Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

Dear Galahad,

I seem to have trod on somebody’s corns over this question of a holyday: I expressly said that I did not wish to keep you at home on my account if you wished to go elsewhither. To be brief, my whole answer was that I refused your kind proposal because I was already booked, adding that I should not care to take another holyday in addition to that at Larne. Now what is your grievance–for grievance you must have or you would not write such good grammar. Is it because I won’t throw up my previous invitation in favour of yours? That would be rude. Is it because I will not accompany you on another holyday? That is selfish of you, to expect me to give [up] my fleeting sojourn at Leeborough for your amusement. Is it because I mildly suggested that you need not go for a holyday? There was never any obligation on you to accept such a scheme. And as for your hot weather–je me moque de cette là, it is bitterly cold to-night! How funny that I always prove everything I want in argument with you but never convince you!

Now, having despatched our inevitable weekly dialectical passage-at-arms (by the way, you have never replied to my theory of trousers), we may proceed to the letter. I admit that the ‘I hope you are all well’ is a blot on my character that can hardly be wiped out: I didn’t think I had sunken so low as that, and will try to reform.

I thought you would agree with me about Mansfield park:

(#ulink_6bc587e1-55c9-5173-8582-bfea86dcf27d) I should almost say it was her best. I don’t remember the names very well, but I think I rather liked Edmund. Do get a Temple Classic. You will bless me ever after, as they are really the best shillings worth on the market. I hope I may prove a false prophet about the Odeon records, and that you will have better luck in them than I. Now that it is drawing a little nearer my return, I begin to hanker again for my gramaphone: but I am not consoled even with the catalogues, so you must stir up the damosel again. I am still at the ‘Laxdaela Saga’ which is as good as ever, and I insist upon your reading it too.

On Saturday I met the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my life (don’t be afraid, you’re not going to have to listen to another love-affair). But it is not her prettiness I wanted to tell you about, but the fact that she is just like that grave movement in the Hungarian Rhapsody (or is it the ‘dance’?) that I love so much.

(#ulink_654d5a93-590a-5772-99b3-10442e4da306) Of course to you I needn’t explain how a person can be like a piece of music,–you will know: and if you play that record over, trying to turn the music into a person, you will know just how she looked and talked. Just 18, and off to do some ridiculous warwork, nursing or something like that at Dover of all places–what a shame!

By the way, that would be a rather interesting amusement, trying to find musical interpretations for all our friends. Thus Gordon

(#ulink_821a097e-c717-570f-83e6-1fd034d956ea) is like the Pilgrims chorus from Tannhaüser, Kelsie a bit like the Valkyries

(#ulink_aadb138d-316c-588b-8e64-2d7f53c3ed3f) only not so loud, Gundred

(#ulink_43a6ba4b-d92c-532f-bc0e-25e239fb5c77) like the dance-movement in Danse Macabre, and Bob like a Salvation army hymn. We might add yourself as a mazurka by Chopin, wild, rather plaintful, and disjointed, and Lily like, well–a thing of Grieg’s called ‘The Watchman’s Song’

(#ulink_71aa6743-70f6-56f3-b100-4b657a47b187) that you haven’t heard. I think I must write a book on it.

By the way (all my sentences seem to begin like that) I am very sorry this is a bit late, but I was writing to my father and brother last night. Now, good night, Galahad, and be good and talk sense the next time you do me the honour of arguing with me.

Yours

Jack

P.S. What about the question of ‘sensulity’?

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 319-20):

[Gastons]

Friday [18 June 1915]

My dear Papy,

I am writing this immediately after reading your letter, but I mean it to belong to next week. Perhaps I shall not post it till Monday to equalize the dates, but at any rate it is much easier to write to you just after reading yours. I somehow seem to be unable to write to you properly now-a-days: perhaps because we make jokes nearly all the time when we are together, and household humour, though the funniest of all things to those who understand (a propos of which, read the first Roman story in ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’),

(#ulink_973d7819-c65b-5087-b9e3-7ef09cb37368) can’t really be written down. Whereas if I try to be serious, I merely succeed in being ‘stuffy’. The last word describes exactly what I mean. However, as Plato says, the written word is only a poor faint shadow of real conversation, in which, among people who know each other well, the merest suggestion explains a train of thought which the most elaborate written explanation leaves obscure, lifeless and formal.

