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 you.
This, by the bye, 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.