Letters to a Friend

by Constance Babington Smith

  I’m sorry that silence and gap in letters made you anxious. Don’t ever enquire about me, or worry, as I promise you will hear at once, by air, from my sister (who now has instructions and your address) should I be really ill. I, of course, can be sure of getting news, when I ask, from St. Edward’s House about you.

  You know, I remember you very well 36 years ago. I didn’t remember that you hadn’t laughed; but at least it was obvious that you had a sense of humour. And you had gentleness, and understanding, and sympathy, and were infinitely helpful and intelligent in advice. And said quite a lot; which I liked. And I loved your retreat addresses. I can say now that I was very sorry when you disappeared, and when dear Fr. Cary returned to take his own people over, good as he was. You had supplied something rather different. And 35 years later you still did, and more. And still do. If you had any photographs of yourself then … sic] but I suppose you haven’t. I don’t know what photograph of me was in a book of 1928; was it a Penguin, I wonder? I have one taken about then, which may have been reproduced; someday I will send you a copy of that, perhaps.

  Later. I am just back from the London Lib[rary], where I found that J. C. P[owys]’s autobiog. hasn’t yet been returned by whoever has it; they have sent for it again. I also ordered Tudor England from W. H. Smith some time ago, but that isn’t in yet either. I look forward to reading the autobiog., especially the tilings about you. Orate Fratres1 I can get, no doubt, from Duckett. I shall have more time after this week for going about looking up books, as I shall have done with the BBC “Critics” that I have been on for 6 weeks, which takes so much time seeing plays, films, books, art shows, listening to radio. I have been doing Radio, but we all have to see the other things one’s colleagues will speak about. This week I am complaining of some of the music hall jokes the BBC puts over, they are so vulgar sometimes as to be nauseous, and of course are greatly applauded by the uneducated public who are their audiences. Jokes like (believe it or not) “I told my girl-friend to walk against the wind when she comes to see me at the farm, so as not to make the goats jealous.” Meaning, of course, that she smelt. Shrieks of applause and laughter at this sally, from the “workers” who hear “Workers’ Playtime.” Really, besides its fatuity and unfunniness, a joke of that kind is rather nasty. Or so it seems to me; but it seems to please the listeners. I believe little prep-school boys think it funny to call one another smelly; girls, I think, not.

  Did you ever read Milman’s book about Horace,2 his life and farm, etc., well illustrated, and with a good many of his odes and epistles in it? It is really rather attractive; I got it from the Library to-day. A book I was asked to review is Professor Allison Peers’s edition of St. Teresa’s letters, in 2 vols. I declined it, for lack of time; but it is a book I should like to have had. I’ve not yet seen Kate O’Brien’s Life of her. I read Vita Sackville-West’s The Eagle and the Dove, about T. of Avila and T. of Lisieux (a tiresome little creature, who shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as her of Avila) and found it interesting. Indeed, she was a wonderful woman, with a great sense of humour and of humanity. I must read this new edition of her letters. Now I must stop and drive off to Moorfields Eye Hospital to read to my friend there who has been having her cornea changed. I am reading Howards End1 to her, which we both love. I would like to continue this letter, but should also like to post it to-night, so will stop it, with my love and greetings, and hoping no more strikes will come between our epistolary intercourse. Anyhow, this goes by air.

  Your affectionate

  R.M.

  I think I have got all your letters up to this one, now.

  December

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  6th December, 1951 (Feast of St. Nicholas)

  Dear Father,

  Thank you so very much for two air letters—such good ones —posted 26th Nov. and 1st Dec. (?) (postmark a little smudgy). I am delighted with your suggestion about Cynthia2 trying to swim; why not tentantis? Teuthras isn’t known much about by anyone, it seems; of course “the waves of Teuthras” may then have had some local meaning, and refer to some pool or bit of quiet sea near Cumae—but if so why has it been forgotten? We know all about the Lucrine Lake, and Avernus close to it, and the causeway of Hercules, and the shores round Baiae, but Teuthras no. I think your suggestion is brilliant; he was probably still referring to the Lucrine Lake and its little quiet waves, where she might either row (more likely be rowed by that annoying alterius) or practise her swimming in safety; for none of them would seem to have gone in very much for the open sea. But I think alterius would still have companioned her, so she wouldn’t have been so much safer from his blandos susurros.1 She was undoubtedly something of a minx; the way she summoned poor P[ropertius] at midnight to make the dangerous (in the dark) journey across the Campagna from Rome to Tibur, was unpardonable. However, she seems to have been the life and soul of the villadom round Tibur, and they all liked her company, so she must have had wits as well as beauty.

