best wishes,
Penelope
25 Almeric Road
London, sw11
29 September 1980
Dear Francis,
Thankyou very much for your kind words and also for your good advice, (which I’ll try to take only I’m not sure if I have the capacity) in the Spectator. I rather wish I didn’t have to be Miss Fitzgerald as it seems to discount my husband, of whom I was very fond, not to speak of 3 children and 2 and a half grandchildren, but I suppose that’s an occupational hazard of writing short, powdery novels.
Anyway, I do truly want to thank you. –
Just a few faithful at PEN. – Jasper Ridley walking about with a piece of paper with the obituary you’d written on it – he said I hate reading aloud and after I have had a glass of wine I can’t read at all – I asked him if he had had a glass and he said yes, but it all went off very well in fact.
very best wishes for your opening,
Penelope
Anne W. and loved one now coming to live in Battersea – just round the corner, in fact
25 Almeric Road
London, sw11
10 January [c.1981]
The U.S. edition of this just arrived so I thought I’d send you one – not because I expect you to read it but because I haven’t anything else to send and wanted to thank you for giving me so much time and advice –
best wishes
Penelope
I still feel puzzled about LPH but less so. I suppose he was just selfish, and I hadn’t the wits to recognise it.
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
22 February [1983]
Just to congratulate you on the ‘Why do we write’ speech – Lettice tells me she thinks it was the best talk she ever heard at PEN – we were both touched by what you said about the actual necessity of writing, and the threat of shortening time, (although we agreed that it would be many years before you’d need to worry about that) –
love, Penelope
[postcard of The British Library]
23 May [1983]
Back at work in this place, though I’m getting so peculiar that if I don’t manage to get seat H5 my whole day is ruined. – I did enjoy the visit to Padua so much, partic. Petrarch’s villa – none of my assorted crockery is broken and I’m keeping the glass boots as a perpetual souvenir – thankyou again for tireless organisation and protection which meant such a lot – love Penelope
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
1 April 1984
Dear Francis,
Please forgive this paper, I’m down at the post office in Somerset and can’t find anything better, and I just wanted to write you a note about the PEN grant, or rather the disappearance of it.
I don’t know who decided this, but it certainly was never discussed by the literature department’s (alleged) consultative panel. So I suppose the literature department (Charles, his dog, Josephine, Kate and a secretary) settled it themselves, or perhaps Finance did. The regions were given a list of organisations and asked which ones they’d like devolved to (or is it onto?) them, and PEN was on that list. They all said they didn’t want PEN, but the question was absurd in the first place.
I asked whether anyone from PEN had been asked to come and make a case before the cut was decided? At each of the literary panel meetings one or more ‘clients’ usually appear (e.g. John Calder, Alan Ross, the National Book League in force, the alarming Federation of Worker Writers &c) and say what they’re doing, and why they ought to be given money, but no-one from PEN ever came, or was asked to come. I was told that the grant was made solely on account of PEN’s work in receiving international writers &c, and yet something could have been said about the archives. (I mean the tape recording of interviews and personal reminiscences) or the encouragement of English writers, or the recent proposal to invite VI forms from the schools to the meetings (which I admit hasn’t got far as yet, still it might do). The whole case went by default because no-one was ever asked to put it.
I expect you know all this, but having now attended my last meeting, very exhausting with Jonathan Miller conducting his alternative meeting next door, I thought I would just send you a word about it. I know, of course, that everyone thinks they’ve been unfairly treated –
love, Penelope
31 July [1984]
Thankyou very much indeed for kind words about Charlotte Mew, (and incidentally for the reference to Mrs Dawson Scott, wh. fitted in rather well with what Valls said, that he owed his release to International PEN).
On seaside holiday – but I’m sure alas that I could once make better sand-castles than I do now love Penelope
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
[c.1984]
My dear Francis,
Thankyou so much for your kind letter – I don’t know what Collins are doing, except that Christopher Maclehose and his sweet but ominously named apprentice have now suddenly become the Harvill Press, but I’m glad they sent you poor Charlotte M. and very much appreciate your taking the trouble to write to me about it.
I say ‘poor Charlotte Mew’ because she seems to have been so unfortunate even in those who liked her and those who didn’t, and now she is coming out at one of the worst times in the publishing year, owing to difficulties (so they say) at the printers. No matter, at least she’s out, only just in time, as Marjorie seems to have got a publisher at last, which I’m glad about really. At least Collins produced a very nice glossy enlargement of the picture of herself and her mother, so I’ve sent that to her in case she wd. like to use it as an illustration.
