dangerous but nevertheless risky mission presented itself in late 1937 when a delegation of writers were invited to Spain to declare their support for the beleaguered Spanish republic. Isherwood and Auden were among those scheduled to attend. Isherwood later recalls enjoying the pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 8

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drama of preparing to embark on a potentially dangerous trip to Spain, even making out a will. At a farewell party for Isherwood that Forster attended, when asked why he was not planning to go, Forster replied simply, “Afraid to.” Forster’s simple honesty deflated Isherwood.25 As it turned out, because the delegation’s trip was repeatedly delayed, Isherwood and Auden decided to go ahead with their planned journey to China.

From his vantage point in England, Forster was becoming increasingly alarmed by developments in Germany and Spain. In 1934, Forster con-sented to be the first president of the newly formed National Council for Civil Liberties whose purpose was to protect individual rights against what was viewed as increasingly totalitarian policies in England. In June of the next year, Forster was invited to lead the British delegation at an International Congress of Writers held in Paris. The congress was organized by French communist writers, and the attendees included notable writers who were dedicated anti-Fascists, such as André Malraux, André Gide, Louis Aragon, Maxim Gorki, Bertold Brecht, and Heinrich Mann.26

In his speech to the audience mainly consisting of young Communists, Forster explained that he was neither Fascist nor Communist and drew attention to the current danger in Britain of “Fabio-fascism . . . working quietly away behind the façade of constitutional forms, passing a little law (like the Sedition Act) here, endorsing a departmental tyranny there, emphasizing the national need of secrecy everywhere . . . until opposition is tamed and gulled.” He also acknowledged that his old-fashioned liberal idealism was out of step with younger members of the British delegation who “may say that if there is another war writers of the individualistic and liberalizing type, like myself and Mr. Aldous Huxley, will be swept away.”27

Forster’s most eloquent statement of his beliefs is found in his celebrated pamphlet, What I Believe, published in 1939. Forster maintains that

“Tolerance, good temper and sympathy—they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.” Yet he acknowledges that “for the moment they are not enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered beneath a military jack-boot.

They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them.”28 The strength and flexibility of Forster’s idealism in these lines are in keeping with his attitude during the unfolding crisis. Equally illuminating is his position on personal ties: “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”29 Forster also strongly believes in the indefatigable strength of artistic creativity for the good of all: “though Violence remains and is, indeed, the major partner in this muddled establishment, I believe that creativeness remains too, and will always assume direction pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 9

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when violence sleeps.”30 These views come across either overtly or subtly in Forster’s letters to Isherwood as the threat from Germany becomes ever more real—and relevant—to England.

Although Forster periodically reveals his fear of the coming disaster in his letters to Isherwood during the mid and late 1930s, Isherwood sees Forster as someone whose values render him impervious to the pressure of outside events. He records in his journal during the Munich crisis of September 1938, “Lunch with Morgan. It pulled me together, a lot. I don’t feel I want to see any weaklings, nowadays: they are like sufferers from a dangerously infectious disease. Morgan says he’s afraid of going mad—he might suddenly turn and run away from people in the street. But he isn’t weak. He’s immensely, superhumanly strong.”31 Twenty years later, in his novel, Down There on a Visit, Isherwood expresses his love and admiration for his mentor-friend on the eve of the war:

Well, my England is E. M. [Forster]; the antiheroic hero, with his straggly straw mustache, his light, gay blue baby eyes and his elderly stoop. Instead of a folded umbrella or a brown uniform, his emblems are his tweed cap (which is too small for him) and the odd-shaped brown paper parcels in which he carries his belongings from country to town and back again. While the others tell their followers to be ready to die, he advises us to live as if we were immortal. And he really does this himself, although he is as anxious and afraid as any of us, and never for an instant pretends not to be. He and his books and what they stand for are all that is truly worth saving from Hitler. . . . 32

In January 1939, Isherwood and Auden boarded a ship bound for America, where both would remain during the war.

It was while crossing the Atlantic that Isherwood records making an important realization: “I turned to Auden and said: ‘You know, I just don’t believe in any of it any more—the united front, the party line, the antifas-cist struggle. I suppose they’re okay, but something’s wrong with me. I simply can’t swallow another mouthful.’ And Auden answered: ‘No, neither can I’.”33 What fueled this realization was Isherwood’s discovery that he was a pacifist. He asks himself: “How could I have ever imagined I was anything else? . . . My father taught me, by his life and death, to hate the profession of soldiering.”34 Isherwood also realized that his pacifism derived from his relationship with Heinz. He acknowledged that he would never be able to shoot Heinz or his Nazi companions because “every man in that Army could be somebody’s Heinz.”35 Isherwood articulates his position to Forster.

In July 1939, he writes: “Force is no good—even to achieve the grandest objectives. One’s enemies can only be won over by active goodwill. If you pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 10

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exterminate them, like bugs, the poison only enters into yourself, so you are defeated anyway.” Forster does not question Isherwood’s pacifism and, in fact, during the same month, writes: “I very much hope that you and everyone will try to keep away—it is clearly your job to see us sink from a distance, if sink we do.” Once the war began, however, some writers in England spoke out against Isherwood and Auden’s emigration to America.

In a letter to John Lehmann in July 1939, Isherwood confesses his fears that his pacifism will cause him to lose some of his friends: “I am sure this is how I will feel for the rest of my life. I’m afraid this will mean that I shall lose a lot of friends but, I hope, none of the real ones.”36 It was, however, not his pacifism per se that elicited the first published criticism. In the February 1940 issue of the new literary magazine, Horizon, the editor, Cyril Connolly offers this commentary on Isherwood and Auden’s emigration to America: “Auden is our best poet, Isherwood our most promising novelist.

They did not suffer from lack of recognition in England . . . nor have they gone to America to animate the masses, for Auden has been teaching in a New England school and Isherwood writing dialogue in a Hollywood studio. They are far-sighted and ambitious young men with a strong instinct of self-preservation, and an eye on the main chance, who have abandoned what they consider to be the sinking ship of European democracy. . . . ”37

Isherwood incorrectly attributed the commentary directly or indirectly to Stephen Spender and in a letter to him, defends himself against what he sees as an unjustified attack. Isherwood maintains that his relocation to American was not a sudden flight but rather something he had considered doing for several years. He explains: “I am quite aware, of course, that it seems unpardonable, nowadays, that anybody should be living in safety, in a beautiful climate, earning money. And I often feel guilty about this.”38

This admission of guilt is absent in his letters to Forster—but undoubtedly felt particularly during the height of the bombings—possibly because Forster assured Isherwood that he was doing the right thing by staying out of England. Lehmann attempts to mollify the attack by telling Isherwood that his critics could be divided into two groups: “those who were jealous all along (like [J. B.] Priestley), and those who can’t forgive themselves for not having got across in time (like Cyril [Connolly]?).”39

The attacks on Isherwood and Auden did not end with the Horizon commentary. In an article appearing in the Spectator in April 1940, Harold Nicolson chastises not only Isherwood and Auden but also Huxley and Heard for distancing themselves from the war: “How can we proclaim over there [i.e. in America] that we are fighting for the liberated mind, when four of our most liberated intellectuals refuse to identify themselves either pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 11

INTRODUCTION

with those who fight or with those who oppose the battle?”40 In June of that same year the following epigram appeared in the Spectator:

‘This Europe stinks’, you cried—swift to desert

Your stricken country in her sore distress.

You may not care, but still I will assert,

Since you have left us, here the stink is less.41

Forster responded on behalf of his absent friends in a sharp letter of approach published in the Spectator on July 5, 1940. He reprimands not only the writer of the epigram but also those who have been “snarling at absent intellectuals.” Forster suspects that the motivation for these attacks are not only patriotism and moral outrage but rather “unconscious envy,”

like that of a schoolboy being punished when all his classmates are out playing. He goes on to warn that such attacks divert attention from those wealthy, influential Englishmen who from their position within “the City and the aristocracy” pose a greater threat to the country.42

Forster’s wartime letters to Isherwood are an invaluable record of a sensitive yet indefatigable writer’s survival during unnerving, exasperating, and dangerous times. In January 1940, Forster confides in Isherwood: “I don’t expect to behave well when the trouble starts, shall be offended and maybe go mad, running slowly in large circles with my head down is the way I see myself.” Yet when the “trouble” does begin, he holds up quite well, maintaining his accustomed life of social engagements and beginning a regular stint for the B.B.C., broadcasting weekly or bi-weekly talks about literature to India. As bombings continue and restrictions on travel take effect, Forster bemoans to Isherwood about being isolated from the rest of the world: “We get very provincial. Since the war started, I have not even seen the sea. Our lives are interned without being spiritual.” There are poignant moments as well. In the midst of the Blitzkrieg, Forster lists a dinner menu cooked by Bob in order to reassure Isherwood that they do in fact have enough to eat; at an another time, he sends Isherwood a postcard signed by Isherwood’s friends who had gathered together for Christmas dinner.

Forster’s guarded optimism comes across in his failure to give in to doomsday scenarios, even when the windows in his West Hackhurst home are rattling from bombs dropping nearby. In the darkest days of the war, he expresses his hopes for the future in a letter to Cecil Day-Lewis: “Well, let’s hope something acceptable will come along—not that Better England which can only last ten minutes, but the better world which will make our lanes and fields again habitable.”43 Forster sees his role as a writer unchanged by the war. He writes in his Commonplace Book in 1942: pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 12

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

“Function of the writer in wartime? Same as in peace time.” He goes on to note that “We are fighting for self-preservation and can’t know what we shall be like until we have won. When we have won we shall arrange this planet in accordance with our characters. Planning now is merely a game.”44 Forster appraises societies of the past and visualizes a better future in an eloquent essay, “The New Disorder”: “Viewed realistically, the past is merely a series of messes. . . . And what I hope for and work for to-day is for a mess more favourable to artists than is the present one, for a muddle which will provide them with fuller inspirations and better material conditions.”45 Forster maintains that artistic creativity can survive the dark, horrific times they presently live in: “even when we are universally hurt and frightened, even when the cause of humanity is lost, the possibility of aesthetic order will remain and it seems well to assert it at this moment and to emphasize the one aspect in which the artist is unique.”46

Meanwhile, Isherwood was coming to terms with his self-imposed exile in California, as a writer and declared pacifist. In a letter to Lehmann in the fall of 1941, Isherwood writes “It’s no use—I shall never write anything till this war’s over. My voice is changing, like a choirboy’s, and I can’t find the new notes. But I am more certain than ever that something is happening inside . . . and there will be something to show for this exile.”47 He also attempts to articulate his understanding of pacifism. In another letter, he tells Lehmann, “I am not, and never shall be, a pacifist in the militant, political sense. . . . Pacifism, as I see it, is only helpful when it is part of something much bigger—a whole philosophy of life and a technique of behaviour, and a belief—otherwise it’s just tiresome obstructionism.”48

Isherwood’s declared pacifism led him, via Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, to study and practice Hinduism under the tutelage of Swami Prabhavananda at the Vedanta Society in Los Angeles. In 1943, with the end of the war nowhere in sight, Isherwood informs his agnostic friend, Forster: “I honestly believe that I now believe in ‘God’”—although he admits that he cannot actually define what he means by “God.” He does, however, “rely on Him, and will turn to Him next time things get tough.”

Forster replies, “I do not understand your feeling that God will help you—

i.e. I don’t ever feel that I shall ever be thus helped myself.” He claims that he gets through his emotional difficulties on his own. Each one, nevertheless, respects the other’s position and the wartime letters focus more on the pleasures, fears, and anxieties of their markedly different daily lives rather than differences in their religious beliefs.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Forster and Isherwood continued to discuss ways to change the ending of Maurice into a happy, optimistic one. Since Forster insists that the last chapter as written must remain, Isherwood proposes pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 13

INTRODUCTION

inserting a new penultimate chapter that brings Maurice and Alec together.49 Forster, who is insecure about the relevancy of his pre-World War I story, is touched that Isherwood still likes it and cares about it. In response to Isherwood’s suggestions, Forster writes in 1952,“I was not at all sure that you would still like M[aurice] and feel very happy.” He begins drafting a new chapter that is eventually inserted. In gratitude for Isherwood’s help and no doubt also an acknowledgment of Isherwood’s faithful encouragement over the years, Forster assigned Isherwood the rights to publish Maurice in the United States after Forster’s death.

When viewed together the letters describe an evolving friendship.

Despite the fact that Forster and Isherwood hit it off well immediately, they develop intimacy gradually. In his first letter to Isherwood, Forster begins:

“Dear Isherwood—we do drop ‘Mr’, don’t we?” Forster’s dropping of “Mr”

and use of the last name alone (which Isherwood does as well in his letters) is in keeping with the familiar yet formal style of address male students usually adopted at elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge at this time. After addressing one another in their letters as “Isherwood” and

“Forster” and closing with “yours” followed by signatures of their complete names for several years, they begin to close with “love,” and shortly there-after address and sign off to one another by first name. One can trace this growing familiarity and affection in the changing content and tone of the letters themselves. Isherwood reveals more and more information about his relationship with Heinz, Forster freely mentions Bob, and as the political climate in Europe becomes more dire, they both let down their guard, expressing their fears and anxieties.

In 1935, Forster and Bob traveled to Amsterdam to visit Isherwood and Heinz and spent several days together as two “couples.” In that milieu Isherwood and Forster would relate to one another not merely as disciple and mentor but also as friends having a good time with their respective partners. Isherwood later recalls that visit: “Forster, beaming through his spectacles, was probably enjoying himself most, since Bob Buckingham was with him. They kept exchanging glances full of fun and affection.”50

Although Forster writes upon his return to England that he enjoyed himself but regretted that they had little time to spend alone with one another (and presumably talk about their writing), the visit drew him closer to Isherwood; for it is in this letter that Forster first addresses him as

“Christopher” and closes with “love, Morgan.” In subsequent letters, Forster closes with “much love” and “very much love.” In the postwar years, one can read Forster’s continued affection for Isherwood in his excited anticipation of Isherwood’s visits to England. Isherwood’s letters reveal that he considers Forster much more than a mentor. In the mid-1930s he pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 14

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

writes with concern and worry about Forster’s health following a series of operations Forster underwent. Fearing that Forster is suffering from food shortages during the war, he sends him food packages. When at the height of the bombings too much time elapses without word from Forster, Isherwood sends a telegram begging him for reassurance that he is safe.

Although there are very few letters after 1952, Forster and Isherwood maintained their friendship. Isherwood regularly paid visits to Forster in England. Their last written correspondence dates from 1966 (four years before Forster’ death at the age of 91). Suffering the effects of several strokes, Forster dictates a brief letter to Isherwood: “Much love to you, naturally & to your work though I am sorry it is not bringing you to England.”

