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

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СКАЧАТЬ shows the absurdity of the statement often made ‘Well at least a man knows when he’s enjoying himself’. I thought I liked the musical comedy tune in my musical comedy period just as much as I thought I liked the Wagner tune in my next period. Memory shows that I was mistaken. And why should I remember with such delight sitting with you near that fountain on the high Holywood Road that summer evening during the great Row—and remember with such complete coldness going to The Arcadians.²⁹ The first seemed at the time a most miserable, the second a most pleasurable evening: but the first has ‘kept’ (as they say of meat) and the second has not. Still, I wd. willingly go with you to one of the old musical comedies if the chance came our way.

It is a springlike evening here—all the birds twittering—and I am beginning to be tired of bed. I am certainly tired of novels and must get something nutritious fetched from college to morrow. I’m not at all sure that I shan’t, after your remarks, have a cut at the Georgics.³⁰ I need not urge you to look after yourself as well as you can. I suppose you are wearing tin-hats—alack the day! All send their love

      Yrs

      Jack.

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      [The Kilns]

      Feb 1932

      My dear Arthur,

      I have been laid up with flu’ for over a fortnight or I shd. have answered you before. As you preferred my last letter to my previous ones, and also took longer to answer it than ever, I suppose if I want a speedy answer to this I had better write a letter you don’t like! Let me see—I must first select all the subjects which are least likely to interest you, and then consider how to treat them in the most unattractive manner. I have half a mind to do it—but on second thoughts it would be almost as big a bore for me to write it as for you to read it. How exasperating to think of you being at Ballycastle with an unappreciative companion, in bad weather, and a lethargic mood: it seems such a waste.

I thought we had talked about Naomi Mitchison before. I have only read one (Black Sparta)³¹ and I certainly agree that it ‘holds’ one: indeed I don’t know any historical fiction that is so astonishingly vivid and, on the whole, so true. I also thought it astonishing how, despite the grimness, she got such an air of beauty—almost dazzling beauty—into it. As to the cruelties, I think her obvious relish is morally wicked, but hardly an artistic fault for she cd. hardly get some of her effects without it. But it is, in Black Sparta, a historical falsehood: not that the things she describes did not probably happen in Greece, but that they were not typical—the Greeks being, no doubt, cruel by modern standards, but, by the standards of that age, extremely humane. She gives you the impression that the cruelty was essentially Greek, whereas it was precisely the opposite. That is, she is unfair as I should be unfair if I wrote a book about some man whose chief characteristic was that he was the tallest of the pigmies, and kept on reminding the reader that he was very short. I should be telling the truth (for of course he would be short by our standards) but missing the real point about the man-viz: that he was, by the standards of his own race, a giant. Still, she is a wonderful writer and I fully intend to read more of her when I have a chance.

I am so glad to hear you have started Froissart.³² If I had the book here (I am out at the Kilns—only got up yesterday) we could compare passages. What I chiefly remember from the first part is the Scotch wars and the odd way in which just a very few words gave me the impression of the scenery—the long wet valleys and the moors. How interesting too, to find how much of the chivalry in the romances was really practised in the wars of the period—e.g. the scene where Sir Thing-um-a-bob (you see you are not the only one who forgets things) espouses the cause of the lady of Hainault. Or again, at the siege of Hennebont (?) where you actually have a lady-knight fighting, just like Britomart in the Faerie Queene.

      To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder-considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books—why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

      By the way, when you ask me to ‘pray for you’ (in connection with Froissart) I don’t know if you are serious, but, the answer is, I do. It may not do you any good, but it does me a lot, for I cannot ask for any change to be made in you without finding that the very same needs to be made in me; which pulls me up and also by putting us all in the same boat checks any tendency to priggishness.

While I have been in bed I have had an orgy of Scott -The Monastery, The Abbot, The Antiquary and the Heart of Midlothian³³ which I am at present in the middle of. The Monastery and Abbot I have read only once before—long, long ago, long before you and I were friends—so that they were the same as new ground to me. Neither of them is Scott at his best—the Monastery indeed is about the worst I have yet read—but both are worth reading. The Antiquary I have read over and over again, and old Oldbuck is almost as familiar to me as Johnson. What a relish there is about him and his folios and his tapestry room and his paper on Castrametation and his ‘never taking supper: but trusting that a mouthful of ale with a toast and haddock, to close the orifice of the stomach, does not come under that denomination’³⁴ (How like my father and his ‘little drop of the whiskey’).

      I think re-reading old favourites is one of the things we differ on, isn’t it, and you do it very rarely. I probably do it too much. It is one of my greatest pleasures: indeed I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. Do try one of the old Scotts again. It will do admirably as a rest in the intervals of something that needs working at, like Froissart.

      There has been a good deal of snow during my illness. Where I lay in bed I could see it through two windows, and a bit of the wooded hill gradually whitening in the distance. What could be snugger or nicer? Indeed my flu’ this year would have been delightful if I hadn’t been worried about Warnie, who is in Shanghai. When there is something like this wh. forces one to read the papers, how one loathes their flippancy and their sensational exploitation of things that mean life and death. I wish to goodness he had never gone out there.

      Do try and let me know when you are coming to London and when there is a chance of your coming here. Otherwise you know what it will be: you will turn up unexpectedly on some day when I have 15 hours’ work to do, and I shall be angry with you and you will be angry with me, and we shall meet for a comfortless half hour in a teashop and snap and sulk at each other and part both feeling miserable. Surely it is worth while trying to avoid this. Give my love to your mother and to the dog. I hope we shall have some famous walks with him

      Yours

      Jack

       TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      The Kilns,

      Headington Quarry,

      Oxford.

      March СКАЧАТЬ