Letters to a Sister

by Constance Babington Smith

  No, I wasn’t hurt by my tyre burst. Tubeless tyres don’t puncture easily, but, like other tyres, they blow up when cut by sharp kerbs etc. when going fast. I wobbled all over the road before I could stop, but luckily without harm, as there was nothing just behind me. Nothing can be done to prevent it except to try not to hit sharp edges with the side of the tyre….

  We had a v.g. [sermon]... yesterday from Fr Harris, about the shock of realising that one’s regular prayers and communions aren’t ‘making a ha’porth of difference to one’s behaviour or one’s attitude towards other people’; his plea was that we should make them more effective, and not think them an end in themselves. I think your [ideal] Service would be very thoughtful and helpful, but would take a very long time. It would have to begin about 8.0, & not end till I.O. It would help if people made their notes beforehand, not at the time. I quite agree about the pauses. Even our sins aren’t given any time to remember. The Prayer Book needs mother’s rows of dots.93 During the Offertory sentences we should think of what we are meaning to try to offer (apart from money); during the exhortation, of those of our neighbours we might not be in charity with, during the thanksgiving of the good works prepared for us to walk in. There might be an annotated P.B. published, with spaces for such details.

  I’m afraid you will be terribly disappointed with my novel,94if you expect the kind of book John the Baptist might have written. I don’t think it is really reformist at all, only full of churchy chat and speculations. Next time I will perhaps write a reformist book, putting in all my plans for a better Church, and send copies to all the Bishops and important clergy. Perhaps it had better be a novel, the central character a vicar, who in the end resigns because his reforms aren’t allowed, and becomes a hedge preacher.

  I was reading an article the other day about the ancient Jews; how they were so wholly religious, and therefore so ready for new revelations of God, because they cared for no secular arts. Unlike the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Persians, Etruscans, Indians, Egyptians, of the same periods, they had, apparently, no secular literature, drama, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, carving, or anything, and concentrated entirely on religion. No philosophy, even, except religious or moral. I wonder if this philistinism about the arts & culture is the best background for strong religious interests. It may be. Certainly the more artistic and cultured popes weren’t very religious. I wonder how far religion and secular culture pull opposite ways, as Gregory the Great always maintained. It seems important to combine them. Of course it isn’t quite true that the Jews had no secular poetry; there is the Song of Solomon, and may be some more that hasn’t been preserved. But on the whole they concentrated on goodness, and on God. They seem to have outgrown this single interest now….

  Now I must write a review, answer 3 letters, and make my will (good works prepared for me).

  Very much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 10 July, [1956]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  Here is Canon [Charles] Smyth of Westminster.95 One sees that it is much more difficult for the unthinking than for the thinking man, who can always think of senses in which he can believe. You are wrong that a clergyman can’t have both brains and integrity; I have known many with both. What he mustn’t have is too literal a mind, he must be a little subtle. Dorothea writes, by the way, that she thinks bishops usually now ask the deacons the 1928 revised question.96 I expect tomorrow there will be a lot of letters telling the Brigadier that people do go to church, not only a handful of old people.97…

  Miss Markham was v. sensible on old age.98 She said the first thing was to face it without dismay. She mentioned the shock she had when, long ago, she was waiting for the lights to change before crossing the road, and some kind person came up and said ‘Shall I help you across, ducks?’ and the shock it was to a man she knows when he heard some people speaking of him as ‘such a nice old gentleman’. But when one has settled down to that, she said how good & interesting life still was, and how many new things to discover all the time.

  Subtopia means, I take it, the country round and near a town, which is apt to get built over and spoilt. Topia is Greek for place, and sub means near (when it doesn’t mean under), as in suburb (urbs, town). Utopia is a good place, from eu, well.99 I suppose Subtopia hasn’t been a word long enough to get in a dictionary.