P. N. Furbank, Forster’s biographer, remarks that “[t]he central preoccupa-tion of his life, it was plain to see, was friendship, and he had a rather special attitude towards friendship. He never casually dropped friends, as most people do, out of forgetfulness or through change of circumstance. . . . [I]f someone became a friend of his, he might expect to remain so for life.”51

This observation is echoed by Don Bachardy, Isherwood’s companion for more than thirty years and who had visited Forster together with Isherwood in the 1950s and 1960s. Bachardy remarked that when Forster admitted someone into his inner circle, he was a friend for life.52

Obviously, Isherwood was one such intimate friend. The letters reproduced here trace this mutually intimate, long-lasting friendship within the contexts of the extraordinary—and everyday—social, cultural, and political events of the mid-twentieth century.

pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:24 AM Page 15

E. M. Forster

Drawing from life by

Don Bachardy,

September 1961

Christopher

Isherwood

Drawing from life by

Don Bachardy,

November 1, 1976

This page intentionally left blank

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The 1930s

12-10-32

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Isherwood—we do drop “Mr,” don’t we?—

I was very glad to have “All the Conspirators.” I don’t like it as much as

“The Memorial,”1 but that is not the point, and there are things in it I do like very much. Thank you for sending it, and for the letter in it, and for

“The Seven Pillars,”2 which I found at the club, packed with incredible care.

I hope you found your friend better than the news suggested. It is an awful worry, that illness at this time of the year. I’m very sorry you’ve got this on you, and annoyed with life generally for being so often just wrong.

Again and again the wonderful chariot seems ready to move.

I have read The Orators3 and liked what I understood of it and what I couldn’t too. There’s a very impressive voice at it, and an active eye. Only, I had a queer feeling that everything might suddenly stop, and the lights of common day be switched on. This may merely be because I know Auden is a schoolmaster: it is the profession which, after hospital-nurses, disquiets me most, and renders all my judgments hysterical.—I think that last ode is very agitating and marvellous: I get from it all sorts of sounds and sights outside the ones he actually provides.

I hope you’ll write again and let me know when you are back in England, and I’ll let you know if I ever come to Berlin. I hope your novel is going well.

I am broadcasting, worse than schoolmastering [ sic] it might be argued, still I do get anonymous letters signed “a disgusted listener” or “the old ladies who remember you 20 years ago at Perugia and can’t help feeling sorry.”

Yours

EM Forster

* * *

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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

[October 1932]

Berlin W. 30

Nollendorfstrasse 17

Bei Thurau

Tuesday.

Dear Forster,

Thank you for your letter. I didn’t send you my novel so much because I thought it has any particular merit as because I once refused to show it you, and this seemed to me afterwards silly.

I’m glad you like the Orators. Auden isn’t by any means what one expects from a schoolmaster. Perhaps he more resembles a hospital nurse—a comic one in a film. He is coming out here at Christmas. I suppose there is no chance of your joining us?

Thank you for asking after my friend. We went to the doctor the other day, and I’m afraid there’s no doubt that one of the lungs is already affected. This weather doesn’t help much, either.

I feel as if I am shortly going to enter upon a period of travelling, half against my will. I don’t want to start shifting about, and yet I know I shall never be happy till I’ve visited the places one sees on cigarette cards. Did you go to India for any special reason, or just because it’s such a long way off?

I am writing an indecent bumptious stupid sort of novel about Berlin which I fear you won’t like.4 It’s strange, I long to do very moving Dickensy scenes with tears, and when it comes to the point I dry up like a stone and write something venomous. It’s as if I had some nasty green poison in my system.

My mother heard you over the wireless and said: what a charming voice.

There was a cabinet meeting here the other day to discuss the permissible limits of bathing dresses. Prussia seems to be in the hands of the Roman Catholics.

Yours

Christopher Isherwood

* * *

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THE 1930s

As From:

4-1-33

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Isherwood,

I was so glad to hear form [sic] you—have been meaning to write—and so glad you saw I’d had the pleasure of mentioning The Memorial. (Your mother thought my voice sweeter than ever, I hope!)

It’s exciting about Manchuria, but I won’t mention it even very definitely to myself, for it would certainly be annoying to come to Berlin and find you weren’t there. I’ve several times dallied with the thought of coming. But my voice incommoded me, and though it is now happily silenced I am [taught?] up in the memoir of a friend—Lowes Dickinson. It’s so long since I’ve written a book that it feels like opening a tomb.

If there’s no news your end there must be less here—except that between the last paragraph of this letter and the present paragraph I went to bed and dreamt that, although still writing to you, I had been to Russia.

What can this mean? No doubt someone can tell one. But I reflected in my dream that I should be able to continue this letter in a more interesting way, and I felt complacent.

I will write again, so will you, and specially you, for I want to hear about the Manchurian plan when it develops. You did not mention (in this letter) about your friend. I was very sorry indeed about the bad news which you gave me previously. It is such a wretched time of year too. I do hope things are going rather better. And good wishes for 1933.

Yours ever

EM Forster

* * *

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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

[Postmark: Abinger Hammer, Surrey, April 13, 1933]

Dear Isherwood,

I was very pleased to get your card on my return from Ireland. I wish you would be so kind as to ring me up on Saturday morning before 10.0 if you are in town, so that we may see when we can meet. It is Terminus 5804.

I am not there for the moment but in bed in the country and feeling rather muddled. However I shall be there, if somewhat complicated by an Indian.

I do hope we shall meet soon.

Yours ever

EM Forster

Thursday

* * *

Monday [April 1933?]

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Isherwood,

Symbolically enough[,] the roof of this house is falling off. I have to put it on again and I can’t be sure of doing so before Tuesday evening. I must therefore take back the suggestion I made to you, much to my regret. I do hope I haven’t put you out. I hope to get up Wednesday. If you could send me a p[ost] c[ard] (here) as to your movements this week[,] I should be grateful.

Yours ever,

EM Forster

* * *

[April 27, 1933]

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Isherwood,

I am very sorry not to see you again. I count on your letting me know when next you are in England. I don’t suppose I shall get to Germany. Bob and I did talk of it for his holidays in the latter half of June, but no doubt we shan’t get further than England. I was very glad you liked Maurice, especially pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 21

THE 1930s

the part about Alec, which I have just read again. An example of domesticity, such as you were asking for, is presumably to be found at “Tisselcot”[?] but I daren’t thus instal them, no, nor even under a hay-stack. I think what might happen is a permanent relationship, but with all sorts of vagaries, fears, illnesses, distractions, fraying out at its edges, and this would take a long time to represent. One might shorten it, perhaps, if one made them take a vow, and Maurice could take it, but I doubt about Alec, as about myself. We are, both of us, more likely to look back and realise that we have, after all, sacrificed enough to bring the thing off.— I’ve some other stuff to show you some time, thought it better than Maurice until recently, but begin to have my doubts; as you say, why shouldn’t one date? [i.e., be dated]—William

[Plomer] will have given you my message, that the MS [manuscript]. is to be left at the Reform Club. I don’t come up till Monday. I wanted to hear more about the German with whom you might be going to Brazil.

Yours ever

EM Forster

* * *

[1933?]

Reform Club,

Pall Mall. S.W.1.

Dear Isherwood,

Your address is pleasantly reassuring. However, look at mine. Do send me your promised letter, in fact it is to secure it that I write, for I have not much in the way of news. Who’s the friend with you? The one who was ill?

I do hope he’s on the mend. Also have you seen Gerald Heard whom I have just heard as being in Greece too.

God, this is going to be a dull letter. Still, why not? I have just come from a committee meeting of the London Library, which was presided over by Sir Arnold Wilson, victor in the Hitchin bye[-]election with an immensely reduced majority, and sister to Mona Wilson, my friend. A shit of a man.

And last month, our chairman was Lord Riddell. I had just finished, unknown to my fellow members, a dialogue between a porter and a passenger, which is not publishable nor indeed very amusing. Sir Arnold looked as if he had just finished with Lady Wilson, and Lord Riddell was not there at all. We discussed Stephen Graham, who at the last annual meeting had been the sole dissentient to our application for a Royal Charter. We had got our Charter, and the question was whether our report should be sullied with the mention of Graham’s name. Not a name I want pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 22

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

to see in other places, but here. . . . It was finally decided that his name should be omitted but his protest recorded, and we parted fairly pleased.

[no closing or signature]

* * *

July 8 [1933]

L’ILE ST NICHOLAS

CHALIA

BEOETIA

GREECE

Dear Forster,

I wonder where you are and what you are doing? If you happen to be in Greece, please come and call. All you have to do is to get to Chalkis by train, then persuade some farmer to bring you as far as Chalia with his cart, from whence half an hour’s brisk donkey ride will bring you to the shore. From the shore you must shout very loud, and I will come over in a boat and fetch you.

It is not really very nice here. The landscape is superb but it is far too hot. And there are too many insects and body vermin. Also we have a permanent water shortage as water has to be brought from the mainland in cans. We live in tents and await the building of the house. It is promised to be ready by the middle of August.

You know Greece well, of course. What do you make of it? Can you fit Plato and Sophocles on to these mountains covered with spiky bushes and these vallies [sic] like ovens, full of sand, inhabited by goats and vultures? I can’t, but I expect that is because I had the wrong sort of classical education, designed to make the classical Greeks as much as possible like Varsity rowing blues. The Greeks nowadays seem so strident and cunning and picturesque. The Spartan toughness remains—I see that. But I simply can’t picture even remotely any of them caring about the Golden Mean or the Good Life.

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

THE 1930s

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

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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THE 1930s

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.

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

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

[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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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.

Hospitality, where art thou? Gone down the general drain, perhaps, with free hold estates and pairs of bays.

But Viertel—after what you say I really shall invite him to the Reform Club. The fact that he praised my eyes is very reassuring, because one’s eyes are always with one, they do not vary from day to day like the complexion or the intelligence. Let him gaze his fill. I shall certainly like to see him again and to thank him—which will probably be a mistake—for a most remarkable and enjoyable evening. I have often thought about it and described it to other people without interesting them. It is a milieu—so energetic[,] friendly & horrible. I can’t believe everything isn’t going to crash when such a waggon [ sic] gets so many stars hitched behind. Every film I ever see will now appear incredibly good, also I shall suppose that it has allowed people like you and Heintz to escape for a bit into the sun.

Virginia has now come out, aprony[?] from some article or passage, and has suggested a photograph should be taken of me. L. thinks it is a good idea, and continues to saw the buddleias. It is 5 minutes to one—no, one, the bell rings, and I must jolly well lock this letter up during lunch, or it’ll pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 30

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

get read. I know these particular ethics. This evening we go to a meeting of the Memoir Club, at Maynard Keynes, and if this letter were read there, and aloud by me, it might be the star turn.15

12-4-34

Memoir Club and much else over. I am back at home, quarrelling with my ground landlord through our respective solicitors. He lives 100 yards from me, but before we can exchange a reply there is

letter from self to sol[icitor]

letter from self ’s sol[icitor] to his

letter from his sol[icitor] to him [entire list is enclosed in a bracket on the left]

letter from him to his sol[icitor]side, [and written next to it:“one week, with luck”]

letter from his sol[icitor] to mine

letter from my sol[icitor] to me

17-4-34

Still waiting for the reply, and think I shall go to the South of France.

Bob is ill, or rather laid up, and I can only see him in his own home. I must send this letter at once, or it will never go. Please write and tell me the colour of Mr Abercrombie’s pyjamas. I do hope you will have a good time.

Please give my regards to Heintz.

Yours ever,

EM Forster

[Postscript:] My blow for British freedom is struck on Thursday.

* * *

c/o Banco Hispano Americano

Las Palmas

Canary Isles

April 30 [1934]

Dear Forster,

Thank you for your letter. Mr. Abercromby was a distinct disappointment—an elderly man with a military moustache and dishonest blue eyes, pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 31

THE 1930s

he approved of Dollfuss because he had never seen a word written against him in the Times. He was very informative about how to avoid tipping hotel attendants in the [. . . ?]evant[?] or the best way of getting a good cabin on a liner. Other key-phrases included: “My friends tell me I ought to work with a camera.” “It’s what I call a potty little island.” “He’s a strong-looking devil” (We were in Madiera harbour and watching a boy diving for coins). “They kept the two of us waiting—just like servants.” “She was a very smart girl—I’m not speaking immorally.”“The German is no good; he goes to pieces at thirty.” “One of these tripper hotels where you see young chits stripped to the belly-button.”

Here there are black volcanic hills and white flat-topped houses; an African town, with palms. A sand beach protected by a reef from sharks.

The inhabitants are beautiful; quite a lot of them fair-haired, the remnants of an earlier race, the Guanchos, who worshipped one God, had blue eyes and imprisoned anyone who spoke to a woman without being introduced.

Why don’t you come here, instead of France? It would be much cheaper.

Up in the mountains, the peasants live in caves and mix poison for their relatives. There are banana groves and cathedrals and extinct craters and no snakes. We have a lovely room on the roof of the hotel, looking across the bay to the peak of Tenerife. We like it so much here that we’re staying another month. It isn’t in the least a fashion resort, like Funchal. Some of the characters from a Passage to India are staying here, but they don’t bother us. They go to some mysterious club and play golf and come home too tired to be aggressive. There are also Germans who bow from the waist and say: Permit. My name is Schenck. The Canary Islanders themselves are gay and handsome and are just discovering, with enormous excitement, the Cocteau decadence cult of 1925. The only statue in the Public Gardens is [dedicated] to a poet. There is a Carlos Marx Street. Real live canaries fly about from palm tree to palm tree like sparrows.

I have ordered your blow for British Freedom and await it eagerly. At present I am reading “Great British Modern Plays.” Well, at any rate, I suppose they’re British.

Do write again soon, and consider seriously if you couldn’t come. It such a simple journey; and no customs examination when you arrive.

Best love

Christopher Isherwood

Goodness knows what happened to Mr. A. He disappeared as we landed.

* * *

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15-5-34

[St. Rémy-en-Provence]

Dear Isherwood,

I was getting on all right here until your letter arrived when I wished I wasn’t here but with you. I enjoy myself here as much as usual and always wonder why the usual isn’t a little more. My friend and his wife are of peasant stock; intelligent, affectionate, gay. Provençal cookery[,] which I like, all natural good sense and natural good taste. [C]omfortable rough little house without taint of artiness and bang against that rough little range of hills which runs from Tarascon to Cavaillon, peasants coming in and so on.

Why isn’t it acute pleasure here? I think I don’t ever get more intimate with my friends or with the scenery, it must be that, and I know that the peasants are always women or old men. So I am wanting to come to the Canary Island and since I can’t do that [I want] to go home. It’s too quiet.

Amusement or work can alone stop one from brooding on the coming smash. My particular impasse for the moment is: (i) Nothing can be done/

(ii) yet the people I admire most try to do something—and character is the thing I care about, both in myself and others,/ (iii) but if one has realised (i) then any attempt to avert disaster is only an attempt to show how admirable one is/ (iv) which isn’t admirable.