  I have now got hold of J. C. Powys, his autobiography, and am reading it with great interest. What an extraordinary character he has—or is it only an extraordinary view of himself? I read the part about you (p. 599) with much appreciation and pleasure. I note that he says you think better of him than he does of himself—or than your God does. I expect you are more nearly right. He must be a very loveable person, and with a tremendous sense of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil—perhaps that inherited sense of it that clergy families are apt to have, indeed, can scarcely avoid, whatever their personal beliefs. He has a very busy conscience, obviously. And beautifully keen sensuous perceptions. I like the feelings he had about the type of picture he loves, and that I love too—the 18th century Italian landscape with trees, ruins, distant water, light in the sky, a bridge; he describes it so well, and I too feel like that—a kind of sensuous joy in such pictures. On the high level, of course, Claude, Poussin, Rosa, and other 17th c. artists painted in this sort, and how lovely and romantic and breathtaking they are! And even on the more ordinary level, all those Italian landscapes that our 18th cent, ancestors brought home from their Grand Tours and hung about their houses, and that one sees now in the old picture and junk shops—there are lots about here—how they tug at the emotions, for some reason which has little to do with art, I fancy, and is perhaps ancestral pleasure in Abroad. Your cousin has many good observations such as those about this. I don’t quite know what he means about the Christian doctrines (see p. 599) if “relaxed a little on the erotic side,” may hold deep cosmic secrets. Does he mean they are too severe about chastity and such things? I suppose so. You told me he wasn’t really sadistic and that that is all his fancy: still, why did he throw you into a bed of nettles? I think he is older than you, isn’t he. I like his remark that the grand struggle of his life has been between Conscience and sensual desires. He has the face of an ascetic at war with the world, the flesh and the devil. As you said once, he might well have been a priest, had his beliefs been different. I like his perfect frankness, and his refusal to present a romantic picture of himself. And how beautiful his love for Llewelyn1 was! I am still reading the book, and expect to find a lot of interest in it. Anyhow, his feeling for you endears him to me. I like his word “Cowperist.”

  I’m glad you like those photographs. Actually, I look older now than when they were taken. Though I hadn’t realised that my hair now looks gray, though of course it has a lot of gray in it. How conservative one is; I suppose one gets used to one’s hair being mid-brown, and it still seems to one to be so. But I am sure Fr. Pedersen is right. (Don’t tell him I questioned it— it would seem like vanity, and I’m sure he must be right.) Perhaps I will chop off a tiny piece and send it to you to judge for yourself—not, I needn’t say, to keep in an album in the old-fashioned way of our ancestors, but to cast in an incinerator when inspected. If I remember, before posting this I will do that— but again, don’t tell Fr. P. Yes, it has, as is only right at my advanced stage, a lot of gray in it. Also, it is fal
ling out too fast! Eheu fugaces.2 I should now like a photograph of Horace, being steeped in descriptions of his farm and his surroundings, so that I feel I could find my way about every inch of the ground, along the cold Digentia, up the hill behind, through the woods towards the Fons Bandusiae, among the oaks and vines.

  I supposed that Peter Livius must have been a Hamburg man. It is obvious that he wasn’t a British merchant, as nearly all of these would be members of the British Factory, and there is no mention of him in the various lists of Factory members given in the book I have about the Factory. I wonder what Livius did in Lisbon. If he was a merchant, he would no doubt be a member of the German Factory; and I have no lists of the members of that. Or he may have been something diplomatic of course. He went there in 1709, I note. And George became wholly English, obviously, in spite of being half German and half Irish. I will look out for further information about Peter’s Lisbon life. What happened to his other children, I wonder? George’s god-parentage looks rather diplomatic—our friend Castres, and Mrs. Compton (wife of the Hon. Charles Compton, who was, I think Envoy Extraordinary from 1742-45. I have read some of his despatches in old days in the Record Office). But yes, do send me a copy of that paper about Peter in Portugal sometime; I should be interested.

