1926

TO HIS FATHER (LP XI: 265–6):

[Magdalen College]

Monday Dec. [January] 5th [1926]

My dear Papy,

I hope the cold has now gone. At best, I am afraid it will leave you weakened and shaken. It is the first week or two after one has got about again that is the dangerous part of such things: I hope you are taking all possible precautions.

Warnie and I had a rather interesting journey back.¹ First there was the episode of the friendly and intoxicated stranger in the smoking room of the Liverpool boat: but I feel that the Colonel’s pen will do that story more justice than mine. Secondly there was the amazingly erudite fellow traveller in the train. I suppose he had gathered from our conversation–W. was reading Evelyn’s diaries–that we were bookish people, but he let several hours pass before he quite suddenly chipped in, in a rather apologetic manner. I surmise that he lives among people who do not share his tastes and it is a relief to him to talk about them. He did not speak with the voice of an educated man, but his reading was curious: Pepys, Evelyn, Burnet, Boswell, Macaulay, Trollope, Thackeray, Ruskin, Morris and ‘The Golden Bough’.² He seemed to be some kind of architect or decorator.

Now this is the sort of thing I like. To have a literary conversation in the study at Leeborough or the common room at Magdalen is (by comparison) nothing, because one remains in the charmed circle of one’s own set and caste: there is nothing to refute the accusation of being out of the world, of playing with things that perhaps derive a fictitious value from the chatter of specially formed groups. But to talk over the same things with a man whose aitches are uncertain in a third class carriage–this restores one’s faith in the value of the written word and makes one feel suddenly at home in one’s country. It is the difference between grapes in a greenhouse and a hillside of vines.

The other interesting thing in our journey was the new scenery produced by the floods. Round about Warwick (you remember Warwick) for miles at a time there was nothing but water between one hedgerow and the next–and then the little hills made into islands. A village on a rise with ‘the decent church that fronts (or is it crowns) the neighbouring hill’³ has a very fine effect. You probably spotted the enclosed picture in today’s Times, but I send it in case you have not. The long building to the right of the tower is ‘New Building’ which Gibbon,⁴ who lived in it, called ‘a stately pile’. The arrow points to the line whose windows belong to (1) Brightman⁵ (the mechanical toy man) at the top. (2) ‘J.A.’⁶ (‘nothing to be gained by stammering over the word consciousness’). (3) Myself. (4) Ground Floor, and undergraduate rooms. You can imagine from the picture what a magnificent view I now have when the park has been converted into a lake. On a fine day when the sky makes the water blue and the wind fills it with ripples, one might almost take it for an arm of the sea. Of course I am not forgetting the serious side of the floods: but after all, what would you? I can’t save the life of Dutch peasants or the pockets of Warwickshire peasants by refusing to enjoy the beauty of the thing as it appears from my window.

I am getting on nicely, or at least enjoying myself, over the lectures. New facts and new connections between old facts turn up every day. Do you remember an essay of Arthur Benson’s about travelling by rail through a countryside where one has walked as a child?⁷ He describes how he saw all sorts of things which he had known all his life ‘linking up’ in new ways. The big field with the stile, when one used to look out into the unknown world, turned out to be only the other side of the field with the duck pond which one passed on another walk. The two big woods turned out to be one little plantation dividing two familiar walks. He goes on to describe the peculiar pleasure which these discoveries gave him. That is the kind of pleasure I am enjoying at present. For instance if you have known long ago that the Wartons⁸ wrote a certain kind of romantic poem full of phrases from Milton, and that Collins⁹ did the same sort of thing: and if you have hitherto regarded these as two isolated facts: how delightful to find out suddenly that the Wartons and Collins were at school together and made a sort of poetry club there as boys and had evolved it together. This is only one example. Something like it turns up every day. Coincidences, accidents, isolated phenomena, are disappearing all the time and being replaced by intelligible connections. ‘Linking up’ in fact. It is a most satisfying process. Let me have a line soon to say how you are, even if you can’t manage a letter.

