Letters between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature

I have written nothing, and shan’t do so, until I’m free of my present mood, which is worse than useless. I seem to have lost what little courage I ever possessed; but it will come back, no doubt. Perhaps I’ve simply been eating too many oysters, or drinking too much milk.

How are Bob, May, Robin? How is your Mother? My greetings to her. I suppose you never ran across Jacky Hewit again? He’s another problem. A very big one. I heard something from Heinz, the other day. He’s just had an operation for hernia. I only hope it exempts him from active military service. Oh dear . . . it’s all very well for Gerald to talk about non-attachment!

Which reminds me that the other, all-too-attached Gerald tells me he’s been seeing you. I’m afraid that Satan has been deserting His own, recently.

Poor Gerald seemed in a very bad way.

My address in Hollywood will be c/o Christopher Wood. 8766 Arlene Terrace. Hollywood. Cal. Hope to hear form [ sic] you there.

Love, as always,

Christopher

* * *

W[est] H[ackhurst]

14-5-39

Dearest Christopher,

I don’t seem to want to write letters to you. An unfinished one lies somewhere, saying how wonderful I thought Wystan’s poems in the China book, and how I found the prose a very good account, but not as good quite as your talking. I meant too to write to you after I saw On the Frontier in London.73 Meant & meant. You ask how things here are, whether people are upset or not. It’s very difficult to describe. I have not been upset myself for nearly a month. I don’t think my conduct out (as Bob has his), but I try, by shirking the wireless news and most of the newspapers, to keep calm and cheerful, and often succeed. It’s a choice, for me, between (i) “facing reality” and feeling and acting poisonously in consequence, and (ii) being amusing and helpful and carrying on a few private dreams. The trouble is pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 80

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the awakening, which might make me go crackers (certifiably insane);

“yah—you haven’t hardened yourself—BLOP.” But I’m fumbling after the belief that one ought not to mind before hand being caught out, one ought not to insure, and that’s all that the hardening process is.

The above state, and other people’s proceeds from the extreme singular-ity of the social scene; the crisis has gone on for a year now: unheard of: and it’s impossible to echo its crescendo with a personal one. In that sense the individual has already given up, thrown in his hand, failed. If you don’t play the crisis’ game though—and Gerald Heard will teach you how to do that—failure will seem less certain. I wonder that I should have taught you anything, but it is quite true that I don’t hate a lot, if that is at all exemplary.

It is partly idleness, partly an attempt to avoid being hated, but partly an impulse towards love. I have had a very lucky life—my best book (Passage to India) has been translated into many languages and become a Penguin, and my heart has been given Bob. This is out of the way luck.

But what are you to do dear Christopher. I don’t see, after what happened to Heinz that you can help hating, and I hope G. Heard won’t try to persuade you out of it. If you can come to love in your own way that’s all right of course. But don’t feel worried at being bitter.

I have still not told dear Christopher what he is to do. Well I in your shoes would not return to England unless the social scene normalises. Your mother can go to Cheshire if there is a bust up, and those of your friends who are caught in London—you couldn’t save them by getting caught too.

Don’t complain[,] I’m talking common-sense. I know I am.

Your account of America is depressing, especially the letter in which you referred to Lincoln Kirstein. My heart lept up at his name—I thought him so nice when I met him in London a few years back. I thought you were going to say that lots of Americans were like him. Instead of which you say none of them are like him. I look forward though to see[ing] this film maker (name forgotten).

I have done nothing about Jackie. I wish I had seen more of him before you left. I don’t know how to talk to him, though when we have run into each other he has been very nice.

G. Hamilton has not told me of his troubles. He introduced me to the purlieus of the Wine & Food Society, and I have written an article for their magazine called “Porridge or Prunes Sir?” but am not sure what J . . .

Symonds74 will think of it. We lunched at the Ecun[?] de France—silly and bad, I thought. [A]nd how sillily and badly the Hogarth Press have brought out my Pamphlet by the way. I told John Lehmann too, I did. Give me back the Woolens if 6d cannot buy a better clothing than that. Now I must go to bed.

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15-5-39

I do not seem to have answered your questions, but here is the backside of a calendar.75 I don’t know how conscription is taken. There was an enormous procession against it the other day but my taxi driver was in favour. I may send you Liddell Hart’s pamphlet against it. I see rather less of the Left or of the poor. Must counteract these omissions. My health is all right again. I have two major works in progress—the editing of A Modern Symposium for schools, and the sending of England’s Pleasant Land to a publisher. I have just been reading an article by Priestley who rightly prefers genius to wealth, and wants genius to be boosted as wealth is. I don’t know what will happen to Conscientious Objectors. Nothing in the present mood. It entirely depends on the Axis. I go to the Libel Committee twice a week and like the Chairman (Lord Porter).76 It is soothing, with the Thames flowing under the gothic windows, but it is fatal for a writer to know so much about the Law. Even if the Law is improved, things must get worse & worse for literature and all forms of public expression, it seems to me. Everything will have to be considered and vetted.

Bob, May & Robin are well—if there’s war May, Robin, Vi (Ted’s wife) and Shirley May and Bob’s mother & father will all get to Berkshire I hope. We expect Cousin Percy and (ugh) his wife, also two schoolchildren (little boys).

Had such an affectionate letter from Wystan.

Bob and I hope to go walking in Dorset soon (Cloud Hill).

With very much love,

Morgan

* * *

W[est] H[ackhurst]

17-6-39

Dearest Christopher,

At a Cambridge commemoration dinner this week, Guy Burgess, supported by Anthony Blunt, came fussing me because you had behaved so badly to Jackie.77 As I daresay you have, and they then wanted me to read a letter from you to him which they had brought to the banquet. This I declined to do, to their umbrage. I could not see why I had to, when neither you nor J. had requested me to do so. G. B. [Guy Burgess] was insistent I should write to you, which I should have done in any case. He is [a] most cerebral gangster.

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and feel very sorry for the boy. This much I will say, that now you know you can miscalculate you will be more careful another time. Have you to provide for him at all?

G. H. [Gerald Hamilton] whom I saw lately, spoke guardedly, that it to say, god how he chattered.

I am well, and until recently stable or impervious. But a couple of letters of George Thomsom have joggled me a bit—he hates my “What I Believe.”

Previous to that I had 3 lovely days walking in Dorset—all bread and cheese and beer and Bob. We went over Portland, then along the cliffs to Lakeworth and Cloud Hill and Wareham. We were both very happy. I have some other pleasures ahead if the weather holds. On Tuesday I go to Geneva to see the Prado pictures, on July 3rd to Glyndebourne to hear Cosi fan tutte and on Sept. 4th to Stockholm, to represent the P. E. N. Club. The Libel Committee continues to make progress.

I never travel, and am rather in a flutter over Tuesday. I would have come with you to America, I think, but was not sure it suited you and Wystan, and I have been too afraid to come since.

Am anxious for further news. Do hope you feel richer and happier. How did the bus tour go off?

With love from

Morgan

Do you know anything of an American dramatiser called Jo Eisinger?78 He has done A Room with a View, without permission. It does not look good and I am turning it down, but wish you were here to advise. Thornton Wilder is brought here by Lady Colifax to tea tomorrow.

* * *

[The following is typed at the top of the page:]

No, never heard of Jo Eisinger. Usually, these people turn out to be ambitious university students. But, for all I know, he may be the flower of the U.S. stage.

7136 Sycamore Trail.

July 3 [1939]

Hollywood. California.

My Dearest Morgan,

I was so glad to get your letter. Yes, of course I have behaved badly. Very badly indeed, but, I hope, quite straightforwardly—if breaking promises can ever be called straightforward. How like you to refuse to read my letter: pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 83

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I am very grateful for that. Really, if I’d known that it was going to be bandied round Cambridge, I’d have drawn up a proper document, headed: To Whom This May Not Concern. I would be angry with Burgess, but I am not in a position to be angry with anybody. It’s no more than I deserve.

Why didn’t I tell you all about it? Because I felt ashamed of myself. I am still ashamed; but don’t see that I could have acted differently, having got things into such a mess. The whole business was a problem of distance and money. I couldn’t afford to fly to England and speak to J[acky] personally, which would have straightened everything out, and left no hard feelings. So, I wrote. And all letters of that sort, however well expressed, sound brutal.

You are right to warn me to be careful in future; but don’t worry, I shall be. This time, I really have learnt my lesson.

The papers say there really will be war, this time: and here I sit, waiting for it to start. I still feel as I did when I wrote to you last, and as I shall continue to feel, I believe, for the rest of my life: that I have been absolutely wrong. Force is no good—even to achieve the grandest objectives. One’s enemies can only be won over [by] active goodwill. If you exterminate them, like bugs, the poison only enters into yourself, so you are defeated anyway. And a semi-victory is even worse. At a reptile show here the other day, I saw an elderly, dowdy spinster (of the type which usually fusses over dogs) stroking the heads of two big Indian cobras. She has kept poisonous snakes for twenty years, and never once been bitten. She can tame any snake in a fortnight. “You see,” she explained, “they know I won’t hurt them. So they aren’t frightened of me.”

Gerald Heard, our master and guide, is away just now. Huxley impresses me much less. He is a big aimiable [sic] cyclops, but he learnt everything out of a book. He just cannot stop quoting, comparing, annotating. And he has a rather sinister underlife of smart luncheons. Harvey goes to art-school five days a week, and is out all day. I take and fetch him in a very wobbly Ford. Our little house would amaze you. It is really beautiful—high up the hill, among woods. There is great deal of work connected with it, which keeps us both busy; and I am trying to write something about Ernst Toller. I have hardly any money left, and no job yet; though Mrs Viertel promises something as soon as Viertel arrives. He is in the train now. I am quite happy on the surface, or perhaps I should say under the surface: there is a layer of gloom about Europe which is likely to thicken. I still don’t really know what I shall do if war comes. Return, Wystan says, and nurse the wounded. But should we be allowed to? If only I hadn’t wasted all this time with the hate-brigade. When you start trying to think for yourself, every step is so painfully slow. I miss you dreadfully. More than anybody in England. And you would love it here. The country is so beautiful. And that pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 84

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great garden-suburb down in the valley doesn’t matter at all. It’s even convenient, for they have very good bookshops. The studios and their life is as remote as it is in London. If you’re not in it you never see it at all.

Wystan, in the midst of the greatest love of his life, is careering about the New Mexican desert. I think he is growing up very fast. Anyhow, his work gets better and better—really classic. In my little way, I think I am imitat-ing your curve. The war-silence is setting in, before, I hardly dare to hope, The Passage to India. But, alas, I’m not writing a Maurice.

All my love to you, and to Bob, and respects to your Mother.

Your erring

Christopher

I find I’ve said nothing about J[acky]. I wish I could do something to help. I paid, of course, for the Pittman School, which he should have finished by now. But the money was going through John Lehmann, and I gather that J. and John had had some kind of coolness or quarrel—anyway on J’s side. I wrote to John when I wrote to J. and asked him to stand by and help. Of course, I was and am terribly worried about how J. would take my letter. He seems to have run to Gerald [Hamilton] (Gerald wrote me) and told him everything. Gerald, no doubt, provided some worldly-wise comfort. But what is he going to do now? He has, or had, his old job at the hotel Goring. (This I heard before he got my letter). He had no need to take the job back, because I had asked John to provide adequate money for him to live on, as long as he was at the school. But maybe, owing to this friction with John, he didn’t go and collect it. There’s a great deal I shall never know.

I do think that, if you feel strong enough, it would be a very good thing if you talked to Jacky yourself.

Needless to say—if you ever do read that notorious letter—I wasn’t quite exact in what I wrote about my reasons for not wanting him to join me out here. I had to express things in Jacky’s terms. What I couldn’t explain to him—perhaps not entirely to anybody—was a feeling of utter spiritual impotence. I just suddenly knew that I couldn’t cope. I knew that, however much I dread loneliness, there is something inside me which has to be alone, and which wasn’t alone when J. was around. Heinz was different.

So is Harvey. Perhaps because they are foreigners. I don’t know. Anyhow, this all sounds rather tiresome when I write it down, like the sensations of a character in D.H. Lawrence.

The only thing that matters, of course, is that J. shall emerge from this business with the minimum amount of mistrust in the human race. That’s where you could help him, if you would. Most of the people he has known seem to have been such utter skunks.

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If you get this letter in the middle of an air-raid, just burn it. I suppose 1914 cut short a lot of similar tangles. Please write again soon.

* * *

10-7-39

Dearest Christopher,

Do not forget me. We are getting rather dim over here I think. I mean I rather think that there is going to be “a war,” and that a sort of veil must be descending. 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.

Now what have I done today, previous to writing the above thoughtful paragraph?

Picked some raspberries and helped to bottle them, and finished writing an unpublishable though not indecent comedy-story.

I have, however, become worried by aeroplanes—the stunting overhead has got on my nerves and I cannot find out how to ignore it and keep on regretting Abinger Hammer’s lost peace—it only lost it early this year, after having had it for thousands of years. I used to get round this sort of dis-comfort by self-pity, but partly owing to Bob I have given that up and have to remain uncomfortable.

I go to London tomorrow, lunch with Ian! who has kindly invited me, and not to dinner with Nik what’s his name!! and Sandy something!!! who have by a coincidence also invited me. (I cannot go, because George Thomson is coming.) I enjoyed Geneva—or have I written since?

Best love from

Morgan

* * *

W[est] H[ackhurst]

23-8-39

Dearest Christopher,

Yes the news certainly is unpleasing and I feel in a farewell-letter mood.

One or two people I am very fond of will get envelopes posted to them today. I hope the same idea has occurred to you. I had intended to go to Sweden next week but England is the best address. This evening I meet Joe with perhaps a Jamaican Blackamoor79 at Piccadilly Circus. Blackamoors are a distant mystery to me. I am very busy and rather resolutely happy and cheerful. Bob is on holiday with May in Devonshire, but the wretched pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 86

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woman on a farm where they once stayed is ill, and May who doesn’t like her has gone to nurse her and run the place, while Bob remains in Sidmouth with Robin who makes too much noise. My mother is well, but somewhat shattered this morning by the German-Soviet non-aggression pact. I took her for a few days to London last week, various relatives and refugees were seen, also a play of moderate merit entitled “Alien Corn.” Post Card from Ian, investigating social conditions in Greece. Met Max Beerbohm on Sunday. Oh yes and by God a Mr Wheeler or Wheler called last week, and said he was a friend of yours and you were so happy in the States. He is what Catullus would call a “salaputium dissertum.”80

Can you or any one else in the happy States translate that?

Mr W. also delivered a homage speech which left me dumb.

Morgan’s best love.

Bob, I, Oliver Low and his wife spent a most pleasant evening together lately and went to a play of moderate merit entitled “The Women.”

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W[est] H[ackhurst]

1-9-39

Dearest Christopher,

Sergt Button [i.e., Bob] and self rang your mother up on the 29th and urged her and Richard to get off at once. So I feel and indeed think I was useful. We didn’t write to Heinz as B. thought that even if the p[ost]c[ard]

got through to him it would do him no good.

I know you want to know how I feel. Well I cried a bit when my mother paid her usual morning call to my bedroom, and I’m a little irritable and hysterical but not at all bad. I am going to write some notes on Beethoven’s Sonatas, and have bought a 2/- book rather than a 4/6 one to write about the war in. Sweden cancelled. I am rather at a loose end. Poor Mrs Barger is here, wearing herself and others out, about her tiresome neurotic daughter who, against her orders, has been dumped by her bossy son in a mental retreat.

It is going to be awful here I expect. Whatever one does is wrong,1 so do not come back here, that is the wrongest.

Love,

Morgan

* * *

September 27, 1939

303 South Amalfi Drive

Santa Monica. California

My dearest Morgan,

Thank you so much for your 2 letters. I only got them yesterday, as Gerald Heard is quite a long way from us now we’ve moved to above address. Please write here. It will be forwarded, if I suddenly leave.

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This place is in the same road as Aldous Huxley, whom I scarcely ever see—and Viertel, whom I see all day: we are doing a film together, in the intervals of listening to the radio. I believe we are both already crazy—but it’s so hard to tell. Anyhow, one lives in a dull, stolid ache of misery, illuminated by hysterical laughter, and alleviated by chain-smoking. I think, at intervals: “Of course, it’s quite ridiculous—I can’t possibly go on like this.”

But I do. Everyone does.

The outside world—which could hardly be less real to the most enlightened yogi—is a thin noisy tone film of fast cars, the Pacific, bathers of superb physique, palm trees, filling stations, mountains, advertisements.

Garbo comes to lunch, and one is not surprised. She has very long eyelashes. There are heat waves, quite big floods. One eats meals. But you, and Stephen and Heinz, and several other of my friends are every bit as solid as the people I talk to in the so-called flesh. I talk to you, too, and have horrible nightmares.

You were only too right in your prophecy that the war, when it came, would be crazy. Just how crazy it is, we have yet to find out. Even as I write, there is an Alice in Wonderland rumour that Germany and Russia will form a new League of Nations.

What shall I do? Stay here for the present. I am half an American citizen, anyway. Later, perhaps, an ambulance corps. Wystan is in New York.

Whatever we do will probably be together.

Give my love to everybody—especially Bob—and write again soon.

As ever,

your loving

C.

* * *

W[est] H[ackhurst]

8-9-39

Dearest Christopher,

Bob writes “I hadn’t the heart to write to Christopher. I feel he must be so upset that I am afraid of making things worse.” As for me, I write, but shan’t do so again until you write to me. (Not huff, Blackmail).

We are comfortably, all too comfortably, settled in—mother, self, cousins Percy & Dutchie, Agnes (servant), and Mrs Jeffrey, former servant, comes and helps. No evacuees so far, on account of my mother’s age. There is no reason I should go to London and danger, since Bob is working or confined to his house when he isn’t. I feel unhappy of course, sometimes very so, but not afraid. I found Gerald’s book most interesting—have pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 89

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reviewed it for Joe.2 My “plans”(!) are (i) to live by journalism rather than by govt subsidy for propaganda work[;] (ii) to give up the B[runswick]

Square flat, and take a cheaper and safer one near Bob[;] (iii) to play and make notes on Beethoven’s Sonatas. I bought a large note book to write in about the War, something was wrong with it, couldn’t think what. Then in a few days I realised what I wanted to do. I have been lent Tovey’s edition of the Sonatas.

Well, this is the very last letter you ever get from me, unless—

Love to all, as per usual.

My ex[ecut]ors are (i) Williams Deacon’s Bank, 20 Birchin Lane, E.C.4

(ii) a personal ex[ecut]or.—J. Sprott, failing him, you, failing you, John Simpson. If Sprott shouldn’t act and it comes to you and you are still as I hope you will be in the U. S. A., you should pass on the job to Simpson.

Morgan’s love.

