One was a sharp featured boy with black eyes and a corrugated forehead, and one a queer humpy man in a cloth cap, with a strong, absolutely flawless voice. He was blind. I was reminded of them putting out birds’ eyes to make them sing. Very queer melodies under the olives, with the old plectrum smacking away at the mandolin, and their right toes tapping in time. Afterwards we took them back into town, and went by car, royally, with music along the roads by the sea. But how can I express this queer place to you. Sometime you must come and share it for yourself …
HAIL AND HAIL AND HAIL.
Larry
[1936?]
Corfu
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Alan,
… We have taken some amusing photos of the island which are being enlarged in Athens, when I get them I’ll post them to you and you can submit them with a letter to the Geographical Magazine if you will. A week or 2 ago we went up to a death-swamp lake in the north, Les and Nan and me for a shoot. Tropical. Huge slime covered tracts, bubbled in hot marsh-gas and the roots of trees. Snakes and tortoises swimming quietly above and big toads. A rim of emerald slime thick with scarlet dragon-flies and mosquitoes. It’s called: ANTINIOTISSA4 (enemy of youth). I shot my first big duck in flight, and we got a couple of herons each. I’ve bought a gun. And tomorrow we get our boat, a lovely 20 foot cutter, which we are going to haul out and scrape and paint ourselves. Send you a snap. It’s a bride of a boat. We are fitting it out and next summer or the next we’ll set off to the Aegean in it alone, with enough food, a gun, a reel. Live virtually on what we shoot and fish and land-skim. When we start I am going to begin a series of letters, long ones to you, which we can print in a book afterwards. A travel book.
My poems are at the printers being quoted. We’ve started the Dugong series. Pat [Evans] will do his poems too. And afterwards I’ll do the Prurient Duck, satires, and Pat an essay on varieties of religious experience. Will you weigh in with a Provençal diary or an open letter to the anti-birth control league. I’ll send you a copy, but much as I love you I’m not going to ask you to hawk me around and incur the wrath of the council. You’re a respectable householder now so just you sit tight and cheer from the stalls. The poems are good. There’s no question of doubt. I know what they’re worth myself. And I don’t care if anyone buys them or not. A little bored with writing these days. I’m going to retire soon, not write except occasionally when I have something to say. At peace a little with The Black Book. It’s not as good as I thought I was. Well, I don’t care. I’ll do the trick yet. Great strength will return the mite. But it must come in its own time. May not publish it. When it’s done I’ll send it to you. What you’ll think will be valuable, because although you’re a bit of a hermit, you really have got the philosopher’s stone hidden somewhere in your dirty rags. O by the way, Pat says you don’t like Miller. Let me buy the copy back will you? I was afraid you wouldn’t, because it’s a book which moves in terribly rare air. I couldn’t read it in England myself. But it’s the book of a great exile, and I’m one myself (minus the great to quite that degree). A greater exile even than Villon is old Miller. I love the red naked personalities of prophets appearing suddenly in the decorous circus of literary literature. It shows up the conscious craftsmen like hell, and makes them see what maggots they are. Away with these old buggers who want art to be a superior cabinet-making. Real art is life. And Miller is a real live Miller all through, not a literary sempstress. As for CHARLES MORGAN “THAT Giant bluebell of Observer literature,” what a thin smell of urine and fag-ends goes up from Sparken-broke. IS THERE NO ONE WRITING AT ALL IN ENGLAND NOW? What do you read when you spend a wet Monday alone? Myself I read one of the sciences. The most exact one to date is demonology. It is fun to follow the growth of science out of magic and demonology, and see it declining again in our time back to magic, its parent. WE SHALL NEVER KNOW ANYTHING. The Victorians tried to destroy our psyche by their cheap watch-chain certainty, their half-hunter universe. Thanks God someone had the sense to break it wide open and uncage the real mysteries for us to feed on.
Adio.
Larry.
[1936?]
Corfu
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Al,
… Well we have a blazing sun again after a few weeks of rain. Just a slight nip from the mountains. I’m a little sunblind these days. I don’t know what poetry or prose I’m writing really. It’s all happening through a dark velvet curtain. But the great thing is, it doesn’t matter any more. If I write I write.…
You wouldn’t recognize Leslie I swear. His personality is really amazingly strong now, and he can chatter away in company like Doctor Johnson himself. It’s done him a world of good, strutting about with a gun under each arm and one behind his ear, shooting peasants right and left. Did I tell you about Antiniotissa? Enemy of youth? We’re going up soon after duck. And as soon as Van Norden can hoist the binnacle and splice a nifty poop we’re off to try for deer and wild boar. I’m queer about shooting. So far I’ve prohibited herons. They’re such heraldic creatures, and when they’re wounded they use their great razor bill like a tailor. I shot a couple and one chased Leslie, and neatly nipped him in the arse. But duck is a different matter. Just a personified motor-horn, flying ham with a honk. No personality, nothing. And to bring them down is the most glorious feeling. THUD. Like breaking glass balls at a range. And the meat is delicious. I could slaughter hundreds without a qualm. They’ve no meaning, no real life. It’s like shooting flying motor-horns honestly. Delightful.