I think the explanation of the impasse is that the human race has never before been faced with a world wide dilemma, and the individual has the right to be staggered at it and to pity himself at having been born just now: a right he is still too shy to exercise.

At this point we went in the bus to Avignon and I tried to buy you a tie, like the one Bob bought his brother the railway porter three years ago. But I couldn’t see one.

I ought perhaps to make clear that the friends I am stopping with are called Charles and Marie Mauron, that he translated A Passage to India into French, that their house is called Mas d’Angiranz, and that it is close to

“Les Monuments” of St Rémy-de-Provence. They pay for everything (which they cannot afford) so my holiday will only cost me £10. Still I do wish I was[ sic] on the Canaries.

If Mr Abercromby had disappointed you less he might have me more. I can’t tell you how glad I am to know about him, nor how lightly I condole with you for a companionship which produced so many memorable phrases. I do not mind his having disappeared. I hope that my Blow for British Freedom has reached you by now. I struck a puff for property too before leaving England: I arranged that the lease of the house where I live should be extended to cover my mother’s lifetime and I refused to sell a freehold wood adjoining it, which the landlord, Lord Farrer, tried to make pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 33

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me do. Instead I devised a compromise which has been very well thought of, but I have not the patience to write it out for you. Indeed I will stop for Charles Mauron is taking this to the post. Please write home. I really have no reason for not coming, but I am unequipped and slightly imbecile. I am determined—and few things stop one when one’s determined—to spend next January out of England, and if you are within reach and sitting anyth[?] still I should like to join you. Bob has been ill—I forget whether I told you that—but now he is better. It’s partly he who keeps me hanging about near home. My remembrance of the past and my sense of the future have made these present years and days seem very exceptional.

I am reading J. Romains Hommes [de] Bonne Volonté16 which I meant to quote somewhere in this letter, but [the] letter has to go as I’ve already told you once.

Best love,

EM Forster

* * *

c/o Banco Hispano Americano

Las Palmas

Canary Islands.

May 28 [1934]

Dear Forster,

Thank you for your letter. I am very sorry you aren’t coming, though I hardly expected you would. Certainly let us be together next January, if we are both alive and at liberty. This is a time when I want to see as much as possible of all my few real friends. We must get together more, prepare some kind of defences, consolidate. At least disaster isn’t coming upon us suddenly this time, as in 1914. We all expect it, so we ought to behave better. I doubt if we shall.

I have just finished your book. It moved me very much. You make me see him, or imagine I see him, very vividly.17 Today we have been in the mountains and I have thought about you and Dickinson all day. I feel I understand your books so much better now. There is so much in your generation which my generation just dismisses stupidly and hastily, because it seems quiet and dull and we are all, or most of us, little Macbeths who have killed Duncan and have to go on murdering and murdering. And when one of us does turn academic, he is usually so shallow and tidy and anxious. I wish there was more of your own life in the book, and I suppose you wanted deliberately to keep it out.

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My own novel doesn’t get finished and changes its form daily. I read chiefly books about what is going to happen in Europe and study maps.

Then, when I have supped full with horrors, I terrify the unfortunate Heinz. Still, there are brighter moments. It is sometimes so beautiful here.

It would be strange, but not inconceivable, to live in Las Palmas always. A few of the inhabitants are charming civilised human beings. They sit out under the palm trees until two o’clock in the morning talking about painting, or meet in each others’ rooms to listen to the Kreutzer Sonata, like undergraduates. And they are gay and gentle. There is one boy of eighteen, a sculptor, who is a genius, I think. I have photographed two of his figures and will send them to you if they come out well. He is very quiet and shy and has epileptic fits.

Please write again soon. I like getting your letters. Let me close with a fashion note from the Daily Palma Post (Palma in Mallorca; no connection with us)[:]

“Anne’s beach wear hinges on shorts, which are shown for use in the sea or on the promenade back of the water’s edge. The close-fitting bathing-suits are also shown for the benefit of those who feel the need of the most revealing attire.”

Best love,

Christopher Isherwood

[handwritten addition]

I quite forgot to tell you about our only female friend. Her name is Leonora Pohly. We met her a month ago, wandering about the mountains at sunrise with her arms full of flowers. She has red poodle hair and a blunt nose like a dog, and is covered with freckles. She comes to see us every day and we have got quite fond of her. During the war and the revolution, she was one of the imperial gardeners at Potsdam. All the proper gardeners had gone to the front, and a most weird collection of cranks, cissies [sic] and mental deficients were wandering about the greenhouses, composing poems on the plants. One of them said to Pohly, speaking of an unusual wallflower: “It is dark as the ebony writing-table of a misunderstood woman.”

Pohly rendered us one signal service: she got the German Consul here to change the profession in Heinz’ passport. Up to now it has been: manser-vant—a fatal word largely instrumental in all the trouble we have had. Now it is: Language Student—the Consul’s own, extraordinary choice. He might as well have written: Archdeacon. However, now that Heinz is a language student, he has decided to learn languages—any languages; the more the pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 35

THE 1930s

better. He stops guests in the corridor and says, beaming all over his face, in Spanish: my friend is very ill. This is so far his only Spanish sentence. It gives rise to misunderstandings, as you can imagine.

* * *

9-8-34

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Isherwood,

I was very glad to get your letter and feel that there is a sort of alliance between us. Let me know when you get to England—you may even be there already. Some of your news was good. I do hope that Heintz will have no further trouble with the customs. Yes—let’s hope that if there’s a crash we shall all behave well, but I do not even know yet what “well” will be. It is all so inconceivable. I work up into a fuss about it for a little, and then calm down, write the Book of the Abinger Pageant,18 go in a char[-]à[-]banc to Oxford with eighteen policemen on Bank Holiday, prepare to entertain Mrs Myslakowska, who tried to seduce me in Cracow two years ago in order to get rid of her husband, and is now in England.19 Then I get fussed, and contribute Notes on Passing Events to the newspapers, which you would easily follow if I sent them to you, or go on a deputation to the Attorney General in connection with the Sedition Bill.20 I think it is sensible and suitable, this alternation between fuss and calm, and I gather you are practicing it yourself. It is the right conduct for our time—better than all calm, and far[,] far better than all fuss. But if the war started, I don’t know what would be right. The very meaning of words would change, and

“war” [would] be the most meaningless of them all.

I meant to write you a letter full of news, as you might like some, but it all boils down to my having a certain amount of trouble at home, and very little elsewhere. Next week I shall go to town to see Bob. The week after he will stop with me at my flat. The day after that (Aug. 22nd) I go to Falmouth and pay a visit to the Hilton Youngs. I have known H.Y. a great many years and am fond of him, and I get on with her. Her son, Peter Scott, is rather an enigma, a toad without a jewel perhaps, though a pleasant toad.

He paints pictures of geese, pictures of geese, pictures of geese, pictures of geese, and no sooner has Sir Philip Sassoon or Mr Amery21 opened them than he has painted still more pictures of geese. He has also written a short story about a crane, which is rather on my mind, as I have lost it. However, that is surely enough about Peter Scott. I expect to be quite comfortable down there, but not to stop very long. I would rather like to start some pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 36

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

more writing for one thing. I am very glad to have done that Lowes Dickinson book.

We will talk about January when you return. Have you been reading anything to speak of? I am just finishing Anna Karenina, which I never got through before. I do not think it is very good—except for the balancing of the two couples, which is certainly marvellous. Any other writer would have had to tether them into their position with a few strings, but Tolstoy leaves them to float naturally in his air. I can’t think of any other novelist, dramatist, etc. who could do this. It’s neither a plan, nor is it a happy chance. It’s something for which there’s no word in criticism. I didn’t even know Tolstoy could do it—I don’t remember anything of the type in War and Peace—and in this respect A.K. has been a great pleasure. But the characters are not really masterpieces, Anna has been much overpraised and Kitty’s nothing at all. And what’s still more disappointing and surprising to me, the sense of family groups—so overwhelming in W. & P. and so desirable here—never gets conveyed. Perhaps all the characters ought to have been introduced as children.

However, that’s enough for Anna. She has taken even more room than Peter Scott’s geese geese geese, and I don’t know whether you’ve read her or want to.

What I did mean to say, when I asked you whether you were reading, was to ask you whether you were writing. I was looking forward to your novel so much.22 However, if you can’t get it down it can’t be helped. I don’t suppose it matters. It’s much better not to write under the tyranny of time.

“This, this, have I achieved before civilisation crashes”? No, no—I feel advancing at this point to some Grand Pronouncement. However, it will not come. I must knock off and write a line to Bob, who is at this moment—which is midnight—driving about a mystery car with a wireless set inside it to detect “crime.”

Please give kind greetings to Heintz if you are with him. I shall send this to Wm. Plomer. He may know your whereabouts.

Yours ever

EM Forster

* * *

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From next week:

Tenerife. August 26 [1934]

c/o Banco Hispano Americano

Las Palmas

Canary Islands.

Dear Forster,

We arrived back yesterday from a tour of the smaller islands to find a stack of post, including your letter. I was most interested in the pamphlet you sent. I knew about the Sedition Bill, of course. And had heard a good deal about the Council for Civil Liberties23 from the Week. What I didn’t know was that you were at the head of the troops. May you lead them to victory. How entirely I understand what you say about the alternations between fuss and calm. Alas, with me, it’s nearly all futile fuss. My conscience pricks me, and I feel like leaving for England by the next boat: To do . . . what? And, if so, what is to become of Heinz, whose relations now more or less openly beg me to keep him out of Germany? We think his father must be in some kind of political trouble. Probably, I shall compromise by settling in Copenhagen, fairly soon. Meanwhile, I have finished my novel; which is less a blow for anybody’s freedom than a home-made jam-pot grenade flung rather wildly in the direction of Berlin. I can’t even throw straight; and am lost in admiration of your marksmanship in the G.L.D.

book,24 which I have now read four or five times, and like better and better.

Do you know, I have never read a word he wrote, apart from your quotations? When I’m in civilisation again, I shall try to get the International Anarchy. I think that’s what I should best like of his, just now.

Can one help your Council with money? If so, I’ll send some.

What is your next book going to be? I’m starting on a write-up of my Berlin diaries. They ought, at least, to form quite an interesting set of illustrations to a serious work on Fascism. I have learnt far more about what

“educated” Nazis think since I have been here, than I ever did in Germany.

Most of them are school-teachers who have never read any history.

The trip to the smaller islands was enjoyable as far as we two were concerned, but it filled me with despair. There they are, in the middle of the sea, with their wonderful ravines, full of palms and muscatel grapes. And on them are thousands of inhabitants of both sexes; the younger ones with very beautiful eyes. And it is all dead, dead, dead. It is how our civilisation may be after the next war. On Gomera, the night before we arrived, five young men had gone into the church, collected armfuls of those stiff gor-geous little dolls, Christ, Maria and St Cristobal, and burnt them on the beach. They were now in the lock-up, but to be released [the] next day.

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Nobody seemed to care much, either for or against. The young men belonged to a club which calls itself Socialist. It was all rather depressing and a bit pathetic. Comic relief was provided by two of our fellow-trav-ellers. We met them first on the boat going across to Hierro. The more conspicuous wore a khaki uniform, puttees down to his bare ankles and sandals. When the boat started, he exchanged his solar topee for a smart felt hat. We hadn’t left the harbour many minutes when he handed us his card.

It was headed: The Spanish Explorer-Captain, Don Ramiro Sanz. Who has travelled for eighteen years on foot from Alaska to Cape Horn. Beneath was a picture of the Captain, in white uniform and Nazi boots, armed with a rifle, a cutlass and a revolver. On the other side of the card, was a posed picture against a studio background of two fat girls, obviously whores, dressed in the alleged costume of the Andes Indians. We were requested to contribute a trifle to the Captain’s travelling expenses. Presently another traveller appeared; a young Hungarian in a very smart flannel suit. It appeared that he also was in the same business, and that, by an unfortunate chance, both explorers were now headed for the same island, which could hardly be expected to provide funds for more than one of them. The Hungarian told us a good deal about his profession. He wasn’t exactly a beggar; in that he didn’t, for a moment, pretend that he was starving, or even short of money.

It appears that, especially in Spanish peasant districts, this attitude is quite fatal. You must be boastful, affluent and aggressive. “Look what they gave me in El Pinar” is the right note to strike. If they are very stingy, you say:

“This village is full of Arabs.” On arrival in a village, the Hungarian would go straight to the mayor and demand five pesetas. He almost invariably got it; indeed, he looked upon the money as his absolute right and perquisite.

“I’ve got three mayors to go and collect from this morning,” he remarked, as though he were the gas-man. When I asked where the money came from, he replied vaguely that he supposed it was taken out of the taxes. The Spanish Explorer-Captain collected not only money but rubber-stamp-marks, in his autograph album. Anybody who had a stamp would do; most of them were from grocers and chemists. On Hierro, he got a poem as well, dictated by a village poet, who was blind, to his “secretary.” From the very little I could understand of Spanish, it seemed remarkably good satire: “Oh thou,” it began, “who hast travelled the Earth from the burning Equator to the freezing Pole, and art come at last to the door of our insignificant hovel . . .

” The Captain had to admit, however, that business on the island had been comparatively poor. The Hungarian cleaned up the chief village and then left for the next island, to pick that bare before he arrived. Apparently, there are dozens of these people in Spain, most of them foreigners. The most successful is an Englishman, who travels with a very large dog.

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Yes, I’ve read Anna Karenina. Twice. I don’t like it as much as War and Peace; though I can’t judge it as severely as you do. I feel a strong personal affection for Tolstoy (which few people seem to share) and enjoy him even at his silliest; as in The Kreutzer Sonata and the notes to What is Art?

Certainly, Anna is a failure: Partly, I think, because Tolstoy tried, consciously or unconsciously, to write a “great” novel in the French manner which he pretended to detest. And so there has to be a “great” tragic theme.

The moment he had written “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” on the fly-leaf, he had doomed the whole book to disaster; though the heaviness is eased off a bit by the confused ending, floating the reader back into life again, after the suicide. Any of the French masters would have closed on Anna’s death, I believe; and left one feeling as though one had swallowed a plum-stone. Nevertheless I am very fond of it, it patches. The row at the opening and the horserace and the haymaking and Anna’s thoughts as she is driving to the railway station for the last time (one of the earliest examples, perhaps, of the modern technique of reported thought?) And Vronsky nearly comes off as a great comic character. There is a scene when he’s already had Anna once or twice and is being very polite about it: “For an instant of this bliss . . . ” which makes me smile whenever I think of it. Of course all this retribution stuff is nonsense. Tolstoy can’t seriously have believed in it, himself. There is a bit where Dolly comes to visit the guilty pair when Tolstoy makes obvious, brilliant efforts to save the book by prov-ing that the liaison was bound to be unhappy in the long run. But he doesn’t prove it, because it wasn’t.

