Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and I should put it fairly high among the pre-17th century novels, wh. as a whole I find inferior to the others. Still, it shares with Rob Roy the rare advantage of having a natural and even pleasant heroine. Finally The Antiquary for about the fifth time, wh. I have almost fixed on as the Scott novel.²² I have read it so often that I do not remember at which reading I ceased to regard Mr. Oldbuck as ‘a character’ and began to think him (as I now do) simply the one sensible man in the book, living as any rational man would live if he were given peace.

      I wonder, supposing that the P.O. is working when this reaches you, would you mind letting me have a cable to say that you’re alright? Unless, of course everything is quiet by the end of the next fortnight. It would really cheer us up immensely.

      I shall resume proper letter writing with the rest of my regular routine as soon as I get back to work. For the moment this is the best I can do. With best wishes, brother, for a speedy removal of your person to some quieter area.

      Yours

      Jack.

      P.S. Your pictures have come. I think hanging them is the safest method of storing them and I shall do so as soon as I am about again: till then I have refused to have them unpacked.

       TO HIS BROTHER (W):

      [The Kilns]

      Feb 21st 1932

      My dear W–

      Since I last wrote to you, four or five days ago, we had two communications from you. First, a message by Bibby Wireless which took exactly a fortnight to reach us. As this is much too short a time for anything but telegraphy, and much too long for any telegraph (wireless or wiry) I don’t know what to make of it: but I’m inclined to think that you expected it to reach us sooner and that its actual date of arrival does shew some dislocation of services. Thanks for sending it. The re-assuring view of the crisis is quite obviously untrue by now, whatever it may have been when you sent it; but thanks all the same.

Secondly, I have had your cheering letter of Jan 14th—‘cheering’ for giving one some conversation with you, though of course it bears not at all on the source of anxiety. I must confess I have imbibed enough of that rather specially shabby superstition which cries ‘Touch wood’ etc, to shudder when I read your proposals about walks in Ulster etc. In fact I have two unpleasantly contrasted pictures in my mind. One ‘features’ the two Pigibudda with packs and sticks de-training into the sudden stillness of the moors at Parkmore.²³ the other is of you progressing from the Bund to Gt. Western Rd. with an eye cocked skyward, just in the old French manner, curse it, and ducking at the old Who-o-o-o-p-Bang! Like Boswell, on that perilous crossing in the Hebrides, I ‘at last took refuge in piety: but was much embarrassed by the various objections which have been raised against the doctrine of special providences’.²⁴ Unfortunately I have not at hand the work of Dr. Ogden in which Boswell found this difficulty solved.²⁵ I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it,’ then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever—to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train?

      However, in spite of this discomfort, I cannot help joining you in your day-dream of a Parkmore walk. That is partly because I am now back in bed (nothing serious, just a slight re-rise of temperature owing to having tried to get up too soon). Do you find, during the endless afternoons of a week in bed, that one’s imagination is constantly haunted with pictures of seacoasts and cliffs and such like? Mine has been specially busy with the walk you suggest. I think it would be better to go down to the coast by the second of the two glens to Cushendun (not Cushendall) after a glance down the first, which is better as a view than as a route. The impressive simplicity—one huge fold of land-which makes it so good a view would make it a little monotonous for footing: the other is a perfect paradise of ups and downs and brawling streams, little woods, stone walls, and ruined cottages. The next days walk—on North with Rathlin in view—I did an hour of with Arthur last summer, and it is even better than you can possibly imagine if you haven’t done it. The lunch problem is a pity: but one can never be utterly stranded in a country full of streams—spring water being not only better than nothing with which to wash down a man’s victuals but better than anything except beer or tea. It is the dry dollop of unmitigated sandwich on top of a waterless chalk down in Berkshire that really spoils a day’s walk. But perhaps this is enough of the day dream—the other picture begins to bother me.

      By the way, if you get through this damned battle next door to you, it will have had one incidental advantage-that of having made me very familiar with Shanghai. I could now draw quite a good map from memory: certainly could get in Chapei Station, Gt. Western Rd, Trinity Cathedral, Cathay Hotel, the Creek, Hongkew fairly correctly.

I thoroughly agree with your revised proposals for the Lewis papers. If you remember, I was always to this extent opposed to your first scheme, that I wanted all letters put in together in their chronological order so as to secure the va-et-vient²⁶ of actual intercourse, whereas you wanted A’s letters in a block, then B’s letters in a block. But your new idea is better than either. How far will you extend it? It seems to me that all good traditional information (e.g. ‘I thought your father would have gone wild’) now can and ought to go in: and I am not at all sure that the contents of P’daita Pie²⁷ should not find their place in the main narrative. Many pages of Boswell are just such ‘pie’ mosaiced into the biography. You see how impossible it is not to be always counting on the future and then being always pulled up by recollection of those shells and made to feel that any such counting is a positive tempting of fate. However, what is one to do.

      I shall make this a short letter and try to send you another short one soon, because whatever you say, it is quite obvious that mails are not safe. How can they be when any boat coming up that river may stop a Chinese shell? I was much taken by the photos of the model railway—though his wall-painting scenery seems to have left some problems of perspective unsolved. I doubt if I should care for a toy of that kind now: toy country would be my fancy—i.e. where you wd. have country as a background to a railway, I should have railway as a feature of the country. Perhaps some such complementary difference was already present in our own humbler attic system. But a man could have great fun, you will allow, landscape-building on that same scale. Indeed I fancy you could produce something of which the photos would really deceive.

I wonder how I shd. enjoy a performance of The Count of Luxembourg?²⁸ I hum over to myself Rootsie-Tootsie and As they pass the gay cafes and of course remember, in a way, all the same things as you: but probably with quite different emotions. I see now that my enjoyment of musical comedy in the old days, though quite real, was largely ‘caught’ from you-or rather from the fashionable world of 1912–14 of which you were in my case the conductor: and it has all passed without going deep enough to make the real remeniscent feeling as they do in you. The sound that I get in our room in college when I pull the study curtains (that unique nimble) releases memories that ‘come home to my business and bosoms’ as the musical comedy tunes do not. Contrariwise, my old Wagner favourites, which are still startlingly evocative for me, wd. probably now not be so for СКАЧАТЬ