11 Outlands Road, Cottingham, E. Yorks
Darlingest of Buns,
I hope and trust that your burrow remained sandy and dry after I had left, that Mrs Flopsy Bunny made you a sustaining mug of camomile tea and there were no depredations by Mr McGregor . . . [continues]. But oh dear, the rest of the weekend put me in a considerable fluster. You see, I had to buy my copy of the Observer – was my poem in this week? I wot not, the fuckers* – from a different shop, as the one I normally go to was closed, and oh, the mean and altogether sinister frightfulness of it, the yawning counter, the newsagent glaring at me and asking, ‘What did I want?’ Just read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four again, and of course it’s exactly like round here.
But here’s your poem, darling, as promised: Sodding Vice-Chancellors, don’t you just hate ’em? Children on fairy cycles – why not sedate ’em? Send home the niggers, string up the reds And let us librarians sleep safe in our beds
Five minutes later – No, I can’t do anything at all – it is really is appalling. That woman below actually whistling as she comes up the stairs! And the noise, like a kind of endlessly churning Niagara filling the whole house with its wretched disturbance. The whole family blatantly talking at meal-times when they know I’m sitting here trying to listen to ‘Hot’ Pee-Wee Cystitis and his Cisco Six. Can my life get any worse? Can it? Quarter to eleven. The clock staring at me with its face of awful reproach. Just read John Wain’s new one. No good, of course. And to make matter worse a telephone call from those vile, awful, unspeakable, conniving fools in Loughborough** asking if I want to come for Christmas . . .
Later still . . . But I haven’t, dearest bun – did I say that I have saved a carrot for you? A nice big orange one – we can eat it together (drawing of rabbits frolicking) – replied to your letter.*** Please don’t be miserable about all this. I shall be glad to have your sympathy, but I think we both feel that the best thing at present is that I shag my secretary and that other woman Monday to Fridays but come and see you at the weekends. Oh, how unutterably unsatisfactory life is.
Even later . . . Really pissed now, I’m afraid. That South African cooking sherry again. Good stuff but 7/9d the bottle, would you believe it? Just been reading Yeats. No good of course. And then K’s novel.**** Funny opening scene naturally taken from that phone conversation we had in January 1947. And then the joke about the woman burning the gravy from a letter I wrote to him in August 1951. I mean, it stands to reason that K. couldn’t write something like that without my help. Dialogue on p. 94 with its repetition of ‘breakfast’ and ‘cigarette-lighter’, both words frequently used by me. I ask you!
Just been browsing through Enright’s new collection (one of my ‘contemporaries’.) No good, of course.
Good night, my hutch-trained, gentle-eyed, lettuce-loving bun.
PX
*L’s poem, ‘Staring miserably out of the window, again’ appeared in the Observer of 4 May 1955
**L’s sister and brother-in-law
***In a letter of 19 April Monica had written that she was ‘desperately miserable’, feared that L would never marry her and was ‘distraught’ over his affairs with other women
****Kingsley Amis’s novel, Friends and Other Enemies (1955)