Today, I am thirty. Did Villon say that, at thirty, he had drunk all his

“hontes”?25 Or was it thirty-three? I feel as if I still had some pretty unap-petizing ones in store. Like you, I am aware that this is the moment for a pronouncement. Like you, I fail to make it. I have no message whatever to the British Public or the boys of the old school. At forty, if spared, I’ll try again.

[handwritten postscript:] Heinz returns the greetings. Please remember me to Bob.

Yours ever,

Christopher Isherwood

* * *

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16-1-35

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Isherwood,

Dr Norman Haire26 has lettered to William [Plomer] that if my novels were analysed they would reveal a pretty mess, and that the works of H.

Walpole and S. Maugham would be even prettier. So I thought I would set to myself, and began last night in a lockable book. There are things in my earlier stuff which are obvious enough to me now, though less so when I wrote them—e.g. the rescue of Eustace by Gennaro in the Story of a Panic, and Gino’s savaging of Philip in Where Angels—, and there is one curious episode: the sacrificial burning of a number of short stories in 1922 in order that a Passage to India might get finished. So I thought I would put all this down, but soon got tired and am unlocking myself to you instead. I wish you were in England for several reasons. For one thing we always agreed to spend January together—do you remember—and it’s already half gone. For another thing[,] I would very much have liked your advice over the Council for Civil Liberties. Can I work with people like Claud Cockburn or not?27 You could have told me. I can’t be a communist because I can’t apply my mind to communism. There may be other reasons: you could have told me. And oh my god tomorrow evening we are to consider what my committee calls a “Charter,” and to specify what bless-ings in the way of free speech[,] free thought and free assemblage we propose to confer not only on Great Britain but on North Ireland, India, and West Africa. Substitute “f ” for “ch” is my own thought, but even thus emended the charter will not carry far, for it has no guts behind it. We have not money, or if we have immediately spend it. The evening after that will be better—a play by Virginia [Woolf] called “Freshwater” (or “an evening at the bay”), and the evening after that will be best, for Bob comes.

Dr Norman Haire, about whom William has already made numerous puns, leads one a circuitous course I must say. To start again at my own writings, I am trying to put together a volume of reprints. There is plenty of stuff and much of it quite good in patches, but slight terrors steal over me.

It’s been so ineffective, when one considers the course of affairs, and it’s so imperfect when compared with real writing. I was very pleased to hear from you. I “owed” you a letter as a matter of fact, and had it been written at the proper time should have told you how much I liked Little Friend. It was wonderfully little spoilt. I went three times. I wish that Len would act again. I hardly ever see anyone whom I care to look at on the films. My other news would have been that, last November, I went for a day to the Saar. It was more pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 41

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like some one else’s expedition than my own, but a great success. Thence I proceeded for a week to St Remy de Provence, where I often go. This was a great success too, but sunshine and calm instead of fog and romance.

Well it is 1.0 A.M. and I seem to have written nothing at all. Day after day goes by in a muddle. We had curried eggs for supper, I have read half a letter of Horace Walpole’s, Mrs O’Brien and Miss Pollak think Mrs Morgan is going to be married, the wireless is less good for regional, Sir Akbar Hydari writes on gold-speckled paper which was used for ancient Moghul documents. What is one to do with all that? I will go to bed. I am at last getting a few dreams again about lovely landscapes and trying to remain very quiet when I wake up so that I may remember them.

Please give my remembrances to Paul Kryger28 and my regards to Heintz.

I do hope you will both get to England sometime soon. I don’t suppose I shall get to Denmark unless I can do so with or without Bob—i.e. during his holidays, which again I have not much chance of spending with him.

With love,

E.M. Forster

17-1-35

The Danes, always thoughtful, have decided this morning to translate A Passage to India and I am signing the contract. Or was it that you gingered them? They are Berlingske Forlag, 34 Pilestraede, Copenhagen K.

* * *

Classensgade 65

Copenhagen

February 7 [1935]

Dear Forster,

Thank you for your letter. I have been a long time answering it because I had to finish typing the play Auden and I have written together.29 Also I have been to the dentist.

First, I must warn you that you will shortly receive a review copy of my novel.30 Please don’t misunderstand this. It is in no sense a hint that you shall “do anything” about it. But merely a device for saving money at the Woolfes’ expense; I am sending review copies to all my friends who can be classed as “literary”: as the six copies I get free don’t go far, and, this time, there is a more than usually large number of libelled persons to be propiti-ated with suitably inscribed volumes.

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How like Dr Haire to “titter” to William abut the unconscious content of your novels. I met him once in Berlin. Really, these sexologists are hardly adult. As if all of us hadn’t made these momentous “discoveries” while still at school! However, it’s an amusing game. The Gino-Philip savaging is perhaps your classic instance, but I can think of two others: The death on the football field in “The Longest Journey” (very fishy) and the moment when Rikky (spelling, or am I mixing it up with the mongoose in Kipling?) faints on hearing that he has an illegitimate brother (obviously because he was in love with the young man all the time and was horrified to discover that his passion was incestuous). So, you see, Dr Haire is not the only smut-hound on the beach.

Of course the Council for Civil Liberties is some good; the question is, how much? And the answer to that is, how far are they prepared to go when it comes to the point. Utopian charters are irritating, of course; but, on the other hand, it isn’t a bad thing to get one’s i[. . . ?] clear while there’s still time. Later, events may move so fast and ti[. . . ?] may be need for such rapid action that unless you know exactly what yo[u] mean to do[,] you won’t do it.31

Meanwhile, I sit here, waver and am in a mess. On the one side, there is the logical course of duty to what I believe: come to England and do my bit, however small. On the other side, there is Heinz. But I’ve told you this before.

There remain, as you say, the curried eggs (which I don’t even know how to make)[,] the letters on coloured paper (but only yellow from the Hogarth Press and dark blue from John Lehmann) and the landscape dreams (which I can only get if I take aspirin).

I am glad the Danes are translating the Passage to India. Rather late in the day, isn’t it? No, I wasn’t responsible, I’m afraid.

Heinz and Paul Kryger send regards.

If only we could meet. It’s marvelous weather here, now.

Best love and write again soon,

Christopher Isherwood

[handwritten postscript:] Please remember me to Bob.

* * *

[11-5-35]

Dear Isherwood,

Have now read Mr. Norris twice and have much admiration and enjoyment. I liked it less the first time because it is not altogether my sort of book—

dwells on the contradictions rather than the complexities of character, and pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 43

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seems to reveal people facet by facet whereas the Memorial if my memory serves tackled strata. However I get over that and managed to read what you’ve written, I think. The construction is fine and Margot was a complete surprise to me. It’s marvellous too the way you’ve maintained standards of right and wrong and yet left Norris an endearing person. And you’ve made him both silly and witty, like a character in Congreve.32 He’s awfully good.

The necessity of combining knowingness and honesty in William render him more of a problem, for in art these are uneasy bedfellows. However you bring him through pretty well. I was a little worried in Switzerland to what extent he was paying his employer’s way with the Baron. Did he go the whole hog or turn a pig-skin cheek? I don’t the least mind, but feel that in the first case he would violate the fastidiousness and in the second the integrity of his character. Still perhaps I needn’t worry, for he was only hired to make the Baron move, not to make him happy.

Do give me an address to write to. I suppose you are in Brussels by now and do hope all’s well. It was a great pleasure seeing you.

With love,

EM Forster

Otto for my island! Oh I do hope he got to the Saar!

* * *

1-6-35

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Isherwood,

I didn’t mind what you said about T. E. [Lawrence] either at the time or afterwards, and it helped me towards sizing him up. The circumstances have been very distracting. I ought to have arrived there the day he was buried, and I did go there last Tuesday with the Sassoons. Pat Knowles, the bat-youth, received us and showed me all the preparations they were making for my visit. Everything very grey and quiet and touching in that rhododendron dell, but outside I know Lord Lloyd was waiting. S. said he looked absolutely foul at the funeral. Well he must vomit for someone else now.

On the top of this worry has been another one connected with property—

our “family friends” the Farrens have been trying to close our thirty-year old path to the village and to take away our field: for announcing this iniquity by a “humourous” poem professing to come from a mare and actually written by pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 44

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

a bitch. The disorders of life are much confused: in my half-waking worries I scarcely know whether I am thinking of the lost path or the lost friend.

Well Bob’s there anyhow, and I got him down on the Sassoons my last day there. It is a gigantic plain country house in Wiltshire, lawns and woods rising to the sky, no gardens or trimmings, very attractive and grand.

Sassoon’s wife sweet, S. I have always been charmed by. I have come away thinking what a gap there is between war writers, especially poets (S.S., Blunden, etc.)33 and post-war writers. The pre war writers (self) seem actually nearer to the war than what is being produced at the present time. I don’t mean that I follow it but anyhow I’m not affronted or scared by it.

Any liaison work to be done here? And by Day Lewis? I don’t know him but feel he might connect groups who are rather regrettably out of touch.

There are such shits of every age now about and they are so powerful that some secret groping in decent quarters seems desirable.

This has led me I don’t know how far from Bob. He was delighted with Heytesbury House,34 and drove me up to the flat after tea. How I do wish we could come to Holland, but expense will be one thing, dates another. He hasn’t yet fixed his lease. His wife is “ever so much better,” whatever that means. She has come out well and people have been nice to her. I should have gone with him today to see her if he could have got the car but he couldn’t. We will think about Holland. All else failing, I might run over alone. Did you know I am going to Paris to this freedom-congress for writers on June 21st?35

Well this is a letter of sorts. I am writing in the garden which has suffered more from the frost of 10 days back than any other place in England: not only wisteria, azaleas, tulip tree, tree of heaven, weigelia, ci . . . tus[?] gone, but even beeches and oaks. You will have gathered that if not a lovely it is anyhow a fluffy garden: planned by one old lady—my aunt—conserved by another—

my mother—, and only ennobled by my own excessively moderate austerity.

It is quite ridiculous to reflect how seldom I have felt happy here.

I am getting Lowes Dickinson’s autobiography typed. It is a remarkable work. It makes me sad and a little irritable.

With best love and also love to Heintz.

E. M. F.

I am very sorry about the passport.

* * *

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28-7-35

From this place (Edinburgh) and its tedious wind I send a line about our visit. We shall certainly come if you are still there. Will you send me a line as soon as it is certain about Heintz’s Passport. We shouldn’t come if you’re not there. The notion is to arrive about Aug. 25th for four or five days, and be with you and go around with you as far as your plans allow. I presume your address isn’t a hotel. I was told that the Y.M.C.A. is good but noisy.

I seem to have quantities of letters to write to people who are ill, so must stop—not to write them, but to remind myself that I am doing nothing pleasant. Down below, three agreeable and enlightened women discuss the affairs of the University, and the Professor, who has been inoculated against Russia, sits apart with a gloomy arm. Edinburgh is a strange place. Last night was Saturday night—all the gardens closed, the castle illuminated, Princes Street deserted, an enormous crowd circulating inside the Railway Station and nowhere else. It might be such a fun-city. There was a man here called Raffalovitch who was said to have a salon. I went to a depressing lunch party with him once. Now he is dead.

Well I will finish up now and write again soon. The fact is I am sleepy and cold and haven’t been out all day, but wanted to write definitely about our holiday. The news of Bob’s wife is good and his child continues to get larger and to recognise him.

With best love,

EM Forster

* * *

as from

9-9-35

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

Perhaps I rather overdid ignorance and vagueness when ringing up your mother, still I think she was glad to hear.36 Then we went to Birmingham, but very indignant as the promised car had not been insured and Bob dare not handle it. By the Monday—that is to say last Monday—

the insurance had been fixed up and we motored off to Devonshire, that doubtful county. I enjoyed myself there as much as I have ever, and took my part in outdoor sports. The red sandstone, the abundance of characters pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 46

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

and absence of character, displeased Keats and never please me, still the place was as good as possible, and the drive through Dorsetshire superb. I saw the Cerne Giant for the first time. What an affair! The very reverse of that deplorable photo. Heinz could find nothing to complain of and Bob was reduced to a series of reverent exclamations. It’s on such a lovely hill-side too. From Sidmouth (to complete this pointilliste rendering) we returned to London. Today Bob has gone to see his wife. I am stopping with him for a couple of nights more, since my flat is lent. He was very pleased to receive Heinz’s letter. How very well it is written[;] he is making grand progress. I think you did realise how very much we both like Heinz.

As for Amsterdam, my only objection to it is that I had no time there whatever alone with you. There was nothing I wanted to imbibe or impart, still it would have been an additional enjoyment. After all, we are both of us writers, and good ones.

I will write again. This is really to thank you for all your kindness—you did do no end, courier, etc. and manoeuvring lady over [our?] room. I want to hear your plans. If you go to Belgium I might go that way into France at the end of the year and see you both again.

With love to you, also to Heinz,

Morgan

Stephen [Spender] has been seen by Wm Plomer, not by me so far.

* * *

Villa Alecrim do Norte, San Pedro, Sintra, Portugal.

21st Dec. 1935.

Dear Morgan,

I have been meaning to write to you ever since I left London because Bob, who very kindly put in an appearance at the station, told me that you weren’t well and I have been worried, wondering if perhaps it wasn’t something serious. I do hope you are better now. As you see, we have arrived here. We have taken quite a nice little house on the hill above the town on a three months lease. Could you possibly come and visit us, do you think?

The voyage might do you good and the weather here is said to be lovely in January. You would like this place very much indeed I am sure. There are all kinds of old palaces and ruins to be seen and dozens of excursions to make.

I think we might quite possibly settle in this country if we can find the right house and if Heinz can get a reasonable assurance that he will be allowed to stop here indefinitely. In many ways it seems quite ideal.

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I hope you have a nice Christmas. Please give my love to Bob.

Best love,

Christopher

[handwritten postscripts:]

Got a nice letter from Bob[,] will write him later.

Many greetings to you both [from] Heinz

Greetings & love to yourself, Bob, and all—Tony

Love and best wishes for Christmas and the New Year from Stephen

* * *

Villa Alecrim do Norte

January 15. [1936]

Sao Pedro

Sintra.

Dear Morgan,

I was so sorry to hear from Bob about your operation and that the trouble isn’t cleared up yet.37 It is so tiresome and miserable for you and I expect you haven’t been feeling well for ages, although, typically, you never said anything about it when I saw you last. But now I do hope they will be able to deal with it once and for all and that, by the Spring, you’ll be well on the way to recovery. I have been thinking a great deal about you lately—we all have—and the others all send their best wishes.

The weather here is obscene, but we enjoy ourselves, as there is lots to do. The animals in our household multiply daily. We have now Teddy, the dog and the fowls (six hens and a cock) and two white rabbits and today a kitten has arrived. It is very savage and we are all afraid of it. Whenever any of us goes near it[,] it makes a curious booming noise like a foghorn. Heinz has just clipped its claws.