  I sent you John Gerard—oh perhaps I told you this last time— and my review of it. Yesterday I met Fr. Caraman S.J. (editor of The Month, and translator and editor of Gerard) at a party, and conversed with him at some length about his book. He had been quite pleased with my review; he says the only Jesuit plotting against the throne and country was on the part of Fathers Parsons and Allen; but he understates; there were more Jesuits than these involved in it. And great distrust and dislike of the Jesuits by many of the R.C. gentry and seculars in England; a point that the former translator rather slurs over. I was interested in the passage where Gerard avows the Jesuit doctrine of lawful lying; it seems very—Jesuitical, and is what we have always accused them of, and what modern apologists such as Ronald Knox say is quite untrue. Here they are convicted out of the mouth of a Jesuit of repute, who would certainly state the case correctly. Fr. Caraman … is a friend of Graham Greene’s and Evelyn Waugh’s. He doesn’t think E.W. likely to write any more comic novels, which is a sad pity, as he can be so brilliantly funny.

  What do you think about C. S. Lewis, of whom I have read very little having had always a slight prejudice against him? But I think I shall now so far overcome this as to read The Problem of Pain, and something called Beyond Personality, which sounds interesting.

  Thank you for giving me your interpretation of that prayer “ut ad sancta sanctorum … introire.”1 I have now added it to my collection of Latin prayers in my Preces Privatae, the ones I pick about among to say to myself before, during and after Mass. I like the thought of bringing in all the oddments of luggage and holding them up. That friend of mine who had her cornea changed still can’t see out of that eye or the other, and is still in bed at Moorfields, where I visit and talk and read to her. The surgeon says her state is all right, as it is a very gradual process. Poor dear, she gets very wxary of lying there blind, but she listens in a good deal, when there is good music, or anything interesting in the way of talks, and her friends and relations divide up the days between them to go and sit with her. She is very gay and amusing with it all, and enormously courageous; a person in a thousand. Not religious; but will admit anything to be possible, and has a splendid gospel of courage and pluck. And beautiful to look at, even with bandaged eyes. Anyhow, I take her in with me to Mass.

  I understand exactly, I think, what you feel about sticking to the P[rayer] B[ook] service instead of adding all those supplementary prayers, etc. I think I do feel they enrich the service; the interpolated sayings are often so good, and seem to light up the P.B. prayers as if sudden flashes of light were directed on them. But even without these, what a wholly beautiful service it is. I can imagine feeling that it shouldn’t be touched or added to in any way. And I can imagine too that, if I were a priest saying it, I might feel as you do—that this was my Church, and these the prayers it ordained, and I its minister and priest. Not being a priest, I like anything that is put into it so long as it is good. It always is at the Chapel. Unlike some churches, which insert translations from the Roman Missal which I don’t always like. As you say, they are better in Latin: sometimes because of the “decent obscurity of a learned tongue,” sometimes (as in the case of honore) because they really are better put. And if rather too Counter-Reformationist for my rather austere taste, they are much better in Latin. I wish they would hurry up and produce that Pelican of Bindoff’s which I have ordered. Or perhaps they have it to-day; I couldn’t get there this afternoon. I know it will interest me. But I now have Powys to read, so, as my reading time is so scanty, it is perhaps as well that Bindoff tarries.

  The Archbishop of Aelia, Dr. Mathew (Apostolic Delegate at Mombasa), whom I have probably mentioned to you before, though I see him seldom now he is in Africa, writes to me to-day that he is dedicating to me the book he is now writing, The Genesis of the Civil War.1 This is because he liked They were Defeated. I am very proud and pleased at this, because he writes so well and is so able. He is coming to England in Feb. for 6 months. I expect he will be a Cardinal before long. I like both him and his brother Fr. Gervase Mathew v. much.

  I feel you are right about the Elizabethans on the whole not wanting religious changes. Though surely there was the Puritan wing (from the Lollards on) who really did. I suppose church abuses had annoyed and galled very many people; one can see that even in Langland and (less) in Chaucer. And the vulgar outcry against the Pope was only partly anti-foreign-power. Many of the ignorant rabble must, it seems, have confused Guy Fawkes with the Pope! See enclosed (part of letter in The Times Literary Supplement). It is hard to say from what springs these surges of popular feeling well up. But I have an idea that the feeling has always, in one form or another, been there. And then national feeling came in to strengthen it and give it drive.

  The season has moved on from the Feast of St. Nicholas (which my father always honoured when we were children, because St. N. was the patron Saint of his old school) to that of the Conception of the B.V.M. (Immaculate? Do we hold with that? No: according to Hours of Prayer, not. Indeed, I am sure not. I wonder do the very extreme churches, such as St. Thomas’s, Annunciation, or even All Saints, celebrate that. I dare say they do. I must ask Fr. Irvine!). Now I must go out; I hope to pick up Bindoff before the shops shut.

