And No Man’s Wit is much too full of Spanish politics. I wonder if you got to where Ellen turns out to be descended from a mermaid, but, only being partly mer, drowns in the sea. I think she was well out of this world, for which she was extremely unfitted. Fabled Shore (my Spanish travelogue) is being before long published in U.S.—but I could send you the English edition if you’d like to read it. I did love that trip. And (if I can lay hold of a copy—it’s out of print) Dangerous Ages. And perhaps the little Milton. Oh dear, I seem to be adding to the surfeit. What insupportable egotism. Fr. Wilkins, in our moment of conversation, said he had found some of my books readable, which was nice of him.
The Spectator has just sent me for review a life of Thomas Fuller1 (of the Worthies). I have always liked “the great Tom Fuller” (a very genial collaborateur); I did a BBC programme once into which he came, conversing with Milton and Roger Williams, the tolerant Independent who fled from Laud to Massachusetts (nearly the only real tolerationist of his age, I think). My theme was the contrast between the Milton of Areopagitica, that great libertarian, and the later Milton, who censored books and pamphlets for Cromwell, and suppressed those advocating “prelacy” whether Anglican or R.C. And even Fuller wouldn’t have allowed R.C. or “heretical” writings (including Quakers). Only Roger Williams from Mass. was disgusted with them both. I have always loved the Worthies and The Church History [of Britain] and [The] History of [The University of] Cambridge, and The Holy and Profane States. This biography looks full, but it may lack style.
29th Jan. How splendid: your letter posted 26th has just come. Such a good letter. Thank you so much. I think, after all, having complained of illness, and in reply to your enquiries, that I will send, this by air, and begin ocean-going after that, f m much better, tho’ the cough lingers about, so does that depressing remedy for lung-patches,M. and B., which is over, but still leaves a hang-over. I’m afraid the 1st page of this letter is rather dismal—perhapsM. and B. helped in that too. It is all accurate, but I try not to dwell on it, so don’t mind it for me. I am now up, tho’ inadequately dressed: declinicized, though not yet decubicalized—and well on the way to recovery.
I have been through all those prayers and am committing to memory “et fac me tuis semper inhaerere mandatis ”1 etc. I shall like to think that you sometimes say it for me. In all these prayers, I can include my beloved companion.
I must get hold of The Trumpet shall sound 2 which would interest me. I might get an American P[rayer] B[ook] too— I will ask Fr. W[ilkins] when I see him next. You have encouraged me very much about him.
Oh dear, why didn’t you think to give me a coup de téléphone in 1938? What a pity! I wish you were contemplating another English visit, like Fr. Pedersen. By the way—forgive my ignorance—is it done by those outside your Society to drop the surname in beginning letters, and simply say “Dear Father,” or is this only practised within the Society? I like it, if it is usual: but feel quite at ease in either style and don’t want to be forward! It really makes no difference to
Yours affectionately and gratefully,
R.M.
February
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
Shrove Tuesday, 1951
Dear Father Johnson,
Thank you much for your air letter posted Jan. 31st. I am sure you will be relieved to see once again these clear, typed characters. How I wish I could write a nice clear hand—but I can’t. I am now sitting up at my typewriter, marvellously better, and surrounded by Bibles in various tongues and of various dates, in which I have been looking up your points. Certainly our English translations are rather loose sometimes. Why turn pais and paidos (my typewriter can’t do Greek letters) into servant? Especially as the Vulgate had puer. I like infans; it suggests the Spanish royal Infante. But our earliest English translations had “servant,” apparently—Coverdale (who has “He helpeth up” for suscepit, which I rather like), Tyndale, and of course ever since. I don’t read the Greek Testament enough; it is worth while to, and I have been trying it with Hebrews, as well as the Latin. I am very unworthy of a great-grandmother of mine, who, from the time she was a girl reading with her father, till she died in her eighties, read the first lesson in Hebrew and the second in Greek, every day of her life. Of Hebrew I don’t know a word. It must be a wonderful heritage to have, for a Jew; a cultivated Jew such as my friend Victor Gollancz, who, without being in the least orthodox, cares intensely for the past of his race. Knowing Jews like him makes one better understand that extraordinary faculty for God with which they were endowed. It had to be them, of course. The Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, and the other ancient races never had that faculty to that extent, nor that concentration on ethical conduct as the meaning of life. And those few who had— Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, etc.—and who tried to obey the God within them, hadn’t the Jewish aptitude for externalising God into a Spirit outside them who would help them. If it had / been all entrusted to the Greeks, what would they have made of it, I wonder? Of course later on they did make a great deal of it; but it was the Jews who started it.