Stephen and I write a good deal; Tony keeps the household accounts.38

He also deals with the two servants, as he is the only one of us who speaks Portuguese—that hideous language: (No More, for instance, is “Naow Mash”: “Naow” should be pronounced with the maximum cockney

accent.) Like all Latin households, the kitchen is a club-room, always crammed with people who chatter and laugh until far into the night. The meals are quite good, however. Stephen’s brother, Humphrey is here. Heinz has just persuaded him to shave off all his hair (to make it grow better) and today the act has been performed. Humphrey is now ashamed to appear in public without a beret.

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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

There are some very peculiar neighbours here. One lady believes in fairies and has prepared an authentic map of fairy-land. Another has had a lot of reincarnations. Her first was as a Syrian lad who fell in with some Roman soldiers who, believe it or not, behaved no better than other soldiers. She is said to have described all her misadventures in a book which she shows to very intimate friends. I have wasted a great deal of time trying to become intimate—so far without success. Tomorrow, we are to be received by one of the leaders of Sintra fashion, a woman named Lady Carrick: we are a little nervous, as usually at Lady Carrick’s house they have charades and Stephen is afraid that Tony may be asked to take a female role and give a too convincing performance.

You would love the palace of Pena, which is right on the top of the hill: it is built in all possible styles and on the opposite hill is a statue of the nineteenth century architect in full mediaeval costume. There is a view over half Portugal when the weather is fine. But as soon as you’re better you must certainly come here and see it all for yourself.

I wonder how soon your book is coming out. I am longing for that.

William may have told you that he and I are making an appearance in a magazine-book edited by John Lehmann called New Writing. It is said to be going to be published at the end of March by John Lane.

Don’t answer this, of course: just tell Bob to send me a card some time.

I was so grateful to him for sending news. And get better soon.

Best love,

Christopher

* * *

23-2-36

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

I think I had better answer your letter, as it increases my chance of getting another one. It was collected with a letter which William had received from Stephen, and the standard of accuracy in Portugal proved surprisingly high. I hope that the reincarnations proceed apace and that the animals also breed nicely. How is the clipped kitten? Micky, one of the pair here, had just killed an elderly pigeon named Mr Pompous, and public feeling ran so high that it was thought he too ought to be clipped. But no one knew how to do it. Heinz couldn’t be got at, and public feeling has died down.

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Yes, I never told you I wasn’t well when we parted. There seemed so much to say and I was so happy seeing you. I am to go back into the Nursing Home on Wednesday, when I hope they may think me fit enough to have the main operation. I haven’t had any pain or even been much bored or depressed. I have wondered why. Sometimes I decide it is because I have a great mind and have Won Through, at others “No, merely idle.” My book, Abinger Harvest, comes out next month. It is dedicated to the people who helped me to put it together—to William chiefly, but to you too. So you’ll get a copy! I’ve just got a copy of John Simpson’s Family Curse. I think well of it. Shall I send you my extra copy? I have one.

I’m in bed with two cats on it, waiting for the local doctor. The weather is vile, but there is a very pretty woolly Surrey view out of the window, a charming old-fashioned Morris frieze, a general sense of security and comfort. Letters have been received from Joe [Ackerley], William, Bob and Lord Kennet of the Dene.

The dog got bitched by a guardsman—that is to say I thought we had better go to a newsie[?] instead. I shall have another try tomorrow (Monday) when I go up in a car, drop my mother at her sister’s, and pick Bob out of his family. He is very anxious to go, too. The press was surprisingly civil, and septuagenarians such as Miss May Lowes Dickinson write with pleasure.

I am full of plans as to what I will do when I get well—e.g. attend every dog that runs, visit the English Lakes, Portugal and Dorsetshire, reform the Police Courts, read all Milton, not lift a finger to hinder the next world-war, be very kind, very selfish, and incidentally write masterpieces. I wonder whether you are on one of the latter yourself. I do hope so.

Please write me your news. I hope Heinz is well and that the particular anxiety you mentioned to me is nothing.

Give Heinz my love.

With love from

Morgan

* * *

March 31. [1936]

Villa Alecrim do Norte.

Sao Pedro. Sintra. Portugal.

Dear Morgan,

Thank you so much for sending me the signed copy of Abinger Harvest.

I am so pleased to have it and so glad to hear from Bob that you are really better now. If I haven’t written for so long it certainly hasn’t been because I pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 50

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

have not been thinking about you and wondering how this beastly operation had gone off. But I thought that you probably wouldn’t be allowed to read letters anyhow and I suppose this is why I haven’t written. I think Abinger Harvest is fascinating: there are parts of it I read again and again: and how amazingly it hangs together. I tried to say this, and other things, in an exceedingly stupid review I did for the Listener. But it all came out wrong and sounded stiff and chilly or else just the reviewer’s usual soft soap. The trouble was, I kept wanting all the time to explain something by referring to your visit to Amsterdam or to something I remembered you saying: and then didn’t, because I think that kind of thing doesn’t do, at least, not when I try it.

Auden, who is here now, is also very admiring. He likes particularly the T.S. Eliot essay and, of course, the speech. Also your own centenary. We are writing a play together, much better, I hope, than Dogskin.39 It is chiefly about our conception of T.E. Shaw.40 It will be finished in a couple of weeks. Stephen and Tony have gone. They are in Barcelona and will soon be in Greece. They like Barcelona very much: it seems to offer a happy blend of night-life, concerts and the feeling of something about to happen without which neither of them are ever really at home.

Here, on the contrary, it is quiet as the grave, which, for the moment, I prefer. We have had awful weather, but I still hope that it will turn fine very soon. At any rate, it is quite warm. Any hope of your coming to convalesce?

You should have every comfort, including a hot water bottle and a room with a view. Perhaps you would take to gambling, as a recreation: the noblest spirits seem to succumb—yesterday evening, after keeping away for nearly a month, I lost three pounds. Heinz saved us by winning heavily.

Auden won a pound and then firmly and wisely refused to continue. My other amusements include walking and taking French lessons from a young poet whom you would like, I think: but I believe I told you that before. The white rabbit ate all her young except one, whom she seems, for some reason of her own, to find indigestible or sympathetic. The hens are reduced to eight. Incidentally, if you come, you may well be the first major English novelist ever to have been killed in an earthquake: one is expected very shortly now. An earthquake, I mean.

Auden and I are deeply involved in the occult sciences. We go to Rudolph Steiner readings at the house of the ladies I told you about. The readings are boring and we argue, which delights the ladies; but what we are vulgarly after is the Tarot Pack, which is produced on special occasions.

Also the cakes are excellent.

At a place not far from here, nineteen years ago, there was miracle. A shepherd boy and three girls saw the Virgin who promised them to do a pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 51

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very good deed for Portugal on that spot on the 13th of May, at 12 noon.

So thousands of Lisbonese, including journalists and atheists, went out to the place to see. At a quarter to twelve, the clouds began opening and shutting like doors and at twelve sharp, the sun revolved on its own axis and shone so brightly that ladies fainted. Later showers of white petals descended on the heads of the crowd and a spring of water leapt out of the earth and has been running ever since. It cures all diseases. I got this from my landlady, whose cook was present. They are going this year to see what they can see. We may go too.

I have decided to say nothing about Hitler in this letter, so shan’t.

Goodbye, best love from us both, greetings from Auden and do get better and come here soon.

Christopher

* * *

Villa Alecrim do Norte

May 12 [1936]

São Pedro. Sintra

Dear Morgan,

No news of you for ages and ages. And yet I feel sure you must be getting along all right, or Bob or Joe would have let me hear. Perhaps you have gone off somewhere for a rest? If so, don’t of course bother to answer this, but ask your host or whoever is with you to send me a post-card saying:

“Forster well” or “Morgan middling” or some such bulletin.

As for us, it is quite as if we had lived here all our lives. Really, the perverseness of exiles knows no bounds. Having removed myself all these hundreds of miles from England, I am now seated in front of an English fireplace in an English armchair in a cottage of English design, sipping English tea. It is true that the cottage has been designed by an English lady, our landlady, so we can’t be held responsible for that—but I have seldom behaved in so English a manner as I do here, ringing the bell for the maids, instead of bawling down stairs, and teaching Anna to serve us from the left hand side.

I love Portugal. The people are charming. They lean over the wall when we are having meals in the garden and wish us a good appetite. But how they do sing! The two maids sing in harmony, very old folk songs with hundreds of verses, until I have to ask them to stop, as I can’t hear myself write.

And the farmer, ploughing with oxen just beyond the garden wall sings a song to the oxen which lasts all day. Sintra is a queer place. On one of the hills, a man and a boy (now no longer) are building a luxury hotel. They pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 52

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

have been on the job, all by themselves, for ten years, and they reckon that another ten will see them though [sic]. Then they will sell it to a combine—

but not in our time.

I am slowly learning Portuguese. It is hideous but rather amusing to see how indistinctly one can talk. You must never, whatever you do, open your mouth at all.

Heinz is very happy here, with his ducks, hens and rabbits. He does a lot of carpentry, making hutches, nesting boxes, etc. And it always seems to be time to feed the animals. We have one “treasure” of a maid, named Anna.

The other is nice but has been sacked because she utterly refuses to get up till 10 or 11 in the morning, and she is the cook. Anna is learning to read and write, in her spare time. As far as I can make out, she believes that all foreign languages are simply “writing,” and that, when she learns to read she will immediately understand English, French and German as well.

As I think I told you in my last letter, Stephen went off, more than two months go, with Tony, to Spain and Greece. Then Wystan came and we wrote another play together, called: “The Ascent of F.6.” It is about an expedition up a mountain and attempts to explain why people climb them. It will be published soon, I hope, and perhaps produced this autumn. I wonder how you will like it. It is far better than old Dogskin, anyhow.

Am also at work on my new novel. Part of it is a most disgusting crib on The Longest Journey. By the way, I must get hold of that book on the great novelists. I want to see what Mrs Alphabet Jones writes about you. I always feel slightly aggressive when people write about you, and promptly add a few mental pages to that classic Essay on Forster which I like to pretend I shall one day produce.

As I have said before and shall say again—I do wish you’d come out here. Sea-air. 900 feet. Every comfort. Private sitting room provided. I suppose it’s too much to hope you really will come; but you once trifled with the idea of the Canaries, which are three days further on.

Anyhow, do get well, and write me a letter.

Best love

Christopher

My best love to Bob. How is he?

[postscript in different handwriting] Hoping that you are well again. How is Bob? Best love to both of you. Heinz

* * *

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[May 20, 1936]

[West Hackhurst]

Dear Christopher,

Morgan middling.

(i) Legal. Sir Murdoch MacDonald, M. P., a wealthy & elderly consultant engineer is bringing a libel action against Arnolds & myself in respect of the article A Flood in the Office in Abinger Harvest. Article (written 1919) reviews a pamphlet (written 1918), which, though none of us knew, was condemned as libelous [Br] in a consular court in Egypt in 1921.

Consequently republishing of review in 1936 is libelous [Br]. We have no case, and that Sir M.M. should demand withdrawal of book, public apol-ogy in court or elsewhere, payment of costs, and possibly a small sum for charity did not seem to us unreasonable. We staged him as a nice cross old gentleman. He has however tried to get £1000 damages out of us, and we shall certainly have to pay £500, which he will spend on himself.41

(ii) Medical ( a) bladder. This, though it does not hurt, remains infected and I swallow some rather terrifying medicine four times a day, tastes like something off another planet, followed by cachets which after dissolution

“repeat” like decayed sweetbread. ( b) feet. These, though they do not hurt except when I walk, have dropped their arches owing to the carelessness of the Nursing Home when I was in bed. Altered shoes arrived by the Portuguese post this morning. ( c) teeth. These though they do not hurt are said to have to come out. ( d) rash on chest and back may have been measles, but I dared not say so in case my lawyers were afraid to see me. It did not hurt.

So it would be idle to pretend I’m not depressed and scared, and I’ve found I difficult to write to friends because the whole thing’s a bore and all they can do is to write back and say they are sorry. I have often thought of you though and am very glad you wrote again, as it has got me over the edge. As to the international situation[,] I am terrified like every one else, nothing original.

Oh well, to have lived to have loved etc., and I am glad to have done both, yet it isn’t a comfort to say so as it seems to have been to the Victorians. Too like the Great Tune at the end of an Elgar Symphony.

Am now out of bed, and my mother in very good spirits and a black dress which arrived too late for King George’s funeral, is preparing for a long drive to Uncle Philip near Orpington, having hired a comfortable car for that purpose. What do I want to write about though? You knew that it is fixed up that I edit a selection from T. E. [Lawrence]’s letters for his trustees, and as they are practically his brother, whom I like, it will be [a]

suitable full-time job. I have already read several 100 letters, more keep pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 54

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coming in, and in the flat, unread, are hundreds of letters to him, and many documents. Brother well says the shorter book the better, but how is it to be done? A difficult job for which I am as well suited as anyone. Dear me what an odd chap. I want more than ever to read your and Auden’s play. I don’t really get behind him. I think he felt [more] the acuteness of his separation from the ordinary man than I do mine. When the o[rdinary] m[an] is nicely encased I can usually make some sort of contact with him. T. E. was always apart, straining or striving. A sad fun.

Bob was bounding when I saw him last week, but in trouble since, as his wife has gone pregnant, neither knows how. I had letters from both of them this morning, and she is to have an operation, apparently super rosam[?], presumably because she is tuberculous. She has turned out into a very decent sort. I go up about once a week to Bob or business, otherwise lie about here in the sun. Also by Portuguese post, I receive the unpublished parts of De Profundis, sent me with much empressement [french, meaning display of cordiality] by Leo Charlton.42 They are from shorthand notes illegally taken down at the Ross-Douglas trial, and it seems that everyone except myself & Leo knows of them. Forrest Reid, now here, says that they have been published in America.

Now here, indeed! This letter is hamstrung. I am trying to maintain it—

is all written at a go. Whereas somewhere after the ink begins[,] Monday passes into Tuesday. I have not seen your story yet, but have reread the Memorial. News of a new novel from you makes me very happy, and the Longest Journey is far from incapable of improvement. I have just written a bawdy short story—I do them sometimes when feeling upset, they tend more and more to occur in heaven of course. Joe and Jack Sprott like them but they don’t quite tickle William’s bell. I didn’t ever write to you about the Dog—I have read it twice and seen it once. I enjoyed it, and more than the Dance of Death. Bob let a shout of “that’s Christopher” when we heard the Virgin Policeman, but it seems it wasn’t.

I’ll lead this letter to a close, anyhow I’ll send my love to Heinz and much love to you and sign it

Morgan

Will write again soon. Much love again. It is a great pleasure to hear from you and about the Portuguese.

* * *

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Villa Alecrim do Norte

May 23 [1936]

Sao Pedro. Sintra.