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IX: 70–2):

Magdalen College.

Sunday

Postmark: 25 January 1926

My dear Papy,

There was no need for any apologies about the affair of the cheque. I was of course puzzled for the request for the return of an unknown cheque and wondered why you had not taken the more obvious step of ‘stopping’ it. In any case however I am so often guilty of dilatoriness in such matters that I can hardly complain if I am sometimes suspected in error.

As to the German measles–will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? The early stages are unpleasant but at least they bring you to a point at which the mere giving up and going to bed is a relief. Then after twenty four hours the really high temperature and the headache are gone: one is not well enough to get up, but then one is ill enough not to want to get up. Best of all, work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.

I re-read some of my favourite Jane Austens and read for the first time that jolly, unexacting tale, Quentin Durward.¹⁰ I even took the chance of going on with my neglected Italian and got through several cantos of Boiardo:¹¹ an interminable fairy-tale kind of a poem, full of dragons and distressed damsels, without the slightest moral or intellectual significance. It is suited to the atmosphere of a day in bed with the snow falling outside: the drift, the holiday from all sublunary cares. Then one returns to a primitive and natural life as regards sleeping and waking. One dozes when the doze comes unsought and if one lies castle building at night one does not mind because there is no getting up in the morning.¹² But of course all these delights have to be paid for: the first few days back to work when legs still ache and hours are long, are an unwelcome shock of earth–and that, I think, is the really bad part of it. I hope you are now past that stage.

I read with pleasure your account of how you had dealt with John.¹³ It is a miserable business. But while nothing can alter one’s contempt for John, my sympathy for the girl is modified by my settled conviction that John was certain to cause unhappiness sooner or later to any decent woman who had the bad luck to care about him. The real misfortune came long ago when they got engaged: something of this sort could then be foreseen, and it is better that it should have come in the form of a jilt than later, through the divorce courts, after years of unhappy marriage. That any process could have made John different, I don’t believe. He is as perverted in heart as he is feeble in head. He has no natural goodness of feeling to supply his lack of any kind of principles, and no inherited tradition of decent behaviour to act as a curb on his selfishness. None of that family has any notion of self control. In the case of Lily and Arthur you see this illustrated over small things and merely leading to bad manners: greediness at table, pettish discontent over trifling inconveniences, the perpetual ‘I want’. In John’s case the circumstances only are different. If one has no notion of restraint I suppose it is largely a matter of accident whether one commits great or small faults. But Lord! how my tendency to preach is running away with me. Better say simply that John is a rotter and leave it at that. And perhaps I ought to put in a word for Arthur who, after all, is an old friend of mine. At least he knows what is wrong with him and, I think, makes some effort to overcome it. As to Lily–what would she NOT do if she really wanted to?

I have given my first lecture.¹⁴ I suppose my various friends in the English Schools have been telling their pupils to come to it: at any rate it was a pleasant change from talking to empty rooms in Greats. I modestly selected the smallest lecture room in College. As I approached, half wondering if anyone would turn up, I noticed a crowd of undergraduates coming into Magdalen, but it was no mock modesty to assume that they were coming to hear someone else. When however I actually reached my own room it was crowded out and I had to sally forth with the audience at my heels to find another. The porter directed me to one which we have in another building across the street. So we all surged over the High in a disorderly mass, suspending the traffic. It was a most exhilarating scene. Of course their coming to the first lecture, the men to see what it is like, the girls to see what I am like, really means nothing: curiosity is now satisfied–I have been weighed, with results as yet unknown–and next week I may have an audience of five or none. Still it is something to be given a chance.