* * *

W[est] H[ackhurst]

31-10-39

My dearest Christopher,

So you have been naughty, not religious. I had all sorts of theories as to why you would not write to me, and had made up an amazing sentence about looking at one’s navel and seeing something like a fountain pen. But you have merely been naughty and idle. My chief extra news is that Bob has portated me into a flat near him at Chiswick—same accommodation as B[runswick] Sq. at 1/2 the price and a lovely view over Turnham Green which reminds me of Harrogate.3 I don’t much like it, but I came not much to like B. Square. Bob arranged the move, took up and put down the lino, called in his helmet on the electricity and gas, fixed the black-outs up, and May stitched, lengthened and stretched.

I seem to have mislaid your letter. I am very glad you and Viertel are doing a new film. As you know, I want you to stop where you are. I don’t know what I feel about the State of Emergency prevalent this side. I seem to get used up trying to be in good spirits and pick up scraps of art. One has slightly smiling confessions with the most unlikely people: “Well, as a matter of fact I feel all right.”—“Well, why, fancy! so do I.” The country looks sweet, there are no aeroplanes. London looks lovely when it is moonlight, and has a charming ultra-violet lamp at the bottom of the Haymarket, which looks like a fuchsia and lights up the luminous paint upon the sand bags.

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London which other people will consider sensible and civilised. Of course, when I think, all seems raving nonsense, as it does to you—except that I’m sure it’s it, not we, who are mad. I wouldn’t smoke so much. Foolish.

Nicotine. And if I look forward I’m sure we are all in for a bad time during the next six months, perhaps for being killed. That’s one of my reasons for not wanting you and Wystan back here. Another is that you both must and can carry on civilisation. I have had some praise for being civilised lately, from John Simpson, Michael Roberts, etc., and lap it all up. You must take care not to get so desperate and hysterical lest there is, in this pompous word, something worth carrying on.

With love, as always,

Morgan.

Will write again soon. Many messages from Bob.

[written along the margin of the first page of this two-sided letter:] Will you send me a newspaper now and then—not the New York Times, which I see. Something of Hearst’s? Or are they too silly?

* * *

31-1-40

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking.

Dearest Christopher,

I got your letter yesterday. I have told Bumpus4 to send you most of my non-fictional work, also Where Angels [Fear to Tread] and The Longest Journey. My books can’t all be out of print in the U.S.A., though, as I keep getting cheques form [ sic] Harcourt Brace for them. As for the newspapers, I didn’t know I had got any from you, but perhaps I have mistaken yours, for Harold Barger’s. He sends us a good many New York Times, and has presented me with a subscription to Time. Now and then a Life arrives. Would that be from you? I have had no Pacific-side papers.

I am very glad you are making money, as some day you may have to give us some. I have had good luck financially though, as an investment which I thought was a goner has paid up in full plus arrears of interest. And my new flat is half the rent of the old one. Bob has got it very nice. I like the bedroom, tolerate the sitting room, but hate the pokey passage, kitchen and W.C. On this last I have seldom sat, as the pipes have been frozen for weeks.

I suppose it is the war that makes me not happy there. It would be difficult to say when I was happy, but it would be untrue to say I was unhappy.

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Though we have had a good deal of trouble here with my cousins, domestic misery indeed, they came here for the duration and left at Christmas in a huff. I think they behaved very badly. The other protagonist was my mother.

My nice aunt Rosalie is here for the present, and we are snowed up. I meant to go and see Bob tomorrow. Do you get news of H. N. [Heinz Nedermeyer]

by the way? If you do I should like to know. We had a Christmas dinner at Bob’s—he, May, Robin from the country, Ted & Vi & Shirley May, Mum & Dad, Les & Con, not Else, not Sid who had made her great with child, me, and Joe came in with a blackamoor. May is nursing, but because she wants to and has nothing to do: private patients at the West London Hospital.

My life isn’t socially rich, though. I have this home stuff and the Bob-stuff, and a good many cheap invitations from exactly the same people I’ve known all my life, though some of them get younger. No Charlie Chaplin, no Krishnamurti. “Oh but you could see them if you liked.” Yes—and more easily than I think, I do think. I asked, very hesitatingly, Norman Birhelt to dinner. He didn’t come for weeks so I thought he didn’t want to. No—

merely busy, and now he writes me a friendly almost raving letter out of the blue, proud to know such a person as myself. Sometimes I regret my long mouse-tunnel and shake my head at all the mice I have met at the cross-ways—I must poke my head out and roar before it is too late. I must ask the French Ambassador to lunch and not have J. B. Priestly to meet him. I must remind Sir Edmund Ironside that Tonbridge, where we were both at school, might well be forgotten. Over all this, I suppose, or upon it, sits Gerald (Heard).5 Is it true that he is fat and has a beard and likes robes? I do not mind, but has he? I myself am much fatter than you remember me—the result of the operation, it’s thought. I am certainly more cushiony and courageous than I was, but more irritable and with fears of hysteria. 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—I think I once told you. Oh this believing! As soon as you believe a thing it goes dead in your hands, and you have to begin again, and on the same thing. It makes being a prophet or a teacher so impossible, and for the life of a mouse. All the splendour and solidity I encounter now is in books written in the past, the shut-away, unnibbled past of Madame de Sévigné.6 I wish I could write one more book myself, and may still be young enough to have it forced out of me by suffering. Wisdom is not a sufficient impetus by itself. I will shirk suffering if I can, don’t worry about me, but if it catches me I would like to make something of it.

Love as always, and Bob will join.

Yours affectionately,

Morgan.

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Write a bit about Harvey—don’t know him.7 Send his photograph? Love again, M.

P.S.

11-2-40

This has laid about as your address was at Bob’s and now I open it to mention our call upon Mr. Norris. We found him in his cul-de-sackery, and he read us your letter to him about the Tom Driberg quotation—I think because he guessed I should have heard the more lurid version, according to which he sold it. His explanation is that T. D. scribbled it down without his knowledge.8 Passing thence to the cellar, his stock did not rise, for there were a quantity of bottles of 1921 Chatéau d’Ygnem and he had much the most persistent efforts to drink the 3 bottles which I had been given for an article in this Food & Wine Magazine. I had only saved them by lying to him, and saying they were drunk. Returning to the drawing room, my stock fell, as I made a festive reference to that day we (though particularly he) were tracked at the Hague. Vagueness and surprise were registered—the chief point though is that you did write him a very nice letter, I thought.

Much has happened in a twiddley way since I began this. Speech to Paul Morand at a P.E.N. luncheon.9 Deputation to Mr Allen [?] about the Defence Regulations. Lunch with H. G. Wells—but not till next Tuesday.

M

* * *

London The Olde Worlde

21-4-40

Dearest Christopher,

I must start a letter to you. I have been feeling depressed and scared and meaning to write in that mood. But the feeling seems to have passed.

Though there is no reason it should have. I have thought a good deal about the comments on you in Horizon which you mention, and with indignation, as you surmise.10 I think Connolly is just an opportunist, who saw good material for journalism—I have no opinion of him, although many of his attitudes are acceptable and cleverly put. Stephen (whom I have gently ticket off) is another case, of course. I think he gets hypnotised by the notion of being sincere. Once when I was a child, eating rice and sweet sauce alone in a room with my great-aunt Monie’s picture, I got up and smeared some of the sweet sauce upon the gilt picture frame. I did this not because I wanted to but because I had the idea of doing it and felt that I pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 93

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should be more straightforward if I put the idea into practice. This is the explanation of much of Stephen’s conduct, I think. Afterwards, as I did, he tries to rub the sweet sauce out, and, as I did not, he probably succeeds. But to go on a bit, how very odd people are. I am thankful you are out of Europe at the present time, and wish nearly everyone else I loved was too.

If you could save us, even at the cost of your own life, I might beckon you back, but such a notion is utter balls. You could do nothing. Where you are you can do something: manipulate the civilisation of the U.S.A. You will smile thinking that I know nothing of the hardness, the hurry, the shoddi-ness and the salads in which your public life is spent. I think I do know.

And I think they constitute something to get hold of, whereas Europe, having missed its beat at the moment of the Spanish War, provides nothing.

We may—having reached exhaustion point—start again, and have enough good books unburnt and good buildings standing to make the start a successful one. But that is mere speculation. Your immediate job is to stop and work where you are.

I have been reading old books too, and older than yours, I bet: Locke and Bacon. I have been ill with pleurisy, which by the way accounts for my moods. First you lie in bed swallowing these dreadful new tablets which make you sick, and despairful [ sic] of civilisation. Then you get better and read Locke and Bacon. Then you get all right and come up to London as I did yesterday, and are reunited to Bob. I am at present lying in bed in the bedroom of my Chiswick flat. I mention the bedroom because it is a very nice little shaped room. The hour is 9.30. I shall go to lunch with Joe

[Ackerley], and William [Plomer] will bring a friend to tea. Next week-end I hope to stop with John Simpson at Birmingham and to see Johnny Fisher and George Thomson who both live there now. You will gather from these names that a good deal of water has passed to and fro under the bridge since you left. We meet no Mickey Rooneys here. As for James Steward, I had never heard of him even till you mentioned him, and you can tell him so just as he is mixing his salad. Bob and I had chops, potatoes and greens yesterday, which he cooked very well, also hock11 and port, and then played chess. I am delighted he has taken to it, as there were rather too few things which we could do together. He came down to see me when I was ill, so did John Simpson, and so—you will scarcely credit it—did Joe. Oh but I really must mention that our local refugee committee has put me on, or rather at, the Tribunal which is going to revise the refugees’ sentences. This should bring me into touch with other Germans [?]. I must really get up now.

Writing to you has made me very happy. Thank you for your letter.12 I was very glad to hear about Harvey. Get him photographed. Give Gerald my love.

Love from Morgan

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11-9-40

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

It is very nice to hear from you again.13 I hadn’t felt I could write to you any more, except on practical matters, never hearing: but your letter sets me off. I have heard from Gerald also. No doubt this blitzkrieg makes one odd and intimating: Morgan carries more parcels than ever, but against what a tragic sky! However you ought not to be overawed by a blitzkrieg, after China. You know you felt just as usual, and went on as usual unless stopped. I saw the first night of it last Saturday from my flat—I think you know I have a flat near Bob’s now, that’s to say overlooking Turnham Green. London burning, a grandiose spectacle. Yet I felt only annoyance and sadness. When I got back here I tried to read the second book of the Aeneid, and that was overwhelming. It confirms my notion that we are only equal to great situations in poetry.

But I am certainly very sad and apprehensive. I am sure that we are going to be invaded.

Up to now, we have abundance of food, drink, sleep & amusement.

I have to go up to London again next Sunday, to broadcast to the Empire. Am not looking forward to it, for the place must be in a bad mess.

Your mother has given me some news of you. She is relieved that the British Embassy understands your position, and Bob and I are glad too, though he thinks it mis understood it! Oh what a silly fuss! My letter in the Spectation [ sic] wasn’t a defence, though I would like it to have been: it was an offensive against the Dean of St Pauls.14 I think the whole thing has died down now, and Mr Wilson Harris seemed a bit ashamed at having vented it in his columns.

The night as I write is full of booming bombers. I wish I was out of it all—not [in] another part of the world, which would not suit me, but dead.

I am sure there is hope, but want some one else to do the hoping. What would the Swami say to that? Down on it, I doubt not.

My pamphlet is out at last.15

I am reading Middlemarch. I have read A Portrait of A Lady.16

This is not much of a letter, but I have sent yours to Joe instead of rereading it, and seem stupid. Bob, May & Robin went off for a week’s holiday in Devon, but he wires this morning that he has been recalled. He has had digestion troubles again, but keeps well if he diets. May is nursing at the West London. Robin has been bombed in Berks[hire], and fell the following pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 95

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day off the back of a municipal dust cart, to which he was clinging.17 Well fare well dearest Christopher though of course I shall write again if possible and to Gerald also. Give him my love.

Love from Morgan

* * *

1-1-41 (my birthday)

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

The archbishop of Canterbury has wished us all an unhappy new year, so I had better do the same to you: Archbishop: Morgan: Christopher is a true proportion, I should think. Also want to write because a letter from you which had miscarried has just turned up. You wrote it in the summer of 1939, in answer to one from me about the Burgess-Jackie imbroglio, and I am very glad to have it as it fills up a gap and also records your earlier impressions of Los Angeles. It miscarried not in the post, but in my mother’s writing table: she appears to have stored it there while I was away, and has now discovered it. She is quite calm about it, in fact all is well.—

Then there is your more recent letter which I want to answer. I can’t do so in detail because I’ve lost that—lent to Joe or Bob perhaps. But you told me in it about “yogi,” very clearly: about the rooms with the clocks in them and the garden at the end. I see that one may, or may want, to go into the garden in the future. But why do you feel you have been there in the past? It’s there I don’t follow you. I long often to be at rest of course, and a good night seems a premonition of something far better. But do I come from, or belong to, sleep or a garden or any conceivable state? I don’t feel so.

I have written to Gerald [Heard] lately. Shall probably send this c/o him, as I think you’ve changed your address. He will have told you my news, unless I send this by air and outstripe [?]. I have several friends and love them—there’s nothing much more to say—and I sometimes look curiously into that love for signs of a new social pattern, but see none, not the least sign of a sign. I am going with a very odd and somewhat marginal friend to Norfolk on Friday—Lord Kennet. He is driving me up. I may see Johnny Fisher up there—you may remember him at Dover. He is now in the army.

In March Bob has a week’s leave, and we hope to go off together. I have not seen much of him lately, being shut up down here with a sprained ankle.

Aunt Rosalie and Mrs Barger stay here—the latter homeless.

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Well dear Christopher this is not a very thrilling letter to cross the seas, but I don’t mind, and indeed remember you instructing me not to mind. I will go to bed now. With my love,

Morgan

Lady Kennet’s epigram:

What is a Communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Morgan’s retort:

What is a Capitalist? One who hopes

To gain Heaven through knowing the ropes.

Query: How is Morgan’s visit likely to go?

* * *

[Letterhead:] Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures

Culver City

California

February 14th. [1941]

as from: c/o Gerald Heard.

8766 Arlene Terrace. Hollywood. Calif.

Dearest Morgan,

Thank you so much for your letter of January 1st. It was a long time since I’d heard, but I didn’t feel out of touch, as Gerald read me what you wrote to him. How odd, and how artistically right—that the letter about Jacky should have suddenly hatched out of your Mother’s writing-desk—such a very ancient egg, Chinese almost. Jacky, I gather, is now somewhere abroad: I hope he remembers me charitably, if at all. Harvey and I are giving up our house at the beginning of next week and retiring into separate privacies—

quite amicably, however. I hope to get a room near Gerald, and see a good deal more of him in the evenings—until my time at Metro is up and I can surrender myself to the Quakers. What they will do with this valuable gift is still uncertain, but I shall probably start at a forestry camp for C.O.s in the mountains near here. Sooner or later, I expect to get sent to Europe.

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efficient, devoted; but they’re beginning to feel that ambulance units and soup kitchens are not the whole of religion. In the summer, Gerald is planning to spend a month with them, meditating and discussing. I hope to be in on this, too.

At the moment, Willy Maugham is here, resting for a few weeks before continuing his lecture-tour. He is optimistic about the war, but very tired, I think. He reminds me of an old gladstone bag, the veteran of many voyages, covered with labels. God only knows what is inside. I wish I could unpack him, but it is forbidden. He has been sealed by the customs. Or perhaps I am only inhibited by a legend. Yesterday he came to the studio, and ran into the Marx Brothers, who have no such inhibitions. They crowded round him, slapping his back: “Hi, Willy—what say we get together Friday evening, and go see the fights?” It was so queer and touching. Willy looked slightly dazed, but happy. This, I felt, is how he wants, so terribly, to be treated. But then I remembered a passage in The Summing-Up, in which he says that he can’t bear to be touched.18

After the war, Willy wants to go to India, and revisit the swamis. “But why to India?” says our own little swami, “And why after the war?” He sits curled up in a corner, wrapped in a blanket, for he has just had a series of heart-attacks, and may not live much longer. He is in his fifties, and often looks like a boy of eighteen. Women clatter around him, fussy and devoted, preparing meals and arranging flowers. At sixteen, he was a revolutionary.

Then he met Brahamananda, who said: “There is no failure in the search for God.” And there wasn’t. There is nothing more to tell about him—no anecdotes, not a line for a gossip-column, nothing. All kinds of people have impressed me, during my life. The swami doesn’t impress you—sometimes he is ridiculous—but when you are with him you know that God exists.

You questioned what I said in my letter about the house with the rooms and the passage leading to the garden. Well, I am bad at comparisons, anyway—they make me feel self-conscious even while I am writing them. But I can’t feel that “the garden” is only in the future. Surely we came from it, or how would we have this awareness that it exists? O don’t you agree with Wordsworth?

I needn’t repeat that I think continually of you in the middle of all this mess. At present, if one can believe the newspapers, we are on the brink of war with Japan. I suppose they could bomb Los Angeles once or twice, if they didn’t mind sacrificing an aircraft-carrier. There are people here who are actually considering building air-raid shelters.

Write again soon.

All my love,

Christopher

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W[est] H[ackhurst]

11-10-41

I quail before preparing an Indian broadcast, and will start a letter to my Dearest Christopher instead, although I “ought not” to do so. It is not the first letter I have started. A fragment about the Chinese wine cups you gave me lies about somewhere. I got off a letter to Gerald about a fortnight back.

I hope it reached him. It was partly about praying. People over here are rather silly and shy about prayer. Anyhow I find it easy to silence them when they condemn it. I believe it is much more like going to bed with someone than is generally supposed. Hence the shyness. Hence the great advantages or disadvantages which may ensue.—Not that, having silenced them, I go away and do a flop. Don’t think it—!

I was not however proposing to address you about this, but rather to give you the menu of a dinner which Bob cooked in my flat last Wednesday for Joe, Stephen, and ourselves. The flat is at Chiswick now, overlooking Turnham Green, and when reached extremely nice. On the mantelpiece were two of your jade cups. On the wall opposite an “oil” by Bob, done from the water-colour sketches he made at Amsterdam when we came to stay with you there. It is said, by Joe & Stephen, to be very good—i.e. one would pick it out in an exhibition. This however was it

MENU

Hors d’oeuvres

Oeufs Mayonnaise: with sliced cucumber, tomato, raw carrots

Joint

Roast shoulder of mutton with mint sauce

Vegetables

Roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, French beans, braised tomatoes. T.o.

MENU (cont)

Sweets

Stewed blackberries and apples. Cornflower cream

Cheese

Coffee

Wines:

Sherry: present from Aunt Rosalie, rather a failure

Claret: Médoc

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Port: Cockburns

Brandy: stolen by May from the West London Hospital: a success So you will see that our problems are not quite what you expected or your Swami perhaps hoped. I must knock off now and have some Beefex with mother and Mrs Barger. The last named has been living with us for a year—

she is the widow of a Cambridge friend, eminent scientist. I had a very nice letter from you, which I meant to reread before writing this, but can’t think where I put it, and don’t want further delay in sending you my love. I do miss you very much—more lately than I have done in the past. For the first year or two I felt content that you should be where you are. I probably hoped your world would spread to me. But mine seems more likely to spread to you.