  I don’t go to all the P.E.N. meetings, but have some tomorrow.100 My protégée, Sheila Davies, is greatly excited by seeing so many writers, and goes about starry-eyed, thinking it all wonderful. I tell her who they are, and introduce her when there is opportunity, so I hope she will get to know some, which is her great ambition. It is touching to see someone feeling so young about writers.

  I have changed the News Chronicle for the Telegraph, which is a good deal less silly and vulgar. And I have ordered Reynolds [News] instead of Sunday Express.

  Wednesday. Only one letter printed today,101 but many received. They ought to print some from the Universities.

  Much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 July 15, [1956] (St Swithin’s, & has rained.)

  Dearest Jeanie,

  … I’m afraid that the ‘Believe’ correspondence is now over, as The Times had a leader about it yesterday, which is enclosed. They say that if any deacon feels the declaration a stumbling-block, it can be removed by proper instruction. It would seem simpler to change the words, but apparently this is difficult. I don’t quite know how they… have the effrontery to say that believing ‘means believing that the scriptures contain everything necessary for salvation’; it is a great twisting of plain words, and certainly not what the original composers of the declaration meant. Our 1662 Prayer Book is, I suppose, the only P.B. that has this form102; the American one hasn’t103; I’m not sure about the Scotch, but I think not.104 But thinking young men can always think themselves out of it, no doubt. Only so many ordinands are not thinking young men, and they must either assent to a lie or say ‘No’. If I was being ordained and the Bish. asked in what: sense I believed any particular book of the Bible, I should say ‘In the same sense that you do, my Lord.’ Then he would be in a hole, as he couldn’t well say that wasn’t enough….

  We had a wet day in Cambridge yesterday, but I think the P.E.N. quite enjoyed themselves. We had lunch in Trinity great hall, where the Master kindly presided (Lord Adrian). I sat next him, and enjoyed talking to him. He and Lord Pethick-Lawrence were talking about the Lords debate on the abolition [of capital punishment] bill.105 Both these Lords had voted for the bill. The Lords can’t hold it up indefinitely, so in a year or two it will probably be passed, unless the Commons change their minds about it. After lunch I showed my new P.E.N. recruit106 Cambridge a little, then went to part of an organ recital in King’s Chapel, then she went off with half the company to a place outside Cambridge whose owners had offered us a party. I stayed behind, then about 20 of us had tea with E. M. Forster in his room. He had asked if as many as possible could be foreign delegates, and of these as many as possible dark-skinned. However, he had invited me also, and most of us were white, though I talked to a magnificent Gold Coaster and a charming Lebanese. Then I went to see Dorothea, and the rest of the P.E.N. returned to London by the coach….

  I shall find this ‘believe’ correspondence very useful in my Cambridge discussion with C. S. Lewis.107 I hope some baulked ordinands will still write in and complain, saying what good clergymen they would have made.

  I am re-reading Evelyn Underbill’s chapter about Psychology and the Spirit.108 It is v.g.; I mean, exactly what I think myself, about the struggling-up of man from his animal state, with all his animal desires still clinging to him. I like her quotation from St Angela of Foligno’s conversation with the Holy Ghost, who said to her ‘Thou art my best and sweetest bride, and I love thee better than any one else in the valley of Spoleto’.

  Next Sunday at 9.30 a.m. there is a sung Mass broadcast from St Paul’s, Knightsbridge,
so mind you listen. I shall stay at home & listen. It is a proud moment for St Paul’s, and the Vicar is delighted.

  Very much love, thank goodness this Congress is over and we can sit back. The Organizing Committee is all but dead. The foreign delegates are, some of them, touchy, and envied one another’s parties, places at the Dinner, length of time allowed to speeches, etc. etc. As people go, I think the British—no, the English —are on the whole less touchy than most, though touchy enough.

  I thought the ‘Lift up your hearts’ speaker was wrong about the one word in which Euodias probably answered the question ‘What is wrong with the Church?’ I think she more likely said ‘Syntyche’ than ‘I am.’109 I thought last week’s speaker very interesting. They are improving….