Dear Morgan,

I am sorry to have to write and say I am sorry, but your letter leaves me no choice. What ailments! What accidents! I am torn with indignation, against the idiotic nursing-home, for failing to prop up arches of your feet, and the unspeakable MacDonald. The mentality of these libel-bandits leaves me simply speechless. You’d think that a man like that would have his share of vanity; yet, when he is advertised from one end of the English speaking world to the other, put on the literary map in block capitals and assured of a footnote in all your biographies—he resents it! But let us be charitable: perhaps he is being blackmailed by a Piccadilly poof and is at his wit’s end for cash. William, in a letter also received today, refers to the case but remarks “it seems that the business will be settled fairly soon and satisfactorily.” Does this mean that he doesn’t yet know the worst, or have there been stop-press developments? I should have thought that if anything in Abinger Harvest really was libellous, it was the reference to Churchill in the Gallipoli Graves dialogue. Has nothing been heard of that? Churchill is pretty snappy at actions, as a rule.

Condolences also to Bob. I do hope that will pan out all right. I suppose there’s no danger if it’s done properly. But it’s very depressing and unpleasant.

Do you really suppose that it was a comfort to the Victorians to think that they’d lived and loved? Personally, I should have thought that if you’d really done either it would only make it worse: but maybe they hadn’t.

What is meant by living, anyhow? Most people, nowadays, seem to long for the cloister or the brothel in one form or another. Which brings me to T.E.

Lawrence. I am awfully glad you are doing the letters and hope you’ll write a long introduction. Please don’t expect our “F.6.” to cast a dazzling light on the subject. I only say the play’s about him for shorthand-descriptive purposes. Actually, the main character is all tied up in his Mater Imago: also, his brother is a knighted politician. In fact, the whole conflict is entirely different and much clumsier, as it seems to have to be on the stage. It’s only in so far about Lawrence as the problem of personal ambition v. the contem-plative life is concerned. And there’s a lot of high-hat talk about the significance of power, which ought to go down well if the actors declaim it in sufficiently woozy voices and the stage is suitably lit.

I knew of, but have never read, the unpublished parts of De Pro[fundis].

I should much prefer your short story: haven’t you a copy? When I was in Greece, I began a novelette called: “Werner and Fritz,” but it became more an more positional and less psychologic, and at last even the positions were pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 56

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exhausted, and I threw it away. It is comforting to know that private pornography is one of the few handicrafts you are still legally allowed to practise, as long as you don’t require any audience. To quote the classic review of Lady Chatterley in John Bull (which I think I once showed you?):

“There is, unhappily, nothing to prevent a man sitting down in an English home to create a literary cesspool with an English pen on English paper.”43

Heinz is very well. Having finished the big house for the ducks and chickens, he is now building a skyscraper for rabbits. It is very high indeed and we fear it may fall over in a gale. Meanwhile, I study the Portuguese irregular verbs and occasionally go over and take a peep into the wardrobe, groan and hastily shut the door again. The reason I groan is because there are thirteen books in there waiting to be reviewed for the Listener. (You needn’t tell Joe [Ackerley] this). Did you read Stephen’s “Burning Cactus”?

I must say, I thought the reviewers were very unjust to it. “The Burning Cactus” itself is a masterpiece, I think: it is the whole history of post-war Germany turned into a kind of fable. I don’t think any [of] the other stories are quite as interesting or successful: but they are all well worth reading. And, in comparison with that frigid arty H.E. Bates,44 they are marvels.

The neighbours we don’t see much of, lately. But we have a new friend, a very nice Lisbon advocate named Dr Olavo. We visit him on Sundays.

Scrambling into his chair, he rests his chins on his chest, his chest on his stomach and his stomach on his thighs; then he dangles his little legs high above the ground, orders whiskey and soda, and regards me with anticipation, hoping I shall say something very intelligent, because I am an English writer. We sit like this for hours, waiting for me to compose a sentence in French about Liberty, of which we both approve. The sentence is never forthcoming, but it doesn’t matter much. The whiskey is followed by tea, which is followed by Madeira cognac and light port. The French poet arrives and talks about Verlaine. The ladies come in. We now begin another game, which is to create situations in which I shall be able to let off my two French expressions: C’est quelquechose de formidable and O, en effet!

Alfred, the French poet, helps me here, as he knows what I want to say, having taught me them himself. Then suddenly Heinz, whom everybody has forgotten, says very carefully and slowly: Voulez-vous une cigarette, Monsieur? And we all laugh and applaud for several minutes.

Or I go across to my landlady, Mrs Mitchell, to listen to the wireless news, and we talk dogs with a deaf neighbour from over the way. Naturally, the great dog-topic for English residents here is the English quarantine.

They discuss the relative merits of the various quarantine homes for hours on end. The manager of one home where the dogs are not well treated is spoken of as if he were Hitler at least. It is a milieu, I say to myself, but I get pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 57

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rather impatient when they can’t stop talking while the news is going on.

Europe interests them about as much as the works of Chaucer.

[Handwritten:] This letter now comes abruptly to an end. There are too many domestic disturbances. I have to keep stopping to throw my shoes out of the window at the ducks, who are not allowed into the lower garden: and each time I do this, the cook very politely brings them back. Then the cat keeps attacking the chickens and Heinz hammers loudly: he has just discovered that the rabbits’ skyscraper is so big that he can’t get it out of the carpentry room—so they will presumably have to live there. I will write again soon, and hope you do the same. And don’t forget Portugal as a possible holiday.

Best love from us both to you and Bob—

Christopher

* * *

[July 30, 1936]

[West Hackhurst]

Dear Christopher,

I am rattled by the news from Spain this evening and feel I am saying farewell to you and Heinz. You know those feelings and can discount them; the last parting is never when or as one supposes. I had been planning to come to Portugal in the autumn. Now all seems impossible—there’s Spain; there’s my libel case still unsettled and stirring slightly when all seemed dead; there’s the rumour that you have had renewed passport difficulties. I am writing most particularly about this last. I want first hand news—

please give it me. I stayed last weekend with Rosamond & Wogan

[Lehmann]—they are gossips I hope. This shall go to the London address.

What next for one who is proper worried and scared? A little news, I suppose. William at Dover. Joe at Dover. I at Dover—as I shall be tomorrow, and Bob with me. This may be very pleasant. I have taken a shave in Joe’s flat there.

This nightmare that everything almost went right! I know that you have it over the Communist failure in Germany. As a matter of fact one’s activities (and inactivities) must have been doomed for many years. I’d throw in my hand if all these metaphors weren’t nonsense; there’s nowhere to throw one’s hand to.

This great podge [variation of pudge] of T. E. letters is often a comfort.

They contain nothing which can help the world (unless the example of courage helps). I should have been flustered if it had been Lowes Dickinson

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fell. Such an interruption on T. E. would be appropriate. The book leisurely takes form—it is mostly a question of arrangement. Desmond MacCarthy came over the other day and was very helpful.

Bob’s wife is all right—aborted and sterilised—so they can go ahead as much as they like whenever they want to. This brings me to my shameful stories. I too have had difficulties with the positional. Implications and innuendo are now basic necessities with me. Someday, or, to put it less primly, when we meet, I will show you one. And since I began this letter by saying farewell I have surely described a perfect parabola.

Dear me, Amsterdam was good. We often talk of it. I can’t believe it was only last year—two big wars since, two operations on myself, and so on, place it on another planet. Heavens what a queer age! Sexually, I’m lucky to have been born into it, but in most other ways unlucky.

I will now conclude with no apologies. I have enjoyed writing to you very much, Christopher. I send my love to you and to Heinz.

How does the novel go? I am glad it imitates the Longest Journey.

Heavens what a queer book!

Morgan

* * *

Villa Alecrim do Norte.

August 8 [1936]

Sao Pedro. Sintra.

Dear Morgan,

Thank you for writing again. During the last month, I’ve been sunk in sloth and now this Spanish business has cut off all overland post and letters sometimes take as much as nine days, if one can’t manage to catch a boat.

Otherwise, the situation here is quite normal. Everybody follows the civil war with the wildest interest, of course; because most people think that, if the Spanish Govt wins, the Red Plague will spread to Portugal. The newspapers are quite openly on the side of the rebels and so it is utterly impossible to gather what is really happening. I manage to hear the English wireless news now and then; that’s all. My own feeling is that this struggle is the most important thing which has happened since Hitler, for all Europe; but out of touch as we are with things here, it’s difficult to judge.

On June 25, H[einz] got a letter from the German consulate in Lisbon telling him to report there in connection with his military service. He didn’t. Since then, no word. Immediately, I set all possible wheels in motion to get his nationality changed, legally and definitely. Everything is still hanging fire. There are various possibilities, including South American. All of pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 59

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them are quite astronomically expensive. My mother, who’s been here, was very decent and helpful about this. Meanwhile, we are at the mercy of the authorities. I am told that they are quite capable of extraditing H. on to a German boat. Every time the door-bell rings, we jump out of our skins and the postman is awaited daily like an executioner. Still, one gets used to anything, and my nerves are better now than they were four weeks ago. The only motto for these days is “You’re not dead yet.” This business has rather disinclined me to write letters, hence my failure to communicate with William, please tell him, and to write reviews, please tell Joe. But I am more sensible now. Only yesterday I did Elinor Glyn’s Autobiography for the Listener.45 No other work as yet.

The novel is postponed. I must finish living it first. Meanwhile I am doing a book of short things, sort of autobiographical sketches, including The Nowaks from New Writing.46 Chiefly to keep Methuen quiet.

We have got some nice people in the house at present, James Stern and his wife. Do you know his short stories? I didn’t, but they are good, I think. He has only published one actual volume, called “The Heartless Land,” all of them abut Rhodesia. He is a great admirer of William’s African work. His wife is German and the sister of two communists, who escaped by less than half the skin of their teeth from Germany. She is one of the most human women I have ever met. It is a real support having them with us just at this time.

Is your visit really hopelessly off? Even if things clear up, as they still might, for a little? Yes, Amsterdam does seem very far off. Your time there was much the best part of it: for a few days I emerged from the dreary dishonourable trance of funk which I seem to have lived in for the past three years.

But I refuse to say farewell to all that. No, never. As long as there’s a kick left in me I shall secretly go on hoping. The only thing you can hope for nowadays is a miracle. Very well, I hope for a miracle. I demand a miracle. Have you ever read [D. H.] Lawrence’s preface to Magnus’ Memoirs of the Foreign Legion?47 I just have. He used to say it was the best thing he ever wrote. It’s certainly very funny and spiteful and in a curious way very inspiring. It also deals, once and for all, with the subject of crooks. If I’d read it earlier I’d never have written Mr Norris. This is so much more comprehensive.

I look forward to T.E. [Lawrence’]s letters, but chiefly to your introduction. What an opportunity! I’m sure it will be in your best manner. I hope your feet are better. About this libel, have you already paid, or what? Does he want more? I wonder who’ll be the next victim. Is there no possibility, after all these scandals, of the law being altered?

Heinz sends his best love to you and Bob. I’ll write again soon, as soon as there is any news at all to give you.

Best love,

Christopher

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* * *

[The following is a handwritten postcard.]

23 Avenue Michel Ange

Brussels

Sept. 15 [1936]

Just got your letter. Alas, it isn’t possible for us to return to Ostende. We have booked our room here for a month.

But can’t you really come here? With the trains connecting up as they do, you can be in Brussels within 1 1/2 hours of landing. Think it over.

You’d both enjoy Brussels—at this time of year—far more than Ostende, which is getting very windswept.

Best love from both to both

Christopher

* * *

23-9-36

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

I have just reviewed F.6. for the Listener: to my own satisfaction, and I’d like to think to yours, but whether to the Listener’s remains to be heard. I don’t consider it ought to have had a review copy at all, poor thing. I read the play 2 1/2 times, and enjoyed it very much. It is far better than Dogskin

[Dog Beneath the Skin], as you say.

We considered Brussels again, but a 10.0. P.M. arrival makes it so late.

We might have been tired next day, and then the holiday would be over. I shall come myself in the New Year. We are going to Dover on Friday, and Joe, Jo-jo, Leo, Tom, and Sandy are coming too. Counting William, and not counting Sandy since he is a dog, we shall be seven. Would that you and Heinz could make nine!

I hope you are all right. I have had war-gloom, consequent on a lunch with Aldous Huxley. I believe he likes upsetting one. He is also very nice, and as long as one has trifles to do[,] the gloom’s kept at bay. This T. E. stuff is a great convenience, and not feeling ill another. Indeed my illness, hygienic and expensive, has got me all wrong on the subject of pain, and because I nearly died without having any I’ve got the notion that vesicant pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 61

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spray etc. won’t hurt. We shall see—or perhaps a lot of us will manage to die without suffering. I hope so. Mr Wells can keep his limelight. Like Gunn, I’m afraid of being killed.48 The combined toughness and complex-ity of the body makes it so awful.

Monday, Aldous H., Professor Bernd[?], Miss Gardrin[?] and myself sat in my rooms for 3 hours, discussing whether intellectuals ought to say that there ought to be a Popular Front in this country. We decided that they ought to say it but not too loudly.

With love to Heinz and yourself

Morgan

* * *

11-10-36

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

Thanks for your card. Was it your Belgian[,] your Mexican or your Equadorian friend who accompanied you to England? One of them, I do hope. Sorry about the tonsils.

I think I have no news of the sort called real. My visit to Oxford, to the university of the Lawrence plaque, was curious. One ought to unveil more.

Lunch afterwards at All Souls. Lindemann, who makes bombs, to my left.

Sir Arthur Salter, who hopes they won’t go off, to my left.49 Winston Churchill opposite, saying there won’t be no war—just yet, so that was no news, and deploring the turning of human beings into white ants, which wasn’t news, even at the time. His neighbour, and on-hanger, turned towards him the whole time, and never looked at Captain Liddell Hart once.50 But the Warden had the instincts of a gentleman. Mr Lionel Curtis, our host[,] spared me a moment on a sofa.51 Sitting down as if we should chat for hours, he said that the most terrible calumnies had been spread about [T. E.] Lawrence, and that what was so dreadful was that people who were like that themselves tried to make out all others were the same—for instance[,] a man who had been in prison had come with an incredible tale to Sir Herbert Baker. Then he sprang up and was gone. I know, from papers which oughtn’t to have come into my hands, that they are worried about me. I was worried too, but the evidence does point to asceticism.

With love—which Bob too will send when I see him.

Morgan

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* * *

October 25 [1936]

70 Square Marie Louise

Bruxelles.