We have been as heavily snowed up here as I ever remember to have been since that winter long ago at home when you had to walk along the bank by the roadside to reach the tram. It was fine, dry, powdery snow while it lasted and the College looked very beautiful under it. The slush and dirt of the thaw is now over. I hope to have a letter from you soon,

your loving son,

Jack

TO NEVILL COGHILL (B):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[3 February 1926]

Dear Coghill

I am in hopes that this, whatever its literary merits, will at least help to make clear what I was trying to express last night: and last night’s conversation in its turn may make cantos VII & VIII more intelligible. If you are disposed to any detailed criticism (a task I nowise impose on you) please put it in pencil on the margin.¹⁵

Can you come & dine to day week (the 10th) at 7.15. I want to get down to it about some of the very difficult things we raised last night: but you needn’t have read Dymer by then–you shan’t be viva’d! I was delighted with de la Mare: its the real thing all thro’ and like cool water after Yeats and—fill in to taste,

yrs

C. S. Lewis

 

By the bye the MS. is confidential: I don’t want it known that I am writing ‘pomes’.

TO NEVILL COGHILL (B):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb. 4th 1926

My dear Coghill

It is as if you had given me a bottle of champagne–a dangerous moment and difficult to reply to. For any one of my temperament there is always a certain difficulty in quite believing praise, especially from a new reader. It is not exactly modesty–more a sort of fear that we must be leaving something out of account. Yours, however, is of the best sort. Waiving any application to myself your remark about ‘the delight of giving admiration in exchange’ is quite a new light to me and enables me to understand better a great deal of my own experience as a reader.

Your remarks on the Masefieldian lines go to the root of the matter–I should say the bad Masefieldian lines, for, in some points, one wd. not be in the least ashamed to have learned from him. The ‘pretense of carrying more weight of beautiful meaning’ is absolutely true. I shall be very glad to have any passages where that happens pointed out to me: the thing has gone on so long now that it is hard to spot them for myself. As to ‘slickness’, I am sure I have often deluded myself and tried to delude the reader that way. All the same, it is not quite plain sailing here. The early parts must have a certain neat, shallow speed–they must appear rather cheap compared with the later because that phase of the journey was cheap, wasn’t it. Of course I know we are here up against the devil of a problem: how to present bores without being a bore, or second-rateness without being second rate: complicated by the fact that the reader must be made to share that stage with Dymer and feel the spell himself.

As to the other side–it pleases me more than I can tell that you recognize the spiritual experiences. I was afraid that they might be private or not of this age. Also you relieve me of my two greatest anxieties a. Whether Canto III was mere vulgar nonsense b. Whether the ‘redemption by parricide’ myth in general wd. seem simply preposterous & shocking.

Dymer hardly felt mediocrity after waking (my dear Sir, how uncannily well you have understood it!) because he died i.e. the special problem of adolescence worked itself out to a finish. We feel it because we are in a different problem now: all Dymer’s problems are past history to us and we live where he never came. At least I think that is true.

With many thanks, & hoping to see you Wednesday

yrs

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. Of course I’m not Dymer: I am about to him as he to his son. At any rate he has done his best to kill me these three years!

TO HIS FATHER (LP IX: 102–4):

Saturday 5th June 1926

Magdalen

My dear Papy,

While not disposed to question the strictly mathematical parts of the reasons submitted in your letter, I suggest that you omit the real question. Did you reply to my last letter? Was the move with you or with me? However, let the move be where it will, I was wrong to leave it for such a length of time. As often before, I can only plead that what has no special date and may be done tomorrow as well as today, is hard to do at all.

I hear with delight from Warnie that you propose to visit England this summer. Let us determine that no light reason shall be allowed to upset this plan, and no difficulty be made into an impossibility. My idea is that I should cross to Ireland for part of my usual time and that we shd. then return to Oxford and you spend some days with me in College. There is a set of guest rooms on this very staircase, so we should be very snug and able to hob nob a’nights without going out of doors. We could dine in Common Room (not dressed) or go to an ordinary in the town as we preferred, and you would have an opportunity of sauntering about the city and its fields with more leisure than Uncle Hamilton’s peremptory programme allowed us. Then, if possible, W. would come up for a week end and we might proceed to London or elsewhere. Do make every effort to realise the plan. Now that I am in College we have a pied à terre in England which seems to have all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of a hotel, and which certainly ought to make visits more possible than they have ever been before. It is rather important to try and fix a date, and I should be glad to know when you think you could get away.