The P.E.N. Congress last month was a good one. Unluckily I neither saw nor heard Erika Mann. Her speech didn’t please Madariaga,19 Thorton Wilder, or Dos Passos, but I don’t know how they judge things. I met Arthur Koestler, and shall see him again, and have already seen again a young Chinese from Pekin[g], Hsiao Chien: he has offered me a banquet in London and been down here with a gift of a tea pot and tea. Oh dear how much easier and more charming are they than the Indians, and this reminds me of my broadcast.

Talking of Manns, though, did Klaus ever publish my article in Decision and if so will he pay me?

I had sometime back now, an extremely nice letter from your mother, and must answer it.

Leo and Tom, after some months with Miss Phillips & Miss Hayles at Teignmouth where Sandy remains are now back in Dover in their old flat.

The Slaughters are at Guildford I believe, but I have not sought them out despite Mr Slaughter’s Beethoven, which was most remarkable. William remains at the Admiralty. Mr N——[Norris] is I believe in——. John Simpson, George Thomson, are still at Birmingham. Bob has got across his superiors through refusing to cart dung to their back gardens, and, though a super driver in his qualifications, has been taken out of the garage and put on to ordinary duties. He has also been bad with what was called bur-sitis, but now they have called it fibrocitis instead, and he got better at once, and can do his squash and his rowing. He looks very fit, and you can take it that he is sending you fondest love. I shall see him again on Monday. Joe—

but perhaps I told Gerald this—has moved to Putney: a nice flat as regards view, near the end of the bridge and on the roof of a hotel.20 He looks a bit older. I don’t think I do—since you left me, I mean. But it is hard to know.

Well dear Christopher this shall do from your

Morgan

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* * *

824 Buck Lane

Haverford, Penna.

January 11. [1942]

Dearest Morgan,

Here’s your letter of November 11 unanswered for at least a month since I got it.21 A busy Christmas, of course, came in between—but also, with you, I have a nice leisurely feeling. The mental communication, at any rate on my side, is still very strong. Also, I feel increasingly that I shall see you before long. I don’t know exactly how, but, as you say, “your” world has spread to “ours.” As soon as I’m drafted as a C.O. I shall see what possibilities there are of being sent abroad. The age group to which I belong is to register on February 16. Meanwhile, I am very busy here—at a Friends’

Service Committee hostel for refugees—since last October. The refugees are all teachers or lecturers who hope to fit into the U.S. educational world, a difficult but not impossible ambition. Meanwhile they study teaching methods at the neighbouring college, and also improve their English by private tuition from a number of people, including myself. Aside from this, my own job is social, menial, confessorial, advisory, interpretive, consola-tory, apologetic; in fact, whatever I choose to make it; and always profoundly interesting. Thee is so little one can materially do, but so much one can understand—if only the attention is focused unwaveringly on the problem. Needless to say, mine isn’t: so I’m guilty every hour of lapses, failures, minor cruelties. These people, especially the Jewish ones, register, like exquisite scientific instruments, every failure towards them in charity or understanding. They draw back quicker than snakes, and the work of weeks is spoilt in a couple of seconds. Mere pity is useless here. True charity is the intense alertness which Gerald so often writes about. Nothing less is any good.

Since the official declaration of war, we, as an “enemy alien” group, are naturally subject to restrictions.22 The authorities have been wonderfully reasonable, on the whole—though some local interpretations of the rules seem to prevent our people form [ sic] going to the post office or getting their hair cut, and similar absurdities. However, we are sure these little points will be straightened out later. In the meanwhile, many of course feel badly about being called “enemy” at all, even in official documents. They fought, when permitted to do so, during the French phase of the war, and are inclined to make obvious comparisons.

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them are much [. . . ?] at letter writing. Benjy Britten is returning to England very soon, I believe: I hope to see him before he goes, and in that case shall give him personal messages to you and other friends.

I agree with you about prayer. It is like going to bed: just as “getting religion” (that horrible expression) is like falling in love. And prayer, in its turn, has various consequences, like consummation. After leading this kind of life—or intermittently trying to—for about a year and a half, there isn’t anything much I can say about it without embarrassment, except that “it pays,” in better balance, better integration, greater contentment, and, much more important, in an increasing appetite for it and commitment to it.

Anyhow, in my case, with all my backslippings, it’s still a lot more satisfactory than physical marriage ever was—not that the one excludes the other.

If the right person came along, that could be more wonderful than ever. At present there is nobody, and I’m quite fairly content to have it that way.

Oh dear, this is a hell of a stiff, censor-conscious letter! Chiefly because I can’t gossip, which would reassure you that I’m the same old Chris you used to know. But I can’t gossip about strangers, so you must just imagine that part of me functioning too, and know that my loving thoughts are very very often with you and Bob. Please remember me to William, John, Leo and Tom.

All my love,

Christopher

* * *

6-2-42

Dearest Christopher,

I have just got your letter of Jan. 11th, and I have just been giving Stephen a glass of sherry at the Reform Club and seeing an excessively nice letter he has had from Wystan. [B]efore which I had just been to tea with the Robin Majors, and mentioned you there, indeed this is just a row of justs, and I have just been broadcasting to India about Aldous’ book, which I think very good, and now I am just going to bed. Only 11.00 P.M., but I after all am 63. It has made me very happy to hear from you and to know that I am in your thoughts, and I am glad to know about your work too. I write in my Chiswick flat—the one that has been such a success, and bears so many signs of Bob’s love, energy and taste. Do you remember the sketch he made at Amsterdam? It has now become an oil painting and hangs in a Bond Street exhibition, and is to tour the provinces next month.

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I broadcast a good deal and read a good deal, and as for writing, if you can get hold of the December number of Horizon please read an article by me in it.23 You will then see where I stand—though it is much more a sit, modified by a very very slight genuflection.

I will leave this letter open till the morning. I am interested I should be right about prayer, I never minded it, and the Maharajah’s gay shrieks of

“Morgan—Morgan—don’t come nearer [. . . ?] this morning, please, I am holy” raining in my ears, even on that morning, as profound.

Very little gossip is obtainable here. Most people are segregated in jobs and there is very little entertaining, through lack of servants, food, and petrol. Stephen Tennant, once an enormous golden mountain, is still to be discerned above the rising waters, embanked by his bad health, and Bob and I hope to go there on Saturday for a weekend. That house, and John Simpson’s, are the only ones I get invited to stay at. Dear dear me, it is a solid overturn.

Well now I really must get to bed, and may even post this right away.

Very very much love from your

Morgan

[continuing on same sheet of paper]

W[est] H[ackhurst]

1-3-42

This did not get posted—indeed look at the date. The best of a letter in two sections though is that one can gossip a little—gossip, as opposed to narrative, being references from section to section. Well, we got our weekend at Stephen T[ennant]’s—Peter Watson, Connolly and Elizabeth Bowen were there too. All went well until the last evening, when S.T.

became annoyed because the boys would discuss a post-mortem and still more annoyed because he could not stop them, left up from the diner table, blew out the four candles which illuminated it, and rushed, switching out lights as he went, into his bed. We knew not what to do nor whither to turn.

Embassies were organised. Later in the evening he dressed and reappeared in the drawing room. So even in England the Private Life can still be led.

But I do not think it will be for long.

Bob loved your letter, said you were exactly the same, and it was exactly like you to pretend you were not, so as to give one a surprise on meeting. I think I am changing a little—not in affection, but three years of a war and such a war deform one’s mind. It is such an awful lot one has to understand, it is too much, and too much has to be suddenly scrapped.

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* * *

West Hackhurst

Abinger Hammer

Dorking

[early June, 1942]

Dearest Christopher,

I have just preached my first sermon, so as parson to parson may I tip you a wink? Perhaps you may not be in a position to return it, but we get the idea that everyone your side preaches sermons. Mine was on the occasion of the death of Ronald Kidd, the founder of the Council for Civil Liberties, and I took my text from Wilhelm Tell.24 It now serves as an opportunity to chatter to you. I think you wrote last. Life goes on as usual here. The most interesting thing I am doing—but I am afraid I shall discover nothing—is to look at St Augustine and his contemporaries, and ask them how they took their Landslide. But they are so different from us, that even when I can catch what they say it does not sound like wisdom. And I am looking for applicable wisdom. They are partly so different because they had a sexual conscience and not a social one, whereas it is the other way round with us. I am only just tapping the thing, though. I wish I had Gerald to direct me, though I suppose he would say I was wasting my time.

After the “Confessions” I am reading a little Claudian,25 and then thinking of the Tomb of Galla Placidia, which I saw at Ravenna once in tourist days.

It was certainly a very strange age, and even less of a piece than ours.

You will prefer some news of ours. The John Lehmann-Spender vista you know. Joe Ackerley is all right in his flat over Putney Bridge, where he has adopted a pigeon. William is still overworked at the Admiralty. John Simpson had not yet been called up, and stayed with me for a night in Chiswick last week. Bob is still spared to me and is rowing in a regatta this weekend. I think I told you he has burst into art (oils—of Amsterdam) and been hung. Robin, aged 9, is up for a few days, since London keeps quiet.

We went to a cinema and there was a film of Dover, showing that vaulted restaurant where we might all still be eating, and a travelling shot down the high street toward the church, where nothing seemed damaged. Robin scarcely remembers Dover. He is very good company, and will soon be going to a Friends’ Co-educationist school at Saffron Walden. As for new objects, the chief one is a young Chinese called Hsiao Chi’en. I wonder whether you have heard of him, or will; he has written “Etching of a Tormented Age,” which is about contemporary Chinese literature, and he is well acquainted with their new ambassador to Washington.

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I don’t much like this letter. It is of course not easy to write friends from whom one has parted for years. One sees and knows them as well as ever, but cannot believe they will hear what is being said.

8-6-42

Since beginning this a few days ago I have heard from Gerald, but it looks a stiff and misty letter and I have not yet coped with it. We get very provincial. Since the war started, I have not even seen the sea. Our lives are interned without being spiritual, and trying desperately to balance we get exalted and false ideas of America or Europe or China. I have violent longings for fragments of my past—mostly small pieces of scenery abroad, with blurred edges—and I reconstruct partings which I hadn’t at the time known would be for so long. One of the worst is the parting from Charles Mauron at Lausanne June 1939 when I scrambled into a silly mountain railway train, and he already almost blind.

Charlie (waiter Charlie), who was at the Trojan Horse near your house, has now gone to the Black Bug [?] at Nottingham. Victor’s is now absurdly expensive; none of us go there, and we learn from M. Victor’s confrères that it is his obstinacy. When in London I eat at the Club or at a Lyons Cafeteria, or Bob cooks down at the Chiswick flat, where we have accumulated some wine. I have plenty of money—partly because I broadcast regularly to India—and certainly it is a help. I wish I had hope, as well as tenacity and calmness. Sometimes I wish I had it [hope?] instead of them [tenacity and calmness?], for I have known the sensation in the past and it is lovely. The lights going up again, the Prince Baudouin running—one would die of such happiness.

I have just brought out my Virginia Woolf lecture. Harcourt Brace is publishing it your side. Have also been preparing A Passage to India for Everyman, with some notes, and with Peter Burra’s article on me as an introduction.

Would like to hear more about your work with “aliens.” I believe they are still unhappy over here, but we got Wolfgang (John Simpson’s friend) back.—Did Klaus Mann ever publish my article?

With love dear Christopher from Morgan

* * *

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As from:

9121 Alto Cedro Drive.

Beverly Hills. Calif.

July 8. [1942]

Dearest Morgan,

Such a nice letter from you, of the eighth of June, which I’m answering from the train, enroute for California and the above address. It is the house of friends and will always find me in the foreseeable future, so we’d better stick to it from now on. As a matter of fact, there has been a little spurt of news suddenly: two very descriptive letters, one from Tony Hyndman, who seems so happy and so admirably fitting into his new life; one from Benjamin Britten, who was fitting less well at the moment but very interestingly, because he could still hold England and the U.S. in some kind of relation to each other.

The train is dragging very slowly through the state of Kansas, hours and hours late: pretty woods, and fields of alfalfa (or isn’t it alfalfa?) and little towns with silos, full of people who believe in the verbal accuracy of the old testament. The Middle West is so overpowering that one hardly dares think of it much, like Antarctica, or interstellar space; but soon the land will begin to tilt up and we shall climb gradually all through the afternoon, and soon after midnight we’ll be in the mountains of New Mexico, seven thousand feet above this grilling heat, and some of us lying in our berths without covers will catch severe colds. The train is full of soldiers and sailors, and farm kids going out to the naval bases to be inducted: the war is still psychologically in its opening phase here. Watching them laugh and joke, or turn suddenly serious as some old hand explains the ropes, one’s heart goes to lead. And then, of course, there are the newspapers, and the car-toons, and the commentators (whose forgiveness one can only commend to the mercy of an all-knowing power): but I have learnt a little from experience and try not to wallow any more in mere futile rage. Personally, I have very very much to be thankful for. I am on my way to the country I love now like a second home: far more than I ever loved any country, except the hills and moors of north Derbyshire when I was sixteen. And I shall see Gerald, and Chris Wood, and Denny Fouts, and lots of other friends. And I shall swim in the Pacific, which is like dying and turning into sunshine and foam. And I shall be able to relax for a few weeks, without correcting anybody’s prepositions and tenses.

And then? Well, I have signed the necessary forms and am now registered as a conscientious objector, which means that, with more or less delay, according to the decisions of the draft tribunal, I shall probably be sent to a work-camp. I have volunteered, as I believe I told you in my last pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 106

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letter, to go in an ambulance unit to China, but it seems to be established as a precedent that one must spend at least some time in the work-camps first: and maybe, if public opinion wishes it, we must stay there altogether.

I hope I am prepared for whatever happens along this line: I try to be: but one is generally less prepared than one thinks. However, right now, I’m hardly worrying at all.

Some day, I will try to write about Haverford. There was so much of it that I never got around to describing it to anybody in a letter. Central Europe could hardly have supplied a second such all-star team of individualistic, neurocratic [ sic] virtuosi: there were days when I could have signed an order for total pogrom without flicking an eyelid: and yet nearly all of them were extraordinarily sympathetic, all were fascination, and, when I felt strong enough, I loved them dearly.

And Caroline Norment, our Irish directress—what was one to make of her? Superficial observers called her a phoney old ham, a Hitler, an octo-pus. True, it was impossible to speak to her before breakfast without unleashing a typhoon; true, she yielded to her appetite for tragedy until, in the last two months, she couldn’t enter a room without playing either (i) the heartbroken mother of congenital idiots bravely fighting back her tears with a smile while the poor little slobbering things pluck at her sleeves and pester her with meaningless questions, or (ii) King Oedipus emerging blinded from the palace at the very end of the disaster, slowly raising his hands to his streaming eyeholes, slowly letting them fall. But all the same I have met very few people who could cope with very difficult tired pes-simistic middle[-]aged middleclass aliens the way she can: she has an absolute genius for it. And I am really very fond of her indeed. I guess I naturally like octopi. In the midst of the tempest, I was often reminded of dear Berthold Viertel, yelling blue murder at Gaumont-British.26 He is very happy and busy and well, bless him, organizing Goethe evenings in New York. Nobody else seems to have had the obvious idea of presenting the best of German culture to the German-speaking members of the popula-tion. It is a huge success. Not only refugees come, but very considerable numbers of second-generation German-Americans who have kept up their language and like to speak and hear it but have been inhibited from doing so lately because of the popular idea that all such meetings must be Bund-meetings, and therefore disloyal. Meanwhile Salka writes movies, and so does Peter, the second son (did you ever read his beautiful novel “The Canyon”?) but very soon he’ll be in the Army.27

Wystan I saw last Monday: he has been staying in the neighbourhood of Haverford. He has been expecting to be drafted last week, but the board held him up another month on some technicality, and this was really heaven[-]sent pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 107

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luck as now he reckons he’ll be able to finish his Christmas Oratorio, which I believe is the best thing he’s ever done. He says his ambition is to be sent to England as an American soldier, and then behave insufferably in London literary circles, chewing gum and talking about “us Yanks.”

I wrote to Klaus about your article but got no reply. I’m not sure if it was ever printed or not, but quite sure you’ll get no money for it now, as Decision has packed up for good. I am hoping to get hold of your Virginia Woolf essay. Many people, including Wystan, tell me how good it was. Wish I could hear your broadcasts.

All my love to you. And to May and Bob. I’d love to see Robin again now

[that] he’s bigger. Why can’t they ship the whole lot of you over: I’d even be content if I could choose a dozen: but no doubt I’d pick the ones Britain needs most.

As always, lovingly,

your

Christopher

* * *

25-7-42

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

This is not too bad for I was thinking twice of you yesterday and today receive your letter. Joe took me into a certain locality, when enter Brian Howard, looking flat [?] and thin, and we exchanged a few civilities: that always brings back Amsterdam to me, for there I first met him.28 Later in the evening I was thinking I would ask your mother for your latest address: but I suppose this is not two thoughts but one thought. Brian told me that you were sitting in a tent in a desert. Untrue. And that Gerald and Aldous were sitting in a temple with an observatory on top. Untrue? Your letter made me feel very happy. But also very provincial, and it is part of the psy-chology of this war that everyone, sooner or later, will come to feel provincial; your lads in the train, going out to the great clear conflict as they thought, hadn’t got to this yet.

Previous to that meeting with Joe and Brian, I called on Day Lewis in the M.O.I.29 He wants to remain there, doing important work, and it seemed just possible I might be able to pull a string over this. I don’t often see him. Lunch, previous to that, with Roger Senhouse.30 Which brings me back to Bob the night before. He arrived with a toothache and a record pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 108

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called the Big Noise from Winnetken [?]. The toothache went off, and so did the record, fairly well: I complained of its thematic poverty. Bob, mashing potatoes around onions and feeling better, argued that rhythm is all that matters. Then we took to drink.

It is now decided that May gives up her job at the West London in the autumn, and that Robin comes home to them. But Bob is longing to go and fight, so I dunno. Nothing seems to fit. Luckily for me, indeed for us all, the police won’t release him, so we all go steadily forward. Even Ted—dim Ted and dimmer Vi—are in the group.

I keep reading about the Roman Empire from about 370 to 450, and seeking parallels with the present. Incidentally I get a lot of fun (from the letters of St Jerome for instance) and a lot of beauty out of illustrated books (Wilpert’s Mosaics; Peirce & Tylers L’Art Byzantine).31 But I wish Gerald was here to talk about it. He would tell me where the parallels stop, and why, and he might say something illuminating on the topic of chastity. I cannot understand why, for several hundreds of years, all the more sensitive people thought going to bed was wrong.

