I was fascinated by the photographs of Weimar and Leipzig, about 1904–6 I should say – the one of Schiller’s house is amazing as the photographer evidently intended a poetic contrast between the nicely dressed ladies and the market women with their shawls and dreadfully heavy baskets, but the effect is quite oppressive and frightening. Perhaps it’s on account of the weak lighting, I don’t know, but anyhow I was very glad to have them. The Lutheran nun who sent me photographs of Schlöben (where the community had succeeded in keeping their hidden chapel going through the whole of the war) told me that she trusted me to send them back, so of course I did, but perhaps you’ll let me keep these ones. I’m sure you’ll be happy to be back with the New Criterion. I felt that was the place where you were really at home. The Counterpoint Press and the North Point Press I, of course, have never heard of. Do you think they’re safe, Chris? But then you’re young, and quite rightly don’t consider these things; you left Houghton Mifflin* on a point of principle and I expect you’ll go on the same way.
My youngest grandchild Alfie, aged 6, has just beaten me at chess, but says that I am not bad for a beginner –
love to you and your family – Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
25 May 1999
Dear Chris,
To begin with, thankyou for sending me the piece about Carroll and Graf, I was never very happy at being published by them as they had a pornographic list – Venus in the kitchen &c. – but I think I had better steer clear of the law-suit.
I very much appreciate your suggestion of reprinting (or republishing) The Knox Brothers but do you think people in the U.S. would want to read it? There’s so much about the Church of England, which has become an exceedingly dim subject, and Punch, too, an important paper in its day, has been reduced almost to nothing (I’m glad my father didn’t live to see it) and has finally been bought by Al Fayed. My uncle Ronnie was once a very well known figure, but I was sent an article the other day titled Who was Ronnie Knox? I’m not complaining about this, not at all, time passes, but with The Knox Brothers I think that constitutes a real difficulty. I’m also a bit doubtful about revising and correcting it, as I no longer have the letters and photographs I borrowed. (I did correct it for the Harvill-Collins paperback in 1991, and what happens to the copyright I don’t know. Perhaps it reverted to me.)
This doesn’t seem a grateful or polite answer to your kind suggestion, and I know you will understand and accept my apologies in advance. Even while I was writing it I thought what a closed chapter of history it was, but I didn’t mind, because I wanted to leave a record of it before it was too late. But by this time I feel it’s barely intelligible. And the bibliography! Someone did do Ronnie’s, I think, for a thesis, but Dilly destroyed all his papers.
with love and best wishes – Penelope
24 August [1999]
Thankyou so much for your card – but it’s a sad fact that by my calculation this is the last day of your holiday – so glad it was such a success. I do wish I liked lobster – this has landed me so many times in awkward situations – and I feel the same about oysters – but I know I must be wrong as no-one else in the world agrees with me – love Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
28 September [1999]
Dear Chris,
This is just on the subject of The Knox Brothers, which may well have gone right out of your mind, but just in case it hasn’t, this is to say that Harvill Press have written to me to tell me that all the rights in this book have reverted to me, for what they’re worth.
I’ve never got to the state where I don’t care if I never see another book, but I sometimes allow myself to think that there are too many of them in the world. Now I’ve agreed to be a judge for two prizes given by the English Speaking Union and that means about a hundred large, heavy new books arriving and where they’re to go I can’t think, for I really have no room at all, and I know I shall have great difficulty in getting anyone to take them away afterwards. I’ve decided that my prize-adjudicating career, such as it is, must draw to a close, but it’s a fact about life that you never do get completely to the end of anything.
One of my grand-daughters is getting confirmed – she is eleven, and wants to wear a long, tight black skirt, which she can’t kneel down in without alarming sounds of stretching and ripping. But there you are, she’s a good girl and plays the cornet with the local silver band –
all best wishes
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
13 October 1999
Dear Chris,
Thankyou so much for your letter, and I’m quite willing for Counterpoint to be the exclusive publisher of The Knox Brothers in the U.S. and Canada and the terms seem all right as far as I understand them, but whatever is ‘the retailer’s freight-pass through allowance’? I ought to know, I expect, but I don’t, but perhaps it will all become clear in the contract, or perhaps I’d do best to leave it to you as usual.
(I feel this paragraph makes me sound stupider than I am. But I’m just no good at business.)
Thankyou, too, for the cuttings – we’ve had two enormous bookshops open here this month, one in (on?) Oxford Street and the other in Piccadilly where Simpson’s used to be. (I must say I miss Simpson’s – not that I’ve ever bought anything there for many years. They were the first people in London to sell Daks – but I’m afraid you’ll never have heard of them.) Anyway, these bookshops are said to be going to stay open till all hours, and serve coffee, and put the little places out of business. Let’s hope not.
Good luck to your daughter with the Irish step dancing. But I don’t think you ought to speak of ‘Michael Flatley’s Riverdance’ as he had an almighty row with them and formed his own company, in which he can still jump higher than anyone else.
