Letters to a Friend

by Constance Babington Smith

  My love always.

  Yours affectionately,

  R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.I

  13th November, 1951 †

  My dear Father,

  Your air paper posted 6th Nov. came this morning, and convinced me that sea letters are, for the present, a very slow proposition indeed, (I think I said this in my last letter, written on All Souls’ Day). Anyhow, I shall use the air for the present. Even the air is slow! Yours of 6th Nov. took a week which is poor. It grieves me that you hadn’t then got my letters of 15th and 24th Oct.—anyhow the former should have reached you. And what of a sea letter you told me of, written after Father Pedersen’s return? And did you ever get those photographs I sent? And The Times Literary Supplement cuttings (two) containing the extracts from the diary of Johnny of Norfolk? Well, I suppose all these things wend safely home at last. I do hope none, either yours or mine, have met with disaster. But never think (a) that I want to write less often or (b) that I am ill. I think I will perhaps ask my sister (a nurse, at Romford), if she will send you a line (air paper) and tell you if I am ill— too ill to write myself, I mean. I know she wouldn’t mind doing that. So, unless you hear from either me or her, I am well.

  I read and enjoyed In search of London.1 And Flame touches Flame.2 Margaret Cropper is a connection of mine—a 1st cousin, on their mother’s side, of the Conybeares. All those Croppers are charming, able, and good. They have Quaker blood.

  Yes, Graham Greene is not New Testament but R.C. The N.T. hasn’t got those magic solutions—being saved (or damned) at the last simply by whether you repent at the moment of death, etc., etc., and everything depending on joining the right Church. G. G. wouldn’t understand or approve of” not everyone that saith ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall be saved, but he that doeth the will …” Doing the will means less than nothing to him, compared with saying Lord, Lord, before the right altars. That gets you to heaven, doing the will doesn’t. No, St. John VIII (I have just been reading it) wouldn’t mean a lot to him. It is all about our Lord being all that matters, the light, the truth, the giver of freedom—personal commitment to Him, not to the formularies of any Church. The Church (one section of it) is all to G.G., one feels. He has been hypnotized by it. Indeed, where should we be without it, but it’s not the infallible dispenser of salvation that he thinks (or writes). It’s the essential channel that God uses —but the Church in a much larger sense than G.G. knows. I find it (the Church) enlarges one’s comprehension of God all the time—comprehension, apprehension, in both their senses.

  I see you say that sea letter was posted by you on 25th Oct. —but has now only been 19 days on the way, so I can’t hope for it for another 10 days, I expect.

  Do you have many religious plays in St. John’s Church?1 Fr. Pedersen was looking out for some, and thought of A Sleep of Prisoners (or was it The Octopus, by Chas. Williams?) that they were doing in St. Thomas’s, Regent St., but I don’t know if he decided on it. Now there is to be another, at St. Martin’s; the Religious Drama Society is very active, but doesn’t usually get hold of v.g. plays, I think. I suppose there aren’t many. G.G. might turn his hand to that, and have it acted in Westminster Cathedral.

  I am too busy to be comfortable, what with Ruins, and BBC Critics, etc., etc. I wish I could get more method into my life. However, I have cut out so many late nights as I was having. One can’t go to bed in the small hours and get up in hours only slightly less small, and work—something must go. Please never think that what is cut out is my letters to you. My love always.

  R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  16th November, 1951 †

  Dear Father,

  Your sea letter (posted 25th Oct.) sailed in yesterday, and was worth waiting for, it is a splendid letter indeed. I sent you an air paper 4 days ago, saying I hadn’t yet got your sea letter, but now here it is, and how I like to have it!

  I’m glad you have Fr. Pedersen safely back. And that he thought me well balanced! Really most gratifying and surprising: I must have put on a capital act when I saw him. For I am actually about the least well balanced person I know. No doubt I was composed and in excellent equilibrium when we spent the evening together, and lunched together; no reason for agitation or excesses of prejudice or other manifestations of poor balance; but, alas, it is poor, and I am very ill poised in reality. So it is particularly gratifying to have so imposed on Fr. P. I’m glad he liked England so much; I am sure it was mutual….