I don’t know how I am, which you will wish to know. After the news of Torquay I looked and felt like a very old man for a little, but that premonition has passed.32 Have been away more than usual lately—weekend to Sassoon, to John Simpson[,] and the Wilsons with Bob, and to the Bells and Leonard last week—L[eonard]. is much the same, though encamped amongst piles of Virginia’s bombed library from London. V[irginia] seems always in the next room. I can never get clear in my mind as to whether she was right or wrong to go: at any rate she gave us something to think about.33 I once told you dear Christopher that I might one day go mad (running slowly in large circles with my head down—an unhelpful spectacle and easily handled by the authorities). I don’t feel any extra inclination to do this, but must be beware of melancholy as you of rage. Wonder if you’ll get to China. Please write again on getting this. It helps. I owe Gerald a letter. Give him my love, and lie a lot in the sea. I haven’t even seen it (until at Leonard’s, faintly) since the war began. There’s provincialism! William, like Day Lewis, overworked in his office. He came here for two lovely days not long ago, and was [. . . ?] looking down at the grass at insects. [the following written in margin of front side of letter:] Yes, I read the Curyon

[Caryon?] and broadcasted on it. Lovely.—Do hope that Wystan will lend me his chewing gum when he gets over here as a Yank. I wish that I, like Britten, could get America into my landscape a little.

[written on top of the front page:] Love from Morgan [underlined three times, twice in red ink], which would otherwise be lost in this shuffle.

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* * *

28.12-42

As from: West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

Your health was drunk first of anyone’s at Bob’s party yesterday. We had roast goose, plum pudding, and lots of wine to drink with. Later on we toasted Joe, William, John Simpson, and other absents, but you seemed uppermost in our hearts, and Ted and Vi, whom you may have forgotten, recalled how competently you nursed their baby at Dover. The party was a little marred by May developing a sick headache, but she rallied towards the close and your galloping pony from China looked down. (You have many here who love you [and count upon your love.])34

I have a clearer idea of your outlook (no—I mean inlook) partly from your letter, partly from your article in John Lehman’s Penguin,35 and partly from a few words with Benjamin Britten. I say, how nice he is. We have not fixed a real meeting yet, engagements swirl between, but I talked to him at Cambridge, and ate some food with him and Pears after their Michelangelo at the National Gallery.36 I have also seen some photographs of you at John L’s—why wasn’t I given one? They are good—and a drawing of you by Paul Cadmus: not good, but I was pleased to think you were in touch with him, for he once wrote me the nicest letter any stranger ever has. Do you still see him? If so, convey kindness and cordialities.

Do you still see anyone? For all I know you are in some training camp, and this is the sort of doubt which suddenly checks a pen. It may be enquir-ing so widely off the mark. I’ll return to myself. I know where I am: on a chair: in my (Chiswick) flat: and on the tiled mantel are: three bits of holly, two green plates, a little rowing cup of Bob’s, two Chinese wine cups of yours, and a clock which has just struck 1.00. I ought to go to bed. I lunched today with William at Victor’s, now confined to the ground floor but otherwise unchanged: then I bought a sponge with difficulty; then had tea with an Austrian refugee—an authority on Byzantine Mosaics. [S]o we interned him in Canada. Then I got back here—difficulty again: no trolly-bus, and black pitcher than black—and have since been conning the Beveridge Report.37 I speak to and with a Search Light Unit about it on my way home tomorrow. I go to them every week. I am not the least suited to the subjects they want, but anything which interrupts army-routine is mer-itorious. Actual Christmas I spent with my mother. She is well, but of course very old, and restless. I will post this letter when I get home.

I go on broadcasting to India. I do it for George Orwell now, and am getting to like him, but he is strange and I dislike something in what he writes without being able to chase it into daylight. Stephen I don’t often pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 110

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see. His new wife is well spoken of, but not in my judgement anything of a pianist. (Each sentence I write has a “but” in it. That is because I went to a university.) Occasionally, and in likely places, I see Mr N—[Norris]: but we do not contact.

Did I tell you I have been reading about the 4th and 5th centuries? I wondered, and still wonder, whether they resemble the times we live in now. Did they contain Christophers, Geralds, Benjamins, and Morgans?

Oh by the way they did—a Morgan, I mean: Pelagius means “Morgan,” and he provided a heresy to which I should not object to subscribe.

I must write to Gerald. If possible, give him my love.

Morgan

* * *

[early winter 1943?]38

I hope no more will go during the next month or two.

Lionel Fielden, with whom I lunched lately, said the Breughels had vanished from Brussels.39 Had you heard? Were put into a lorry by Belgians, he said, and never seen again. I remember seeing them with you, and asking you, in a larger room near them, to become my literary executor. (Released you since) I feel flustered that these Brueghels should be lost.

The cold is endless—ever since Christmas. This week I go to town to broadcast on Stefan Zweig40—sorry that this letter should end much as it began, but it can’t be helped. Come and see me if possible—it would do me good.

Ever so much love again from

Morgan

* * *

7-6-43

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

Things were bad during the past month and I nearly wrote and whined across the Atlantic to you. Permitted by Police regulations, Bob volunteered for almost certain death, for the post of engineer on a bomber. May was in tears, Robin said “But Daddy, aren’t you happy at home?” [T]he pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 111

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Board recommended him specially, physique perfect, and then Christopher would you believe it they discovered that his eyes are of the type which go completely blind at 25,000 feet and so it has gone by like a nightmare. He will volunteer again for anything when he has the chance, but anyhow he won’t be able to go up into that filthy sky. His argument—divested of some boyish frills—is that he has hated Fascism for years, and that thousands of people who don’t mind it in the least have been forced to go and fight against it and be killed; so why shouldn’t he fight? Not a bad argument.

Well I am glad I didn’t whine to you, but glad I thought of doing so. You can think now either that things are O.K. or that I have learnt how to handle them. William has been wonderful.

I don’t really know what else to talk to you about besides Bob, we have been parted too long, and I reach you easiest through that deeply-cut channel. I know one can’t genuinely reach anyone through anything, though. So I had better continue with some scrap of news. John Lehmann, whom I don’t often see, has just been so nice to me and taken me to the Ballet. He showed me a very gay and exciting letter of yours about a book you were at, and about a book of Lincoln K (forget how the name finishes but like the man) which you had put him on to. Life here is very boring geographically—one can’t move about, or rather can only move with great trouble and arrangements with hotels; and one can’t, without even greater trouble, turn from a continental gadabout into a cosmic one. It is boring gastro-nomically also, and like our two pussies I am usually meat-hungry. Wine isn’t so bad, for I never drank much and now drink all I can, and that comes to the same. Do you remember the champagne dinner in an upper room on your birthday at Ostende? That was a strange visit. It crackles up most of it like burnt paper, but here and there a word stands out.

I see it is 1.00 A.M. I have been mowing the lawns and feel sleepy. Lovely lovely garden, and the wood, much of which I planted in the twenties, has turned this summer into a wild young man who no longer needs my help.

Oh, before I forget. Richard wrote me a kind and unexpected letter, telling me how you were, and what he thought you were feeling.41 I didn’t get a great deal out of it except the kindness, the much kindness. John Simpson I see as much as I can. And I have a new friend whom I like extremely—

Hsiao Chi’en is his name. He is studying myself and Virginia [Woolf] at Kings. And I also have a new girl acquaintance—her name is Hazel Earelly-Wilmot—who works in the Czechoslovak Institute. Thus, thus, do I avert the cosmic. If I realised that I was penned up, a Britisher, in Britain, I should “go mad.” Love to Gerald.

Love as always from

Morgan

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* * *

1946 Ivar Avenue

June 21st. [1943]

Hollywood 28. Calif.42

Dearest Morgan,

Your letter, dated June 7th, just arrived: nice and quick. I must write by return, while it’s “warm.” That’s what I did in answer to your last, but it sank with that clipper which foundered in Lisbon harbour, and tho I tried several times to communicate, the channel was somehow blocked, and I wrote stiff cold literary notes which I tore up. Today, however, it’s wide open. Gosh, that must have been awful for you about Bob. Thank heavens he finally didn’t go. I wish I was a real Yogi and could utter authoritative prophecies that he will die at the age of 101 in bed, though, actually, nothing would surprise me less. My experience, such as it is, all points to the fact that those who are always volunteering and plunging ahead tend to survive. As for Bob’s reasons—yes, they are good ones. But, among his friends, let him not forget Heinz. One can build arguments sky-high, and very firmly, but the foundations lie deeper. Heinz is really most of mine. I begin to know this more and more. It’s the old story of Sodom and G. Because everybody is Heinz to someone. The Gita says this is no argument, because

“Both he who thinks the Self to be the slayer, and he who thinks It to be slain, know nothing. It cannot slay, neither can It be slain.” But that, as you’d say, it too “Cosmic” for me at present. For Bob too, I guess.

Yes, my letter to John Lehmann was gay, and I am gay most of the time: but I also know quite well that this is a pleasant period, with a time-limit to it, during which I have to prepare some steel cables which won’t snap when strained. I honestly believe that I now believe in “God” (can’t explain what I mean by “God”) and that I rely on Him, and will turn to Him next time things get tough. But, of course, I have absolutely no way of being sure of this, or of what help I’d receive in, say, a crisis like yours; or of whether this belief of mine mightn’t go away just as mysteriously as it came. If you can fall out of love you can fall out of faith (but can you fall out of love?) or anyhow, William James says so.

Swami is away just now: one of his brother-monks got sick in the East and he won’t be back till mid-July. I do the ritual worship most days, which is probably familiar to you: the flowers, the brass bowls, and incense, and candles and perfume and bell. And the Sanskrit mantrams. I think of you very often while I am doing it—you especially, because everything Indian suggests you to me—and sometimes I talk to the Lord about you.

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wrap I’m wearing, and the flower on the top of my head. “Look at Chris in drag!” And I can see you at lunch with us: you and Swami warming to each other; and you enjoying the curry, which is good.

I have a feeling I must know Hsiao Chi’en. Believe he wrote to me once, from Cambridge. And, oddly enough, Eardly-Wilmot is the name of one of my Mother’s greatest friends. She was the wife of a brother-officer of my Father’s, who was killed in the last war. Hazel is a relative, maybe? This one was Mildred, and she had two very attractive children, now grown-up, Anthony and Joan.

Gerald is down at Laguna Beach. Very busy with religious groups and gatherings. Haven’t seen him in a long time. Aldous is finishing his novel in the desert at their little ranch. Willie Maugham wrote an affectionate letter from New York. He has just published a drug-store anthology of modern literature, not bad, but a few inclusions almost unbelievable, and I didn’t agree with his remarks about you. Lincoln Kirstein and Pete Martinez are both in the army. Pete, you know, is co-author of the Mexican novel I like so much. He and Swami would probably be your favorite people in the U.S.

Well, goodbye for now. Do keep writing often, and I will too.

Love as always from

Christopher

And to Bob too, much.

* * *

West Hackhurst—Abinger Hammer—Dorking

23-10-43

Dearest Christopher,

The enclosed it is hoped will reach you about Christmas. You were spoken of with love. It was a party given by Bob and me in my flat to Leo and Tom whom I extricated for a couple of days from Dover. I don’t think they had been to London since the war started. Joe put up Tom at Putney and I had Leo. The only other person was Margery Wilson, the sister of John Simpson’s idiot, and as she did not know you she has not signed. Bob suddenly looking at the door said “if only Christopher would walk in . . . . ” We are all changing, and it is not always true that a:b::a+x:b–y, but it is oftener truer of people than of ciphers. Thank goodness. The party was a big and grand one for these days. A ham in a tin, which an American lady sent me three years ago because she thought genius was starving, was opened, and found not to be bad. May made manes [?] of cheese straws, Bob potato salad, and we drank real sherry, unreal burgundy, and one bottle of champagne.

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I understand your ritual and drag easily. The universe is very odd, and we do not recognise this enough. 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. When I was so upset about Bob’s being taken from me, I seemed to get through it all alone—first behaving as an Englishman should, then breaking down, and then behaving as a human being. That last stage ended when he was rejected on account of his eyes, and now I really don’t know how I behave. Perhaps you will write more to me about this “trust-in-God”

business, but I don’t think I shall be able to catch on.

Dinner party at Stephen’s. Tea with John Lehmann. M. Fouchet, editor of Fru [?] French Fontaine, to lunch, très parisien, né en Venezuela, and full of gossip about Gide.43 Slump in Arnold Bennett. Attacks on Milton failing. Do you know anything about Mark Twain? Am rereading Ulysses.44

When, where, how often, and how have you crossed (i) the Mississippi (ii) the Missouri? Have you ever visited Cairo or St Louis? This cannot reach me in time for my broadcast to India on Nov. 4th. Still I should be glad to know.

My most important news is a revisit to Rooksnest, Stevenage, Herts (the original of Howard’s End).45 It is very strange. The strength of such feelings. (I don’t think you know much about them—Richard probably does.) This house really bores me though I shall be upset when I have to quit it. I must go down now and have some Oxo [?] with my mother in the drawing room. It is pouring wet day but mild, and the leaves of the tulip tree, the guelder [rose], [. . . ?], the Japanese Cherry and the azaleas are all lovely different colours.

I will write again before long. I have not written to you for a long time, but I think of you and talk of you a lot.

Love as always from Your affectionate Morgan

[enclosed Postcard:]

Christmas 1943

With love to Christopher from:

[signed names:]

Leo Charlton

Tom Whitchelo

May Buckingham

William Plomer

Joe Ackerley

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Bob Buckingham

Morgan Forster

Oct. 20th 1943

9 Arlington Park Mansions

Chiswick W.4.

* * *

Vedanta Society of Los Angeles

1946 Ivar Avenue

Hollywood, California

July 27 [1943]

Dearest Morgan,

If this ever reaches you, it will be by the hand of Bill Roehrich, who needs no other introduction because you will like him, too.

As always,

your loving

C.

* * *

1946 Ivar Avenue

November 27. [1943]

Hollywood 28. Calif.

Dearest Morgan,

Your letter intended for Xmas arrived nearly a week ago: you were pes-simistic. The mails aren’t that bad. I loved getting it, and the card with signatures. Yes, wouldn’t it be funny if I did walk in? I might, I suppose: if this war goes on long enough or stops. What should I say as my opening line?

How would you answer?

At Xmas you will get a parcel from me, I hope. It was guaranteed to be delivered then. It will probably have the most futile collection of oddments in it—three genuine San Diego shrimps, a piece of scrapple from Philadelphia, one Idaho potato, and so forth. Talking of geography, I have never visited Cairo or St. Louis. (I was once in Memphis). Not counting our journey from Vancouver down through Canada, via Chicago to N.Y. in 1938, I have crossed the continent five times, always by Chicago except once, when we went down by bus to New Orleans and up through Texas. So that’s 5 Mississippi crossings. Am vague about the Missouri because it’s at right angles.

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About God helping us. “Helping” is [a] misleading word, perhaps. Let’s say, for example, that there is something inside you which is larger than your personality, and which has some kind of access to what is outside you, just as the smallest inlet of the sea anywhere has access to all the oceans.

Call it your genius, if you like. You half sarcastically acknowledged its existence when you burnt those stories in order to get on with The Passage to India. (of course, that could be written off to innate Puritanism: but I think that’s superficial.)46 Well, this “genius” lives in you all the time, and it is not merely literary. Literature is only a function of it. It is there, neither friendly nor hostile, not in the least “sorry” for your troubles or “made angry” by your failures or “pleased” by your successes. It just exists, and you can communicate with it or leave it alone, as you please. Communicating with

“it” consists in realizing that you are it—or rather, it is you. The only “you”

there is: because Morgan Forster is only real in a temporary sense, like a cloud or a storm. While you are communicating with your “genius” you lose all sense of being an individual Morgan Forster, and so you lose all Morgan’s fears, doubts, desires etc. etc. You are just as much Bob, or Joe, or William, as you are Morgan—because they too have inlets leading to the ocean, and you are the ocean. And that “helps.” In fact it’s about the only thing in life which does help. Giving soup to Czechs, etc., is just a way of saying, by token action: I know you have a drop of the ocean inside you, too. Otherwise, to hell with the soup. It might as well be arsenic.

I wish you would write me about Stephen [Spender]. I know so little about his present life, wife, ideas etc.

Am very much occupied with our translation of the Gita, which is going to be quite curious, partly verse, partly prose. I never thought I would turn into a poet in my old age.

Later. Reading through what I’ve written about God etc. I feel bored. It’s so badly put. Full of religious clichés. And as always I feel: how impossible to say these things directly, much less write them. If I saw you, maybe I could convey something which was nearer the actuality—while I was talking about the weather, or the poetry of Blunden, or Prague.47 After all, what can you tell me in so many words about Bob? You can only talk around it.

But I get something of what you feel.

Am reading Lorca—Spender, and La Chartreuse de Parme (which gives one a glimpse of what postwar Europe could be, if the worst comes to the worst).48 Wystan is making a Tennyson anthology, and a collected works.

We wait with the greatest interest for Willie Maugham’s new novel, which is reputed to deal with mysticism in India.49 It is alleged to be the most expensive film-property he has ever written. Isn’t he a wonder? Aldous gets nicer and nicer: so truly kind and full of thoughtful attentions to everybody. He pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 117

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expects to finish his novel soon. The sun shines and shines. The gas-ration decreases. We dig new flower-beds. The dummy Santa Claus figures are up all along the Boulevard; and a plaster snow-man. I have an ingrowing toe-nail and a bad tooth: otherwise am well. The war, as Hemingway says, is there.

Excuse this lousy letter. I must get something off to you today. Love to everybody. And write again soon.

Always your loving

Christopher

* * *

14-12-43

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

You do send me good things—Bill Roehrick, and now I get a delicious food parcel: most welcome butter, and other delicacies. The dried bananas are new to me, and we shall have some for Christmas. You have sent me a letter also. But I will begin with Bill, who completely bears out your note about him, and speaks of you with affection such as goes straight to my heart. I have only seen him twice so far: we lunched and he took me to his show and Stephen took us to tea at the Ritz afterwards, and the next morning we went about to book shops. I like him immensely, we have written to each other since, and all being well shall meet in London. At present they are on tour, and as he will be in Birmingham for Christmas I have put him in touch with John Simpson. He has such good observation too: few people would have overheard one lady saying to another in the Ritz “We still manage to wash the cow all over everyday.”

I wonder if a p.c. reached you, or will reach you: it was signed by Bob, May, Leo, Tom, William, Joe and self in my flat, and took you our love. “If that door would only open and Christopher come in!” said Bob, but it was a good party otherwise, and the biggest I have ever given—Margery Wilson, John Simpson’s idiot’s sister was there too. I had made an effort and asked Leo up for two nights from Dover, and he made a greater effort and accepted, and Joe invited Tom. Leo & Tom also managed to get down here to lunch with my mother. They were fairly well and very nice.

The friend I miss even more than you is Charles Mauron for the reason that he is working out, in his blindness and the darkness of France, some connection between mysticism and aesthetics with the help of Chinese pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 118

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philosophy: I should be able to absorb this, I think, better than I could absorb the connection you are working out, with the help of India, between mysticism and conduct. (Heavens what a sentence! Quite Geraldean in its elaboration and misleadingness.50 It makes me say, incidentally, that I like Charles better than you, which I don’t, and that I absorb connections, which I can’t). Returning to you, thank you very much dear Christopher for the account you give of your ritual. That I do follow, for I know that the universe is a queer place and that ritual is a way and perhaps the best way of acknowledging this. What I don’t follow is your belief that when you are in trouble, as you soon may be like all of us, God will help you. You may be right, of course, but I can’t imagine the belief. It is too far beyond my powers, and I can’t connect it with ritual.

