So I Have Thought of You

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  2. Romney Green certainly was a carpenter, only surely a bit more than that, a master-carpenter, or even a master-craftsman?

  3. I would have thought that ‘A Recorder’ in the June 1920 Chapbook (D2:12) was certainly Alida Monro herself?

  4. Is it worth mentioning that Anna Wickham had an arrangement to offer any collection of more than 48 poems to Grant Richards, which is why some of her titles (e.g. The Man with a Hammer) were published by The Poetry Bookshop?

  Well, all this is hardly worth saying, perhaps, meanwhile I can only congratulate you again on reducing the ‘bibliographer’s nightmare’ to order, and of course I would think a dedication a great honour, best wishes, Penelope

  P.S. I can’t give up Margaritae Sororis! Perhaps you’ll come across a copy one of these days – perhaps it was series 3 no 24?

  I notice that in HM’s will he directed that the PB should be closed down when he died, and I think it’s rather sad that AM struggled for another three years –

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  26 August 1987

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou so much for your letter and your comments on my draft – I tried hard not to repeat material that had been used before, but, of course, in many cases I couldn’t help it. I know it’s not a scholarly introduction and indeed I haven’t the knowledge to write one. But, as you said, the PB people are not at all like the much-heard-of Bloomsbury group – they’re not well-known and some biographical information doesn’t seem out of place. – Incidentally I see that in your list you relaxed just for a moment, and said one of the Christmas cards was the most beautiful of the series – I was very interested, as I never knew bibliographers admitted, so to speak, that one item was more beautiful than another – only rarer.

  I’m very grateful for your corrections and, of course, accept all of them. I’ve never seen a complete run of the Chapbook and, I’m afraid, was in a terrible muddle about the numbers. In a muddle, too, about the opening of the Bookshop. Could I take out ‘(published, in fact, before the Bookshop existed)’ on page 8 1.1-2, and alter the footnote to ‘was officially opened’.

  I don’t know what to do about page 5 1.5, I suppose it does sound peculiar. Could I change to ‘In 1913 the Bookshop began to publish’ and take out ‘work was extended in two directions’?

  Apart from the corrections, would you like anything else done or rewritten? I’ll get on to Virago and Anna Wickham’s son about quoting the lines on page 4 – incidentally Jim Hepburn (the son) still has Harold Monro’s corkscrew, which he stole from the Bookshop as a small boy.

  The Samurai Press interests me so much. I thought James Guthrie gave them the press – but after all, why should he?

  best wishes, Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  8 September 1987

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou for your letter, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m glad you’re leaving your comment about the Xmas card in – very glad, because although I know there’s an accepted way of writing bibliography, (there has to be,) still bibliographers ought to show that they’re human sometimes.

  I was sad to hear about the Curwell Press – I didn’t know that it had gone, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of the Stellar Press – but if Rota’s recommend it that says something.

  Harold Monro’s son committed suicide, but, I’m afraid, I don’t know exactly when, or anything more about his life, though I have a notion he was a doctor (my notions, though, have been proved not to be worth much). I’ll try to find out, and let you know. – The copyrights were left in a confused state – Charlotte Mew’s for example being left to a friend of Alida Monro’s who was to take care of the remaining dogs in her kennels – by the way I don’t know if I told you that an American publisher, Addison-Wesley, are bringing out Charlotte Mew and her Friends, together with her collected poems, which will give her a modest foothold in the U.S.

  Howard, if you could get the corrected introduction typed up, I should be most grateful. I’m so far behind with everything – perhaps you know the feeling –

  best wishes

  Penelope

  P.S. I hope the building work is going along well. It’s such a relief when the builders leave –

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  2 October [1987]

  Dear Howard,

  This is to thank you for the beautiful clean copy of the introduction and I need hardly say that you must make any changes to the punctuation you like. I haven’t any double quotation marks on my typewriter, by the way.

  I wrote to Jim Hepburn (Anna Wickham’s son, who threw snowballs at D. H. Lawrence as a little boy because he thought DHL was after his mother – but I’ve just remembered that you must know Jim, because of the Malcolm Lowry connection) and he’s very willing to have her verses quoted (on p. 8 of the typescript) but points out that in spite of their furious rows, Anna and Harold were really friends deep down, so that if it’s possible to add, to the footnote on p. 8, (’the verses were never published in her lifetime, and there was in fact a considerable sympathy between Anna Wickham and Harold Monro’) I should be grateful, but perhaps it’s too late for these alterations.

  I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know about Smith Settle at all, although I go up to West Yorkshire most years, to teach creative writing (but what is that, I often wonder?) – But I’m quite sure that (understanding a little, as I do, how difficult it must have been to do this particular bibliography,) you’re right in making sure of printers who will understand the atmosphere and the period of the Bookshop. But oh dear, this tedious and ungetroundable problem of money –

  best wishes – Penelope

  24 April 1988

  Thankyou so much for the cutting from Publishers Weekly. I hope for the best for C. Mew, although unfortunately the printers have got 2 pages in the wrong order and all has to be put right again.