  I’m sorry you erased (and so impenetrably) your Latin Psalter quotations. Now I shall have to guess what it was, from the context, which was concerned with perfect equilibrium. Perhaps the psalmist has something on that; I must look. Don’t you think that idea that it was irreverent to use Bible phrases in speech (and I suppose Fr. Benson would have included light writing—like mine) was very much of his period? What I suffer from now is that one’s scriptural phrases, often apt, are as likely as not to go unrecognised, which deprives them of their point. I think I am always doing it, even without knowing; I must be very scripture-minded, because Biblical phrases, like Shakespeare’s, swim into my mind on all occasions.

  As to Fr. Benson’s Rule, I suppose the Holy Spirit, always on the move, expanded it continually, suiting it and making it possible to the times it had reached. Isn’t that what the H.S. does? Just as He makes us believe in all kinds of new facets of truth, some of which our Christian ancestors of past centuries would have thought quite incompatible with their religion, which hadn’t yet filled up to that level. Isn’t that what the R.C. Church lacks, and what makes it rigid and brittle and so apt to repel and shock modern minds—I mean, it lacks real belief in the action of the Holy Spirit; it thinks things got stuck at a certain point and can’t move on. Do you get the storm we have here about the Pope’s pronouncement about saving the child at the expense of the mother’s life? It has fluttered medical and nursing services badly; also prospective parents. As my sister says, no husband wants to be left with a baby instead of a wife. She says it is a rare predicament, in these days, but does arise; and then the doctor sometimes asks the father, but usually saves the mother. I am sorry the Pope said it, because it has stirred up religious quarrelling. It seems an utterly false and inhuman notion; because the mother will perhaps have other babies and bring them up to have souls to be saved. Anyhow, this mechanical belief in baptism as a soul-saver is so odd. Well, where was I? Saying, I think, that Fr. Benson to-day would perhaps like us to quote Holy Writ when apt, so that you should, dear Father, have left in that Latin Psalter bit for me.

  Yes; the S.S.J.E. has developed, hasn’t it. I expect Fr. Benson is watching it with approval and pleasure. He probably likes Fr. P. very much. How good that the influence of the Society has made the girl B-to be a church girl and to stick to it. She must have a lot of strength of character to take up that rather hard, poor, austere life, for love, when, from your accounts, she could no doubt have married into comfort and money. I am glad you told Mrs. Paine that the prayers you asked her to say for me had worked. That puts one in a nice relation with people.

  Thank you for telling about Fr. Baker’s book1; I don’t know it, and will enquire after it of Burns Oates. It sounds what I should like to have. So Fr. Baker was converted by Uncle Richard Floyd. Good. There were several Floyd brothers, all R.C.; I only know of Henry, John and Edward, but will accept Uncle Richard too. Uncle John was, like Uncle Henry, a Jesuit. I must look into Uncle R. When I next have access to Challoner,1 or another of those R.C. biographers, I will have a search for him. Or I might ask my clansman who told me about Uncle Henry—Captain Flood-Macaulay who has all the family annals at command. I have looked up Fr. Baker in my Dictionary of National Biography Epitome, which only gives brief facts, but there will be a longer life of course in the full D.N.B. I see he became head of the Benedictines at Padua, which was rather grand. I can probably find a 2nd hand copy of Sancta Sophia somewhere.

  I like your suggestion about concentrating on a w
ord. To take salutare would be good. There is so much of it. Then, one can take any prayer slowly, and its pauses fill with meaning and new thoughts. E.g. “Quid retribuam Domino pro omnibus quae retribuit mihi?”2—a question one should always be asking oneself; and there can be more answers than “calicem salutaris accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo.”3 It is a good exercise to think up other answers; then, in the day that follows, one can put some of them into practice. The same with “et fac nos tuis semper inhaerere mandatis, ”4 and “Dingere et sanctifcare” etc. And “Grant that we may both perceive and know what things …” But all the good collects in either language can be spread over great spaces of prayer and thought, if we only will try, and make the time for it. You know, I am very bad at this. “Quid retribuam? “Well, at least one should answer this question by trying to offer up prayers. I was thinking the other day that, among the best things “quae retribuit mihi” are your friendship, your help, and your letters over the last fifteen months. Where should I have been without them?