Certainly Juvenal’s Jews must have been irritating, with their secret rites and scriptures and their contempt for all outsiders. They had indeed forgotten their vocation of “telling it out among the heathen.” But how much had they done of this, during the 7 centuries between Isaiah and birth of Christ? I must read about this. As you will have gathered, I am shamefully ignorant of Jewish history. But what a people! And what a pity they stayed (in the main) outside Christianity. I was interested the other day to find that there were Christians living in Pompeii before its destruction in 79; in one of the houses an altar and cross were found. Would you think that family tried to spread the Gospel among the rather worldly and fleshly Pompeiians? And did St. Paul visit Pompeii? I don’t remember that he did. I think that continuity, which you point out, of the missionary spirit (though interrupted) from Isaiah to the Apostle of the Gentiles is extremely exciting. And the similarities of phrase. It must feel extraordinary to have that heritage; and to be still waiting for its fulfilment.
Another book you set me looking at was Cowper’s letters; the little Golden Treasury edition of 1884, that was my mother’s. Quite full of your relations, of course; Heskeths, your double great-grandfather John Johnson (who must have been nice), Bodhams, etc. What a pity you can’t establish the Donne relationship.1 All those chests, all over the country, put away in country house attics, stuffed with old letters—how tantalising they are. There must be such a wealth of history stowed away; now and then some of it comes to light; but far more is neglected, and much destroyed, as it was during that silly paper salvage drive during the war. My father was once working on some papers in the Lytteltons’ house, Hagley Hall; he said there were chests and chests of precious documents, which no one ever bothered to go through. Sometimes of course some enterprising person really does rummage, and then appears an invaluable collection such as the Verney Memoirs. I was allowed to see, years ago, a lot of fascinating Macaulay papers in the house of an old cousin, the daughter of the historian’s younger brother.
I don’t think I should expect my Wilderness to make much of a hit in America; it is too English. Some of my early novels went well—Potterism, Dangerous Ages, Told by an Idiot, Keeping up Appearances—but They Were Defeated sank with scarcely a ripple, though it got across pretty well here; and every one says English books aren’t having much of a time, on the whole, in the States at present. I don’t much mind. I have had some quite kind and intelligent reviews, though probably not many. Reviews are chancey things at the best; just a question of luck into whose hands a book falls; and books are a matter of taste after all. It is one of the things about writing; one has to train oneself not to mind (much) what people say, or don’t say, about one’s books. Probably no writer ever succeeds in not minding at all! Some of them have said they don’t; but… [sic] We have all a feeling for the children of our brain; even if we don’t think them particularly good children,
we don’t like to see them slighted. But I find it matters less and less. What one does care about is that the people whose opinion one values should like them.
Now this must go down to the sea, tho’ there is a lot more I could say.
Yours affectionately,
R.M.
You know, confession is a desperate business. You think in the middle that you can’t go through with it, but somehow you do, and at the end you feel winded and dazed. I felt so much so, that, instead of going into the chapel after it I forgot all about this and just went home. I can only hope that Fr. Wilkins put this down to disturbance of mind and the highly unusual (for me) circumstances in which I found myself, not to mere distaste for prayer!
