I like Blackfriars1 when I see it. And, usually, Dominicans when I see them. I sometimes do, as Archbishop Mathew, the R.C. arch, of East Africa, and his brother Gervase O.P. are friends of mine. Both very able. The arch, is good on history, particularly on R.C. life in England since the Reformation; he writes with learning and style, and has an affection for the C. of E….
If I come on the Everyman More I will send it, but fear it may be out of print. I have read that Dialogue2 in an Arber reprint, and liked it very much I remember. No, I could never write a novel about that period, because the language they talked was just too different from ours to make easy dialogue which wouldn’t sound affected. By the 17th century this isn’t so. And there is such a mass of letters, diaries, memoirs, plays, essays, of this period that one can soak oneself in the language and easily reproduce it. In the early 16th century there is much less available of colloquial talk, and one doesn’t quite hear them talking. I should have to make them talk modern English, as I don’t like the usual compromise, and I should hate to do that, it would be all wrong, and would modernise the idiom of their thought too.
Thank you for imprecating my reviewer! You are the friend whom every author wants. It is so comforting to have someone indignant with the reviews which one tries not to feel unfair and anyhow can’t with dignity complain of oneself. I did see that review, I forget what paper, but someone sent it me. I suppose the reviewer didn’t happen to like the book, probably didn’t read it all, perhaps was in the wrong mood for it, or was the wrong reader. And no doubt much that he or she said was justified, tho’ obviously he is weak on French geography. One mustn’t be too hard on reviewers, who are generally in a hurry. But some of the American reviews have been very nice. I enclose one (don’t want it back) I forget what paper it comes from.
I would like to know what you think of Victor Gollancz’s anthology A Year of Grace, so am sending it you. It has a lot of interesting things in it—religion from all angles, from all ages, all races. V.G. is a brilliant and philosophic Jew, with Christian leanings. Not a practising Jew, but believes in God.
There is snow here. I am just in from tobogganing down Primrose Hill with two small girls and their parents. We only had a tea-tray.
Christmas posts are so dubious and slow that I think I will make this a 3d. letter.1 It brings my Christmas greetings, and a good many things that I haven’t said and can’t say, but that I hope you will understand.
Yours very sincerely and gratefully,
Rose Macaulay
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
23rd December, 1950 †2
Dear Father Johnson,
Thank you so much for your letter of 13th. I hope that by now one of my two former letters has reached you—one air, the earlier ordinary mail. But I am writing again, because there seem so many things I want to say, and you make me feel that you put up with my badgering.
Thank you for copying “pro vivis et defunctis.”3 I haven’t got a full Roman missal. I suppose “venia”4 is the pre-requisite for learning fresh things and making fresh advances. One likes to think that if the dead go on at all, in any mode, it must be progressive—perhaps more quickly and with fewer set-backs than in life. I think, if one felt that one had received venia, the next stages would show themselves, and one might be shewn what one had to do and be, to make up a little for the past. And I see that it should be officially notified, not a matter of private enterprise; it is more satisfactory like that, and freer from danger of self-deception.
I am leaving a lot of things till I hear from you again, perhaps with further recommendations as to procedure.
I always use the P[rayer] B[ook] version of the psalms, when I read them. I like Cover dale’s translation better than the Authorized] V[ersion] (Tyndale’s?). I have been reading the 119th. Was it all by one author? There is a great difference of mood; between, e.g. “Adhaesit pavimento”1 and “Legem pone”2 on the one hand, and “Principes persecuti sunt”3 with its stress on “I have kept thy commandments.” Yet in the very next section he says “I have gone astray …” Perhaps the expression of different moods. By the way, you mention the verse in Ps. 73, “Yea, and I had almost said even as they: but lo,” etc. You will think me dense, but I have never quite known what it means. I wish you would tell me. Perhaps it is a muddled translation? Or perhaps I am merely stupid.