But I know what I do in raising the point of ‘date’. At least I presume it is from you that I inherit a peculiar tendency by which a chill comes over the happiest designs as soon as a definite detail of time or place is raised. At first all is attractive and like a floating island, detached from the actual world: at the mention of a date, obstructions crowd upon the mind: arrangements to be made, difficulties to be overcome, and all the repellent lumber of packings, boats, time tables and interrupted habits rush in and ‘quench the smoking flax’.¹⁶ The odds are that the whole scheme, if injudiciously pressed at that moment becomes a sort of bugbear. Is this a true bill? It is of me, I know only too well. The only remedy seems to be to remember that every happiness we have attained in the past depended on the lucky moments when we were not cowed by the ‘lumber’. (Lord! Was there ever such a young fellow for preaching at his elders? He cannot take up his pen but a steady flow of doctrine begins. Perhaps it comes from taking pupils.)

A heavy responsibility rests on those who forage through a dead man’s correspondence and publish it indiscriminately. In those books of Raleigh’s¹⁷ we find, as you say, letters like ‘a glass of good champagne’ side by side with mere squibs thrown off in high spirits or mere grumbles written when he was liverish. Notice how Liverpool, India and Oxford all come up for castigation in turn. Much of this should never have seen print. The anti-religious passages are odd. Something must be allowed for the mere turn of his language which was always violent and dogmatic–like Johnson. When he says ‘Jesus Christ made a mess of it’¹⁸ I doubt if he really means much more than another might mean by saying ‘Even the teaching of the Gospel seems to involve fundamental difficulties’. But I am speaking without book and of course it all depends on the context. In so far however as his remarks show a real ignorance of the importance of Christianity as (at least and on my view) one of the biggest and most venerable things in the history of the mind–in so far as they refuse to allow to it even that reverent consideration which any educated person must allow, say, to Greek Philosophy, or the Renaissance, or Buddhism–to that extent they are merely silly and unenlightened. On the other hand, so far as they are merely using terms of expression which are offensive to religious feeling in order to express legitimate, tho’ may be very erroneous, views about Christianity, I think they are covered by the fact that they occur in private letters. On the whole I must confess that the reading of the letters, much as I enjoyed them, did not raise my opinion of Raleigh. When all allowance has been made for the haphazard nature of casual letter writing, it remains true that there must be some flaw in a man who is always blessing or damning something or other. There are too many ecstasies and the opposite. The funny thing is that his own view on the things of the spirit, in a large sense–I mean about what is really valuable and what is not, and about the position of mind in the world–are not really in opposition to the atmosphere of Christianity. Whatever he thought about the historical side of it, he must have known perfectly well (everyone seems to be getting to know now) that the religious view, whether literally true or not, was at any rate much more like the reality than the views of the scientists and rationalists.¹⁹ I daresay the whole thing springs from some prejudice contracted in early boyhood. You speak of ‘comfort to tens of millions of men and women’ and this just reminds me to quote a sentence from Raleigh’s ‘Wordsworth’ to show him at his best. ‘The vision shown to the pure in heart does not fulfill, it corrects their desires’.²⁰ I do this to adjust the balance, lest I should seem to have forgotten that ‘with all his faults etc., etc.’

I have been bothered into the last job I ever expected to do this term: taking a class of girls once a week at one of the women’s Colleges.²¹ However, I am not engaged to be married yet, and there are always seven of them there together, and the pretty ones are stupid and the interesting ones are ugly, so it is alright. I say this because as a general rule women marry their tutors. I suppose if a girl is determined to marry and has a man alone once a week to whom she can play the rapt disciple (most fatal of all poses to male vanity) her task is done.