  Very much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 24 July, 1956

  Darling Twin,

  This brings very much love for tomorrow.... I thought the St Paul’s service came over beautifully, and I was glad to hear it, for once, from the outside. The music there is excellent, and the choir and choirmaster celebrated. I am very lucky to be able to have it every Sunday; I wish you had too…. Fr Harris was perhaps almost too expository, aimed too much at people who knew little about it, but this may have been useful. He did say that when the bread was broken we offered our selves and lives with it, to be broken in the service of God and of other people; but I should have liked more about the effects on our lives; I have heard him preach well about this, tho’ too seldom.… Had I written it for him, it would have been nearly all about this, one could go on for some hours about it of course, but he had only 10 minutes. However, I was glad he set the scene for listeners, including the incense, which is a good thing to popularize. We now all feel that St Paul’s has had a good boost, and, if it wasn’t just at the beginning of the holiday months, should hope for a rush of fresh congregation. I wish you could come up some Sunday in your holiday and we could go there together….

  I think the meaning of music adds a lot to one’s enjoyment of it. Still, the music I enjoy most—Mozart symphonies & concertos, & Beethoven, Haydn, Bach & a few others—has no words and no meaning beyond what one feels as if was in it. And music one doesn’t care for isn’t really made palatable by a meaning one does care for; in fact, the music matters more than the sense. The most beautiful poetry set to dull music is no use, and much better left in words only….

  I think I shall be here most of August. I wrote cancelling my voyage,110 also told Gervase Mathew, who writes back how healthy it would be for me, but, judging from what I heard from someone who made such a trip last year, it is rather tiring. I hope I am not now past such enterprises, and that it is only this year that I don’t feel quite up to it. But let’s face it, we are getting old. A nice young woman offered me her seat in a train the other day. I said ‘How nice of you. I don’t see why I should take your seat, but I agree that I’m much older than you, so thank you very much’, and she smiled sweetly and I took it. This seems the friendlier course, I think, even when one isn’t tired.

  Did you hear ‘Lift up your Hearts’ this morning? I thought it good, but I never quite liked the idea of those old rotten clouts,111 they were probably smelly; still, I expect poor Jeremiah didn’t mind, having been so long in that deep dirty hole, which I saw in Jerusalem.

  I’m glad you are taking Reynolds [News] too. What do you make of the story of the doctor M.P. who was drugged and put in an asylum and certified, till his wife drank the same sherry with hemp in it and went mad too, which showed they had been drugged? He says he is now hunting for the gang who drugged him.112 It sounded a very odd, mad story.... It surely can’t be all that common to be wrongly shut up. I thought they had access to doctors continually, and could be decertified any time they were thought sane. Tho’ of course I have read many novels about patients shut up by their enemies for years....

  On Friday we will talk about your holiday. Dear me, what should I do without these Fridays, or Saturdays, or whenever the weekly meeting is. How very lucky it is that you are so near; you might be at the other end of England, or in S. Africa or somewhere, and then what should I do? As it is, provided you live as long as I do, or even longer, it is all right. All my love for the year. I shall go to Mass for you and St James tomorrow; how right it is that he should be your saint.

  Now I must get on with Style in Eng. Religious Lit.113 I am full of envy & spite, and believe that other people are the same, but not you.

  Your loving Twin

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 28 August, [1956]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  ... I am glad you are getting on with The Towers, and like it. John Connell told me today that he supposed Laurie to be a man till the mention of Vere; he thought Vere a male name so that L. must be female. Actually Vere, like Laurie, can be either. He likes it, and is reviewing it in the Evening News soon. I also met Paul Dehn in the street, he is on the ‘Critics’ just now, and says they want to do the book, not next week, as they are doing the Edinburgh Festival, but probably the week after. We must listen to that. I expect the two Sunday papers may do it this Sunday, or possibly not; if so I will bring you Sunday Times. The reviews will be interesting. Some people think it is mainly funny, which I didn’t mean, though no doubt a few jokes got in as I wrote. I am a little nervous about R.C.s, tho’ not really about Moslems. I had a letter from Stewart Perowne, whom I mention in the Jerusalem part, as he was there when I was; he is very pleased at being in a book, and I hope the others I mention will be too; I don’t say any harm of any of them.