I’m so glad there is going to be another Maeve Brennan. HarperCollins did ask me to do an introduction to the first one, but I couldn’t see it was possible to have any introduction except William Maxwell’s. It just couldn’t be bettered, and I’d have had to take all the information from it anyway –
best wishes
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
11 November 1999
Dear Chris,
Thankyou so much for your letter, and for the photograph of Charlotte Mew – you say ‘in her prime’ but she looks quite old, although absolutely ready to defend her corner. Our Eddie looks much less aristocratic – Charlotte Mew has a proud, delicate expression. – Meanwhile my elder daughter is in real trouble, as she had 2 cats from the same litter, much prized by her daughter Jemima – Tina had a day off teaching and undertook to mow the lawn, or a bit of it – and there in the long grass she found the stiffening body of Rosie, one of the two cats – Jemima came home from school and Tina missed the moment and didn’t tell her that she had just finished burying Rosie in the orchard – and now she has to keep up the deception somehow, and even, at Jemima’s suggestion put up an advertisement in the local shop – LOST, GINGER CAT and so forth – I suppose one should never tell a lie, even with the best intentions.
(Please thank your mother-in-law for her kind message.)
You may feel I haven’t tried very hard with the questionnaire but I promise you I’ve done my best. At least I’ve been able to suggest a photographer. But I have to admit failure with the reviews of The Knox Brothers, but equally certainly I haven’t any now. You say ‘if you feel you can trust me and the post-office with the originals’ – well, of course I could but I haven’t any. I feel the same inadequacy as I did when Texas (who have all my mss) said they would like some diaries, but I haven’t kept any diaries.
I seem to remember that Malcolm Muggeridge wrote quite a nice notice, but alas! he’s dead now.
I’m having to save up
The Rose Garden as nearly 200 books have arrived, to be judged for the Heinemann award. Really, the publishers seem to have sent anything that came to hand. I can’t believe Charlotte Mew was the first book you edited. I thought you’d edited dozens, from the calm, experienced way you took it on. Well, that’s an honour for me – love, Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
5 December 1999
Dear Chris,
Thankyou for your letter, and the contract for The Knox Brothers. I don’t feel sorry to have written it, as all the evidence and the direct witnesses were disappearing or dying or losing their memories, but oh dear, it seems to belong more and more to a vanished era – I never dreamed of a time when Punch would have been bought by Mohammed Al Fayed, and Bletchley would become a museum. However, I’ve got great confidence in what you call your familiar m.o., though I don’t quite see how you manage now Counterpoint has moved to Washington? You’ve never had the time to explain that.
I was very interested in the story of your family’s old tortoise-shell cat. It’s the element of time again – the secret had to be kept so long that when it did come out you weren’t sorry either for Chat or yourself, but for your mother. Let’s hope the same thing happens to Tina’s daughter, Jemima, but they are still at the painful stage of advertising in the local papers.
This letter seems to have got rather melancholy, but it was really intended to thank you for all you’ve done with the Knox Brothers – love and best wishes – Penelope
P.S. Books still pouring in for the Heinemann. The poetry collections are slender, as usual, but the biographies have reached vast proportions, and the novels are almost as bad.
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
13 January 2000
Dear Chris,
Thankyou so much for your letter and I’m glad everything goes so well at Counterpoint (can it really be nine months?).
When you say ‘new poems’ by Geoffrey Hill, I wonder if you mean The Triumph of Love or something since that?
I was rather dismayed by what you said about my short stories. I didn’t know Houghton Mifflin were thinking of bringing them out – they didn’t tell me anything about it, and although Harper Collins did suggest it, they wanted me to write at least one new one, which I’m afraid I haven’t done, and I couldn’t even produce a list of the old ones, as I haven’t kept one. I sent them the titles I could remember. That doesn’t sound much like a book! I did tell them (Harper Collins) that short-stories don’t sell, but they, I suppose, know that. (I don’t mean Maeve Brennan! She is a classic.)
I do congratulate you on your Christmas presents. Putting what you say about the Smithfield ham together with what you previously told me about the lobster-kettle on your Maine vacation, I take it that you’re an expert cook, (although there is one trouble with hams, which is however to finish them up).
And it’s splendid to think that you’re coming to London. I myself don’t go out much, particularly in the evening, as I’ve got rather lame lately (said to be arthritis, but really I think just old age) but perhaps (although Highgate is rather a distant suburb) you could make time to come and see me?
Love and best New Year wishes –
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
31 January 2000
Dear Chris,
Please forgive a short letter as I have to catch the post (that’s what they always said in Victorian days but it’s much truer now than it was then).
What you’ve written about The Knox Bros is splendid, except that my grandfather was Bishop of Manchester – he had been Bishop of Birmingham, but the height of his career was in Manchester.