Dear Morgan,

Thank you for your letter, not to mention them kind words in the Listener. I felt very honoured: I’m sure Wystan did too. Actually, we’re neither of us satisfied with the play as it’s printed, and have been trying to alter it; or, to use your phrase, to discover a kind of spectacles through which the whole subject could be seen at once. We are doing this partly by attempting to show more clearly how Ransom was, at the critical moment in the Monastery, forced into going up the mountain by his followers, like every dictator. And we’re also making Mrs Ransom more like a dictator’s public; submitting to him and yet preying on him. I don’t know quite how this will work out. In the last resort, of course, every play is a kind of mad rugby scrum, out of which the players fish balls of various colours and sizes and rush off with them in all directions.

We are back from Spa, where the enormous hotels—some of which have existed since 1780 and housed Tsars, Kaisers and notorious novelists—are empty and the leaves are falling and there is a non-stop casino which nobody visits. We had a very nice room, with the kind of stove in it which killed Zola. I returned with a few pages of a new book; very defeatist, because it is all about the twenties. I am writing it in the spirit of the ship-wrecked sailor who puts an M.S. into a bottle. Getting back, I found Stephen’s book waiting in proof, and felt inwardly rebuked, because, instead of putting things into bottles, he is doing something which may really be some use and help to clear peoples’ ideas. It is awfully good, I think. There is no index, but don’t worry: you are mentioned all right. On page 173, you are “a defender of freedom and a great writer” and you express “a real and important doubt” about communism.

To return to the ignoble trivialities of my life, I recently spent a night in quite the most unpleasant pension I have visited in all my long and terrible travels. A Scottish lady, speaking French with a Scottish accent, argued with a young Persian student, speaking French with a Persian accent, throughout supper about why Persia (pardon, Iran) had a French superscription

[on] its stamps and not an English one. She then went upstairs into the room next ours and began feeding her canary, which sang till 2a.m. From 2

to 3, the cats obliged with rapes. At 3, the Scottish lady got up and performed an intimate function, no nuance of which was lost on us: a peculiarly irritation sharp high note was given off by the utensil. At 3.15, a special all-night service of trams came into being. At 6:30, the landlady’s pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 63

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family started to get up and immediately turned on the wireless. At 8, we gave notice. We are now at another pension, called La Source, but of what we do not yet know. So, I prefer to give Hamilton’s address for post. Heinz, poor dear, is to be operated in a fortnight: the chief operation, this time, on the nose. He is scared; but I suppose we shall have to go through with it.

Meanwhile, Mexico proceeds satisfactorily and may be settled, barring accidents, in about a month. Please don’t mention this however, as far too many people are talking about it already.

How are you? How are your feet? How are Lawrence’s letters? Have you read Auden’s new book of poems? If so, do you like them? I have just got a copy, but maybe they aren’t out yet.

You have probably seen in the papers about the Rexist demonstration which was to have taken place here today and how the Govt has forbidden it.52 Until this evening, we shan’t know what’s going to happen; but I’m afraid that Rex is very strong here. Everywhere you go, you see their filthy paper in people’s hands.

Tomorrow, we are going to see a play about a boy of fourteen who has a baby. I mean, he becomes a father. It is called “Dame Nature” or rather Darm Nattyour (I never knew you could say that in French). It was a great success in Paris, it seems, and the juvenile lead is said to be brilliant.

We think and talk chiefly about Spain.

How is Bob and how are [ sic] his family? Well, I hope?

Best love from us both to you both

(did I tell you that my Mother understood his name as Robert Button on the telephone?)

Christopher

* * *

29-12-36

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

In the first place thank you for the sweet Christmas card, both. I had no idea there were snow and robins on the continent, only imagine, though I don’t think the breasts are quite as red as those of our dear English

“robins”—“robin-redbreast.”

Then I get your letter. I will get forward with Bob. If he can’t come that weekend, I think I shan’t come either—aha! not come then but a little later in the month. This is so that I may have a visit from him in London instead, pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 64

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which I have not had for a very long time, owing to Christmas, etc.

However we’ll see and I’ll write again in a few days’ time.

I had not known about Auden or even about Tony. W[illia]m [Plomer]

certainly has been worrying, says he knows he’s not a pacifist, but with both parents ill & dependent on seeing him is not likely to enlist. He is very irritated and wretched about everything, and has not the comfort of being satisfied with his work—the prose has certainly gone downhill for the last few years, though I think he does poetry as well as ever.

This letter is rather “robin” style all through, but I am engaged in starting with my mother for London, she is sewing on a button, reading [a] letter from housemaid’s sister aloud, dealing with cat which now will now won’t sit on her lap, etc. and so on.

I want to get off something to you. I may finish in the flat. I have had rather a tiresome Christmas.

Flat

Bob has rung up— yes the 16th does look all right—that’s to say the 15th, we would hope to arrive that evening[;] he would have to return Sunday evening unless he flew Monday morning. I would stop till Monday or Tuesday.

I shall want to talk over your plans. Would Heinz go too if you did? Feel muddled too. I am sure you oughtn’t to go, but these matters are seldom decided by one’s sense of duty.

Flat full of relatives. Trying time continues. Joe—trying Christmas. We go to the Witch of Edmonton this evening.53

Love to Heinz & yourself,

Morgan

* * *

5-1-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

The Spain news is terrifying this evening. I assume that we shall find you both at Brussels unless I hear to the contrary, and you will assume we can come unless you hear we can’t, but I feel the world is close to the edge. The passage in literature which suits me best is War & Peace pp. 1184–1185

(Mrs Garnett’s translation).54 There is another passage which I cannot locate to the effect that people when war approaches them sometimes take every precaution and sometimes are utterly reckless; they tend to the first pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 65

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course when they are alone and to the second when they are with their friends, and both courses are equally sound.

We had better eat in the train on the 15th. It arrives nearer 10.0 than 9.0.

I think.

I hope that you are getting on with the book which is a letter to me.

I hope that Heinz is all right and not worrying too much. Oh that we all had the wings of one dove.

With love,

Morgan

I see Bob in London tomorrow—he stops at the flat. J. B. Priestley may ring up to suggest that I go with him and Miss Margaret Kennedy to complain to Mr Bildurn about the libel laws.55

* * *

12-1-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

Our obstacles have increased to three. Bob thinks he may be able to wangle to catch the 2.0. on Friday. On the other hand, his father is having a sudden operation and if things went wrong he wouldn’t be able to leave. (I should in that case probably come alone on the Saturday). Thirdly, the European Unrest—this morning more composed. His leave might be cancelled if things turn worse, and in that case I should probably be too frightened to come myself.

It stands that if you hear nothing, we shall arrive by the train reaching Brussels at 9.0. (Even if we do get it, we shall still wire if we can). We shall probably leave together—1.0. train on Sunday or early plane Monday.

With love to you both

Morgan

I go on Thursday for the night to 26 Brunswick Sq. W.C.1

* * *

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28-1-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

I have several scraps to impart. Firstly, I heard from the solicitors, and sent a suitable reply. Then I do hope you won’t forget to let me have two seats for the opening night of F.6. I heard something about Feb. 19th for the date. I do hope Bob will be able to get leave.

Then, to complete business, Peter Burra drove me from Reading to Oxford and I talked to him for his safety. Not with conspicuous success. I will tell you details when I see you, as I hope I may soon. He admits close touch with the Embassy—but clings to the numerous friendly references to yourself and G. H. which are made.56 He is in the position of a host, not of an employer, and wishes, he says, to terminate the visit, but knows not how, and he says he is bored; but it may be boredom with ecstatic interruptions.

Heavens, how queer one’s English gets. English, the language of the Free!

Thank you for what you said of my Will. I will speak to you again if I ever decide to trouble you again.

The Lawrence MSSS have been returned.57 Now what? Our maid has partly answered this question by breaking my typewriter. And Johnny Fisher seems to have broken the washing basin in my flat. Smashes & bills everywhere—new clothes wanted. I ought to have at least 3 suits.

Love to you & Heinz. It was a glorious holiday, I loved Brussels and all we saw there, and the Royalty bedroom. Thank you both so much for all your kindness,

Morgan

Shall be glad to be put wise over F.6. as soon as it’s convenient.

* * *

27-2-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

I will put down some impressions in case they are useful towards alter-ations in the acting version.58

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Act I—splendid. My only query was Mrs R’s circumambulation, the discussion about the two sons, and the slinking away of Levantine James: “but this will come clear later on.”

Act II—kept me more critical. The monk—not good nor good to look at. Presages are not interesting in themselves, and Ransom’s, which is interesting, comes out well enough in his ensuing talk with the Abbott, John S[impson] and I felt the monk could be cut.

The Abbott—the finest scene in the whole play. Quite marvellous. Then troubles gather, for which the meagre scenery isn’t wholly responsible. The elimination of Lamp made me wonder “How will they get rid of the other two?” Ian’s was good—jealousy does carry one along. David’s too slow.

Then Ransom—falling into the audience almost, realistic, panting: “I will kill the demon”—it wouldn’t live in that theatrical bleakness, nor would Mrs R’s rocking chair. I’m sure the changes here are all for the worse: the summit ought to seethe with visions as soon as R. goes wampy; and why not? You couldn’t, even with expensive settings, carry out this losing of comrades in the course of a long crawl, unless you thickened the climax with reminiscences. James must be put back—besides, the preparation with him in Act I is left hanging in the air. And I should have thought the Abbott back too.

Then we thought the farce of the final scene quite wrong. The villainy is much more telling if the villains are left to speak it with dignity. To show them up by making them squabble and giving them ridiculous flags is a great mistake, and I don’t think it was made in the text. When they’ve intoned their faiths, I’d have the Announcer: “Dance music will now follow

—” and curtain to a strain from those amazing singers.

The A’s—v[ery] good. Their dash off to Hove shouldn’t have been cut.

The other two tragedies I saw in the play were the temptation to exercise power, good too, and the mother-business which doesn’t work out as it should dramatically.

How good the music is—and the acting. Play didn’t seem the least long, and if you remove the monk there should be time to restore some essentials.

Veiled figure—not demon. Mother on ice-throne, not rocking chair.

The rocking chair is the sounder, but it won’t come across. It’s a moment when you must sacrifice psychological propriety to poetry.

Will be up Thursday and will ring you.

With love,

Morgan

* * *

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2-3-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

Could you have tea with me on Thursday at 4.30? I would come up and go straight to my flat and meet you. I dine out at 8.0—Or I could go to the Club.

Yes, I see the Visions will tear holes in that stage.59 So does a rocking chair. You want something easy for the spectators, and the easiest is mother in white on ice-throne. I am annoyed that the success of the play has been risked by such narrow circumstances. I shall not feel happy until it has been transferred.

The final scene (microphone) is excellent, and there is a grand addition (Lady Isabel’s) to the text. My only complaint is that it was all guyed and consequently rogered. I wouldn’t end with mother’s paw-paw.— Her acting wasn’t up to the standard by the way.

Dukes must have wanted to keep the party to those concerned in the play, so I’m glad we didn’t stay on.

Hoping you can manage Thursday.

With love from Morgan

* * *

Luxembourg, le 27th April. 1937

Hôtel Gaisser

Luxembourg

30, rue Beaumont et rue de la Porte-Neuve

Dearest Morgan,

Here I am, in this last resort of the police-chivvied. I arrived here on Sunday night, after the worst crossing of my life, and a very dazing non-stop-talking dinner with Mr Norris: “Here you are, my dear boy, to the minute, I must really apologize that everything isn’t quite ready, but this is the very best duck obtainable, tell me honestly, don’t you think it’s decidedly on the cold side, well well I must apologize, but don’t let’s waste our time we must really talk about your affairs, yes, yes, actually, I’ve not been feeling very well all day, what sort of journey did you have, I wonder where that boy’s got to, but do start, now let me see, as I was saying, my goodness, there isn’t any mustard.” etc. I caught the train on to Luxembourg from Brussels by the skin of my teeth.

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Heinz I found a little crushed, after a week in the Grand Duchy. He firmly denies most of the charges made against him in the French police report. (They include seduction of a deaf and dumb chambermaid, aggressive behaviour to the authorities and male prostitution!) Personally, I am convinced that he is the victim of a really swinish frame-up on the part of two prostitutes who inhabit the hotel Savoie. The trouble is that all this is now engraved in bronze in French archives and no power on earth can erase it. Kind friends have been spending their time trying to persuade me that it would be better if H. were packed off to the Fatherland or Mexico for good, and altogether I have been in a terrible state of bother and nerves. I am now feeling rather ashamed of myself for having listened to everybody except Heinz himself, who, even under English law, had the right to be heard in his own defence. And I feel correspondingly grateful to the very few, chief among them yourself, who did not offer advice, interested or otherwise.

Anyhow, everything is now cleared up between us, and the mere difficulty remains that he mayn’t go back to France or enter Belgium, at any rate for more than a few days. This ban, it seems, may be lifted by the Belgians after the Mexican business has been put through, which ought to be the end of this week. Meanwhile, we wait here, under the sulky pout of the Grand Duchess and the charming grin of her fourteen-year-old son. If only it would stop raining, I should feel quite gay.

Do send us a line to the above address. Love to Bob and his family.

Enclosed with many thanks for all your kindness is the cheque for five pounds.

Best love from us both,

Christopher

* * *

30-4-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

Thank you for the cheque, £5 in repayment for 500 francs. I never tire of helping people in such ways as these. I was also glad to get your letter, though how are you? I don’t suppose you are very well, what an endless run round. When we meet I have much to ask—partly about the inadequacy of Mr Norris.

Now there is Peter Burra, killed while flying, and I keep thinking about death. The worst thing in it is that people seem different as soon as it has pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 70

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happened, and one will seem different oneself. The word “loss” is inadequate. I have lost my fountain pen, but it does not alter.

No doubt everything in human beings is changing all the time; and so, under the surface, is one’s feelings for them—indeed here there are two factors for self ’s human too. O see Proust! But it’s so difficult to remember the change is going on, especially when one establishes what are called “permanent” relationships in daily life. Death turns the dead person into something worse than nothing—something deflecting—where all one’s affection for him or criticism of him becomes false. The most satisfactory dead are those who have published books.

With best love to Heinz and to you. I am hoping for news about the Mexican passport.60

Bob will be spending the weekend of the 8th–10th with me—I suppose in the flat.

Morgan

* * *

Brussels

Tuesday [June 15, 1937]

Sq. Marie Louise 70

Do forgive my not writing. Have been expecting to return to England very soon and do the film: may still do so—they haven’t yet decided if they want me. No news from Germany, except a nice letter from H[einz], who has had rheumatism and a cold but now feels better.61 If only they’d settle things one way or the other. These postponements are getting me down.

Bob wrote such a charming letter, which I didn’t get till after my return. I can’t help feeling that you and he are the only people who really care—for H[einz’]s sake, not merely for mine. I must see you again soon. Jean is very lively and sends his love. He has visions of popping over to Dover—for a Belgian it’s hideously easy. Oh dear, how complicated everything is. Thank you so much for sending the book. It’s waiting for me at home.

Christopher

* * *

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4-7-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dear Christopher,

I think the date is the 7th; please send my love and Bob’s also as soon as it is possible to do so.