I do remember The Romantic – I think the heroine is called Charlotte Redhew – May Sinclair being very reckless about names. I went to see an old lady who remembered her (i.e. May) quite well – but at the end of her life, of course. It didn’t seem to her anything very remarkable that Miss Sinclair had ‘lost her mind’, and I could see that she thought of it as a likely fate for writers and ‘artistic people’.
Since my visit to Leslie’s Avondale, now transformed into the Misty Waters Grade 2 Hotel and canoeing centre, I feel I can’t write any more biography, as in Leslie’s case he always seemed to get one jump ahead, so to speak, of anything I could write. They were running his big greenhouse as a nursery garden and of course it suddenly fell down one day, as though by magic.
I’ve got the right things here for making redcurrant jelly and strawberry jam and looking after the baby, but no paper except endless post office forms (one of them gives the scale of rewards for resisting armed intruders) – there must be some paper somewhere, but meantime I thought I’d write this –
love
Penelope
76 Clifton Hill, NW8
[To Francis King CBE]
2 July [1985]
So very many congratulations, which I would have sent before, only news gets so slowly down to the depths of Somerset –
Penelope
[postcard]
30 August [1986]
Dear Francis, Thankyou so much for your kind p.c. – you’ll hardly remember, having been to so many other places since, that you told me the story of the Italian family and their dwarfs yourself, for which I also have to thank you.
I hope everything went well in India – love Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate, N6
25 November 1988
Dear Francis – (This is not the right sort of paper, but I ought to be writing something else, only I thought I would very much like to write to you first) – I hoped perhaps I might see you at Raleigh’s party last night, but Josephine explained that you hadn’t much felt like a lot of noise, and there was a lot of noise – she also told me that you’d had a good report from the doctors, and that’s the point of this letter, simply to say how glad I was. I count on you to defeat time and nature, just as you’ve got the better of so many other things.
I hope you don’t miss the theatre – it seems to me that one expects to miss things, and then doesn’t, or not as much as expected – I d
on’t miss teaching as I thought I would. But I admit that I do miss you as president of the PEN English Centre, when I make my way down there from the northern heights.
This, of course, is a letter that doesn’t need answering, it’s only to send my sympathy for everything that’s been painful and tedious and my best wishes.
love
Penelope
I’m just sorting out, not my letters but various notebooks, drafts and backs of envelopes which seem to me of very little interest, for sale to Texas (I shan’t let anything to do with Leslie Hartley go). I’m weighing them on the bathroom scales, and I suppose selling your papers is a ritual stage in a writer’s life – a very late one.
[15 October 1993]
Many congratulations on your speech at The E. Standard lunch – I know you’ve made a good many speeches in your life and I’ve heard only a few of them, but I thought it was particularly successful, specially the change of tone at the end, which gave me some idea of the book – love P
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
19 December [c.1996]
Dear Francis,
Thankyou so very much for the copy of The Buried Spring. It’s an ambiguous title, like others of yours, but I don’t find it depressing, because springs are buried (like the Twill mill-stream) only until they reappear again.
One good thing about having flu, which seems to be, and indeed is, lasting for weeks, is that I’ve been able to read things slowly, as they deserve. But they’re sad poems, Francis! I’ve read an immense amount of poetry this year for the Forward Prize and stuck to it that John Fuller ought to win, (as he did), because of elegy on his father – ‘and this is what it is to grieve’. I thought that in The Buried Spring there might be an elegy for your mother, but I was quite wrong and I should have known that it’s not my business to look for a poet’s subjects, but to try to understand them when they come.
So much of your distress seems to be on other peoples’ account –
How could I even if I choose Now let another swimmer drown?
This seems to go against what you wrote in your autobiography – ‘why could one not be brave for one’s own sake?’ but I think it isn’t difficult to sympathise with you in both cases. – What makes me sad is that (like Housman) you sometimes seem to write as though life was a kind of responsibility laid on you which you can never hope to discharge. – But I also get the impression that what you yourself can’t bear to lose is the capacity to feel strongly, whether it’s loving or hating, which makes me wonder why you didn’t include the Carcase?
Meanwhile I’m given a kind of hope or reason for hope by The Raising of the Blind – not that I think reason has got much if anything to do with it.
Thankyou again and best Christmas wishes –
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road, N6
4 October [c.1997]
Dear Francis,
This is to thank you very much for Dead Letters and your kind inscription.