I still dispose my time between here and London, and make new acquaintances still, mostly of foreign nationality. I keep pretty well—staler and older, but managing to blame both these defects on to the war. Bob looks older too. I shall get Christmas meal off their goose I hope. Robin is learning to play chess.

With love as ever from

Morgan

* * *

1946 Ivar Avenue.

January 22. [1944]

Hollywood 28. Calif.

Dearest Morgan,

Thank you for your letter. I am very glad to hear that the food parcel (and Bill Roehrich) arrived in time for Xmas. I would give a good deal to have seen you all at tea at the Ritz—or is the Ritz not ritzy any more? Yes, indeed, I got, and shall treasure, the signed postcard from your party. I thanked you for it, I’m pretty sure, in one of my letters, so fear this can’t have reached you. It is hard to know just how much gets through nowadays—except to Mr Norris, who always begins: “I received your letter of August 1st on November 23rd. Cannot understand this delay. My letter of March 4th to you should have arrived, but you don’t mention it. Please let me know about this at once . . . ” and so on. In fact, most of his letter is usually taken up with discussing when and why and how the last one will, did, could, or should have arrived. His conversion to Catholicism—a theme before which Balzac himself might hesitate—is still only referred to somewhat obliquely. Do you ever see him now?

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I was also much pleased to have a copy of Stephen’s new poems among my [C]hristmas mail. They are very interesting, I think; though I didn’t altogether follow the philosophy involved. Nor the exact tone of voice in which the title “spiritual exercises” was used. Ironical? Apparently not. S.

inscribed my copy “from the untransformed Stephen,” which also needs some explanation. I have written to him, of course.

I gave your address to “Pete” Martinez, the Americo-Mexican boy whose memoirs Lincoln Kirstein wrote in “For My Brother.” I hope you will meet or have met him. He is something quite special—one of the really unique people I have known. He may have left by now, however.

You say you “can’t imagine” the belief that God could help you. But if

“God” is inside you, surely there must be some way to contact him, and surely contacting him would be “a help”? I don’t have to tell a person like yourself that there is something inside you infinitely greater than what you ordinarily think of as Morgan Forster. As a matter of fact, you have asked Its help dozens of times—whenever you sat down to write anything. No artist can possibly doubt that this power exists, can he? Aren’t we just misunderstanding each other in a purely verbal way?

I suppose one could argue that this power only exists in each individual for certain purposes, or to a limited extent. And of course there is still the problem of “evil” which Buddha refused to solve, and which [C]hristianity solves much too glibly. And the equally mysterious problem of “grace,” or whatever you like to call it. Any theory can be exploded, because all intellectual truth is only relative. But I come back to the empirical. Aren’t you, in practice, aware of this power? And how do you explain the saints? There are an awful lot of them. And such different temperaments. Are they all crazy, or mistaken?

You say that Mauron is working out a connection between “mysticism and aesthetics” and that I am working out a connection between “mysticism and conduct.” But I’d say they were three corners of a triangle: or maybe it is a much more complicated figure. They all confirm each other on different planes. What is conduct, anyway? Behaving as if some set of values were true. And by behaving in this way you actually make them true.

But, conversely, if you believe in a certain set of values, the appropriate conduct will follow. (I think the above are some of the most risky general-isations I have ever made: but you will perhaps get something from them impressionistically, at any rate.)

Did I tell you in my last letter how much I admire William’s autobiography?51 My Mother sent it me for Christmas. Am now just starting Willie’s The Razor’s Edge, but can’t say anything yet. At any rate, the subject is interesting.

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This weekend I saw, for the first time, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

Do you know it? It’s still wonderful, in spite of the fascist racial nonsense about negroes. There’s a kind of Tolstoyan simplicity in the contrasts: the two schoolboy friends from the North and South who meet again on the battlefield and fall dead in each other’s arms; and the Southern colonel coming home from the war, and the killing of Lincoln, and the attempted rape and suicide of Mae Marsh, and Lillian Gish’s romance: everything told like a story to a child, without any impressionism. And subtitles like: “True to the stern code of her Father’s honour, she sought refuge within the opal gates of death.” (Why opal?) The movies have lost all that lyrical quality now.

Aldous told me this quotation from D.H. Lawrence which I didn’t know: “The dark stinging centrality of the duck on the muddy pond.”

Mother, I’ve been stung by a duck! A good entrance-line for a character in a play. In fact, the Nobel Prize should be awarded to anybody who could write a play in which this seemed quite natural.

Must stop now.

Very much love to you as always, and to Bob,

Christopher

* * *

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer, Dorking

10-2-44

Dearest Christopher,

The enclosed will partly explain itself. I have quickly become attached to Bill [Roerick], and am distressed that he is likely to go to Africa very soon.

I would have liked much more talk with him: when people have so much charm I am never content until I have got to the bottom of their charm.

Something solid underlies it, I doubt not, but want to know. Such heaps of lovely things you have sent me— two parcels, not one, arrived and at our party we had sandwiches made with your butter, ham and sardines. Robin was very good, sat on bed sorting stamps, then played chess with me. Bill and I lunched in town next day, and he sang two lovely folk songs as we walked round Leicester Square. What a turn for evil civilisation has taken.

How glib I sound saying so. Bill manages to see John Simpson at B[irming]ham and Forrest Reid at Belfast. But I expect he has written to you. He has seen a good deal of the Kenneth Clarks in London.

The dolour and heaviness which invade one when writing to a friend who has been long far away—discount them when reading this letter. I was pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 121

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moved specially by two things you said in yours. One of them was your reminder to me how I had burned some stories in order to finish A Passage to India. That sacrifice still seems to me right, still inexplicable for I wasn’t and am not ashamed of them. I will try to connect it on to “God.” Your other remark was about my feeling for Bob. It made me realise that he (and he only) can make me feel a shit without saying so, or even thinking so.

There does seem—in both the above—a reaching out into some sort of sea.

Paul Cadmus, who did a bad picture of you, has done a very nice one for me. He writes very pleasant letters. What sort of a chap is he? He has asked me to get into touch with Lincoln Kirstein’s Mexican friend, but no success so far.

It is cold here and there is no gas[,] no electricity here, scarcely any coal, very little oil, and green wood. So war suffering is in this direction. London has plenty of everything as far as I can see, and there is no gas rationing such as you have been worried with.

My aunt Rosalie, whom you may remember from Dover, is here and she and mother send you messages. I have become a “good”—i.e. acceptable—

broadcaster did I tell you, having made my reputation on the Indian service, and there is a clamour to use me on the Home [broadcasting service]

to preach culture. Preaching (with me) would soon lead to compromise and falsity, so I go careful[ly]. The things I want to talk about, like the destruction in Italy, I shouldn’t be allowed to say. We are all crouched around the drawing room fire, the ladies are trying to mend the knees of my drawers, but arguing so much that I am losing my sense of gratitude. I will finish and take this to the post. Best love to Gerald when you see him—yes, I owe him a letter. My good wishes to Aldous, also to Willie

[Sommerset] Maugham. How is Wystan? This piece of paper is from a present given me by Miss Phillips & Miss Hayles. They live in Devonshire now.

Much much love from

Morgan

[Enclosed Postcard:]

With love to Christopher from:

[signed names:]

May Buckingham

Stephen Spender

Joe Ackerley

Bob Buckingham

Robert M. Buckingham (Robin)

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Bill Roerick

Natasha Spender

Morgan Forster

9 Arlington Park Mansions

Chiswick W.4.

February the 8th 1944

* * *

28-2-44

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

Yours of 22-1-44 has been with me some little time and merits answer.

Your previous letter of 27-?-43 took a much longer time to come. Which brings me to Mr Norris. I had not heard of his conversion to Catholicism, but Tony Hyndman, into whom I ran in a tube, said that he was violently anti-Semitic. This, and other rumours, has caused me not to see Mr N.

though I am false to myself in not doing so[.] I ought to examine his depths for myself, since I got amusement out of his shallows in the continental days. Occasionally, when I have been where perhaps I shouldn’t I have been conscious of him through the reek.

Bill Roehrick has gone, missed by many, and particularly by me, for he has gone out of his way to be serious and sweet. It is long since I have felt so close to such a young person. I don’t know how much the “well known writer” in me is important to him. Legitimately important in so far as he has been trying to make me write. He got down here for an afternoon and all loved him and the day before he left we spent ten hours together trailing about London and the Churchill Club, and got so thoroughly worn out that we could only grin at one another and say so. I have written at his introduction to Tommy Ryan. The other boy, with whom Tommy was, is killed or missing. As for Martinez, I have been hoping to hear from him, for Paul Cadmus also told him to look me up. But no one has any news of him, and perhaps he may not be in this country.

You will have read of the renewed raids. All whom you know are safe, so far as I know. Bob had his usual heroic gruesome time, and he’s been very grave since, and has changed—come nearer to your point of view over this and to mine. No further satisfaction in smashing civilians in Germany. We pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 123

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are all feeling pretty serious minded. My flat shook, and the windows and door of his flew about. I hope America will never have anything as bad, and I hope Poland etc. hope that we shall never suffer as they have. It is a ladder of misery, in which each rung is tempted to keep to itself, ignore the rung below it, criticise the rung above.

Yes, I’m aware of something in myself at times which isn’t myself, and which Stephen wanders towards in his poem. I don’t like to call it God nor do I think it wisely so called, for the reason that the word “God” has kept such bad company and hypnotises its users in wrong directions. I even queried your saying that it was infinitely greater than oneself: different, yes, but one hasn’t the apparatus for measuring size.

I returned from London the day before yesterday with one of my pleurisy threats, and since then have mostly been sitting, quite well really, in the drawing room with my mother, and getting muddled and fidgety.

And I’m not content with my remarks on God. When the weather improves, and I can be alone, I will write about him again. Do you like Blake? (I do) Do you give good marks to generosity, tenderness? In what set of values are we to believe if generosity and tenderness are to colour our conduct?

Yes, William’s autobiography is splendid. I have written a long thing for me (40,000 words or so) about this house, and it’s amusing in parts, but dispirited and scrappy, and anyhow couldn’t be published because it criticises the living. I wrote partly as a social document, partly to read to the Memoir Society.

Much love and Bob will be sending his. He is altering deeply but you would like him. I wish he would paint or even read but know by analogy that he can’t go farther than gadgetting [ sic].

Morgan

Two lovely food parcels, let me repeat, reached me from you at Christmas.

* * *

1946 Ivar Avenue

March 16. [1944]

Hollywood 28 Calif.

Dearest Morgan,

I am sitting writing this against the wall on the beach. Denny Fouts, whom you would probably like as much as I do, is studying anatomical German—part of his work at the University, where he has just started, pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 124

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being free of the draft with a heart-murmur. Anatomical German, incidentally, is much easier than anatomical English: the occipital, for example, is just called the Hinterkopf. I suppose this proves something—but as Denny has to learn both words anyway, the interest is somewhat academic.

It’s really a very cold day, owing to a wind off the snow-mountains, but this wall is so hot that I feel quite sick. Five yards form [ sic] it, we’d be shiv-ering. This also proves something.

No doubt Bill has told you all about Tommy Ryan, and Bruce

Wadsworth, his friend, who is missing. In fact, he says you may be meeting Tommy. I hope you do. You can help him so much—more than you realize.

When I heard about Bruce, I felt miserable all day—though I barely know him: we’d met twice. He was crazy about old houses. I wanted him to see Marple, but he never got there.52

Twelve years last Monday since I met Heinz. He is so vividly with me, much of the time, that I’m surprised I don’t know, telepathically, whether he is dead or alive, somewhere. But I still mind where.

Have been quite busy in a literary way. The Gita translation is finished—part verse and part prose. I’m afraid the verse isn’t so hot—but the variety does seem to make the whole thing more readable. Then Aldous and I are writing a story we hope to sell to the movies. Prostitution? No—

it is rather good, and the kind of story which is best told as a film. I’ll let you know more about this later. Thirdly, there is a story I began to write last year, and have just reopened, about working with Viertel at Gaumont-British. This is quite a problem: it has to be written as historical fiction, and should be called: “A Tale of the ’34,” or some such title.53

Viertel himself left for New York last night. He has written a play about the Nazis—at the cost of Herculean snortings, groans and carpet-pac-ings—and now he hopes it will be produced. My fear is that he will be too late. Such things are so quickly out of fashion.

Auden is well, busy teaching and writing. He just sent me a most curious production—a commentary on “The Tempest,” in poetry and prose.

Haven’t had time to digest it, yet.

Paul Cadmus you would like, I’m pretty sure. But I can’t say I know him awfully well. He is gay, affectionate, talkative, intelligent—but there is a mysterious part of him which sometimes paints a picture of a massacre, a riot or rape, so hellishly ugly and perverse, that one doesn’t know what to say or do, except vomit. On being expostulated with, he obviously doesn’t understand why he does it himself, and talks unconvincingly about being influenced by Bosch, etc. The rest of his work is represented quite well by the drawing of me and the picture he sent you.

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Is civilisation really decaying—or is it that, as we get older, we notice it more? The pre-1914 was an obscene mess, in a different way. And as for the 20’s!

I am much worried by the news of another bad raid on London. It’s so impossible to evaluate these things by the newspaper. Do take care of yourself.

Very much love, as always, and to Bob,

Christopher

* * *

[May 2?–9, 1944]

[Patterdale, Westmoreland, England]

Dearest Christopher,

I take up, to answer your letters of March 16 & 28, the pens of Dorothy Wordsworth and Canon Raunsleigh: that is to say, I am in the Lakes, and it is raining. It did not do so for the first days of my visit, and I had a very good time alone, walking slowly all day without fatigue. It is the first time I have been out of the London area for 2 or 3 years. Travelling is so awkward that one needs an incentive, and this was found in a lecture I undertook at Glasgow. I am at Patterdale, the head of Ullswater. It has been a lovely change from Surrey and London—the last named looks a dreadful muddle. Bob was in some bad raids—he wormed his way into a cake of rubble whose plums were human beings, cut through the back of a wardrobe, handed out the dresses, cut through the front, handed on [out?] morphis-pills from a doctor whose hand showed through the floor, and extricated an old lady and carried her in his arms to safety, and she calling on Holy Mary all the time. I took Robin a fortnight back to Natasha’s [Spender’s wife] recital. He sat between me and Joe, was very good and sensible over the music and shook hands or bowed to what is left of the Bloomsbury elite—Beryl de Zoete and Sybil Colefax-Wraiths54—offered toffee to Elizabeth Bowen, and had popped into his own mouth a spoonful of demerers [?] sugar by Stephen to steady his nerves. The concert was a success—lovely Schumann, smashing Ravel. Beethoven less successful. Oh and that reminds me, I have a bone to pick with the C sharp minor quartet—

easy enough, for it consists mainly of little bones. I cannot believe that this scrappy self-willed dispirited stuff contains the secret of happiness, and expect it was an extra piece of naughtiness on B’s part that made him say so.

It is so dark that Christopher Wordsworth can scarcely see the paper.

The sky is lighter than the earth, so a cloud must have set down on us. I am the only guest in the hotel which I first visited nearly 40 years ago, and it hasn’t much altered, except to become more comfortable and to send a pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 126

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grandson to Rugby.—Ought one, by the way, as one gets older, to fling about such unreturnable weights as “nearly 40 years ago”? It is a moot point, and I haven’t found a ruling. I want to be thought young, and for very good reasons. Yet I combine this wish with the heaving of silencers.

The truth probably is that neither youth nor age are bad, so one wobbles between them.

Oh the mists are lifting! May Hutchinson can see Helvellyn quite well.

Coleridge, who should have gone up it today, would be better for a little Landanum;55 disordered stomach; too much exercise? Too much food?

Landanum not to be had. I return to London tomorrow, and shall post this letter there, and perhaps add something to it when I have seen Bob. I don’t think I can write austerity stories. I did finish the memoir, rather against the grain, and the result is wry and peeved. I have now heard from Bill

[Roerick]. An interesting letter, but he makes no reference to any person, thing, or incident in this country, although he was here several months. Is this “American” or is it Bill? And does one rally him on it?

I think I shall go to the Post Office, and buy some chocolate modge[?], against Southey’s advice. It is strange that you and I should be writing in sceneries so different from each other and from ourselves—you amongst carrots and rattlesnakes, and I in this slightly holy upland of the English-speaking people. I wish we could meet. Could it have been a cousin of yours whom I saw in a shop in Shere? I know you have an aunt there, and he was rather like you to look at: very young: you would know him—if he exists—as a child.

I have been broadcasting on books that have influenced me. Bob said

“Don’t forget the negative ones” and this panned out well

NO

YES

The goodness of St. Augustine

v. Blake’s

The cleverness of Machiavelli

v. Voltaires’s

The indignation of Swift

v. Samuel Butler’s whose Erewhon I

was specially considering

The strength of Carlyle

v. Sophocles’ in the Antigone

I agree with all you say about love when I read your words, but never manage to think or feel clearly on the subject. Has love an antithesis?

Would its antithesis be hatred? I agree one can’t determine to love. But I think one can determine to realise other people exist, and if one succeeds love may come easier. Of Heinz I have often thought, and have looked at photographs of him and Bob grinning at one another on that Dutch railway car. So you have known him since March 1932. I met Bob in 1930—also March I pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 127

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think—it was the Boat Race Day. The two often occur to me together. I often expect you will meet H. again—the ordinary earthly meeting—and I am glad on that account that you didn’t stay here, as on other accounts.

Nothing from Tommy Ryan so far. I hope I shall see him.

I shall like to see your Gita translation. I read Mrs. Besant’s and got a good deal out of it. Best luck to your Viertel novel. I liked him when we met. I don’t expect I shall go to his anti-Nazi play. Most people here are fed up with them, and I am disgusted with the Lunts’ change of locale from Finland to Greece, though they acted well.

The rain redescends. Not even de Quincy would have gone for a walk with a rather Doverian gunner, and I don’t expect I shall for the gunner won’t call for me this evening.56

Susan Glaspell—I can’t remember whether she once sat on the edge of my bed at Brunswick Square or not. Norman Matson, who was closely connected with her, certainly did, and I liked him. Didn’t she once have another semi-phony play about a University? Bill lent me Wilder’s The Skin of our Teeth. Not phony, but sometimes foolish and expecting carelessness to do the job of charm.

9-5-44

This about a week later. Have reached home and the flat. Nice second letter from Bill, introducing personalities, but what is not so nice [is] my letter to Tommy Ryan returned to me[.] “Name rejected” is the alleged and mysterious cause. Meaning, I guess, that there are two of his name and that the naval address given me by Bill was not enough. Please write to him and give him my address, and we will hope to get into touch that way.