  I’m glad you think that the line of prayer chosen should be congenial to one’s particular capacities and leanings. I do, too. That’s why I always shun those rather florid, sentimental prayers and meditations; they might sink one altogether. There is much in R.C. devotions that I can’t stomach; nothing in what a contemptuous convert called “Cranmer’s little work.” I have been collecting good ancient collects from various sources, for my collection. The words of liturgies can carry us, even without very strong feeling, in a way extempore prayer can’t. As, best of all, the act of the Eucharist can. I felt that so much the other morning, when, during Mass, a dear friend of mine was, I knew, having the cornea of her eye cut out and changed for another (incredible, but true) under a local anaesthetic, so that she was knowing all about it though not feeling pain—and of course I could think of nothing else, I felt I was there watching it, and I couldn’t think of the service at all. But suddenly I felt that we were both being somehow carried, by the mere words and act, however little we attended to it. Nothing we can do deserves that—but there it is, and how thankful one is that it is so. When I think that this time last year I knew nothing of this…. [sic]

  I didn’t know you hadn’t seen The Stricken Deer,1 or would have sent it you long ago. It is very good, don’t you think? Please remember me to Fr. Pedersen, and tell him I took it unkindly that he never communicated with me again after his return from his European Grand Tour, which I wanted to hear about. But I know how busy and how mobile he had to be. Tell him too that that American P[rayer] B[ook] Commentary is among my more treasured works—I find it useful and informing at every turn.

  I feel we are arriving at the time when sea letters are going to take an unconscionable time crossing the ocean (though yours was only 3 weeks), so I think for once I shall commit this to the air, or it will get tangled up with the Christmas mails. It grows late in the night, and I must stop this and go to bed. I am trying now to get to bed a little earlier, as I found late nights and early mornings didn’t go well together. I am reading in bed a lovely book of travel in the east—deserts and ruins and ancient cities, that send me to sleep in a drifting dream of strangeness and beauty. Good night, dear Father, and my love always.

  R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1

  19th November, 1951 †

  Dear Father,

  Thank you very much indeed for your letter (air) posted on 15th, which came to-day. I am so sorry you were worried by the long gap between letters. Of course the one posted 17th Oct. ought to have reached you ages before it did. And you are right in thinking there was another I wrote on 9th Oct., and I do hope you have got it by now, because in it I enclosed those old snapshots I spoke of, some of which I thought might amuse you. I also enclosed, as you surmise, the 1st bit of Johnny’s Diary, from The T[imes] L[iterary] Supplement],

  What else was in the letter I forget: but I must have talked about your letter of 1st Oct., and the visit from your Powys cousin, and Orwell’s book, and other things in your letter of 1st Oct. I hope you’ll get it, because of the photographs. As you say, no letter between us has yet been utterly lost, only delayed. Still, it might happen, of course. In a recent letter, which you may have got by now, I said that, in the event of my being too ill to write, I would ask my sister to send you a line. So, unless you ever get that line, I am well. If just laid up with some mild complaint, I should write myself, and get it posted. Don’t be anxious about me. Though it is a nice, warming feeling that you can be. I wrote you an air letter on 16th Nov. (as the sea seems to have settled into its winter sloth) but write this line now because I have got yours.

  I was much interested in what you say about Tudor England (I haven’t yet got the Pelican, but shall). Is Bindoff1 a Roman? Or just (what we are bidden not to call) Anglo-Catholic? They mustn’t run down “Cranmer’s little work” or try and deprive us of our Mass. The ceremonial must have been most comfortless, both to old-fashioned worshippers then, and would be to us now, but I don’t agree about “blocking the last loophole,” and “the forbidden vision of sacrifice.” It sounds like the attempts R.C.’s make to deny the validity of our Eucharist.

