Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

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       TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Feb 3/54

      Dear Mrs Farrer

      Sternly suppressing my conscience (in George Herbert’s style, you know ‘Peace, prattler, do not lour’)⁷⁸ I have allowed no duties to interfere with my reading The Cretan Counterfeit.⁷⁹ I admire very much the thick-woven texture: it doesn’t easily come apart. Janet and Shrubsole are very well done and Janet wins my heart. Two scenes that especially engaged me were that where Richard is hunting for Shrubsole in Janet’s house and the final scene. The tragic-heroic twist at the very end is good technique as well as being moving in itself. Georgios is, in his smaller way, a wonderful little horror.

      Would Clare have giggled (p. 201)? Or even if she had, isn’t the word ‘giggled’ too damaging? (I’m always reminding people that nothing can get into literature save by becoming a word, and that things may be O.K. where the words are not. The bearings of this are wide, as you’ll see if you reflect on the difference between drawing a nude and verbally describing it,⁸⁰ or the impossibility of mentioning Cheko-Slovakia (is that how you spell it) at the apex of a lyric however deeply one may feel about that country).