Must go and broadcast.

Love,

M.

* * *

West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, Dorking

Saturday, 16-6-44

Dearest Christopher,

I don’t suppose that pilotless planes are more dangerous than anything else, but new forms of danger make one self conscious, and I find myself waiting to get off one more letter to you. I don’t think I have written since my visit to the Lakes (Ullswater) at the beginning of May; I had been lecturing at pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 128

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Glasgow, and looked in at those lovely model mountains for 5 days. So small. But I got so tired and was so happy. I thought of you amongst carrots in huge Mexico—and now it seems to me I must have written to you since, and if I did it tells you something about my life: its lack of variety.

The Lakes will stick out for years. I wanted Bob and May to go, with [?]

Robin, when they take their holiday in August, but they have managed to hire their motor boat again. It does not move, but stays in the water between Teddington and Richmond. You get from the bank to it and back in a dinghy. I stayed a night there last summer, and the early mists rolling off the Star & Garter were certainly striking.

The windows keep shaking, my poor mother calls down for assurance, (she is very good over this hateful rubbish) and I call up that it is guns.

Probably it is. But Christopher[,] how disgusting, how difficult not to grumble in a war’s 5th year, how impossible for me to create a book. I wonder whether you, by sheer willpower, will succeed, as you intend to do.

Sun.

At this point I went to bed. What a night—cold[,] starlit and restless.

Everything far away, including the owls, and the voices of boys calling out excitedly. The house shaking itself gently for no reason. I didn’t intend to write you this kind of letter, but perhaps it is worth preserving as a document. As for news, I hear constantly from Bill, but (as I mentioned to you when last writing) my note to Tommy Ryan was returned from its official address. William [Plomer] came to a meal in the flat with us last week. I have rather lost his acquaintanceship through his overwork, and I have lost Joe’s [Ackerley] through his emotional specialisation. [R]egrettable losses, though they aren’t losses of friendship. I have had another letter from Paul Cadmus, a long one. I do think he must be very nice. His horror pictures gave me the depressed feeling that impotence does—I felt the same, more strongly, when I saw the pictures of D. H. Lawrence. I did not want to vomit. Do you know his friends the Frenchs?

Best love from

Morgan

I envy you your film work, and wish I knew more about the tricks and technicalities of that trade, so that I might spot the dishonesties in a picture with less bother and be left free to enjoy its achievements or possibilities.

* * *

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July 8. [1944]

1946 Ivar Avenue. Hollywood 28.

California.

Dearest Morgan,

Your letter of June 16 arrived today. It had been opened by Auntie Censor (unusual these days) and was directed to the old Alto Cedro address. So, considering the delay, it was very quick.

Yes, I’d been worrying a lot about the rockets. Here, we argue about them, wondering if they are more frightening than piloted planes. I have rather a thing about the malice of pilots: they may suddenly take a dislike to your particular house. But the rockets must be dreadful, too. So imper-sonal, like roulette.

Your earlier letter told me about the lakes. (I answered it a week ago).

I’m so glad that was a happy time.

Hope that you will be seeing Lincoln Kirstein. He has your address. I think you will find him very stimulating, and able to talk the language of both hemispheres, which is rare. Also, he might bring Pete. It seems he’s in England still. I wrote L. and am awaiting a reply. He may also see my Mother.

Am reading George Moore.57 I infinitely prefer his gossip to Proust’s. It’s about nothing much, but I like the tone. He is fearlessly preoccupied with the things he thinks important (in Salve) and assumes you will be too. So you are.

Or at least I am. The account of his hunting for a house in Dublin—told without the slightest attempt to amuse. One couldn’t care less, yet one reads on.

Also saw Garbo in her first big film, Gosta Berling. She isn’t special—only 17 and curiously plump. But the atmosphere of the picture. Those immemo-rially old saga-faces. The whole smell of the North. The gloom which somehow isn’t depressing. The great lakes and forests, and the neurosis and the furs, and the scowl of hopeless love. Strangely cosy. There were also some very sympathetic wolves, which, apparently, could only run on ice. As soon as Garbo and Lars Hansen reached the bank of the frozen lake, they were out of bounds, and the wolves retired and they had a love-scene in big fur mittens. Several young ladies of enormous size fainted on top of small but agile men, who bent under them but did not break. Mrs. Viertel told us that Garbo’s eyelashes were so long they had to be curled up before her eyes could be photographed.

Gerald has written a life of Christ from the point of view of Gamaliel.

Brilliant, I am told. The Huxley-Ish[erwood] movie story is not sold yet.

I’m getting ready to write a life of Vivekananda.58 Harvey Young is coming back to Hollywood soon, which may mean almost anything or not much. I feel more and more strongly that I shall see you before long.

Best love,

Christopher

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* * *

7-7-44

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

All whom you love are safe so far—the narrowest shave has been William’s, who was keeping John Morris company in his (M’s) flat. They were mainly battered by the noise. Glass broke but did not stale them. Bob injured his knee carrying a boy out of a blitzed house—returns to duty today. Leo writes cheerfully on his own behalf and Tom’s from Dover.

Down here it is fairly safe, though occasionally Goering doesn’t put enough stuff in, and they flop on the downs. I am mostly here, so do not worry about me. I only go up to broadcast or to see Bob. I am thankful that you are away from it—not so much out of the danger, which you aren’t interested to be, as out of the daftness. Only to music do I retain a first hand response. Everything else is conditioned by bombs; one is bearing up; one is setting an example; one is being kind; one is patronizing the past for its ignorance, or enjoying it for its security. Even if I could write a novel, I wouldn’t; it wouldn’t have integrity. Your work can have it. You are spared this unedifying worrying. One or two people are heroic certainly: Rose Macaulay plays away at a work of erudition, Visitors to Portugal, and won’t even leave London for a weekend. But silly heroism, what. Daft like the rest of us. She is not making anything of the amazing situation which has burst on us. I do a little thinking about the Flying Bombs, though. I believe they are going to be important psychologically. They will bitch the Romance of the Air—war’s last beauty parlour. Fewer films entitled Flarepath at Dawn.

They are inhuman, and people can’t get to grip with them in their minds, and feel thwarted, and are driven to reconsideration, and so to—?

Bill keeps writing to me. He is a grand fellow. I disappoint him with my sterility, but no matter: he must keep on being disappointed. What a lot of pleasure that rapid meeting with him has given me!

Jeanne de Casalis and Antony Asquith want to make Howard’s End into a film.59 What do you think of the idea? I think it is a dreadful idea, though I am struck by her sensitiveness. She sees what the house is and does see herself, I fear, playing Helen. I wish you were here to talk to. You would be sure to have some opinion. Umm. The house is an actual one, and during the past two years I have been going to it again. They would either shoot it

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vision of elm trees in the hedgerows, and of thousands of cows, such as astonished the Hardys when they saw Tess.

Popping into the Red Cross Book Sale yesterday I bought the Memoires of Saint-Simon.60 Six volumes, which seemed to be wrong, with London Library edition contains [ sic] forty. Still, six will be quite enough, for my main object is to find out what happened to civilisation when Madame de Sévigné left it, and before Voltaire came to it. I want also to find out which human beings have scored for the human race by having happy lives; Saint-Simon is unlikely to tell me—too cross. I think I have scored myself and I do not mean anything subtle by “scoring.” I have had good friends, and have not been parted from them too soon, and health, and have gained a reputation of the sort I’m glad to have had.— How tepid this reads. Please steep it in something, Christopher.

You will keep on getting letters like this from me I’m afraid, for the reason that we are not for the moment at our mental best in the London area.

Love from Morgan

* * *

1946 Ivar Avenue

July 29. [1944]

Hollywood 28. Calif

Dearest Morgan,

I think of you so much. There is no way of knowing just how bad the bombing is on any particular day. The newspapers are not allowed to say, and anyhow the news is not popular, because it doesn’t form an harmonious peal in the victory carillon. Please keep writing very often as long as this continues, even if only postcards. (But of course I hope and even expect it will have stopped before this letter reaches you).

There seems little news. The Gita translation will be ready next week and will go off to you, to John Lehmann, to Stephen, etc. You probably won’t be in the mood for it at present, but put it aside. It can wait. It has waited more than two thousand years. At the moment I’ve just finished a very priggish-sounding article on “The Gita and War” for our magazine. It annoys me, but there are things in it I wanted to say. The rough draft of my novelette is ready: a triumph of will rather than literature. But perhaps I can turn it into something. The present war gets in the way. One tries to choose between wisdom after the event and deliberate stupidity. I have been so very active this year, writing anything and everything: which I can’t help taking as an omen that the war will end very soon. Spring coming and the nest-building instinct. If novels are nests.

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I will now come right out quite frankly and say that I have no idea what Saint-Simon wrote about. Or Madam de Sevigne, either. Or, for that matter, Chateaubriand, Rochefoucault, or someone else, with an appetising name—Beavais, Bernaise, Bonpoint—oh, I remember, St Beuve. Not to mention Montesquioueuoueuouxxxxxqq. And weren’t there some more Madames? Recalmier? Or did she just lie down? But I have asked you enough questions for one letter. Please answer on one side of the paper, dismissing each character with a single sentence, or silent disdain, if you prefer.

Howard’s End, to my mind, is a play, not a movie—in that it is designed to induce claustrophobia rather than agoraphobia. Pictures should never be made about old or loved houses: the camera destroys all the atmosphere.

But Asquith has plenty of taste. And de Casalis helped write that rather good play about Napoleon on St Helena. I agree with you in mistrusting the

“really English” line. “Really English”—that’s a rare bird, not to be caught by the camera: unless one photographed it by mistake for a parrot.

Strange grey lifeless weather again: as if all the sunshine had been taken over by the government and made into something explosive. Must stop and cycle over to see Dodie Smith, who, as I’m sure I must have often told you, strangely reminds me of you. Your letter didn’t seem the least tepid, but if it had, you know what I would have steeped it in.

Lots of that, as always,

Christopher

* * *

15 Dec 1944

[telegram sent from Hollywood, CA]

How are you no news in ages worried please write

love happy Christmas Bob Buckingham family friend

Christopher Isherwood

* * *

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18-12-44

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

I have just wired to you and this inadequate letter shall go off tomorrow.

We are all of us all right. My good news is that I have at last news of the Maurons. They have emerged after four years from their cares and their Chinese mysticism, and Charles, now quite blind, has gone straight to the Mairie and is organising the distribution of food. Marie looks after five goats and has written five books. I find it difficult to write to them, as I do to you. Old Gerald once neatly explained why; starting to hope is painful, and we have had to practice, for so long, the better kinds of despair over here—gaiety, endurance, helpfulness, the enjoyment of art are some of those kinds.

I am just broadcasting to India, of all places, about your Gita, of all books.61 I like the translation very much indeed, far better than Mrs Besant’s, the only one I had read. (N.B. this is not my first canter though, vide Abinger Harvest). Instead of thanking you, I have cabled you to send me another copy, for I don’t like to lend mine, except to Bob, and people start asking for it.—[I] Don’t say much to India, of course. Quote poem about Fig Tree towards the end.

I hear constantly from Bill. Another American soldier has also been found—by Bob, and we are all getting fond of him quickly. His name is Noel Voge, from California. He is a translator, and married, in Portugal, a Yugoslav wife. Bob is going in for French, also for high class drama, and here he is supported by Robin and May: the four of us attended Hamlet and Richard III. Their party is on the 26th—we shall be thinking of you.

We meet at 12.00, for roast goose. Bob’s father and mother will be there, also Noel Voge, and Joe and his sister Nancy arrive for tea. Brother Ted is breeding too fiercely to make this journey.

You must be anxious as to whether we are safe, and I must write more frequently. I am so afraid of being depressing for depression’s sake. Most people mind V. 2 less than V. 1.62 I’m not sure I do, for when everything is quiet and the silence I love approaches, I sometimes start wondering whether one [i.e., another bombing raid] is coming. Certainly anyone you know in the London area may vanish entirely at any moment, not run to a corpse even [i.e., burned]. But the percentage is very small so far—that is to say among those I know. Though many houses of friends have been destroyed or damaged. William Plomer is fairly all right—in the admiralty, pal-zeik-02 4/21/08 10:33 AM Page 134

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not too good with shingles. Joe moderate. Leo and Tom still at Dover.

Please write again. What news have you of Wystan?

Best love, and I am sorry to have worried you and much [. . . ?] cable.

Also I should have thanked you for that book at once.

Morgan

Just received letter from Richard.

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3

The Postwar Years

9-5-45

Chiswick [London]

Dearest Christopher,

It is long since I wrote, but soon after I received your last letter my mother died, which has given me much to do, besides terrible grief. You might tell Gerald when you next write, with my love. She was not ill long—

under a week, and did not suffer, or have illusions, and I have no regrets or remorses [ sic], though all the other sorts of sadnesses [ sic]. If I could have come straight away, say out to you, it would have been all right, but neither the state of the world nor my immediate duties permitted that, and I have to drag on at West Hackhurst destroying things—150 years of letters mostly from women to women about women, and masses of rubbish from straw fans to wardrobes which are in many cases not absolute rubbish and have a semi-life which complicates their fate. I dislike destruction, also sadness. What I shall do is beyond me, as it is beyond the world. I have no illusion that problems are soluble: their only use is that they show one, roughly, where one is. Everyone has been very kind, and I eat and sleep all right. The actual date of death was March 11.

I have just turned up such a pleasant photograph—you and me on beach at Ostende while Heinz in middle distance appears to be looking down his back at his toe. I expect that the sight of it got this letter going, though you have often been in my thoughts. I am in bed at Chiswick. Last night was Victory Day, you will remember, and today is another one. I came up to broadcast, also to see Bob, but of course he is on extra duties. I am feeling rather sick as I drank a good deal (for me) in an experimental way. It was not very nice in London. Isolated shrieks, no rhythm, no contacts. Six years have been too long. And we haven’t yet had Vactory Day. Or Vuctory. A man in the club, whose name I do not know, grimly stood me champagne. Then I squashed [?] in pubs for beer. Buckingham Palace, seen well from sideways, was surprisingly effective, with a great decor of evening pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:56 PM Page 136

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clouds, and the King lobbing words very carefully at the enormous con-course. I should have liked to be in his place, for there is great thankfulness, and he could have seen it and focused it if in possession of field glasses. I could not see him.

I must get up, dear Christopher, and settle whether to be unwell. No, I need not get up, because I have now done so, turned on the bath, and got back into bed again. It is only 8.00 A.M. so my celebrations have not been riotous. Through the windows I can see the spire of the church which William calls St Utrillo and the flag on it town hall, but dimly because of the dirt. Will this country ever be clean and tidy again? No. I was merely stating a problem. My broadcast will be on Osbert Sitwell and on a concert of Indian Music in the National Gallery.1 Oh that reminds me, I don’t think I ever thanked you for the additional Bhagavad Gitas. I was very glad to receive them. Joe sits on one of them, another is promised to Indians in Broadcasting House.

Please write again, with any news. We are so provincial here, and I have an idea that your province may be larger. The people you know here are all right—that is to say the people you knew with or through me. Bob has bought a boat and is rigging it. At present it lies inside a barge at Hammersmith Bridge, so is not very big. Bob calls the barge a dry dock.

May says with resignation that she understands that there are intervals in the career of a boat when it can be used, and that perhaps one will occur before the end of the summer. Perhaps I shall look in on her this morning on my way up. It is very nice having them so near, and there is always lots of food.

Best love, dear Christopher

Morgan

* * *

26-8-45

W[est] H[ackhurst]2

Dearest Christopher,

News at last, and in the Hollywood sense. Having finished my picture with the Crown Film Unit, I am flying to India to attend a conference of writers. How livelily Morgan writes—always did! No, but this is so. It is an Indian P.E.N. meeting on Oct. 20th, at Jaipur, and I have got air preference.

At the last moment I may be pushed off the plane to accommodate a business man, but up to that moment it is so. And I am partly writing to ask you whether you have a message for this conference. I should be very glad of it if you have. It doesn’t matter your not belonging to the P.E.N. A greeting.

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Or more. And will you ask Aldous if you are near him. And Gerald if the same. Swamis can also communicate. I think the company would be thrilled and pleased if something came from your coast. I will enclose, if I can find it, all that we yet know about this curious stunt. They are my hosts in India, and the British Council is sending us out: odder still. “Us” is self and Ould, the P.E.N. Secretary in London.

All my friends want me to go, and some may be glad to get rid of me, for I partly died when my mother did, and must smell sometimes of the grave.—I have noticed and disliked that smell in others, occasionally—I do not cotton [?] to sorrow.

My old maid has been very nice at being left alone for a couple of months; has a sister who will come, and a former fellow servant, and my aunt Rosalie, and Joe, and Bob, May and Robin. And I have a good gardener. So they should get through somehow, and the house still working on my return. I have still millions of things to see to and destroy, and no visible future or bright reground. But I shall be thankful to see men and women of a different colour in the streets and India will provide that. My best friends there are all dead, and if death meant being with them I should like it. I have a romantic fantasy that I shall never come back. But events don’t stage us like that. Besides, I may never start, which is more likely.

I forget if I wrote to you since my visit to Leo & Tom at Dover, but I don’t want to fill the rest of this paper with small chat—except to say that Bob and May & Robin have gone up the Thames in a boat they now possess, have been away a fortnight and are now returning. I met the boat at Weybridge regatta.3

Very much love from

Morgan

* * *

1946 Ivar Avenue

Hollywood 28 Calif.

[September 26, 1945]

Dearest Morgan,

Just got your letter. I hope this reaches you before you leave. Look here, couldn’t you possibly come back by way of California? It would be so nice, and I know you’d have a great welcome in N.Y. too. Cadmus would see to that. Here, of course, there are Chris,4 Gerald, the Huxleys—not to mention Dodie Smith, who would love to meet you—as who wouldn’t?

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I haven’t been able to contact the Huxleys and Gerald quick enough before writing this. But I am sure you can convey their greetings to the conference, with Swami Prabhavananda’s and mine. I really don’t know what message to send—as I combine the utmost goodwill with the wish that all Indians would speak Hindustani, Bengali, Urdu, etc, and stop murdering the English language. I always tell Swami that this was India’s revenge on British imperialism.

No time to write more. Am just finishing a screenplay. Then I hope for a long holiday and work of my own.

All my love,

Christopher

* * *

137 Entrada Drive

March 26. [1946]

Santa Monica. Calif.

My dearest Morgan,

My reasons for writing to you have been accumulating steadily, these last few days. A letter from John Lehmann saying that you were selling West Hackhurst and perhaps going to live at King’s, then a copy of your lecture on inter-war prose, a photograph in an old book, the Passage to India left in the apartment by a weekend visitor and reread—also, more indirectly, a deep deathlike sleep last night after three days of beach-picnics, gin, chatter, empty grinning and too-loud laughter—a glance at Mencius in some anthology over early coffee—most of all, perhaps, a letter from Heinz, written last August 26, form [ sic] a prisoner of war camp in France. “Dear Mr Isherwood, you’ll be astonished to hear from somebody whom you think will be already dead. After I had a bad time in Germany as you may know, I had to become a soldier and was caught than at the Reihn-River.