I told him, you know, that the whole thing was your doing; he seemed to think this quite natural.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
9th February, 1951 †
Dear Father,
(Thank you: I rather like that. And I should be delighted when ever you chanced to feel like saying “Rose Macaulay”; lots of people do, among them many I have never met. I think one likes people to address one exactly as they feel like at the moment, don’t you. Though, as to that, if one really followed that principle, it’s not by any means every one to whom one would always begin “Dear …”; “Hated Sir” might sometimes meet the case better.)
I got your wonderful Candlemas letter yesterday; thank you very very much. I had posted you a sea letter the day before, answering yours of 31st. But this one is to be air, reporting how nearly recovered I now am. Still slightly bronchial, and not yet supposed to do anything energetic, like going out early or plunging into swimming pools. (Yes, I am vaguely ichthyous and mer; can’t breathe under water, except through one of those lovely goggle masks with air-pipes, which I was using in the Mediterranean last summer, you get such a nice view of the fishes and sea-weed grottos; but I should notice it at once if a shark got into my pool, and should tell the Club secretary. I dare say some Conybeare rector in Devonshire once married a mermaid, tho’ it doesn’t seem to have got into the family records.)
All this nonsense. What I really want to say is, thank you for always saying the thing I need. And for not telling me to put the past behind me, now that it is absolved. And for understanding how one has to face there being no cheap and easy way back, and that Horace was right, and Omar and FitzGerald with their “The moving finger writes, and having writ, Moves on, nor all thy piety and wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.” And yet that they didn’t know the last word, about the potter and his workmanship. I suppose all one can do is try to keep the eyes of one’s understanding enlightened and try to have no more black-outs. I do see the point about monthly confessions; I wonder if Fr. Wilkins would see it too. I might tell him it was your idea, which would make him think well of it. And of course it would provide opportunities for asking advice. All you say of Fr. Wilkins sounds very reassuring and what one wants. If only I can make the mental effort to write to him and go there. I will try.
Thank you for what you say about my writing, all those years. You know, I have always felt “Anglican”; (heredity, no doubt, like Ellen’s mermaidishness). I mean, I have been an Anglo-agnostic; and even were I an atheist should be an Angloatheist I suppose. For years I scarcely entered a church except to look at the architecture or to attend weddings, funerals or baptisms; but still I was an Anglc-non-church-goer. It was a matter of taste and affection, and perhaps a kind of loyalty, rather than of belief; and I suppose this attitude would emerge in what I wrote about it; it is in the blood and bones, at deeper levels than brain or will. Perhaps it is a good thing, now that brain and will begin functioning again, to have that heritage to draw on. A kind of spiritual capital, laid up for one by one’s ancestors and upbringing, and by various influences since. Certainly no merit of mine. When people I know have said that if they turned from their present unbelief it would be to Roman Catholicism, I have often asked “Why not Anglicanism?” But they probably feel this insufficiently dramatic. And yet what a thing it is, that re-made pot! In reading that Fuller book (I’ll send you the Spectator, with my review) I was taken again into that mid-i7th century world. Fuller, of course, was something of a collaborator, which doesn’t emerge much in this book. But he was able in that way to help outed clergy less fortunate or adaptable. (The Spectator has misspelt “Heylin,” curse them.)
I am much looking forward to that packet, and particularly to the snapshots. (Which reminds me that, as a signature to those poems that you will get sometime, I appended a recent passport photograph.) I shall like too to have the American P[rayer] B[ook] pages, and the Juvenal. My classical library is not so well restored after its blitzing as it should be. The Greek is better off than the Latin, as Gilbert Murray (that very great and revered man is a most kind friend to me always) gave me a lot of Greek, with his own translations. I should love the Norfolk diary sometime, too. I told you in my sea letter how I had been meeting your relations in Cowper’s letters.