  I’m sorry you won’t be here this spring, but look forward very much indeed to seeing the PBS book.

  I suppose by now you have many generations of Burmese cats in Revere –

  best wishes Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  London, N6

  25 May [1988]

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou for your letter, and the portrait of your cat, though I don’t see why it has to share a stamp with a Maine coon cat which I should have thought was decidedly inferior.

  I’m looking forward very much to seeing the book in July. At last there’ll be something to show what the Poetry Bookshop was like and why it meant so much to people, and it won’t have vanished completely off the face of the earth. – Five copies would be fine, if you could manage it.

  As to my papers &c, they’re a bit complicated as they include all the material I collected for a life of the novelist L. P. Hartley, but haven’t used, because I realised that if it was written it might be painful for his sister, who I was and am very fond of, and his great friend David Cecil (who died not long ago). So there it all sits. Otherwise it’s just my own mss, letters and so on. By the autumn I should be sorted out (I’m a very slow, inefficient and tearful mover, but I’m going to a nice small flat which my younger daughter and her husband have converted out of their garage* and it will be lovely once I’ve got myself in order), and I should very much like to talk to you about it –

  best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  15 June 1988

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou very much for your letter. They say moving is the second most traumatic experience and although I’m going to lay my bones with my kind younger daughter and son-in-law, who have turned the garage into a little flat with wonderful ridge-tiles and finials, I feel in a state for which confusion isn’t nearly a strong enough word. And then it’s a duty, in fact a necessity, to throw a lot of things away – old envelopes, jam-jars and bits of string – and yet I can’t bring myself to part with
them.

  I also feel that perhaps I’ve misled you, which is the last thing I should want to do, about these papers – there is nothing complete or systematic (I’m not complete or systematic myself as you know and quite failed to make a list of the PB rhymesheets) – I haven’t got mss or tss of everything and I have certainly thrown away a lot of letters. As for filing them alphabetically or taking carbons or Xeroxes of them, well it never occurred to me. What I could do is try to get them together as you suggest – under the different titles, but the letters are, I’m afraid, not from famous names. Then there are note-books full of disjointed and unintelligible bits and pieces. I feel rather ashamed of all this, but mustn’t give a false impression. Please do ring anyway, won’t you, when and if you come to London in the autumn –

  best wishes, Penelope

  P.S. The L. P. Hartley material is so complicated that I’d have to explain it to you, if you felt like listening!

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  [summer 1988]

  Dear Howard –

  This is just to welcome you to London – a London with no post, however, so I’ll drop this in. I’m just going down to Somerset – until Monday 12th, and then I have to go down there again on the 17th and 18th, for newest grand-daughter’s christening, but otherwise I’m here in Highgate, and do hope you’ll find the time to ring me up –

  best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  London, N6

  1 August [1988]

  Thankyou for sending the Book Collector piece, it was very nice, and ‘scrupulous and helpful volumes’ – well, you must be pleased with that.

  Very hot here, and American scholars say they can’t stand it without air conditioning –

  best wishes, Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  London, N6

  26 August [1988]

  Dear Howard,

  I’m just hoping that this arrives in time (I mean before you leave, but for all I know you may be going to other places first) to congratulate you on the PB bibliography. To me it seems beautiful, and worth having for the sinner and the Christmas card alone (but I’m ashamed to say I don’t know who Alistair Stewart was), and I can scarcely believe it’s out at last, as at one point I was quite convinced I’d leave this earth without anyone ever having heard of the Poetry Bookshop. Joy’s book was out of print, and everyone was dying, or their memories were fading.

  congratulations and best wishes

  Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  Highgate

  London

  12 October [1988]

  Dear Howard,

  This is just to say that the 4 copies of the PB have arrived now, and to thank you very much for them – and to tell you something quite absurd (for a moderately sane person) which is that, although I’ve been through the book so carefully, and paused over all kinds of things, and admired the colour, and speculated over whether the ghosts would ever materialise, I only just noticed the dedication, for which too I’d like to thank you so much – I never thought I’d live to see the Poetry Bookshop properly treated and properly studied, so much of what Monro produced seemed to have dropped out of memory, or in the case of the rhymesheets, literally blown away with the wind. So the dedication means a very great deal to me –

  love Penelope

  Will ring up as you suggested on the 25th. Meantime have to go out with a TV crew to Highgate Woods to try and film a birch tree – all for 2 minutes in a programme – Well, I mustn’t complain

  6 December [1988]

  Dear Howard – You won’t think much of this receipt, but it’s what I was given – I suggested to him that his firm ought to have a receipt book and he said That’s Not A Bad Idea.

  It was nice to see you and I hope all went well in Aberdeen and in Edinburgh, and with your house move, but I still think it’s a very serious thing to leave a garden, particularly with walnut-trees in it –

  very best wishes for 1989

  Penelope

  When I was little I used to think it would be a wonderful thing to live to the year 2000, and now I don’t care a bit whether I do or not –

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  15 January [1989]

  Dear Howard,

  Nice to hear from you, and to hear that the beautifully wrapped-up cases have got to Texas. I felt a bit disconcerted by Emery Freights, as, though they were amiable and came when they’d said they would, I thought it was strange that they had no receipt or invoice forms of their own – still all is well – things do turn up in the end – I once had a letter from Harvard which took a year to arrive – it was from a postgraduate who was reading some letters of Rossetti for me, for which he made a charge of 50 cents.

