[35A School St., Andover, Mass.]
[27 October]: 1956
NoEnglandEnglish traditions;c4Order of Merit;a2, please not ESQUIRE in full except when you want to pull my leg. I only wanted you to know that I was a genuine ESQUIRE. I don[’]t mind in the least being addressed as Mr. (but not Mister in full please).
IfPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt);o7 I had known the date of Aunt E.’s birthday I would have written for it. I am struck by what you say of a change in her. NowHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3TSE's worries as to future appearances;j2 as forPrinceton Universityand EH's bequest;e8 the letters sent to Princeton. I hope you will not think I am being fussy, and I do want to say this (and whatever eye looks at the letters first, at some future date, I should like to fall on this letter first, if you will add it): It isn’t the intimate and personal things that I would wish to conceal from the curious reader, when we are all gone – let the whole world see that. One is not ashamed of one’s intense and passionate moments, but of the petty gossip, the exhibition of vanity, boastfulness, peevishness, perhaps even malice unconscious – and of all the callow and mistaken judgments upon people that one has made in the past. But a correspondence should not be edited to show the writer in the most favourable light! And the great reason for delay is the avoidance of pain to anyone still living. {For instance (this is my small machine which I use because the other is out of order) IStrachey, LyttonTSE fears having denounced;a8 may easily have expressed my loathing of Lytton Strachey – IBussy, Janepotential reader of EH–TSE correspondence;a4 am quite fond of his niece Janey [sc. Janie] Bussy, who is young enough to outlive me for many years, if she lives to be as old as her mother is now]. And it’s no good just forbidding publication, if letters can be examined by researchers who will go to the library where they are housed. WhenJoyce, JamesTSE on his letters to;e3 James Joyce died, his papers, including all the letters from his correspondents, were sold lock stock and barrel to Buffalo University. I was able to look at a projection of a microfilm of my letters to him at the British Museum; and I thought, how fortunate that I did not know Joyce intimately enough to have made personal revelations or to have expressed adverse opinions, or repeated gossip or scandal, about living people!
But what do you mean by saying that long ago I made you feel the necessity of regarding me as a Public Figure? I certainly hope that I do not see myself as a Public Figure!
YesNason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldineher health;d1, there was a birthday cake – and Meg has lunched with me more recently, and she is now rejoicing because the oculist has reassured her about her eyes. She had fallen down stairs some time ago and landed bump on the base of her spine, and it seems that some small blood vessels at the back of her eyes were ruptured; but the specialist says that it should be right again in a year. I am sorry you never let me know ere now, that you would prefer a birthday card to a cable; for, as I said in the cable,1 your letter did not arrive in time to fulfil your wishes. IRattigan, TerenceSeparate Tables;a1 find it hard to believe that ‘Separate Tables’ clever as it is, could be a great success in the U.S.A. – one ought to know that kind of ENGLish seaside boarding house.2
IFitts, Dudleyhis Lysistrata;a4 forgot that I was going to write this as an ordinary letter at 1/3d. in order to include a F & F house chit about Dudley Fitts Lysistrata. I’ll send it by surface mail – it might please him to see it.
1.Birthday cable not found.
2.Terence Rattigan’s suite of one-act plays, Separate Tables (1956), is set in a boarding house in Eastbourne, on the south coast of England.
1.JaneBussy, Jane Bussy (1906–60), painter; her mother was Dorothy Bussy, née Strachey (1865–1960) – sister of Lytton and James Strachey – wife of the artist Simon Bussy (1870–1954).
3.DudleyFitts, Dudley Fitts (1903–68), American poet, translator and literary critic, won especial praise for his translations of Euripides’ Alcestis (1936) and Sophocles’ Antigone (1939), King Oedipus (with Robert Fitzgerald, 1949), and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1954), Frogs (1955) and Birds (1956). Other work includes Poems 1929–1936 (1937).
1.JamesJoyce, James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist, playwright, poet; author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939).
1.MargaretNason, Margaret ('Meg') Geraldine (Meg) Geraldine Nason (1900–86), proprietor of the Bindery tea rooms, Broadway, Worcestershire, whom TSE and EH befriended on visits to Chipping Campden.
3.LyttonStrachey, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), writer and critic; a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. Works include Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921). See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (1971); The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy (1972).