Meanwhile I hope you will not find it too dreary in England. I have found it drearier myself since you have been here.—Of course you know what I mean, as they invariably add in England.

I will come up on Tuesday, will bring 2 or 3 of those stories with me, and will ring you up. I hope that your foot is better.

I have written a very emotional poem, and cannot make out whether it is good or not. The title is:

Landor at Sea

I strove with none for none was worth my strife:

Reason I loved, and, next to reason, doubt:

I warmed both hands before the fire of life

And put it out. 62

* * *

I have also been considering what has been most satisfactory in my own life, and ruling out Bob on the ground that he is not in a cheap edition. I have come to the conclusion that it is the

Passage to India

. It’s amazing luck that one’s best book should be the widest read one, and the one most likely to do good, as well. When writing the

Passage

I thought it a failure, and it was only owing to Leonard [Woolf] that I was encouraged to finish it.

[B]ut ever since publication I have felt satisfied, and find very little in it that nauseates or irritates me.

So I shall ring up—probably about 5.0. on Tuesday, or perhaps you might then ring the flat. Bob will be with me and we might meet you later if all are free.

With best love,

Morgan

* * *

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[postcard]

17-7-37

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

And you shall have one too. I may ring you up Sunday evening for news, or on Monday morning if not too rushed. I leave for Paris at 10.0. I remarked during a performance of Uday Shankar’s that you were intending to address the Cambridge Majlis.63 It would seem prematurely, for the Indian to whom the remark was addressed simpered that you had not so far replied to him.

Popped over to Brighton last night in a car and gave a certain William there quite a surprise. Wish I was more often surprising, but cannot design the suitable machinery. Am delighted this morning by notices from the

“Right” Book Club[,] so called it says because it gives people the right opin-ions. P.T.O. Can we not form the “Wrong” book club now, and if so what shaped note paper will it require?

* * *

17-2-38

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

My dearest Christopher,

I do wish I’d written before. I didn’t want to write, which was anyhow something to write about, and now your letter posted at Columbo arrives.

When I get to London on Saturday I may send you a cable. Bob and I enjoyed that party, though I believe it wasn’t the general verdict and the wine-cup vile and Rupert Doone an obvious crook. Since then a good deal has happened as good deals go. I have taken my Northern Lecture Tour, and stopped for three days with the Lord Lieutenant of Northumberland and walked for once upon the Roman Wall. I liked all this. Today mother and I and Aunt Rosalie have been cutting up oranges for marmalade, and I have—at last—finished Guy Mannering.64 Tomorrow I must start tearing up family letters—there are about 200 years of them in this house, all insipid, and like most people I am the last of my race, but calmer than most, since I accept the theories of Mendel. I’m glad that you came to this place, and think of it as sane: glad that I am [of] any use to you whatsoever.

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THE 1930s

so certain I shall fail in mine that I can’t think about it.65 Now and then I get towards facing facts, but get too tired and bored to keep on at it. I only hope I shan’t let any one down badly: that thought does precise itself [i.e., make itself precise] rather alarmingly.

Bob seems older. I think it is stirring him to do something about his painting, though. May is like all women here; no respect for art when it is practiced by her man. I have never seen friction between them, but have the impression that when he wants to win he does and that he will get the oil-paints which will make the front parlour smell and might have been a great coat. His intelligence is so great that it makes up for his inferiority to her in will—if there is such a thing as will. I am going to supper there on Sunday, and he to me on Monday. I could go on writing bout him at length, and I know you would read all I say. He is doing very well at school— this sentence refers to Robin—and can already read and write a little and tell his parents about Jesus.

I hope I’ll get to Berlin, Christopher. My mother is the difficulty, as she thinks Hitler will cut my head off. I will see if Mr Bennett of Caius

[College] can’t again be helpful, and quiet her. Anyhow I will write to Heinz. And when I go up to Caius again I will be seeing Ian. By the way, I liked Oliver Low at your party extremely.66—What a paragraph is this! all the big bits seem to have got together. Like when one cuts up for marmalade. Bob wanted to come to Berlin with me, an April weekend, but it doesn’t look possible.—Well, writing this letter makes me rather sad, perhaps [that is] why I didn’t write it before. I wish we could be talking and I wonder why and how it is that we help one another, for we do. I’ll go to bed now and have some of my extraordinary dreams. These are either sentences which I sometimes write down as I waken, and are I believe proofs that, as a novelist, I have gone underground. Or they are about war, aerial bom-bardment, gas, marshalled by me without any appropriate emotion.

I know that sort of voyage and am very sorry about it. Well it’s over now.

I love you, and Bob and I love you,

Morgan

* * *

[handwritten postcard]

Hankow. [China] March 16 [1938]

Thank you so much for cable and letter. Off tomorrow to look for the moon in the Yellow River. Wystan says may he print your Landor parody “I strove with none,” in Oxford Book of Light Verse? Fine weather here, snow pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 74

LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD

all gone, but full moon, so the raids have started. Best love to you and Bob.

Thinking of you so much.

Christopher

* * *

Friday. [August 1938]

My dearest Morgan,

Have just spoken to Oliver Low. He will send you his address. He was enchanted at the prospect of seeing you again.

Have finished “Maurice,” and am in a state of reverence which even my most irreverent moments of you do nothing to dispel. What a book! In some ways, your very best. In those scenes with Alec, you are positively clairvoyant—nothing like them has even been written about the class war, by anybody. And Maurice himself is a masterpiece—one of the few truly noble characters of fiction. It seems odd, and pompous, after all these years, to be paying you compliments, in words which we both feel are rotted through and through with misuse. But I can’t help it. You are a very great writer. And I am more proud than I can say to be your friend.

I have nothing, really, to criticize about the ending—except that you shouldn’t stop there. Or there should be a sequel. Alec and Maurice have all their troubles before them. Maybe, it’ll be all right—but one wants to know. I suppose Maurice threw up the office? I suppose they both went out to the 1914 war? I should love to know what they’re doing now.

Thank you for my visit to West Hackhurst. I hope there will be others.

Your loving

* * *

28-8-38

Fritton Hithe,67

Nr. Gt. Yarmouth.

Dearest Christopher,

There was and perhaps somewhere is an Epilogue chapter to Maurice but everyone thought it a mistake. Kitty, on an old-maidish weekend in Yorkshire, comes across them both as wood cutters. This seemed both too short and too long. Yes, Maurice chucked his office, and—though the tale is set pre-war—they went to the war, I suppose. That would now make pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 75

THE 1930s

them, if alive, now about 50 each. I can only still see them together if they have passed a life of adventures together.—I have sometimes thought of Alec marrying.

The third section of the book was once much the weakest. I have worked on it cautiously as I gained new experience being very careful not to make it my experience. I was in 1914 ignorant in this way of class—it stimulated my imagination, that was all. About ten years later I met old Reg Palmer, (and about seventeen years later Bob) which gave me knowledge, and stuffed the frame of Alec out in places suitable to his physique. But I tried to keep him as the dream which turned into the scare and then into the mate. I was always determined not to end sadly—as we were saying, it is not worthwhile.

Yes, Maurice is a good man I think and so a nice one.—I think, to run back in this letter, that part III should have been more gradual and longer, more social wrenchings shown or heard “off ” [ sic].I wish it could be published, especially after getting your letter. But it isn’t so much my mother now—it’s Bob. Everyone connects him with me, and this Dover muddle showed me how careful I must be not to bring bother or harm his way. My

“Life” if briefly and blazingly written, might be worth doing after my death, but that’s ruled out too while he lives.

Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and are [ sic] as fond of as you.

It confirms my belief that life is not all nonsense and cruelty—the inversion of Victorian complacency—but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there. The people here, in this Hithe, seem grimly chaotic, just holding on to the wharves till they slip off, the news gets worse and worse, and they don’t seem able to feel—still less are they able to do, none of us can do that. I warrant you, I silence them all at the breakfast table.

However, my visit is in no sense a failure. We bathe, go to Lowestoft Regatta, sit in the lake-ward sloping garden. On Tuesday I go to c/o J.

[Icelandic] Sprott, Magavelda, Blakeney, Norfolk, and to the flat for a night on Friday, where [I] will ring you up.

My mother much enjoyed your visit, she writes. I specially liked the talk about China, or rather the Atlas. I think a good deal about the book. It’s a major technical problem.68 Howsoever that’s solved, the book will come easily, but unless the solution is the correct one, the book won’t be good.

And I cannot think what the correct solution is. Perhaps Wystan divinely distrait, will hit on it, but I am more disposed to rely on you.

Well I must conclude, hoping that you will like this letter and your household its envelope. Coronets seen everywhere, on the little boats, on the bigger boats, on the bath towels. I cannot make it out. Host and hostess are out calling on some Colmans (“we’re all mustered here”). Weyland69

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and his cousin—15 o[r] 16, pleasant—have gone out in a pram, which is a little boat, to visit boys across the lake, and I have been walking round the estate with Lady K.’s slightly critical elder sister.

With much love & great gratitude from

* * *

[October 1938?]

Sunday

Dear Christopher,

I find that M. M. Gabet and Huc had exactly your and W[ystan]’s problem to solve, and the result of it was “Huc’s Travels.” H. writes sometimes

“I,” sometimes “M. Huc” and of course sometimes “M. Gabet.” The result is very readable.70

It is 10.0. P.M. and I have only just found or indeed looked for my pen.

I am really very depressed and perhaps shall join the Labour Party.

Communists, cut off from the one practical experiment in their creed, will become even more flimsy and irresponsible than they are now. The alternative to the Labour Party is to find some ballast in my own past.

Nothing seems right—the table is too high, the bed packety [ sic], and all because four people who could under no circumstances have been my friends have met at Munich.

I come to town Monday and go to Scotland on Tuesday.—I was very pleased to hear that the Chinese book is to be dedicated to me.

With love,

Morgan

* * *

14-11-38

Dear Christopher,

I am “thinking of you”: a nice evening for the elderly lovers, no rain and not much wind. I shall see it in London.—I come up on Wednesday, at least I suppose so, but have mild influenza or a bad cold. Under their stress, I have signed Toller’s letter to Roosevelt, sent Richard Acland money for Mr.

V.[?] Bartlett,71 favour the arrival of Czech refugees at Hollingbury, recommended copulation to Zukunft, and asked my M. P. to support the Abolition of Capital Punishment. But I have refused to ask New Zealand to send mutton & butter to Spain. One must show a little proper pride.

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Perhaps I shall see Jackie some time.72 I can’t feel that Guy Burgess matters. I used to take him seriously, but he used “a priori” where it made no sense, which I found disconcerting. The si tua tion, the taking away someone from someone, is more serious I agree, but if J. is a strong character this won’t matter either.

May ring you up Thursday morning if only to ask you Gerald Heard’s address.

* * *

W[est] H[ackhurst]

23-12-38

My Dearest Christopher,

I have had your card, and—today—your letter. I rang your mother up the day before yesterday, having forgotten your dates. She told me in brief a story which you will now have heard at length from her—namely that Heinz had rung up the house, under the impression that you were leaving almost at once for America. This suggests that letters between him and you have been miscarrying. She gave me an address to which I sent a card and to which I had better write, I think, after I have had a reply from you, and learnt your latest news or absence of news.

My life is a water-colour rendering of yours: a burst water-pipe instead of a frozen radiator, cough and cold instead of clap, failure to start an article on “How I listen to Music” instead of a novel, and a £50 loan to poor Mrs Morgan at the garage instead of an American debt. I will not mention to anyone what you have told me. I don’t wonder you feel a bit down. When I see you again I shall like an account of the illness, about which I am vague, I’ve had catheters, and if they are the painfulness to which you refer, it gets less and less each time. Is the doctor good as well as sensible? (The Englishman always assumes that every continental doctor is sensible).

I shall see Bob, May, Robin, Mum, Dad, Ted,Vi, Con, Les, Else, Monday if I’m well enough to go to them; then I have to broadcast twice in that same evening.

I have been away (Nott[ingham]s[hire] & elsewhere) for about a week.

You don’t mention Wystan’s operation. Please send all news, particularly about Heinz. I was very glad to hear about Jackie.

We are almost snowed up here—primitive and comfortable, plenty of coal, food, and wine, and the gardener can flounder as far as the accumula-tion and the postman as far as the back door.

Love to Wystan. Very very much love to you, and thank you for your letter.

Morgan

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* * *

237 East 81st Street.

April 29. [1939]

New York City.

My Dearest Morgan,

I am so sorry to hear that you have been ill. I do hope it wasn’t very serious? Wystan has written to you, and you’ll have got his letter by this time; but I don’t know if he told you any of our news?

Barring accidents, I am leaving New York on Saturday next, en route for Hollywood, travelling by bus, with my American friend, Harvey Young, whom I think I told you about. We plan to make a big loop to the south, taking in New Orleans, then up through Texas. The whole journey might take three weeks.

I certainly shan’t be sorry to leave this city. It’s really not New York’s fault, but mine, that I’ve got so little out of being here, except the feeling of pure despair, values dissolving, everything uncertain. The war-scares, the central heating and the publishers’ cocktail-parties have combined to create an atmosphere which I can only compare to the wood at the beginning of the Inferno. Perhaps, too, it has to do with the approach of my thirty-fifth birthday, which is a key-birthday, I believe. But where is Vergil? The only one I can espy on this continent is Gerald Heard, so I must go out west to talk to him. Particularly, I want to talk about pacifism, for I know now (it’s about the only thing I do know) that I’m a pacifist: or, as Wystan defines it, I won’t kill people I don’t know personally. And certainly I wouldn’t kill even my dearest friends to save the imperial trade-routes. So what is to be done? Gerald thinks the Red Cross. I agree. But it’s more than that. You have to get into a state of mind. You have to stop hating. I mean, I have to stop hating. You, I know, never have: that is why you and people like you are the only visible towers of strength in this awful time. I suppose, if I knew definitely in advance that the English authorities were going to shut all conscientious objectors up in prison, without the option of doing medical or other work, I wouldn’t return to England at all. There is no sense in being a muzzled martyr; unless, of course, you’re so famous that

[your marty]rdom makes an impression on other people. Or what do you think? [Wyst]an, provisionally, is staying here. He has been more or less definitely [off]ered a teaching job next month, at a public school upstate.

We both plan, if war doesn’t break out, to get on the quota, which will enable us to take any kind of employment here. That doesn’t commit us to becoming American citizens. In fact, you have to have been on the quota two years before you can even make your first application. And, in the pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 79

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meantime, you can return to England if you wish. So nothing irrevocable has happened.

Do write soon, to say how you are and what you have been doing. We entirely lack any reliable news about England. One day the newspapers tell us everybody is in a panic, the next day they are calm. How has conscription been received? What do the Left say? Are they simply preparing to kill the entire German nation in order to free it from Hitler? Or have they thought up something else?