  An odd thing seems to be happening to me, I am getting Lower Church. Where will it end? Perhaps in All Souls’, Langham Place, sitting under Mr Stott.114 I am getting annoyed with all these absurd extreme Anglo-Catholic ways. Not with incense etc., but with such absurdities as [those which] Kensit mentions, which are copied straight from Rome, and with the materialistic view of the sacraments; I am not pleased when the bell goes during consecration. Actually I suppose it isn’t Low but Broad that I am growing increasingly, though always pretty broad before, but now so broad that all the bowing & holding up trains that goes on at All Saints’ [Margaret Street] worries me. It is time I returned to St Paul’s and Grosvenor Chapel; All Saints’ is too high for me.

  Do you mean that 40 bombs over remote seas will make us ill in Britain? It must be stopped at once.

  I am rather sorry Archbishop Mathew is abroad in the Aegean just now, when all the hierarchy must be agog to get Westminster and the various jobs that will become empty owing to the general post.115 He should have been in the Cathedral at the Requiem, with the other bishops etc. Still, he certainly wouldn’t get Westminster. I wish he would; it would be splendid for the Church.

  Someone writes that my book is very persuasively Anglican. I hope it is. How splendid if it was read by chemists, who took my criticisms of unlabelled Pills to heart! It is a very silly and dangerous practice.

  I shall come on Friday. I do feel pleased that you like The Towers. I should have been very sad about it if you didn’t.

  Very much love.

  E.R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 10 September, [1956]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  ... I am very glad Miss B——liked Trebizond, and that it both amused her and increased her sense of sin. What a lot you have done for her to develop and change her attitude towards life. She must be very fond of you.

  I do feel glad you like the book; that matters more than any one. One this morning from——, the most enthusiastic I have had, saying it is the most ‘improving’ book she knows. I had a very nice letter today from the Bp of Tewkesbury,116 … I hadn’t been sure if he’d like it, but he does. My unre-ligious friends seem to like it too; I have a lot of nice letters from them. I wonder how Gilbert Murray is getting on with it; he was going to read it to cheer himself up. I shall probably call on him when I am in Oxford, and he may tell me. I go on Thursday [to Oxford, and].... on Sunday I go on to Droitwich Spa
, to keep Eric Gillett company while he swims in the briny baths; I shall be back on Tuesday. I will write from either Oxford or Droitwich….

  Dorothea says she doesn’t think she has improved muscularly, tho’ she has learned better how to manage to do things.117 It is very depressing for her. Still, much better than being dead, like Janet Trevelyan & so many others.

  I noticed that Trebizond isn’t going to be done on the ‘Critics’ next week, I believe because Veronica Wedgwood was going to do it and is off the ‘Critics’ this week because her father died. Perhaps she will come back the week after. Instead, they are doing The Red Priest,118 which sounds an odd book….

  Raymond Mortimer wants me to go on about Laurie in another book, as he liked her idiom of expression. I wonder. It would have to be about something quite different, another set of experiences and encounters, and people and animals. My camel and ape are immensely popular, by the way. It is a great thing to put in something for everyone….

  Very much love.

  E.R.M.

  [Probably 24 September, 1956]

  Dearest Jeanie,

  ... I am still getting some very nice letters about Trebizond. I get to feel almost like a priest, with so many people writing to say how much I have helped them in their religion. One writes ‘That a person like you etc. should affirm publicly in August 1956 that she believes there is such a thing as sin, and that she is agin it, must hearten many also-rans who had a suspicion all along that this might indeed be so. It will enliven their endeavours to stick to their notion that “what we have to gain is not one battle, but a weary life’s campaign”, and that it seems, on the whole, better to wear our souls away in a doubtful attempt to see the job in hand through to the finish.’