I enjoyed the book very much, although ‘enjoyed’ isn’t quite the word, because it’s such a sad book, Francis. It’s sad not just because of the Principe, he’s doomed from the start and for him the story is an elegy, but because you make us like Steve so much, (as always, you have the art of letting us get to know these people so quickly, a paragraph or so is enough – ) anyway I loved Steve because he was so patient and efficient and because he had no idea who Prince Myshkin was and wanted to climb higher and get some fresh air, and tried so hard to keep straight with the money – and then you gradually and quite relentlessly show him as a loveless man, ‘someone who does not want to think about it’. It’s true that you say he’s given the Lampedusa figure ‘the will to carry through to eventual triumph’, but if that’s to be the justification for Steve’s life then that’s putting art above humanity with a vengeance. – You didn’t ask me for my opinion, and you mustn’t think I didn’t appreciate the book’s construction – indeed I did, and I thought it was a wonderful book – being sad is nothing against it.
I wonder why you didn’t put Yesterday Came Suddenly on the list of Also By – that puzzled me.
Thankyou again and best wishes for everything – love Penelope
[c.1997]
Dear Francis – Thankyou so much for Olympia, who cheered me up – I was so very sorry to miss you at Virginia’s and it was very good of you to write. Let me seize the opportunity to tell you about my symptoms, and say my gout isn’t at all the socially-historically sort which Roy Porter lectures about but the result of poisonous chemicals given me by the Whittington Hospital to make my heart work a bit better. – I don’t like the way doctors take out their materia medica nowadays and look anxiously through it before writing out yet another prescription – they used to pretend to know, and pretences have their value –
love and best wishes Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road, N6
19 November [1997]
Dear Francis,
Thankyou for your letter, and I should be happy to be interviewed about what I’ve written, that is if you quite honestly think anyone would want to come and listen, (always a worry). Only, please, could I have a kind, tolerant interviewer, as I’ve never been able to remember the names of my characters (can you honestly say you remember all yours?). Andrew would be very good I’m sure although he is always immensely busy.
Feeling very low after the last days of the BL reading room – love Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
19 October [c.1998]
Dear Francis,
Thankyou so much for your invitation for October 26th – I should have loved to have come, but, most unfortunately for me, I’m irrevocably committed to help with an (alleged) literary dinner at the Highgate Institution. It was very kind of you to think of me – and I was deeply impressed by the equatorial schoolgirls on your card, writing on the earth, without any need of a teacher it seems, love Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
28 October [c.1998]
My dear Francis,
I won’t apologise any more for being the lingering guest, because you didn’t make me feel at all like that, indeed I’m sure no-one ever does in your house.
I would really have liked to ask you about everything you were doing, and say how much I admired your alterations to the house, and ask whether you designed them yourself, but instead of doing this I talked about myself. Not that I had much of interest to say.
I get depressed at times – I suppose it’s ridiculous to regret the Liberal party, the Church of England, Lyons tea-shops, Carter Paterson, telegrams and so on, but so many of them seemed to disappear at once. I had a letter from Edward Blishen (who I don’t think is too well), saying that he’d always suspected it might be a mistake to get into your seventies.
But then after a delightful dinner party, like the one you gave last night, (delightful in every way, because the dinner was so delicious and I very much enjoyed talking to everyone there) I can’t remember why there should be anything to be depressed about. Thankyou so much – love Penelope
[March 1999]
Dear Francis – This is just to say how absolutely right you are about the north and south of Europe, and yet no-one seems to have said it before.
It was so nice to see you at International Writers Day. It reminded me of old days – such a long time ago.
On no account answer – it was just a thought – love Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road, N6
1 September [1999]
I’m just reading The One and Only and enjoying it so much and partic. the absolutely right pre-war details. The 1 and only thing I question was whether you could flick Hatter’s Castle, as I remember it, across the room. But this of course doesn’t matter, the atmosphere is marvellous, many congratulations love P.
Norah Hartley*
25 Almeric Road
London, sw11
15 July [1981]
&n
bsp; Dear Norah – Just one more letter of many! I was rung up by Hamish Hamilton last night to tell me that you had authorised a biographer for Leslie – I’ve been so dreadfully slow (and still haven’t collected all the material I wanted, or managed to see Mary Wellesley) that I expect people have given up any hope of me getting anywhere – but if you should want me to help him (that’s the new biographer) then please tell him so.
Meanwhile we are having rather a sad year, because my daughter’s baby that we were all looking forward to so much was born in May and is a darling, a boy with large blue eyes, but after a week or so it turned out that he had an incurable muscular disease, it’s difficult for him to breathe and they seem to think (always ‘they’!) that he can’t live for much longer than two years. My daughter and her husband have decided to give up teaching and run a little sub-post-office and shop in the depths of Somerset and look after the baby there, and they said will I come and grow the vegetables – but I shall have to be in London part of the time to earn a bit of a living – so what will become of us all I don’t know, so life goes on.
So I Have Thought of You Page 33