Otherwise things go on as usual. Nearly all my pupils went off during the strike to unload boats or swing batons or drive engines.²² The best strike story I have heard was about engines. A train (with amateur driver) set out from Paddington to Bristol, first stop Bath. When it reached Bath half an hour earlier than normal express time, every single passenger got out of that train and refused to enter it again. Apparently the genius in the engine had just opened the throttle full, said to the stoker ‘Carry on’, and left the rest to fate.

A boy I knew at Merton drove an engine for twenty seven hours. At the end he never could remember whether the last light he had seen was green or red. Sometimes he painfully shunted back to see: but he found that if he did that once, he wanted to do it again. There were surprisingly few accidents. Warnie had some ugly adventures in London but if he has not told you, perhaps they are not to be committed to the written word. We of course had to stay on as long as any pupils were left, and it had just got to the point of our having got to go when the thing ended. I don’t mind telling you I was in a funk about it. Docking was filled up and I would sooner have gone to the war again than been a constable. The necessity for either moral or physical courage is bad enough, but the two together are ‘a bit thick’. I could make some shift to stand and have things thrown at me: I could make such shift to lift up my voice in an angry crowd. But to have the spiritual ordeal first and then the physical! As well, I haven’t got the right voice or face for ‘moving on’ people. The first time I spoke they wouldn’t hear me: the second time they’d say ‘F—off!: the third time I’m afraid they’d simply laugh. In fact I had come down to thinking of inglorious canteen work when the whole nightmare came to an end.

Well, I must go to bed. I think I am beginning, as you say, to feel my feet under me. Every one is very pleasant. I am examining in a fellowship examination in the autumn–rather a sudden reversal of positions. You diddle me over Falstaff: it certainly is surprising when taken out of context.

your loving son,

Jack

TO A.K. HAMILTON JENKIN (B):

Magdalen

Sept. 8th [1926]

My dear Jenkin,

When your hymeneal epistle²³ reached me I was spending my days in correcting exam papers and my nights chiefly in thinking about toothache–nature having then favoured me with particular opportunity for a first hand study of that phenomenon. With the immense superiority of a miserable man who was startled at the shallowness of character shown by people who married and were given in marriage while my tooth ached: I reflected that so they had done in the days of Noe until the flood came and swept them all away.²⁴ Since then, as leisure and ease have gradually returned, I confess that my judgement of your exploit has progressively softened. From scorning it as impertinent, I tolerated it as pardonable: from toleration (it was even at that moment when the fumes of the gas began to leave my brain and I heard a voice say, Rinse your mouth out with this) ²⁵ I proceeded to approval. The thing was innocent: even laudable: nay profitable, comfortable, and a cause of gratulation. You see that at no earlier moment could I properly have taken in hand to offer you (as I now do) the heartiest congratulations and the very best wishes (even to a Shandëan particularity of curious beatitude) of Mrs Moore and myself.

Indeed there was something in your manner of announcing it–with the parenthetical ease of a man borrowing a box of matches–which hardly invited a formal reply. ‘It was not unpremeditated’. Egad, was it not? Well, the lady is fortunate: I am sure you are too. You have as much of the gift of happiness as any man I know, barring donkies, and I am sure you will taste domesticity (the Augustans wd. have said ‘vertuous love’) with the same fine palate you have applied to mines, birds, woods, wind, rain, fires, crime, letters and ghosts.

Authors ought to marry author’s daughters (a notable tongue twister) as they may be supposed to be already inured to living with genius. It must be a wonderful experience. (1) Please recommend me to your wife and, even in my absence, remit the friendship with her new seal, which as Lamb says, you know, is needful.

I have had an infernally busy summer, writing lectures, and have nothing to tell you: except that I grow daily more and more doubtful in all subjects. Once more heartiest congratulations and best wishes to you both,

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

 

(1) I mean marriage, not ‘living with genius’.