I liked your account of Fr. Humphreys’s4 Requiem and burial in the little woodland cemetery. Are the Fathers all British, or are there Americans among them? This is the kind of thing that Fr. Pedersen5 will be able to tell me, if, as I hope, I see him when he is here. He will also give me news of you, and I should much like that. Do ask him to make himself known to me, either by letter or by coup de téléphone, when he is in London, and we will meet. My address is in the telephone directory, so he can look me up, if he would really like to be so kind as to spare the time.
In a train. I wonder if you agree with me that Potterism is rather jejune and too much of a tract. I feel I hammered away with a kind of angry fervour. I could probably rewrite it better now. I am glad you prefer the Wilderness. Thank you for that nice, kind review, which I hadn’t seen, and am glad of. I haven’t heard how the book is doing over there; probably not very well, it is so British! I am just now writing, (by fits and starts) poetry: a disease of which I have always had periodical attacks. I tried to make a complete poem of those 3 lines I used for the title-page of the Wilderness, but didn’t do very much of it. Then I turned to Hadrian’s Villa, Tiberius and Capri, Sybaris, etc. All rather time-wasting, but I like it. It is probably the “primitive droning,” that meets so deep a need.
Christmas Eve. I am just off to the country, to spend Christmas with a charming and gifted family, great friends of mine, in what probably will be the deep snows of the Kentish weald. I am driving my car, and hope the roads won’t be iced.
Oh dear, how I wish you were a little nearer at hand!
Yours,
R.M.
1951
January
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
2nd January, 1951 †
Dear Father Johnson,
Your air letter posted 29th reached me to-day, which was quick; thank you so much for it. The letter before that (posted 15th) came about ten days ago; I answered it (air) on Christmas Eve. You should have got before you wrote on the 29th my sea letter of 12th or so, answering yours of 29th Nov., and talking about Fr. Waggett and how we knew him at Cambridge, and other things of not much importance; in yours you had most obligingly and consolingly cursed a reviewer for me. Posts are rather uneven; some letters seem to take longer than others sent by the same route. But, however and whenever they arrive, all your letters are better to get than I could easily tell you. They all seem to light some fresh candle.
The one that came to-day was, also, a great relief to my mind; before I got it, timor mortis conturbaverat me1 a good deal, so thank you for reassuring me. Of course your phrase was more likely to be generally precautionary, but it might, on the other hand, have not been so. As to your semi-seriousness, in Latin or English, I find it very much to my taste; and certainly should in the confessional. Anyhow, please out-live anyone whom you can reasonably out-live. I like the people I am fond of and rely on to live well into the nineties; unfortunately they tend not to do this, and the more I want them to the more they don’t. My oldest living relation now is an aunt2 of 83; she may well live into the 90s, but then I don’t really particularly want her to.
Thank you for producing a bishop3 for me—and such a bishop, for whom I have an immense respect. Too much respect, I suppose, because the difficulty is that I should never pluck up courage to write to him—or, anyhow, to post the letter if I did. I should feel too presumptuous. He must get thousands of letters from his own diocese, and wouldn’t his secretary (if a good one) turn down out of hand any ultra-diocesan request of that kind? If he did answer, I am sure it would be kindly, because I should mention your name, but I should still feel I was
encroaching on his time and attention. To ask a bishop (and him of Oxford, too) to turn from his weighty affairs and intellectual preoccupations to attend to a stray person from another diocese, and me not even a clergyman—wouldn’t it seem to him rather cool? He would probably do it, and do it splendidly (because of you) but the feeling that I was presuming might make me too shy to utter. So I don’t think I can. Don’t think me ungrateful and choosey. But I now think (as you take a poor view of anonymous QUEUES) that I will adopt your earlier suggestion, and ask Fr. Wilkins if I may come and see him. So I telephoned to-day to St. Edward’s House and enquired about him, and was told that he was at Oxford this week but would be back after that. So I might then write him the ominous letter; if I mention you, I should feel the assurance given by the introduction of a friend, and should be within the Society, which I should like. It will anyhow be difficult, making a confession covering about 30 years, years full of all the usual crimes of commission and omission (most of which I have of course forgotten), as well as the major business. How do people do it? Oh dear. Well, I suppose it will get done somehow. I wish you were here.