I’m glad you like my Mrs. Arthur1; I grew fond of her myself. She was based, externally, on a nice woman who kept a small cigarette and sweet shop in Marylebone near me. She looked like that, and had that bonhomous air. The rest— character, career, conversation—I made up. Dear me, the liberties one takes with people scarcely known but just met; they provide a basis, on which one builds some fantastic structure, no doubt with no relation at all to the actual person. What would that nice, no doubt most respectable, lady think if she knew? But this habit of novelists only becomes dangerous when they use as a basis someone recognisable whom they know and who will certainly read the book; they invariably think it is all meant to be them, and will never believe they were only a starting-point and that the finished character is really something quite unconnected with them. A dangerous trade; one skates on such thin ice. Keeping up Appearances offended, I fear, a very nice young woman who worked in the … Library, and who thought I had drawn her in one of the Arthur girls, when actually she was definitely higher in the social scale than that. Of course some novelists … are completely ruthless; they put in not only real people but real situations, some of them supposedly unknown to the people’s friends, such as secret love affairs, jiltings, etc., and leave a trail of misery behind them. Very cruel and unfair. Novelists should have a sense of responsibility towards those they might injure, like car drivers, and not run them down from behind.
Yes, thank you, I am well looked after when ill. A nice char, who will stay on if wanted, and a number of obliging friends, of all ages and sexes and avocations, who rally round with sick-room amenities, such as flowers and fruit, and offers to shop, post letters, get library books, come and get my meals, come and talk. This last I don’t allow with flue; they would catch it, and their charming chatter would exhaust me. This is the result of living in London and being naturally gregarious (one need never lack for company). Actually, I rather like being alone when ill; it is more restful, and gives one a chance to read and to think.
Your letter set me thinking about the pursuing purposes of God, and I remembered Francis Thompson’s “I fled him down the nights and down the days; I fled him down the arches of the years; I fled him down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears, I hid from him, and under running laughter. Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurrying chase, And unperturbèd pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat, and a Voice beat, More instant than the Feet. …” And then, “I stand amid the dust of the mounded years—My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap…. Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of eternity; Those shaken mists unsettle, then Round the half glimpsed turrets slowly wash again, But not ere him who summoneth, I have first seen…. Now of that long pursuit Comes on at hand the bruit; That Voice is round me like a bursting sea….”1
Unhurrying pursuit; yes. It is we who refuse to be hurried. But it doe
sn’t tire his kindness out, and he gives us these fresh chances, and lays these plans, in “the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness towards us.” All very odd. Why? That seems the enormous riddle of the human race and of God. Or, if not odd, very overwhelming.
Of course I am very sorry that I shall never see you in England; but I do understand how exhausting it would be, and it would be worse than anything to see you getting ill. I can imagine feeling as you describe, though actually I am a fairly happy traveller. But what a fuss those set over us have agreed to make about our getting about. The young scarcely believe me when I say that before 1914 we had no passports, let alone visas or currency restrictions. Driving down Spain, I could never get off from anywhere before about 10.30, because the hotel didn’t extract my passport from the police to whom they had sent it the night before, and who held on to it with the firmest Spanish apathy and tenaciousness. And the Americans putting half of us on Ellis Island for presumed un-American activities… [sic] All very irritating and wearing.
Fr. Wilkins said he knew a sister of mine in India.1 She works in a mission (S.P.G.)2 school at Ranchi. We are fond of each other, but quite unlike, and I suppose have less in common than I have with any of the rest of my family. She is devoted to her work and her untouchable pupils, and is very intelligent and good, and translates English books into a number of Indian dialects as easily as I could into French or Italian, which seems to me very admirable. No doubt Fr. Wilkins can do the same. When well enough, I want to attend Canon Raven’s (C. E. Raven, Master of Christ’s) Lent lectures on “Christianity in the world of modern science.” Biology is his subject, and he is interesting. We used to know him at Cambridge in old days. He is a pacifist. I think I am too.
Letters to a Friend Page 6