 

Jack was unable to persuade his father to travel to Oxford for a visit. He did, however, manage a visit to Little Lea from 11 to 20 September. He was with his father when the narrative poem he had been working on since 1922, Dymer, was published by J.M. Dent on 18 September. As with Spirits in Bondage, Dymer was published under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’.

TO CECIL HARWOOD (B):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Postmark: 28 October 1926

My dear Harwood,

Thanks for your letter. I can think of a thousand replies to what you say about Cantos I and II, but you must be right, as Barfield, the reviewer in the New Leader (my best so far), and the only don who is in my confidence, all think the same.²⁶ Securus judicat.²⁷ That is one of the many quotations of which my knowledge is purely functional: one knows where it applies, but what the de’il it was about I never discovered.

About powers other than reason–I would be sorry if you mistook my position.²⁸ No one is more convinced than I that reason is utterly inadequate to the richness and spirituality of real things: indeed this is itself a deliverance of reason. Nor do I doubt the presence, even in us, of faculties embryonic or atrophied, that lie in an indefinite margin around the little finite bit of focus which is intelligence–faculties anticipating or remembering the possession of huge tracts of reality that slip through the meshes of the intellect. And, to be sure, I believe that the symbols presented by imagination at its height are the workings of that fringe and present to us as much of the super-intelligible reality as we can get while we retain our present form of consciousness.

My scepticism begins when people offer me explicit accounts of the super-intelligible and in so doing use all the categories of the intellect. If the higher worlds have to be represented in terms of number, subject-and-attribute, time, space, causation etc (and thus they nearly always are represented by occultists and illuminati), the fact that knowledge of them had to come through the fringe remains inexplicable. It is more natural to suppose in such cases that the illuminati have done what all of us are tempted to do:–allowed their intellect to fasten on those hints that come from the fringe, and squeezing them, has made a hint (that was full of truth) into a mere false hard statement. Seeking to know (in the only way we can know) more, we know less. I, at any rate, am at present inclined to believe that we must be content to feel the highest truths ‘in our bones’: if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruth.

At all events if more knowledge is to come, it must be the wordless & thoughtless knowledge of the mystic: not the celestial statistics of Swedenborg,²⁹ the Lemurian history of Steiner,³⁰ or the demonology of the Platonists. All this seems to me merely an attempt to know the super-intelligible as if it were a new slice of the intelligible: as though a man with a bad cold tried to get back smells with a microscope. Unless I greatly misunderstand you, you are (in a way) more rationalist than I, for you would reject as mere ideology my ‘truths felt in the bones’. All this, by the bye, is meant for exposition, not argument.

I should dearly like a visit. Term ends on Dec. 11th, but I am not quite certain whether I shall be able to interpose a weekend between that and the beginning of a scholarship examination. But I will do my best. But seriously, are you certain that I shall not be a bother? I know that even an intimate friend cannot come to a house without disturbing to some extent the even tenor of its way–and there’s the parvus puer.³¹ Please make quite sure about this: and above all don’t let Daphne persuade herself that it won’t be a bother, because she thinks you’d enjoy having me. The fact that you have inflicted the whole of Dymer on her

(Unhappy fate the poet’s wife attends

–He reads his own stuff, and he reads his friends’)

has given me such large idea of her altruism, that I am afraid.

Barfield spent a night with me in college last week and we had a golden evening. With best wishes to all of you,

yrs

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS LILY SUFFERN (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

[November? 1926]

My dear Aunt Lily

A copy of this³² has been set aside for you ever since publication, but I lost your address many months ago and so it has stood over. You gave me a bad fright in your letter–it was a relief to get to the doctor’s revised verdict. Do let me know if there is anything more to know. Both you and I have had dealings with pain and death: I hope we can talk to each other with soldierly freedom. You will tell me everything, won’t you?³³ I am sure your attitude is the right one: half the people who die are killed off by fright at the names of diseases–often falsely diagnosed! But quite apart from this present trouble, is it really wise to live so entirely alone? You know you nearly fell into your well out at Thame…of course there are difficulties and a stupid housemate is a cross: but perhaps a fairly wholesome kind of cross.