Have you ever seen an octopus killed? Last night we got a big one. A stick with its hook hidden in a few bits of greenery. They’re very gullible. Tease them and they come skating out of their holes and spread like a cobra. Then’s your time. You lunge out, hook, and drag them up. Behold, you have a pink deadly gesticulating umbrella trying to get at you.
The big one coughed up a huge spout of water plumb in our faces, panting heaving and writhing. Their suckers are terrifying. They wrap themselves round your wrists, heaving and squirting and pulping. Altogether filthy. Or walk up and down the wood with a continuous syrupy, sucking noise. Utterly foul. We put it on shore and watched it trying to get back to the sea. Curious, because it travels along the ground, throwing its tentacles out, but not in the air. It moves like lava, with a dull squelch. But funniest of all. When you stab it with a knife, huge electric tremors run through, it lights up for a second like a light, and then changes colour. When you sever the chords above the right eye, half of it dies and goes deep green blue, then over the other eye, and the other half dies. But very very filthy. I’ll send you one in an envelope.
HOUSE AT KOULOURA, CORFU
(gouache)
Well, see you on paper soon. And do I send a grand salute of five guns to the terrible cyprian on whom you dote, and whose talons are hooked in your vest? Madam I do. If I’m not one of the bloody family, then what am I? Eh?
Cheers chaps.
Larry.
[1936]
Sotiriotissa [Corfu]
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Alan,
Broadside of a hundred guns.5 I’m delirious with the news. Hurrah. June is usually a ringing month. We shall have the Van Norden in the sea and can make several amusing trips for you: to Mourto, a Turkish port opposite us here. To the little islands at the north etc. Such fun, and champagne and sand. Well that’s grand. I was wondering where the cash was coming from to make the Venice trip. Now I have a respite. Perhaps when you’ve been here a little while you’ll forget where you come from and who you are. Lose your memory I mean. Then we’ll chain you by the leg and make you live on the beach until September, just giving you enough fruit to eat, and reading Miller to you all day.
I’m glad you ignore Tropic of Cancer. It means that the backlash that is waiting for you from this writer will be even greater. All great men are fifty years ahead of their time, and H.M. is no exception to the rule. It’s largely a question of experience I think. When I first r
ead Tropic I was delighted with it, not as a new bible, but because it bore out a few theories about writing that I had been trying to formulate. The art of non-art. You remember us in Bournemouth on this theme. Real art being absolutely devoid of “artifice,” in the literary sense. The experience proper which is in the core of the book I was rather afraid of: the reason was this. When I read it first, my repulsion from it was the reflection, NOT OF ANYTHING INHERENTLY REPULSIVE IN ITS CONTENT, but of my own habit-pattern, my own upbringing. I was reading into it an unpleasantness which was my own mind. Getting to know Miller a little I see that the medal has an obverse side which very few people will grasp unless they are spiritually adult. Even Zarian in his obscure way is still fighting this bogy. I NOW REALIZE TO THE FULL THE PARADOX WHICH SUCH A BOOK, SUCH A MAN HOLDS IN STORE FOR US. It is this: TROPIC OF CANCER IS THE PUREST BOOK WRITTEN IN OUR TIME: by reducing everything to a common denominator of phenomenon, it achieves a PURITY of soul and cleanliness of spirit, against which people like Joyce and Lawrence in their most abandoned moments seem a little grubby: a little hand-soiled by the great northern mantrap (our disease, our death) THE GUILTY CONSCIENCE. I italicise this coz I want you to read it over and meditate on it. The paradox is there, and sooner or later you will grasp it, reciprocate it with your own conscience and soul. When I say that this is at once the greatest piece of writing in our time, and also the most religious book, IT IS THIS PARADOX WITH ITS LIVID IDEOLOGICAL EDGES WHICH BURSTS OUT OF THE MUMMY WRAPPINGS AND CONFRONTS ONE. You will get it in time: but the toll a great work takes is not a light one. To confront a nakedness so dazzling it is necessary first to achieve a reciprocal nakedness. My dear Alan, I have no fear in saying this to you, because it is the simple and inevitable truth. I was never so poor a critic that I could be lead astray on anything as open and obvious as this …