Who knows what my life will look like after I get discharged. Yours affectionately . . . ” I have written, of course—to one of those addresses which are all numbers and capital letters—but he must have been sent back to Germany long ago, and I don’t suppose they will forward P.O.W. mail. So there’s nothing to be done till he writes again. “Dear Mr Isherwood”! What do you make of that? Does he think I’m ashamed of knowing him, that I’ll be embarrassed, or something?

You have never written since you got back from India. I think I understand why. There is probably too much to say. Well, you shall say it, I hope, before very long. I plan to come back this summer, in July or August. When I think of England, it all really adds up to my mother and you.

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I wonder if you have read my novelette, Prater Violet. They liked it here, chiefly, I think, because it doesn’t pretend to be a masterpiece, in this land of canyons, skyscrapers and epics. You will see all its weaknesses and forgive them. They are weaknesses in myself. Yes, it is quite clever, quite amusing, nearly plausible—and one then reads something like your lecture. People say you are a great writer, and I think you are, whatever that means—but it’s not the point. The point is that you are incapable of telling a lie. Oh, there’s so much I want to talk to you about—Hinduism, God, sex, (why a little S? The typewriter chose it), your prostate operation (I just had a minor one), India, America, England, War, Peace. I would love to see you and Swami together—the two pillars of wisdom. They can keep the other five for a public building.

But I can’t write you a proper letter, Morgan dear. I can only make noises indicating love—another small letter, but it has stayed with me when so much else has been left behind in strange houses or scattered on the road in the haste of retreat.

As always,

Christopher

* * *

1-4-46

West Hackhurst,

Abinger Hammer,

Dorking

Dearest Christopher,

I have just received your letter of March 26th. I am very much excited about Heinz, as will Bob be, whom I shall see tomorrow. I do not fear Dear Mr Isherwood at all. It is very natural after years of oddness, also he has been through much more than you, and is bound to be strange in himself for a time. It is grand too that you will be in England this summer, and we will talk, amongst other things, of when I shall come to America.

My Indian visit probably saved my mind. I returned to more worry and sadness, for I have been given notice to leave this house—it is not mine to sell. However, I expect to get through. My mother’s death has been much more awful than I expected. I am glad that no one will miss me like that. In India I found food, warmth, “fame,” affection, and space—the mere travelling about was exquisite. I can’t tell you how happy I was. I kept telling myself—e.g. in the mosque at Delhi, the Fort at Bikaner, the Fort at Agra, the Caves at Ajanta, and from the train during Diwali passing Sassaram. (How many of these words does Swami remember?) I lectured, broadcasted, talked pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:56 PM Page 140

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literary—you are well known to Indians, but for Gita and Goodbye to Berlin only. I will try to get two broadcasts (done over here) out of Joe Ackerley for you. It is a nuisance that I haven’t been able to settle down here on my return, and think, I like to think when I want to think, and I rather think I wanted to think.

King’s [College Cambridge] has worked out fortunately. Two small rooms out of college and one very large one in, all unfurnished. So I shall be able to bring along quite a lot of stuff. I don’t go till the autumn, so you will probably see this house again. Last time you arrived very late, and the cold duck was overdone. There is also the flat at Chiswick still. I could put you up there if needful. My goodness the weather has been lovely this week. Such a nice boat race—the 16th anniversary of Bob and my first meeting. He rowed in a fascinating centipede called The Head of the River, the sort of race which you don’t know whether you’ve won until for some time afterwards.

I must leave room for one or two points which you relegate as minor.

What is this operation which you mention? Prater Violet I have never read.

Could you send me a copy? What is this present address of yours? I don’t think I’ve had it before.

Bill Roehrick is very faithful, very generous. I have fed the whole of Abinger Manner School with his maple sugar. I wonder how you will find the food over here. I don’t think it is any worse than it was 6 months ago, but people are not looking as well as they did—I noticed it on my return.

Morgan’s Love

* * *

14 Jan 1947

[sent from Hollywood, CA]

STAYING WIT LEHMANN BUT LONGING TO SEE YOU 22ND OR

23RD IF POSSIBLE ALL MY LOVE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

* * *

K[ings] C[ollege] C[ambridge] 21-3-47

Dearest Christopher,

I ought to have written. I am never ill but sometimes becalmed. I like the Don Quixote and have been reading in it.

Thank you for your Bill’s address. The Bill I can scarcely call mine is being so helpful, and I think a programme may evolve that won’t inconvenience his pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:56 PM Page 141

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plans. A little New York, with Red Carpet for you, then Tyringham,5 then I go to Harvard, then Arizona, perhaps, with him, for he has to go sometime in May to Hollywood. I shall return to New York. I shall go home, which means Bob and his family for me now, as you saw.

When do you come back to London? Can I not see you before I fly on the 14th?

Also can I give you a cheque for £50? Curtis Brown have just snubbed me for making what I thought a quite legal and indeed honourable offer.

The £50 will be, you understand, payment for a copy of Don Quixote, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which you sold to me.6

Dearest Christopher, I have just had three very pleasant nights in town, went to the Alchemist, saw Bob, had a present of a large picture by Jamini Roy, perhaps a farmer, perhaps a god (Kama?) holding a parrot with his legs rather apart.7 “Fancy meeting those eyes in the dark!” cried little Mrs Bolton. The picture has brought excitement and freedom to me in a way you may understand. It is something of my own, and it represents the goodness of India. The painter gave it me because I once admired it in his studio at Calcutta and did not say so; I talked about it in London and he heard of this. And it was brought to me by two other Indians, Narayan & Rekha Menon; such a trouble they took, she especially. The boy’s flesh is blue: he is that mixture of the sturdy and the sacred which, if it does not repel, attracts strongly. I only had the picture yesterday. I expect to get tired of it, then I shall take it down.

I saw that wisp in the distance, Guy Burgess. His meeting with you seems to have gone as I expected it would.

Much clothing is accumulating here for Heinz and his son. Christopher, you do not like packing things up. No more do I. That is the real trouble.

I am here till next Thursday. By then I hope to have finished my Harvard stuff and to spend 3 or 4 days in town.

Is there any prospect of help for your mother? Does Richard see eye to eye with reality more? Have you tried advertising? And for a married couple?

Hoping for another letter.

Morgan

* * *

In train called “Exposition” (to Burlington)” in Nebraska 2-6-47

Dearest Christopher,

I seem to write to everyone but you. And you to me? It was a muddle over Swami. Suddenly I decided to visit an old and isolated friend, C. H.

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Collins Baker, at the Huntington Museum, San Marino,8 wrote to Chris W.

and had nice telephone talk with him and Gerald, but that was all. My letter to Bill missed him. I do wish I had written to you.

I spent 9 happy days in Berkeley with Noel whom I like more and more, and with his wife whom I much liked so far as I could see her, but she is hoping to become a Doctor in Zoology and very busy. Noel and I went for two days to the Yosemite, and it even looks if I shall include Niagara. The third of the Heavies, whom I had purposed to exclude. Heading now for Chicago. I may very likely reach New York on the morning of Monday the 9th. Paul Cadmus should have left the keys of his apartment at Harcourt Brace’s where I shall call for them. If I do not find them, woe and telephones, in which you will be involved.

Niagara is rather funny. In 1944 I spoke to a Canadian air officer in the tube, and since he did not know London met him next day for St Paul’s—

that is all I have seen him—rather “common” commercial type. He came down over Germany and we corresponded, now it turns out from the map that he lives close to Niagara Falls. He is very anxious I should stop with him and meet his wife and child, writes “life is so short that we may never be near one another again,” which is enough to fetch me and most people?

There seems no reason you should need to catch me at Chicago. In fact I can think of no possible[reason]. But I shall be there until the evening of the 6th if I achieve Johnny Kennedy, and longer if I don’t. Address: c/o C. F.

Huth, University, Chicago.

Kindest greetings to Bill. Love to you and I hope we shall be together often. Except for visits to Bill Roehrick, Harold Barger, Archibald MacLeish, Paul Cadmus, and Asaf Ali,9 I am expecting to settle down in New York quietly.

Morgan’s Love

* * *

Dakar. April 12 [1948]

As you see, we are drawing inexorably nearer. We’ll probably get to le Havre around April 24 and then spend a few days in Paris. We ought to be in England at the beginning of May. Our boat is an overcrowded old French tub, and crawls across the Atlantic inch by inch. The jabbering of the passengers is probably audible for miles around. Am longing to see you.

Christopher

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[postscript:]

We’ll be seeing you very soon. It’s wonderful to be cross the Atlantic—it took forever.

Bill

* * *

K[ings] C[ollege] C[ambridge] 3-5-48

Dearest Christopher,

Thank you for your foreign card, and I have your arrival from Bob.

When will I see you. Bill also?

I was meaning to come up on Wednesday. Could you both come to tea at my flat at about 4.00? Lunch at the Reform Club would have to be for one guest only. Could you come alone to that, and then we meet Bill? Or I could offer you both drinks.

If you have gone north Wednesday, I will cut an engagement here on Tuesday with Harvard University and come up and meet you in the late afternoon or evening. But in that case, it will be necessary for you to ring Cambridge 55006 at about 9.30 tomorrow (Tuesday) morning.

Love from

Morgan

John not there, is he?

[the following, at the bottom of the page, is a poem by Isherwood, written in his hand:]

He pulled up short 2 miles from the place,

Number Four stared him right in the face,

Turned to his fire boy, said “you’d better jump

’cause there’s two locomotives that’s going to bump!”

[written below the poem:]

O mio babbino caro.

Petite Suite Roussell.

* * *

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[Kings College Cambridge] 25-6-48

Dearest Christopher,

Tennessee Williams got up too late to reach Cambridge. [Gore] Vidal arrived, and I wish hadn’t, as I disliked him a lot. I hope anyhow he returned you Gerald’s [A] Street Car [Named Desire]. I am looking forward to seeing it on the stage, where its colour, violence, and seedfulness [ sic]

should be effective. I did not find the characters alive (my old whimper), but that is where actors and actresses are so useful. Alive themselves, often through no wish of their own, they are compelled to vivify the dramatist’s ideas. I shouldn’t have thought it was a good play—with the chief character an invalid who ought to have been looked after earlier. Still the stage is always surprising me into a good deal of pleasure. The poker scene might look lovely.

What I am really writing about though is Maurice. I should very much like a talk alone with you during the next week or so. I am ashamed at shirking publication but the objections are formidable. I am coming up on Tuesday for a night or probably two. Wednesday morning should be all right. If you [are] able to drop me a line here, do so. Otherwise, I will ring you in London.

Lovely letter from Ben [Benjamin Britten]. Herring etc. comes to Cambridge at the end of the month.

Love,

Morgan

* * *

KING’S COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE [summer 1948?]

Your visits much enjoyed—though there were provincial wonderings why you had an evening engagement in town. Now I am deposited here, I think for some time. Grand if you could disclose yourself to Heinz on Liverpool St. Sta[tion] Sat. 8.30—or ring him up at Lark-crow[?] on Sunday morning at CH1 2407. Later in the morning Bob drives them away to Coventry for a couple of days.

Much love,

Morgan

* * *

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[Kings College Cambridge]10 March 27, [1949]

Dearest no Christopher. No alas, no chance whatsoever of us taking the long trek to the Pacific seaboard. Am sure to get dazed and tired as it is and may pay but a short visit to the U.S.A.

On the other hand it is, as you know, only a little hop from the Pacific seaboard to the Atlantic one. Could you and Bill not take it during our stay?

Who you may ask but should not is “we”? Bob is coming too, all being well. He is wild about it, it is his suggestion, and all that remains now is to get some one to sign an affidavit to support him in the U.S.A. I have asked Bill Roehrick, what if it is not convenient to him shall approach Lincoln.

We shall have plenty of money as soon as we land in New York, so the guar-antor shouldn’t be called upon. (We didn’t write to you, since a N.Y. guar-antor seemed best.) My own permit to travel will have to be through the Bank of England, and probably forthcoming. Bob could only stay about 10

days. I should rather like to return with him, but this is not yet decided. We shall be flying.

I have a good deal of news and all good. I have been for the last 3 weeks in Aldeburgh composing (with Eric Crozier’s help) a libretto for Ben’s next opera, “Billy Budd.” The work went wonderfully well. I am amazed at it and at myself. I have so far only written a sort of play, but think we shall be able to break it down into libretto form. (What does break down mean and why is it so often used?) Crozier plans the thing and stuffs it with naval oddments. We are a lucky combination. I do hope it goes through. We have another session in August.

All the above PRIVATE for the moment. Ben is issuing a statement for his agents shortly.

(N.B. Peter would play Vere, not Billy)11

Today is Boat Race day, and 19 years ago did I meet Bob. He had a lot of duty, but I managed to see him, and he treated me, Robin, and two New Zealand women to seats at the Race itself. Hot sunshine and all very gay, and Cambridge won by 1/4 of a length. Robin is going to France.

I go to Cambridge tomorrow to write the lecture. They only want about 1/2 an hour.

Bob has just had a long and interesting letter from Heinz[,] [w]ho has received 4 C.A.R.E. parcels from you this year. He would 1/2 starve without them.

Besides love to Bill, would he send me the photos of me which he took at Aldeburgh. They are said to be so good but not a glint of them have I seen.

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Love to you, and I never thanked you for your birthday letter and cable Your health was drunk, and Bill’s.

Morgan’s Love

* * *

January 16th [1950]

31152 Monterey Street. South Laguna.

California.

Dearest Morgan,

I hope you got the letter I wrote a short while ago, and I hope you had a nice birthday? I’m writing again because I’ve been asked to, for the following reason—

It is said, I don’t know how truly, that you were “approached” recently by some Hollywood representative or agent, asking if you would consider letting them make a movie out of Passage to India. Your answer, allegedly, was No; because enough novels had been ruined already and you didn’t see why Passage should be added to the list.

All right—

Now I have a friend named Frank Taylor, who used to be in publishing and has now come out here and become a film-producer. He works at 20th century Fox. When I describe him as a friend, I hope I sufficiently indicate that he is unlike the usual sort of producer. He is, in fact, a civilized person.

And the Passage to India means to him what it means to people who care about novels, not movies. At the same time, he would like to make a film out of it, if he could do the film just exactly the way you wanted it done.

What is more, his boss, Darryl Zanuck (the head of the Studio) is also interested in making a film of the Passage, and would therefore be very likely to let Frank go ahead and make the picture if Frank could get you to agree to it.

So Frank has asked me to ask you if your No was an unqualified No. Or if you would consider any kind of arrangement. He would suggest that you should come out here personally, and that you and I—or you and anybody you wanted—should write the film together; and that you should have absolute Last Word on how it was done. This is, of course, not an offer; because no offer can be made until Frank knows whether or not you will accept one. If you agreed in principle, then he could go to Zanuck with the idea and try to get it through.

Morgan dear, I hate even to bother you with all this; but obviously I have no right to decide without asking you that you would or wouldn’t be interested. So I pass it on to you. I feel almost unwilling even to add how pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:57 PM Page 147

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much I would love you to come. You know that. You would stay with us, of course, in our dear little house overlooking the ocean and Billy would make you very snug, and we’d just pop into the Studio maybe once a week, and Frank would come out to see you here, and you would be treated like a priceless jewel. Of course, I just want to get you here, no matter how. My attitude toward the project is frankly prejudiced for that reason; and now I won’t say another word about it.

Our life here (since moving down to this place) has entered a phase in which everything immediately visible is perfect, and everything and everyone not here is a cause for anxiety and fear. Now we’re told that everybody in England is threatened by flu. . .Oh dear. . .This certainly wouldn’t stop us coming to see you all, if we had the money. But we have to live very quietly at present. I review books. Bill is taking a job with a potter.

Please write sometimes, Morgan dear. We both love you very much.

* * *

Kings College Cambridge Jan. 4, 1951

Dearest Christopher,

Is not that nice! Shall expect you Tuesday, let me know when, also whether you would like to dine in hall that night—cosy but tires one if bossy Professor Adcock presides.

Generally speaking you must organise, for though Ian and I get on nicely, I don’t know him well, so that there is no point in the three of us going about together. There’ll be my room here if you want to talk to him.

Must conclude, as I am wearing two spectacles which makes writing difficult. Can’t get over that picture.

Morgan’s gratitude and love.

Going to Aldeburgh late in month

Epigram for 1952: Women are not mysterious, merely incalculable

* * *

[At] Bob’s [London]

Jan. 23[,] 1951

Dearest Christopher,

Here is your letter, here was your letter, and I love them both and was about to answer the first one.12 Oh how I would like to be with you and Bill and sun, and have all three of you waiting on me! Dear human [?] friends do wait on me here, but where oh where is the sun warmth and sunlight?

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All so grey, and I am weary of the modulations, delicate though they may be, inside that grey.—I fear though that I mustn’t consider travel. Not quite robust enough for export yet, and more easily tired and muddled than in the past.

Now for the film. I fear my answer must be a paregoric NO. As I told 20th Century Fox when they were rushing after A Room with a View in 1947. I like films, I like novels, but I don’t believe that a novel can be turned into a film without transforming its character. I gave this same answer to the man who wrote pleasantly recently to me: name forgotten, had a Roger in it I fancy, and said I had met him with you; firm called Mann. I added (to him), that sooner or later an author’s name disappears from the bills: instance, Henry James’ from The Heiress, which is now written by someone else. I wouldn’t at all mind writing for the films—have indeed done so, and enjoyed yielding and cooperating and fitting in, as I enjoy it over the Billy Budd libretto. But I won’t hand over what was written as a novel to an unknown number of cooks. The nearest (and dearest!) cooks I could control, should indeed be in complete sympathy with, but what of the cooks who would be unexpectedly called in—the vegetable cooks, the curry-experts, the continuation kitchen maids, the overall-contractors, the contractors in overalls? How could I control all [of] them? More grit and vigilance than I possess would be required. Bob says Bernard Shaw did successfully control. Muddled, I acquiesce, and then remember Caesar and Cleopatra.13 With the film industry as at present constituted, I don’t see an author can be guaranteed to have the last word. I am sad about the films, but that is another matter.

Your letters [are] not before me. I am in bed and must get up, for I am going this afternoon to Cambridge with May. She most kindly coming to overhaul my wardrobe, but will be trapped into a certain amount of festiv-ity I hope. I did have a little influenza for my birthday, however I got here with it, and was not bad. There are two sorts of influenza, the little and the large, and the large is mainly north of the Tees.14 Always think of us in the south, when you are inclined to be depressed.

Don Windham has been here, much nicer without “monster” Sandy.15

He comes up to Cambridge for the day on Thursday. And there has been a long and welcome visit from Noel and Marietta Voge from Berkeley—

them you don’t know.

Well dearest Christopher [I] must stop. Much much love to you, much to Bill, and respects and regards to the friends with whom I should have been immediately working.