Harley³⁴ is priceless. The incurable vulgarity of mind in our Holywood relations is a thing I shudder at: incurable, because it is accompanied by conceit.

What luck having the £250 to publish with–but surely it hasn’t got down to publishing at your own expense. Surely even in this country there must be someone sufficiently alive to be interested in what you are saying. I long to see it as I still have only some idea of it in its earlier forms.

I am well, except for a cough, and live in the midst of (probably) too much beauty and too much comfort for soul’s good: the only corrective is–well, not real overwork, but a continued succession of jobs, social and academic, which fritter away one’s time.

As to Dymer–I always rely on you for plain honest criticism. The first four Cantos you have seen already: the last four are the best, I think, and certainly the most in your line. It has had one or two good reviews and is promised another, but I am still in Harley’s position about sales.

I shall be very anxious to hear from you again as soon as possible. As regards all practical advice, you are much better informed than I am: I only beg you not be foolish and undertake more than you can manage. Can’t you have even a girl in to help? It is dreadful to think of you in a cottage alone, falling thro’ ceilings etc. I wish I could do anything that might be of help to you. Is there anything I possibly can do? Is there anything I can send you–you must be out of reach of most of the resources of civilisation. In the mean time, I can only assure you of my deepest sympathy in all the bothers you have had and my intense admiration of your courage. I saw the following dedication in a book the other day, and it made me think of you ‘To—,—, and—, who had nothing in common except that they were not governed by fear and desire and you cd. believe what they said.’ That is simple and sound, isn’t it? With best love and best wishes in every way,

your affectionate nephew

Clive

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Magdalen College

December 1926]

My dear Arthur,

I was on the point of writing to find out where you were, when your letter arrived.³⁵ Of course I am sorry that we shall not meet at Christmas, but I quite understand that after your long spell of home you are not eager to return.

About the play³⁶–of course I ought not really to speak without knowing more details of your new ideas than I do: but I can not help thinking that the introduction of incest is a mistake. I think it is quite legitimate for a man to take incest as his main theme, if he is really interested in a tragedy of it or the various moral and psychological problems which it raises. And in that case I shd. regard any moral objection to his work as invalid. But it is a very different thing for him simply to throw it in as the makeweight in a play whose real purpose and interest lie elsewhere. That, I think, might be legitimately objected to. At any rate it would irritate the best kind of spectator by diverting his attention from your real theme into the realm of mere pathology, and attract the wrong kind who will always find sexuality (specially abnormal sexuality) more interesting than anything else. Besides, you bring it in only to make things ‘more so’. Wasn’t it just that desire for the ‘more so’ which spoiled so many Elizabethan plays–piling horror on horror and death on death till the thing turns ridiculous? It’s quality not quantity that counts. If you can’t make tragedy out of the story as it was, you won’t be any the more able to do so by the help of the unnatural. I think, myself, the whole feeling about incest is very obscure–almost a savage taboo, and not really moral at all: that makes it, to me, rather external and superficial. Again, won’t it force you to load your play with improbabilities & long explanatory dialogues? I don’t know if Gribbon is in your confidence about the play. If he is, you should discuss my view with him and try to reach a conclusion. The Banshee may be a good idea enough–it all depends, as you know, on the way it is introduced.

Minto and Maureen are well and send their love. I have had rather a nasty term with a cough wh. has kept me awake at nights and a good deal of work. I don’t know how Dymer is selling, if at all. One thing is most annoying: you remember that the T.L.S. reviewer wrote a very kind letter, promising a good review.³⁷ It has not yet appeared. No doubt it will in time, but it is too late now to give a lead to other papers–wh. wd. have been its chief value. I am learning Old Norse and thus beginning to read in the original things I have dreamed of since before I really knew you. Dreams come true in unexpected ways.

yrs

Jack

 

P.S. I don’t know the French for C/O. Is it ‘chez’ or ‘au son soin de’?