(#ulink_cb5e83f4-1659-5aa9-b914-f9f2be009757) Still, as it would be expensive to telephone to you every week with trunk calls–do you remember the lady in ‘The Whip’?

(#ulink_bcf759ab-3e0c-5cd4-9437-6587cc0b75b2)–we must do the best we can.

I think we may reasonably hope that the war will be over before it begins to concern me personally. At the same time, the knowledge that I had gone as soon as possible to the front would not, I fancy, be a very substantial comfort to me if I arrived there as a conscript. All the people on whom that name has fallen would be lumped together without distinction in the minds of our Tommies–who indeed might be excused for feeling some warmth in the circumstances. Then there is the other possibility that Europe will be at peace before I am eighteen. In that case I believe my career at Oxford would be, if anything, a little easier than usual, owing to lack of competition. It would be ghastly however to reckon up that condition as an advantage–when we remember what it means. I am sorry for your sake that ‘Mr. Carr’

(#ulink_a3370860-08bc-5eaa-bf9d-dc28859b4ca0) has gone, but after all, from his point of view, it was inevitable. There is not much objection made to the teeth now, it seems!

I will certainly write to the Colonel as soon as you send me his address, which I am not quite sure of. I don’t think I will make it a birthday letter, which–from me at any rate–would not appeal to him: I may find some ‘crack’ however to interest him. Isn’t it interesting to note the different things we expect from different people? If I imitated your style exactly, and could write a letter to the Colonel almost the same as a typical one of yours, the result would be merely irritating: if you tried the same experiment with my style, or absence of style, the result would be the same. Yet both, I believe, would be acceptable from the right authors.

This is a digression: to go back to Warnie, it certainly must be very depressing to see so many of the Malvern lot–for whom he had a regard as genuine as it was inexplicable–dropping off like this. ‘It is an ill wind’–the proverb is rather old. But one result of the war to us seems to be that you and W., if I may say so, understand each other better than you have done for some time.

I am learning lots of things here besides the Classics–one of them being to take cold baths: and such an artist I am becoming that you will hardly know me when I get home for the brevity of my sojourn in the bath room and the prodigious amount of noise I make over it. The weather is still hot and a trifle oppressive here, but agreeable in the morning and evening.

I have been devoting this week to the reading of Othello,

(#ulink_b7f0cb89-4cdf-5a73-96d8-825cf0a79ad1) which I like as well as any Shakesperian play I have read. The part of Iago, to my mind, is something of a blemish, and the fact that his pitiless malignity has absolutely no motive leaves him rather a monster (in the Classical, not the newspaper sense of the word), than a human character. But then of course Shakespeare at his best always works on titanic lines, and the vices and virtues of Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Desdemona, etc., are magnified to a pitch more splendid and terrible than anything in real life.

(#ulink_127d3f2b-1980-5041-8dcf-e625f780438a)

If I leave here on the 30th July, so as to arrive home on the last Saturday of that month, the exact half of the term ought to have fallen about four hours ago. That will make the usual twelve weeks. Only six more now! That sounds perhaps too like the old days at Malvern, but don’t suppose that because I will be glad to see you again, I am not happy and more than happy at the K’s.

your loving,

son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Gastons

29 June 1915]

Dear Galahad,

Did the Norns or Dana holy mother of them that die not, weave for us in that hour wherein our mothers bare us, that never should we write to each other without the first page being occupied by argument? Because, whether by the decree of fate or no, this has always been the case. First it was Shee v. Souteraines, then Tears v. Trousers, and now Larne v. Leeborough–which by the way means Little Lea. How you can have known me so long without picking up the words & tags which I use every day passes my understanding–unless I am to conclude that you are asleep half the time I am talking to you, which is very probably so.

Well about this infernal holyday: as your infantile brain–for which I have catered on this envelope–is incapable of swallowing my previous very elementary argument, I will explain my position once more in very simple terms, as follows:–

I have eight weeks vacations.

I have been invited to stay 10 days with Mrs Hamilton.

(#ulink_b4501c5e-9cd1-5e2c-a3f2-aa1dd64fca87)

I have accepted her invitation.

I intend to keep that promise

I don’t want to be any longer away than 10 days.

I don’t want to keep you at home on that account.

I therefore decline your kind proposal.