  It was very good of you to buy the envelope – I told Hugh Lee that he ought not to mix up professional artists with amateurs like myself, but he gets carried away by his enthusiasm, and I’ve known him ever since World War 2. Really he ought to have tried to get a royalty off the new Lloyd-Webber musical of David Garnett’s Aspects of Love – the songs sound frightful, and I’m sure it will run for many years – perhaps he did try, but I’m afraid without success, and now he’s having difficulties with his committee at Charleston. Still, everyone has difficulties with committees.

  The Knox Brothers was rather hard to write, for fear of hurting people’s feelings. (I don’t at all mind everyone taking religion seriously, but not if it means separating people who love each other. – ) Yes, Dilly was deeply fond of Maynard Keynes and L. Strachey – but Somerset Maugham, (who often said very sensible things, even if he has gone out of fashion) said that when a man gets married his wife, sooner or later, gets rid of his old friends, and Aunt Olive almost managed to do this. – It was partly that they couldn’t stand the freezing cold in the house –

  Thankyou for the page from the catalogue and best wishes for 1989 to you and Bob – Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  9 March [1989]

  Dear Howard,

  This is to thank you for the delicious dinner which I enjoyed so much, and for the wonderful Blake’s Seven Songs. I needn’t tell you how much I value them, even more perhaps because as you say in the Bibliography, they’re not ‘coloured consistently’ – partly I think because of a kind of Poetry Bookshop nostalgia for Blake’s own plates, which after all aren’t coloured consistently either, partly, I like to think, that Charlotte Mew ‘hadn’t finished with the Prussian blue’ as we used to say when we were children sharing a paintbox.

  The very first thing I’m going to do this morning is to compare them with the Innocence and Experience plates in the Geoffrey Keynes ed:, then try out the music on the nursery piano with one or 2 fingers. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know anything about Geoffrey Gwyther and very little about G. Spencer Watson (but I can find out). Then they have to go into a special drawer, because Tommy, now 4 and a half, came in just now while I was looking at them and suggested that he might fill in the bits that weren’t done with his paintbox. But he accepted at once that they were precious and it would be better to fill in something else. I was glad, though, that he liked them so much, even though I’m only going to allow them out on special occasions. – Truly, it’s a marvellous present and you can be sure I appreciate it.

  Very best wishes for your trip to Athens, which I still think sounds like the beginning of a Raymond Chandler, and for the extensions to the house, and to Bob and the rockery. I wonder if he can grow dryas octopetala, because that’s my favourite among everything they have in the rockeries at Kew –

  love Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  8 April [1989]

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou so much for your letter, and for the cheque – please don’t think that I don’t realise what a lot of trouble it mus
t have been to send the money in sterling, but it was a great help to me and I’m grateful, as I’m sure you realise. I see now that dealing in contemporary (if that’s the right word for me) authors must be just as much trouble as dealing in rare books. I’m so glad everything turned up in the right place in the end.

  I’ m so glad you still like your picture. That, it seems to me, is the great difficulty of buying anything, particularly if, like me, you’re not very strong-minded – you begin to think of all the other things you might have done, or might have bought, but I can see that you’ve learned to trust your own judgement.

  The notices of the Day-Lewis Hamlet are

  1.That it lasts 4 hours – (but it used to last 6 hours in the Old Vic days when the gallery cost a shilling, and we all stuck it out) –

  2.That he’s physically just right for the part, but his performance is a ‘near miss’. I’ve seen more Hamlets than I dare count up, but I still feel David Warner and the Russian, Smektounovsy,* were the only ones who got it right.

  Very best wishes for your Athens expedition. You ought to keep a diary – perhaps you do – best wishes – Penelope

  27a Bishop’s Road

  London, N6

  16 May [c.1989]

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou so very much for the wonderful W Morris sale catalogue, full of marvels and (to me) unbelievably high prices – I’m reading it through slowly as it’s so very interesting – I see for example that the cataloguing for the Cobden-Sanderson bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan library was done by F. B. Adams junior, the Charlotte Mew collector, now retired to a château in Chisseaux – and what wonderful illustrations, particularly of the Morris Virgil. The shameful thing is that I’ve never heard of the Doheny collection, but then there are so many things I’ve never heard of. Well, I shall treasure my catalogue, and in my will, which I haven’t yet succeeded in making, I shall leave it to the Library of the William Morris Society, which is only a small one, but has some nice things including a Kelmscott Chaucer, and is much consulted and much loved. (When there was a dispute between the Trustees and the Society we had to rescue all our books from the Trustees’ locked cases with a keyhole saw). The Morris house on the river in Hammersmith has now been bought by Christopher Hampton, the playwright, and we’ve recovered the coach-house in which Morris used to hold his Social Democratic meetings, and are about to clean it out and restore it, with the help of the (usually unhelpful) council.