As to The Black Book, you might like it. But you will notice the slight contamination of conscience here and there infecting the sentiment—a peculiarly English disease. I hope to outgrow it. The sails are set. I’m starting out now in a more splendid curve than you would ever have imagined possible of me, with all your infectious faith and gaiety and loyalty. Don’t be worried by my touches of megalomania here and there, my saying that I’m the best writer in England etc. What I mean is this: I HAVE BEGUN TO BE A REAL WRITER. There is no one else on the horizon in England who seems to be developing into the same kind of faun. At the best, brilliant literary practitioners, which is on a level with cabinet-making—any poor fool can learn it at the polytechnik. So when I Durrealize, please understand: I am not comparing myself to the Walpoles, the Morgans, the Aldingtons of the world. I do not compete. By degree I may be lesser: by genus I belong to another race. It is a qualitative difference in which I blow the Lawrentian trumpet. I my own kind, I haven’t begun. Beside Lawrence, beside Miller, beside Blake. Yes, I am humble, I have hardly started. BUT I AM ON THE SAME TRAM. As for the Morgans and Eliots and Co. Why, they do not wear the first eleven cap. You will understand all this better when you see my writing on the heraldic universe. You will exclaim with delight in time, my dear, as certainly as Monday. You will exclaim.
MORE ANON. LOVE LARRY.
[1937]
c/o Ionian Bank, Corfu
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Alan,
Just been out to Paleocastrizza, where we are having our meeting this spring to arrange about the house. Lovely weather—the fields are crushed hip-high in asphodels and spring flags and millions of wild flowers whose names I don’t know. I am lolling a bit, resting really for the Ist time in my writing life, content and at ease with myself. There is nothing I want to write just now. We walk about the fields with the dogs, are out to callers, and lie in the sun. I want to tell you about Paleocastrizza, so you will expect neither more nor less than you get. We are going round the island to it in the boat, and will anchor in the little bay. Here Koster is living in a little peasant house, and as his girl is leaving him soon, here he has offered us a room—a guest room. It is about as big as your old room in B’mth. I am putting a comfy bed in it, a few pictures on the wall, a table. Very bare. Ourselves we will be camped in the glade near the house under canvas. We will eat together—god knows what I don’t. Bread and cheese and Greek champagne: you might find the diet a bit wild. Figs and grapes if they’re in. Anyway—very rough eats. But from the bay itself we will excurt every day in the Van Norden—to the islands at the north where we will try and find Calypso’s grotto. This is Homer’s country pure. A few 100 yards from us is where Ulysses landed. The women still wash their clothes in the stream. To the big sand-beaches at the south also, Myrtiotissa, Synaradès etc. When the time comes for you to leave, WE WILL MAKE THE JOINT TRIP BACK ROUND THE ISLAND TO THE CORFU SIDE TOGETHER, stopping off to look at the Greek theatre in Butrinto, and at Cassiope the old Roman summer villa of Tiberius or some such. Enclose a map of our plans. You will move from one, to two, and from two to three, as marked. I am not, of course, making anything cast-iron—you may feel like a week’s sun-bathing and nowt else when you come. O.K. But the islands are there, and we’ll see them. Nothing to stop us. We have a fine little black boat, tent, blankets etc. And the good talk we’ll have! I myself want you to arrive on June Ist. Because the moon begins then and on the 8th is full. If the weather is fine we can sail all night, drowsing in the moonlight, among the islands. You’d love that. It should be just nice, not too hot. A boiling English summer. July is the stinker. Take note please of the clothes you must bring:
A LOIN CLOTH???
ONE PAIR OF VERY LIGHT LONG TROUSERS made of any lightweight linen. (You may find the sun a bit burny).
A pair or two of shorts.
A couple of old shirts.
A PAIR OF SANDALS OR BEACH-SHOES.
Nothing else. Now you won’t get a bath until we get back to Sotiriotissa: and the food may be bread and cheese and beer and figs. But in compensation you’ll have the finest bathing and scenery in the world—and ISLANDS!
I’m looking forward to your trip, and I hope you won’t stint yourself about time. You need the sun to get strong and ruddy again after killing yourself over the business. Remember it’s an investment in its way—health gives you more fuel to run on. Don’t work too hard and let me know what you think.
The Van Norden is all black and brown, with white bowsprit and sails. A dream, my good friend, a black devil. Wait till you see her!
Enclose a map of your travels to give you some idea of the topography of the island. The names must muddle you up no end.