  I wonder what the Christmas air-posts will be like, and on what date I should write to you for Christmas Day. In about 10 days, I fancy—my love till then. I look back on last Christmas, that strange, dark, suspended time…. [sic]

  R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.I

  15th December, 1951 †

  Dear Father,

  I’ve just got your air paper posted on 10th—well, it came last night, actually—and think I will now write for Christmas, and enclose my Christmas card, which I like very much, whoever isn’t going to. I got it out of an old early 19th century Spanish book. I think the flautist looks so happy, and is leaping in the water with such spirit. I expect, as it was Christmas Day (though that is only my addition, and I dare say actually it was summer), he is trying to keep warm by motion. Anyhow, he brings my love and Christmas greetings, though I fancy he will arrive a little before time.

  Thank you so much for your letter, which I peruse every word of with pleasure. I’m glad you will like to have Gerard, and also like my review. To-day there is one, rather to the same effect, in The Church Times, which I send herewith, though I think you very likely see this journal. As you see, the reviewer agrees with us that the political background shouldn’t have been omitted; but he puts it with more feeling than I did, and I think seems to share Fr. Manson’s apprehension of the harm the book may do. In fact, he sounds a little cross. It takes R.C. propaganda to cause Church Times reviewers to speak with so much sympathy of our Protest
ant martyrs. I like Fr. Palmer’s thanksgiving for Elizabeth and Archbp. Parker and Hooker. I think I should like Fr. Palmer a good deal, from all you have said about him.

  I heard yesterday from Fr. Wilkins, suggesting that I should compile a set of short “acts,” or prayers, suitable for people to say in buses and trains on [the] way to work. Of course I can’t. But, as I told him, I wish someone would; we would all find such a collection useful. He mentions those (8, I think) at the end of Sancta Sophia,1 which he thinks not enough in touch with what young church people want or can easily use. Nor, I suspect, old church people either, to judge by the one most familiar to me. I am sure good new collections of prayers are badly needed. Fr. W[ilkins] kindly said that I would, he thought, be able to do the kind of thing he has in mind. My view is that people had better make their own, since they alone know what they can say and use without difficulty and embarrassment. I have by now made for myself (largely assisted by your pointings out, especially of Latin prayers) a collection that I like very much, and keep adding to. I get them from all kinds of sources. And among them are verses from psalms, from the Bible, and some poetry, and other oddments. I have them in one of your homebound scrap books, which seems their suitable frame, since so many of them are suggested by you, and since it is so much your doing that I am well in. Yes; that is a comforting thought, that one can go through a Mass with mind straying elsewhere, and still be inside, and nourished by the treacle well. I, of course, never take part in offices (in church; I say parts of them alone) but I think it might become a kind of submergence of which one would be glad. “The rock that is higher than I”—how good to remember that we are set up on it, whether we are thinking about it or not. Yes: what indelible impressions those childhood homes of ours made. The hymns one’s mother sang to us in bed; those tunes are so deeply planted in one’s soul that I resent all these new ones to which they are now set and sung. I’m sure the old were better; anyhow, it is the old I know and love. One was well inside that small, dear world, and can never get quite outside its influences. Christmas brings them back, of course. Cribs and Christmas trees and candles and stockings, and singing “Wreathe the holly, twine the bay” (which we all thought meant our Varazze Bay, the sea lipping on its sands) “Christ was born on Christmas Day”… [sic] and the lovely plaster sheep and cows and angels in the Cribs in the dark little shops in the piazza arcades, and the harsh bells clanging out from the 14th century church among them, and the orange and lemon trees shining on the terraces of the hills above the town. Those were the Christmases. Now, and here, it has become too much a racket—crowded, noisy, commercial, expensive. But it is still Christmas; and the first that I shall be fully taking part in for so many years. I shall go to my sister at Romford, as I usually do, for Christmas Eve, Day and Boxing. I hope there won’t be fog. I got caught in it last night, dining with friends in Westminster; when we started for our homes, about 11.30 p.m., it was so dense one couldn’t see a foot. Luckily I wasn’t driving; those who were abandoned their cars in despair. 1 groped a mile on foot to St. James’s Park station, and thence home in the safety of a train. Last Christmas was snow and ice-bound, I think; I spent it with friends in Kent. And felt tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, without. What a lot has happened this last year!