3rd January. Snow, frost and sleet; I expect Memorial Drive is deep in snow. I have been wandering about the Abbey, where one keeps on finding fresh pleasures. I believe the Dean and Chapter are in hiding, being liable to imprisonment in the Tower for not guarding the coronation stone better1; but there was evensong, sung very beautifully among the soaring vaults among the crowd of listening marbled ghosts and the fat little cherubs mourning them. As a point of theology, ought cherubs to weep for the decease and entry into heaven of these eminent beings? I am sorry such tombs are over. Are there any like them in our late colonies? No, I suppose baroque, in that exuberant form, never settled in New England among the Puritans. What beauties they missed! I like to hear that I have more letters coming to me. Good. Thank you all the time.
Yours affectionately,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
9th January, 1951 †
Dear Father Johnson,
Thank you very much indeed for your air letter of 2nd Jan. How I miss your various sea-letters that have never come— I suppose mine haven’t either—e.g. mine of 15th Dec, thanking you for yours that I valued so much. And if your letters posted before Christmas Day haven’t yet reached me, it must surely mean that a ship has been sunk without trace, which probably happens oftener than we think? But I dare say Christmas is a bad season for posts, and that I shall get them one day—I do hope so, because I like them v. much.
Fr. Wilkins is hearing my confession on Friday 12th. In his reply he sounded very pleased that we both know you; so am I. Perhaps I may see him on some later and more auspicious occasion, and talk of you. He says he saw you in Boston in ’48.
I have been very stupid always about that verse in Ps. 73, because I vaguely supposed it to mean that “even as they” was what he had almost said: and connected it with the verse before, about his having been punished every morning; so I couldn’t make sense of it. I should like the psalms published with quotation marks for the speeches, and with names of the supposed speakers; they really are confusing sometimes. Till your explanation it hadn’t, for some reason, occurred to me that it meant “I had almost said what they say”, of course it is quite clear, and very logical and good. I have a Psalter interleaved with blank pages, that my father used at Eton, and that is inscribed in his round childish fourteen-year-old hand with the explanatory notes of his instructors—as Ps. 24, v. i—” idea then was that the earth was flat, surrounded by sea and round like a plate, with water underneath“—Ps. 8, 5—“Cicero says, homo mortalis deus”1—etc., etc. But nothing about Ps. 73. I like the sense of that verse now. Oh dear, I do hope it is true what you say, that I have never in my books “condemned the generation,” etc. I have certainly never meant to—but one writes too carelessly, and gives impressions by mistake sometimes. I’m not proud of that book about the Buchmanites and the Basques,2 I think now it is rather a bad joke, I mean about the Groupers; one shouldn’t really make fun of people who, however aesthetically repellent to one’s taste, are, after all, on the right side as between moral good and evil. To do this would be to condemn all the generations of revivalists, “enthusiasts,” Salvationists, excitable pietists—and look what practical good they have done in a wicked world. All very difficult. Moral; don’t write about such people at all; I mean, I shouldn’t. I hear that Monsignor Knox’s book on “Enthusiasm” is v. good, and doesn’t lack sympathy at all. But I’m very glad you feel I have avoided irreverent levity, if only narrowly. And I’m glad too that you saw the religious motif in the Wilderness. To me it was important. But of course most readers don’t see such things, they are too busy with other aspects. Their heart is as fat as brawn. You are the most discerning of readers, and see all I mean.
10th. You will note with relief that I have rejoined my typewriter, from which I was temporarily severed. Wish I could hand-write better. Still no sea letters from you, is it not odd. I feel I am missing what I could have very well done with just now. All this digging into the past is painful… with my many privileges, it is bad. I suppose the worst betrayal was when I … went to confession, and went away … meaning to come back … and I never after that returned to any sacraments … I don’t mean, can one be forgiven, but can one be good, honest, unselfish, scrupulous. Or is the whole basis and structure of character sapped by the long years of low life? I see horribly clearly how low it was, and how low I am.