Athens day after tomorrow. More anon.
Love.
Larry.
[1938]
c/o Ionian Bank,
Kepkypa,6 Greece
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Alan:
Just a line to apologize for my neglect of you. We have been moving about again this summer and allowing mail to accumulate without bothering even to deal with it: living off the grape-country by the big sand-beach of Aghios Gordios. Also, I have been in Athens three and four times, as people came to stay and I couldn’t work at home.
News of the island? The same idiocy prevails—the afternoon silence broken by nothing but the crack of the Belgian consul’s rifle, as he wings pigeons from his office, safely guarded by a national flag and diplomatic papers. Spiro flourishes greatly. His English has become simply horrible this year, as Leslie is teaching him to swear.
Theodore, to everyone’s sorrow, is probably leaving the island to take up a job on Cyprus; Koster left for Paris last Friday, nearly mad with inaction and blue. I expect he will have to have a plate put in his skull. He hasn’t painted a stroke since you were here: not a bloody nature-morte even; and when he admits it he looks rather nature-morte himself. It reminds me of the Creswell epigram
Master John Blank, the poet, has cut his
throat
The only perfect line he ever wrote!
As for me I am in the middle of a book called the Aquarians. The Black Book s
hould be out by the time you get this letter. I am also embarking on a verse play; a certain amount of stuff got printed in magazines this year but nothing so very good. I feel a little estranged in writing about my work to you, because I feel that I am quickly taking up a stance which you don’t understand, and consequently don’t subscribe to. Differences in experience are always tedious things. So I am content always to let time do the dove-tailing again. There is no hurry. I have suddenly discovered what it is I want to say: and you are one of the people I want to say it for!
Alors be of good cheer, father patience. The future is never too far away.
My God sorry about this scrawl. I am down with grippe and hate typing on my stomach. Pen a bit costive too, needs a laxative.
I think we are possibly coming to England in a month or two to live for a little while there. Serious financial troubles! I am keen to see how you are getting along with the bookshop; no less than with your Gauguin woman or your beard.…
Miller coming down here he says to stay and Perlès. All the Best. I hope to look you two up soon: and smell the bindings: so Ella and Alan, Salut—
Larry
[1939]
[London?]
To Anne Ridler
Thursday as I live on the eve of the cataclysm:
Posting from Stratford I find the poem I promised you, good Mistress Anne, lying on my desk, unposted owing to the thin and nauseating web of procrastination woven around me by the charwoman daily. I have discovered, if not Shakespeare, Arden, Avon, Snitterfield, and the delectable county of Warwick. I am a little drunk but in good repair. (This is to apologize for the delay). But I must tell you about the journey.
As you drop over the Oxon border by Long Compton there is an air of another territory; the country arches and curves, and behaves in an entirely new way. The trees behave with a propriety and decency altogether fantastic. The air goes all sour-sweet with the bells from the little minsters, and you feel you have reached common land at last, a kind of green limbo between territories which breeds fantasy, medievalism, wrack, ullage and Pentavalon her shining and tainted pavilions. From this point until you reach the swan that lulls so soft under the Trinity spires, you hold your breath. In Stratford even the petrol pumps were gaudy and in keeping; and the river runs like sound through steel tubes—a little icy tinkle by the weir. It is so still in the afternoons that you could breathe on a mirror and not find it so still. And the swan does little cobbles with her horny black foot on the absolute water. Lie on your back in Shottery with a good pipe going, the noise of mowing, the tourists passing, and you begin to see the edges of this huge industrial myth Shakespeare; you begin to bless the arm-in-arm girls and boys maundering on the greens, waiting for the shows to start, with their texts pocketed and their labours lost in love. Shakespeare is not a text but a festival, a rite, and there’s no clue to give you the meaning of it. After all, one cannot be a disciple, merely a devotee. There is no order and no rule; merely this pilgrimage to this particular town where the records are so scant that they make you jump for joy. The visitors’ books are swollen with weird and ghastly names; and him in his niche by the altar is full of a kind of indecent pride; not for literary benefits or the shabby flourishes of the critics, BUT SIMPLY BECAUSE HE GOT SO MANY OF HIS FAMILY BURIED IN AN HONOURABLE PLACE INSIDE THE ALTAR RAILS. Lashings of them. No, his is the burgess-pride, the smalltown pride of the local boy who has made better than good. And that is why the Americans love him, god bless the reverent slinkers in holy places; they rejoice in the trouble he took to buy his arms and set up prosperously in New Place with the river running silver under his elbow, and a fig for Momus7 as exemplified by London or the muse.
Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel Page 5