Bob may want to add a line. Much love,

Morgan

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[note from Bob:]

My dear Christopher, I did my best for you but it was “no go.” M. dis-trusts Hollywood too much. I expect he is right. I will encourage him to make another visit to America when he is really better. We all send our love, Bob

* * *

King’s Coll., Camb.

Jan. 14[,] 1952

Dearest Christopher,

I found your letter on my return—what you say about Maurice excites me.16 There ought to be that extra chapter, but should it not come before the boat chapter at Southampton instead of after it? I mean like this: Leaving the British Museum, they go off together, we know—in surround-ings not too unsuitable they talk as you say, they feel as we know, and M.

says “It mayn’t work but we’ll give it a try”—A[lec] says I can’t, I daren’t, I must go as arranged with Fred, you’re the only person I’ve ever . . . but I can’t—also (perhaps) there have so often been women that I daren’t—In the boat chapter he has dared, Maurice has won him. The final chapter with Clive then stands firmer than ever.

Do you think this would work? Or do you still prefer them to have it out after the boat?

I will have a try—humility my guide. I don’t think though that I could write fiction—and of that type—anymore.

I enclose a precious and remarkable letter to Dear Forster, which please return.17 It shares your fear that it may be only physical attraction. It is an enlightened letter—sometimes too much so: some great things also happen in the dark—it is there that the physical may start flowering.

It occurs to me that you may have seen the letter already. I adopted some of the criticisms when redrafting. He is the model for Risley, as he gaily suggests.

I’m sure we’re right about Arctic Summer, though when I read it aloud, with cuts, it seems much better than it is.18

I come up on Sunday the 20th for most of the week. What can you manage?

I was not at all sure that you would still like M[aurice] and feel very happy.

Love,

Morgan

No. Much love

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* * *

[King’s Coll., Camb. letterhead crossed out and replaced with “As from Bob’s”]

Jan. 18[,] 1952

Dearest Christopher,

I could meet you Tuesday evening—dine say, or after dinner if you couldn’t dine. Please ring Bob’s. Monday as you suggest. I get there Sunday night and may be staying on a few days.

I have drafted out that chapter, and would like to show it you, together with the chapters before and after. British Museum—that chapter—boat at Southampton—good bye to Clive is the sequence. I’m afraid it isn’t right in itself, and couldn’t be after so many years, but my wanting to do it is important, and I am sure it is wanted, and may—despite the jar in tone—

strengthen the stuff on each side of it. A (recorded) meeting between M.

and A. after the boat sailed might too much resemble the signing of a pro-tocol. As it is, A. has full license to misbehave and throw this attractive weight about, and M. to be grand. [A]nd I should like to think that they take it. I do feel so grateful to you. I have had the story much in mind these weeks, wondering whether A’s entry up the ladder could be heated up without becoming hot stuff. But your query is infinitely more important.

What have you done to little Mark Boxer? Last term he called me Morgan, this term Sir. Still if you do not have a similar effect on Ken Shadbolt and Alex Kwapong[?].19 I do not really mind. Dined with Simon Raven last night, and got a little drunk on nicely calculated wines. Both boys pleased with your messages.

Love and gratitude from

Morgan

* * *

As from Bob’s [London]

10-2-52

Dearest Christopher,

I have hammered out a technique. Alec is known to favour the Boathouse, Penge, as a trysting place. He is also known—and Maurice knows him—to have Maurice’s home address for he wired and wrote there when Maurice fled. What more natural than that he should communicate there again? Maurice thinks of this (we didn’t) and rings up his mother pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:57 PM Page 151

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from Southampton, after the boat has gone. She, amidst babblings, reveals that a telegram awaits him. Shall she open it? Yes. It contains one word

“Boathouse,” which she will conjecture as to be a code-word. He goes there and it is obvious they have clicked before his interview with Clive.20

I deplore the neatness of this. Raggeder [ sic] suggestions welcomed.

The hotel chapter is done.

Equally important, I come up Wednesday to Wozzeck.21 Stop at May’s till Friday and then perhaps to my own flat. Shall I see you dear Christopher?

Love,

Morgan

Let me have Lytton’s letter back.

* * *

[return address of air letter: King’s College, Cambridge]

[postmark date: Oct. 3, 1952]

Dearest Christopher,

Lovely to hear from you after all this time and I have much to say, but will confine my reply, or most of it, to Maurice.22 I have heard from Monroe Wheeler (whom I know better than I do Glenway) and I am today writing to my Lit. Ex[ecut]or Jack Sprott, who has been away. He will own all my copy-rights MSS after my death, so it’s complicated and I don’t know what I shall decide. In the interim, would you be willing to have a copy of Maurice on condition that it wasn’t published until I died, and was only published by you in the U.S.A.? I am afraid that that’s the most the gift is likely to amount to.

Also it would arrive without the additional chapter which I have never got into shape. Don’t be angry—who has not yet finished his novel? Or shall we be angry with each other?

No you can’t be equally angry with me, for I have finished the Dewes book.23 The publishers are now peeking in it for libels.

So write again, please, and by then I should have consulted Jack Sprott and seen Monroe.

Next week I go to Belfast to unveil a plaque to Forrest Reid,24 and next month (I hope) to Paris. The French Government has invited me, and to do nothing, it says.“Merci, madame, d’avoir existé” as they said to Rosamond Lehmann.

Bob is well, arrives here tomorrow, loves his probation job at Coventry, but May finds it all less lovely, as do I, for they will probably have to give up their London home, and they had got it so nice.

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I am well enough—get a little tired and am at the moment at a loose end. My visit to Paul and the Frenchs at Florence was grand. In fact it has tinged me with grandeur.

Well I will write again and hope by then that you may have written again to me.

Give much love to Bill Caskey when you see him.

Oh and had forgot—Jans [?] had better write direct to Ben over setting the verses. I am afraid he is unlikely to say Yes and may be was used to say No. He gets so many suggestions like that and he is at present hard at work over his opera with William.25 He’s awful at writing.

Much much love dearest Christopher,

Morgan

* * *

King’s Coll. Camb.

Oct. 15[,] 1952

Dear Christopher Isherwood,

As agreed, I write a formal letter to confirm my gift to you of one of the typescript copies of Maurice.

It is your property, and I assign you the right to arrange for its publication in the U.S.A. after my death. You have the right to sign the necessary contracts and to receive all royalties and other payments.

By the terms of my will, all my MSS and literary rights become the property of my executor, Professor W. J. H. Sprott, or of the executor acting in his place. Professor Sprott has, however, written you a letter which you will receive at the same time as this one, and you will see from it that he fully approves of the arrangement between you and myself, and formally under-takes to respect it.

He does however make two stipulations. (i) If the book is not published in the States within three years after my death, all U.S. publication rights must revert to him. (ii) You must not publish or attempt to sell the books in Great Britain: if you did this my executors would be entitled to take action against you.

I have had a talk with Mr Monroe Wheeler. If for any reason you do not wish to publish, he is willing to act in your place. In that case all U.S. rights would pass to him, and he would be entitled to sign contracts and to receive royalties, etc.

Yours very sincerely,

EM Forster (signed)

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* * *

King’s College, Cambridge

Oct. 15[,] 1952

Dearest Christopher,

Thank you for your sweet, also salt, letter.26 All goes well. I have seen Monroe and have today posted a [copy of] Maurice to him, together with formal letters for you from me and from Jack Sprott, who is my ex[ecut]or, and entirely approves our goings on. You should now have a convincing enough array for a potential publisher. I know that you won’t like receiving any money from sales and will refuse to use it, but it is simplest that the owner of the MS and rights should receive; otherwise such complications.

What I would like is for the money to be kept in America for people from here who want to visit America, and can’t. Bob specially in my mind.

Alternately, to help any one who is in trouble. Would you mind receiving it now?

I’ve asked Monroe if he would see to the thing if you couldn’t. He said he would. If neither of you acts, I would be grateful if Glenway [Wescott]

would take over, but have put Monroe’s name in the formal letter, since we had talked about it. Bob, May and I dined with him Sunday. She is at last more equable.

The salt overleaf is of course Bill Caskey, or part of him. Give all of him my love. Yes—what a figure.

I must pronounce on Hemlock and After another time. More important, Walter Baxter’s new novel has much progressed—it sounds completely different from its predecessor and I am longing to read it.27 We meet or correspond regularly. He has just read Maurice and is terribly upset by its sadness, but was drinking all the time he read. I hope to see him this week again. I hate him being sad. I shall read the “new” chapter to him and see how he feels then.

Bob has been fine over it. “Do you want it published?”—“Yes.”—“Then I’ll see it is.” He stays happy about his future. I don’t think of it. It is bound to be unpleasant for me. Coventry is an impossible place to be idle in, or to reach. I wish I could think of some other work for myself. I have enjoyed doing “Letters from Dewes State Senior,” and miss it.—Can you think of a first name for it, a selling name?28

Much love & thanks and I will soon write again,

Morgan

* * *

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[return address of air letter: King’s College, Cambridge]

Nov.25[,]1952

Dearest Christopher,

I have just been rereading old letters of yours, Greece, Portugal, Luxembourg[—]all over the place, always inviting me to go and I never went, always generous, praising and helping me, always believing in what Maurice tried to do. Dear Christopher oh you have been a good friend.

I am more glad than ever that the typescript is with you and that Jack Sprott has behaved so well.

I see Walter Baxter once a week as a rule. I go to tea with him, no one else ever comes in, although he has masses of friends, and either he talks or I talk.

Bob spends his short weekend with me, his long weekends with May. I spend Christmas with them. I don’t want a birthday or any more birthdays yet awhile.

I don’t know about 1953. 1952 has been odd—that wonderful visit to Florence which I haven’t yet grasped, and then a good deal of worry and sorrow. I cannot sum 1952 up.

If Bill has arrived, give him my love again please.

In one of your earlier American letters you say that the two people I should like were Pete and Swami. I never met Swami. You were right about Pete.29

I expect I have told you all the above already. But tonight I feel able to put it differently.

Love dear Christopher.

Love,

Morgan

* * *

July 7 [1953]

400 South Saltair Avenue

Los Angeles 49. California

Dearest Morgan,

The immediate reason for this—after how many months?—is that Swami Prabhavananda is on his way to England, and I do so hope you two will meet. So does he, and I have told him to go to Cambridge, which he will gladly do. He will only be in the country for a few days, however, around the 20th of this month. So could you send a postcard to the Countess of Sandwich (The Cottage, Hinchingbrooke, Huntingdon) with pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:57 PM Page 155

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whom he is staying, saying which day would suit you? Of course, if you are in London, Swami could meet you there.30

The Countess of Sandwich is, improbably enough, an Englishwoman named Amiya Corbin who used to be one of the leading members of Swami’s congregation and household, and whom George Sandwich met while in California recently. She is, in her own forthright way, a character worthy of the amazing George. Do you know him? You probably do.

Here I sit and will not stir until that fiendish novel is done. Two complete drafts finished already, but much still to do. I think everybody will hate it. It certainly isn’t what they expect—if there is still anyone who expects anything of me. Am otherwise well and happy.

I long for your new book.

Bill Caskey has left the sea and is making bead collars for fashionable ladies with an intensity which borders on sadism. He makes them, and they are damn well going to wear them—or else. He’s like those woman-haters who design fantastic hats which only the richest can afford. In the last phase, the hats are made of iron, with in-pointing spikes.

I hope you enjoyed the caves?

I still hope to get to England again before long.

Stephen was here. Such a great joy. My little garden-house has gained something in atmosphere since his visit. How I do wish you could see it!

Please give my love to Bob and May and William especially; and tell Simon Raven, if he’s around, how much I’ve liked his reviews in the Listener.

Au revoir, Morgan dearest,

your loving

Christopher

* * *

[return address of air letter: King’s College, Cambridge]

Sunday,

July 26 [1953]

I write to Dearest Christopher,

Incredible dictu—the Countess Amiya and the Swami have just lunched in my room at King’s with myself and Bob. Quelle combinaison et quelle chance! I wrote just at the exact moment, all fitted, and I feel so happy about it and am sure you will be. The Swami (in a silver grey complet) was gentle and friendly, but I did not “get to know him” or have much consec-utive talk. I felt that he had a philosophic mind and that I should have to peck at its edges as it turned round rather than expect it to poke me. Earl pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:57 PM Page 156

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and another man joined us after lunch. Bit of a rush. I took them all to the Chapel, which was just before service and a parrot warren, now they are sure and Bob has gone, and fatigued and a little dazed [I write to Dearest Christopher].31

It is lovely to think you may be coming over. I do hope I see Bill too. Give him my love. Rob’s marriage went off well and gaily, but there is this endless trouble of house-getting. Incidentally I am moving myself—but only from Trumpington Street entirely into College, where I have just been assigned a large bedroom close to my present sittingroom. It is a for-and-against situation, but I am thankful to have been assigned anything—the Wilkinsons are moving, and couldn’t keep me.

I forget whether I wrote to you since my visit to S.W. France with Bill Roerick & Tom Coley: one of the treats of my life. I hope to go again (alone) to France in September, but it depends on all the movings [ sic].

I doubt dearest Christopher my getting to America again. I can’t tell you how often I think of it and of my American friends. It has been such a wonderful addition at an age in my life when I didn’t expect to do or get more.

I half hoped to see the Swami again next week (at the Hyde Park Hotel) but he is very busy. But what luck it has been to get him to Cambridge at a moment when Bob was here. I want very much to talk about him to you.

Love from much satisfied

Morgan

* * *

King’s Coll., Camb.

July 2[,] 1954

Dearest Christopher,

I am fascinated with the book,32 despite disappointments and difficulties. I will be lending it to Bob, and will then read it again. It keeps approaching to and then receding from the world of my own experiences, like something moving in the dusk, and so is more provocative tha[n] anything else you have written. Leading ambiguity is Asparian-Elizabeth, whom I do not want to meet nor whose moves to read. She is very well done, with almost fiendish consistency, yet I haven’t yet grasped how you

[wou]ld have us react to her. Again and again—lifting her remarks out of their prevalent sauce—I’ve felt I should like then so much if they were your remarks and tasted sharp and straight of you.

Michael is a very naughty hero indeed, and how Stephen could have stood up against him I do not see—who anyhow had to have a bit of something, as afterwards with Jane. So that the (British) book-jacket’s reference pal-zeik-03 4/14/08 2:57 PM Page 157

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to “shameful betrayals” puzzles me. My feeling is that there is no specific moral lesson in the book, but that all the characters who are worth anything are learning something—to be simpler, to be alone, not to gloat even about sin, not to attack the hate-disease directly, to lie open to intimations of unity should they happen to come. Gerda—and of course Sarah—learn most, and though they try they never learn through the trying.

Technical item: Shouldn’t pp 238–244 (English edition) come elsewhere? Your time-sequences are so intermixed that I can’t say where, but it should be in some relationship to the marriage to Jane, not inserted into an Elizabeth-sequence, which it interrupts.

Bob and I are just back from Leiden where I had a degree and was addressed very movingly form [ sic] the pulpit of St Peter’s Church. Will try to send you [the] address. All went well, we thought and spoke often of you and at Amsterdam and the Hague revisited some former scenes. At the end of this month I go via Switzerland to Bayreuth, so you may deduce that I am in good health and continental. I meant to write to you when I saw your play, which I enjoyed whenever it was yours, but van Druten had vulgarised it; and had failed to convey the atmosphere of Nazism thickening outside in the street.—Well acted, and as you know still running.33

I am well (as in last paragraph) and have plenty of sensations and impressions. The trouble is they rush by so quickly, as in a dream. Holland is already vanishing, and the people who have been coming in and out of this room all day coalesce into a monologue and I into a civil grin. Indeed as I write I remember that I have not been here all day—arriving from London at 11.00 A.M. only, and since then going once and perhaps twice into a nap.

We had a large quiet upper room at Leiden, looking over a garden which had a great maiden hair tree in it. Sky always grey in the morning and sun later. Town hall near—very cheerful with its bells. The Dutch were at their best. It was a lovely quiet time and I found speaking publicly came easy—I never do it in England now. I shall be seeing Bob again soon, when he drives over with May and her New Zealand brother to lunch.

Love, and thank you for the book,

Morgan

* * *

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King’s Coll. Camb.

Jan. 17[,] 1956

Dearest Christopher,

Your titled friends have told me of your arrival, and here comes my line of love. Catch me spilling my further news, though. Plans only. I plan to be here until Thursday week (26th) and then to London. I should be free on that evening, but what is important: can you dine with me and Bob the next day, Friday? It is one of his very rare visits to town, and probably his only chance of seeing you. The mornings of Saturday and Sunday might be possible, but Friday dinner the 27th is best.

Love

Morgan

* * *

[postcard]

K.C.C. Sunday

Feb. 19[,] 1956

Could I bring Nick Furbank for a drink on Wednesday at about 6.15?34

I am writing to you both to suggest it. He would like it I know.—Send me a p.c. by return if you are able to as I may be leaving here Tuesday.

The visit of D[on] and yourself was much enjoyed by me and all.35 Bob

& May have just left.

Morgan

* * *

King’s Coll., Camb.

Jan. 5[,] 1958

Dearest Christopher,

Love to you and Don, and I rang up the Cavendish before I left London yesterday but though expected you had not yet arrived[,] I am afraid I shall not see you again unless you manage, both of you, to run up here.36 When how welcome you would be. I forget your sailing date.

Lots of letters to answer, including one from Heinz, which shall be treated discretely. He is at an address new to me, in a nice flat.

I did so enjoy our two evenings.

Love to Don and you,

Morgan

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THE POSTWAR YEARS

159

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[postmark of air letter: Cambridge, January 14, 1960]

Dearest Christopher,

Double Envelope cannot move from John’s fireside, and I read it there last week in comfort and with great interest, but too hastily as time was short. The photographs of Tom, we agreed, was a master stroke, broke up the Forrest-Leonard alliance, and created new alliances.

If it is the sort of story I think, I think it oughtn’t to have gone to such lengths right away. As it is, the opening and the closing exercises vary too little, and there is scarcely anything extra left for Leonard. I would have been sketchier and more restrained earlier. But there, I may not have got your intention or the nature of the life you wish to describe. It may have been this absence of progress that made me feel sad as I left the fireside and went to open an exhibition of pictures by Mr Mukul Derz. I certainly found no progress in them.

It is difficult to tack on personal scraps when one has been concentrat-ing on a single thing and that such an unusual one. I am well. May is well.

Bob better but still far from his old self. I spent the New Year with them.

Christmas at Aldeburgh. Tomorrow I am televised on the subject of the Cambridge Humanists, next week I go to Oxford to see the premiere of a Passage to India.37 However that: enough. Close below me I see a spot that must have come from butter, and will stop.

With much love

[unsigned]

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[postcard]

King’s College Cambridge

[postmark: April 19, 1961]

Just to thank you for your card and to say, yes, I am only just out of hospital, though feeling unharmed. I look forward to seeing you and Don a bit later on.—Love to both—

Morgan

Wednesday

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