About Not Shown (not my title) I have actually now signed a contract for this book, but I was taken aback because all I’d done was to produce a list, not at all complete, of short stories, but it is due to be published by Houghton Mifflin, I think the publisher. The trouble is that I don’t really seem to have got a particular editor, at Harper Collins, since the departure of the much-missed Stuart Proffitt, who has gone to Penguin, and I find this rather confusing –
Love, looking forward to seeing you –
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
London, N6
5 February 2000
Dear Chris –
Thankyou so much for the New Yorkers. I hadn’t read one for a long time and at first I thought – How it’s changed. But then it occurred to me – perhaps I’ve changed. In any case, I liked Joan A’s piece very much –
love and best wishes
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
15 March [2000]
Dear Chris,
If this wasn’t as near as I can get to a business letter, I would say what a great treat it was for me to meet you, but let me at least thank you for the amazing amount of hard work and care you’ve taken over this book. Believe me it’s appreciated and gives me a wonderful feeling of trust.
My arthritis (about which I’m afraid you’ve already heard too much) is a bit overwhelming at the moment and I can’t quite face typing. Will you forgive me returning your letter with the answers written in – the same for your corrections.
I don’t really want to alter anything in the book. One of my troubles was to say as little as possible about my aunt Ethel and my nephew Christopher, who were both (in varying degrees) not quite normal, and about the vexed question of Uncle Ronnie’s Money which he left to us, but we never got anything except a small plaster bust of Shakespeare, which I still have. So it’s really the opposite of the usual tell-all biography.
My main worry, though, is about the foreword. You kindly say that my uncles’ world must have been a great inspiration to me, but the truth is that (like most children with conspicuous relations) I tried to get away from them and do my own thing. I didn’t realise until much later, indeed until after my father’s death, how much there was to find out about them, and by that time it was almost too late. Isn’t that your own experience?
I don’t think I could write three or four pages of introduction that would be in any way satisfactory, and I certainly don’t want to say anything about Al Fayed, let us hope he fades away like the nightmare he is. What I would like is to break off the existing foreword at line 12 ‘one humour and one mind’ and go on:
They gave their working lives to journalism, cryptography, classical scholarship, the Anglican church, the Catholic church. Since I wrote this book twenty-three years ago all these professions, all these worlds, have changed. If the four of them could be reborn into the twenty-first century, how would it treat them? I can only be certain that they would stand by the (sometimes unexpected) things they said. Evoe, my father, muttered to me, on the way to my wedding ‘the only thing I want is for everyone, as far as possible, to be happy’. Dill-wyn: ‘Nothing is impossible.’ Wilfred: ‘Get on with it’ – also ‘why should we not go on, through all eternity, growing in love and our power to love?’ Ronnie: ‘Do the more difficult thing.’ I miss them all more than I can say.
Then the acknowledgements could start ‘I should never have got any way at all…’ (Most of these acknowledged people, or at least some of them, are dead, and I haven’t got their addresses, so they must stay where they are.)
I want you to have a line to yourself, please, so ‘I am most grateful to Richard Garnett’ must shove up into the paragraph above, and then could you put ‘Finally, for this Counterpoint edition I should like to thank Chris Carduff for his energy, inspiration and patience’ – or if this isn’t the right thing to say, put whatever is the right thing.
The bibliography is a real problem, especially Dilly’s – now that the files at Kew have been opened there have been quantities of books on Enigma (and an appalling play, in which Dilly figured as a kind of fall guy), and it woul
d be a daunting business to bring it up to date. When my Edward Burne Jones was reprinted by Sutton (for his centenary) there was the same problem, and I just had to do the best I could, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. On the other hand, an out-of-date bibliography is not of much use to anybody. But you have to have them.
so many thanks for all you’ve done
love and best wishes
Penelope
27a Bishop’s Road
Highgate
London, N6
21 March 2000
Dear Chris,
To start with, I feel terribly distressed by your remark about Herbert Morris’s poems, that you hope I’ll find them more interesting than I did when you were describing them. I don’t remember your describing them at all, or perhaps it was to somebody else, could that be it? Let’s settle for it being someone else. I haven’t even read What Was Lost yet. Evidently it mustn’t be read in a hurry, and I have to review Saul Bellow’s novel first, and I’m such a hopelessly slow reviewer. I’m also saving up The New Criterion which is always so elegant-looking, such a pleasure to see.
I don’t know what to say about the photograph of my father with the Punch marionette. I’ve always thought he looked so desperately embarrassed in it. Prof. Peter Mellini was here last week – I’d always pictured him as Italian, but he is a German from California with a bushy beard and a flat cap. He’s just on the verge of retirement and has been writing a history of Punch since 1900, for years, but can’t really grasp any thing in the nature of a joke – He gives an audible sigh of relief when he gets back on the business side.
The difficult thing is really to get photographs of Dilly, who didn’t much like having his picture taken.
I never did thank you for your letter from Durrant’s Hotel, which made me wonder if you oughtn’t to be writing yourself.
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