I oughtn’t to bother you with all this; I have got into the habit of uttering my thoughts to you, and just now I feel rather in a pit; adhaesit pavimento, etc. I suppose it will be better later. I like “he wanted to go home, where the food was better.” I am reading Ps. 119 a good deal; very applicable to everything. “I will keep thy ceremonies”; but the way to them isn’t easy.
Yes, I got home safely from my Christmas outing. Cars and lorries skidding all about the roads, but I conducted mine with admirable firmness and caution. Having manipulated all the wild and disconcerting roads of Spain lately, my faithful vehicle is not to be thrown out of step by a little ice in Kent.
If you were here, there are 1000 things I should say and ask you. As you aren’t, I will now commit this letter to the air, putting no more trust in the ocean which swallows up all. You will observe from enclosed cutting that our Dean of Westminster is under suspicion of Stone-stealing. Would you think he did it? And what is the Hebrew for Tush? Is it always an interpolation in our psalm versions? I like the word; a pity it has gone out of use, like pish, twish, faugh and other terms of contempt. No derivation, says the O[xford] D[ictionary]— just “a natural utterance.” What does one say to-day? “Nonsense,” I suppose. And in Latin, according to my dictionary, “…”1 but I don’t remember this, do you. Now this must go. Forgive all this babble.
Yours affectionately,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
11th January, 1951 †
Dear Fr. Johnson,
This is a P.S. to my letter posted yesterday by air, which contained lamentations that none of your sea letters had reached me; I should like it, if possible, to overtake that letter and arrive at the same time, because this morning the deep gave up your three sea letters (Dec. 22, 23, 25) and your air Epiphany letter too. I hope mine too have perhaps now arrived—(those that hadn’t when you wrote on 6th Jan., I mean). I feel I should like you to get them all, even tho’ of little importance; they said what was in my mind when I wrote them. Yours, I needn’t say, are a great joy, all of them. I am writing at once, for the reason I said, and haven’t even yet had time to read them with the care I shall give to them later, or look up the references, which I always do, and always rewardingly. They have come in the nick of time to strengthen my morale.
I know I was right (though it seems stupid and timorous) not to act on your suggestion of the Bp. of Oxon. If one could have met him with some good pretext—say on a retreat—it would
have been very good; but my morale would have succumbed and disintegrated altogether if I had had to make an approach; and one needs to forget who one is seeing, and whether one may be thought presuming, etc., and concentrate on what one is doing. So it couldn’t have done, tho’ I should have liked to do it.
Now I will post this; I have a lunch date and must hurry to it.
Thank you so much for the letters. I shall write properly soon.
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
14th January, 1951
Dear Fr. Johnson,
This is to be a nice leisurely sea letter, the treacherous deep having now, no doubt, recovered from its Christmas obstructionism that was so annoying. (Have you even now, I wonder, got all my ocean letters, as I have at last got all yours?) I told you, in a postscript air message that I sent you on the nth, that there came that day 3 sea letters and your air one of Epiphany —-just after I had posted you a letter written in some Dejection (like Coleridge). I feel much better now, thank you.
I was so glad of those letters, all of them. They were so full of a number of things—bits of autobiography that I liked very much and found very moving, in the same letter fragments from Coleridge and Donne and prayers from the Rom. Missal —“ remedium sempiternum,”1 “O Sapientia”2 and the others. Do you remember that Candlemas sermon of Donne’s about “those occasionall and transitory prayers” (some on celluloid; yes I have kept all those) being “payments of this debt, in such peeces, and in such summes, as God, no doubt, accepts at our hands.” Remarkable Dean. I love the splendour of his phrasing. “Poore intricated soule! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthicall soule!” “And therefore interrupt the prescription of sin; break off the correspondence of sin; unjoynt the dependency of sin upon sin … But thou shalt live in the light and serenity of a peaceable conscience here, and die in a faire possibility of a present melioration and improvement of that light. All thy life thou shalt be preserved in an Orientall light, an Easterne light, a rising and a growing light, the light of grace; and at thy death thou shalt be super-illustrated, with a Meridionall light, a South light, the light of glory.” “Thus it is, when a soule is scattered upon the daily practise of any one predominant and habituall sin …” And then his poetry:
Letters to a Friend Page 4