  “They had no sacraments,” says Evelyn Waugh, of the Protestant Elizabethans. I’m glad you say that about its sufficiency and validity under the P.B. formulas; after all, they preserved and kept it down so many centuries, and if people like Laud, Hooker, Cosin, George Herbert, and Jeremy Taylor were satisfied and nourished by it, we needn’t run it down, though it is good that we have given it now a more fitting and glorifying dress. We can’t whittle away the profound Eucharistic experiences of our devout ancestors before the High Church movement took over. I must send you the address of Marcel Simon to the Modern Churchmen, praising the Anglican Church. I think I told you about it in one of my letters lately.

  I sent you the picture of J. C. Powys on the jacket of his book, I forget in which letter. The Prophet in the Mountains —I must read his autobiography. I am afraid his financial circumstances aren’t v.g.

  Yes, I suppose And no mans wit is, in a sense, an indictment of the Franco regime, which was then very shocking and barbarous and unjust. It still is Fascist, of course, but time has toned it down, and it has improved. The position of the poor is deplorable, everyone says. I think I should probably write the book rather differently now.

  Let me know if you get my letter of 9th Oct., with the photographs. There is still hope. It all seems very capricious. I think I shall use the air now, mostly, till Christmas is past or you won’t get anything I write till 1952, which won’t do at all.

  My love always,

  R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  28th November, 1951 †

  Dear Father,

  Thank you so much for your so good letter of 17th Nov., which came a few days ago. I am relieved to know that my letters had all reached you at last, including the one with the photographs, and the 1st T.L.S. cutting. So it was a strike that held them up; really it is too bad. It might in some cases do a lot of harm; imagine the people waiting anxiously for news of a sick relation or friend, or a lover for a word from his lady— the failure to get it might ruin lives. Very bad.

  In dating this letter, I remember that (I think) on this date last year I wrote you a letter that started quite a lot. No; it didn’t start it; it was really the carrying to its logical outcome something started before; still, it was important. And now here I am, thank you! And learning something new all the time. Not that one never passes sometimes into “the parched places in the wilderness,” where one doesn’t “see when good cometh”; those are bad times; but more often one has access to the river, and the river may reach the roots even if one doesn’t feel it much; and one may hope (if sometimes rather forlornly) for the “fruit in due season.” Thank you for the last page of your letter. It confirms much that I have known in myself was right to do. “Solid ground”: yes. I’m glad you said that; for sometimes it does seem to be a bit quakey and bog-lik
e under one’s feet. Especially after a bad night. But I try and remember that it doesn’t depend on my feeling about it, but on the whole church in action.

  When I got your last letter I sent you John Gerard, which you refused before; I had it for review, and herewith I enclose the review, in case you’d like to see what I said of it. I don’t quite see why Fr. Manson thinks it will do harm. I suppose he means it will give a heroic picture of the Jesuit mission in England —but then it was heroic, surely. As I say in my review, the picture doesn’t include the political background of Jesuit pro-Spanish conspiracy against the queen and country, the plans for invasion, etc., and I think it should; but what can one expect from a Jesuit autobiography and a Jesuit editor? Of course they keep that side of it quiet. It is a pity, because it loses a chance of enlightening a very ignorant public on an interesting historical situation; but of course they are too propagandist and too little historical or scholarly (or honest) to want to do that. All the same, I don’t see its doing much harm. Though one of its publishers, a rather innocent young man in Longmans, did say to me, “I’m not a Catholic, but …” (I distrust that beginning.) He went on to say what fine people those priests must have been. He sees something of Fr. Caraman, the translator and editor of the book (editor of The Month) and I dare say … [might] be a convert before long. I think it is for the most part those rather ignorant people who have never learnt much about theology or history or the church, who are seized by the R.C. idea and carried by admiration and emotion into it. I am interested that Fr. Manson should feel as he does about it, as of course he must have come across far more of that kind of thing than I have.