[Villa PestilliniHale, Emilyreturns to Florence;e6, 32travels, trips and plansEH's 1934–5 year in Europe;b4EH returns to Florence;d1 via della Piazzola, Firenze, Italy]
Thank you for your sweet letter of the 17th. It is dear of you to write so regularly and at such length, and I appreciate it; I am only afraid of having become a burden to you; I should hate to think that you wrote except because you wanted to, or when it was inconvenient and a fatigue. I shan’t expect to hear so frequently now that you are moving about, mind; it is difficult to write under such conditions, and even if the change makes matters easier, as I pray it will, travel itself is tiring. ButTime & TideEH objects to TSE's tone in;a6 first of all, please believe that I like you to write frankly and critically. I need not always agree humbly! for instance, IMilne, Alan Alexander ('A. A.')controversy with TSE over pacifism;a1 can’t see that I handled Mr. Milne in at all a personal manner, in fact (though I have never met him) I rather liked the man, and took especial pains to be more polite to him than he was to me – or so I thought. Perhaps you will enlighten me on that point. But your comment on my Rebecca letter responded to the voice of my own taste: the last paragraph was a bad blemish. But I quite agree with you on the general principle (I hope by the way that you will consider my next Milne letter, due tomorrow, as scrupulously impersonal).1 To continue, I feel flattered (with or without reason, it doesn’t matter) to have you go for me as boldly as you please. It would be bad enough to be considered infallible, and almost worse to be considered so touchy that I couldn’t accept criticism – because that would be such an insuperable bar to intimacy. So go on!
IItalyRome;b3'centre of the world';a2 will write to the china shop, as you suggest, for the missing pieces have never come. And I am happy to have the book marker; it must be a fine painting. OfChristianityRome;d2;a2 course you haven’t exhausted Rome, no one could in the time; but to have got the feel of it is the main thing, the tremendous sense of the Roman Church as the most solid thing in the world – and very much needed in a world like this. As solid in its contemporary encyclicals as in its foundations in time.
OnTrouncer, Margaretintroduced to TSE by EH;a1 Saturday a Mrs. Trouncer (?) [sic] is coming to see me, on the strength of an introduction from you.2 IItalyRome;b3TSE's month in;a4 never went to Frascati3 – my month in Rome was an intensely unhappy period – I only remember the line De l’ancien Frascati vestale enamourée which is a lovely line, whatever it means.4 I like sightseeing in very small doses, and to let anything seen sink in before obscuring it with anything else; elderly people are sometimes indefatigable, my mother was. PerhapsFrancethe Riviera;b8TSE's guide to;a1 they are aware that time is short. I wonder when and where you go on the Riviera. The only point of going to the Riviera is to bask quietly and not try to see anything – for there is nothing to see. The country behind in the hills is lovely in a quiet way; the Riviera proper is ugly, sordid, and unreal. The natives are an unpleasant mongrel French mixed with Italian, Monegasque, Spanish and Saracen, not improved by making their living out of the odious kind of English and American people who go there. The climate is treacherous. NiceAmericaCalifornia;d3Cannes reminiscent of;b8 is a sink of influenza to be avoided; Cannes is very like Southern California. Bordighera Mentone and the Italian side are cheaper and filled with the kind of English people who live in South Kensington; there is usually an Anglican church of a very low-church kind. The priest of the English Church in Florence is a Father Varty who used to be curate here; he did not impress me very favourably. Hyères I believe is not bad in any way; Grasse and a few places a little back are well spoken of. Scent ought to be cheap. I read that the French exchange is moving against the dollar and the pound, I don’t know why.
To judge from one or two of the hats I saw this afternoon, the new styles should not suit you or anybody else. IHuxleys, thehost sherry party without Aldous;a5 went to a sherry party at the Huxleys in the Albany. Aldous did not appear: Maria says he has been doing too much, which I quite expected; he is sociable and popular; so he has had a bad attack of insomnia, and has retired from society. There were the people there whom one would expect, including Robert Nichols who is off to Finland (see my last letter). INichols, Robertapologises needlessly;a2 didn’t recognise him at first, and he said he hoped I didn’t mind the way he had treated me in ‘Fisbo’. I pulled myself together, and remembered that he had sent me a very long and very dull looking satirical poem by that name, which appeared to be all about Osbert Sitwell, and I hadn’t read it: so I said to be on the safe side that I didn’t mind a bit, and I thought that what he said about me was quite incidental to his main purpose. I think that this reply did its duty.5 AlsoMorrell, Julian;a2 Julian Morrell and her husband (a nice young man named Victor Goodman)6 were there, and they seemed not to know anybody, so I talked to them, with the result that Julian has invited herself and husband to tea with me here at Grenville Place on Saturday, which is a nuisance, but I like them. But I quite agree with you that a woman must be FIRM about hats nowadays, and it is better to wear one not in style than to wear a style that does not suit you; and the style of face that some modern hats are made to suit is not the style that I like – too much forehead and little pinched noses etc. I don’t pretend to be a judge of dress – I go out so very little myself – but I think I might Develop taste if you were in London more, as that would give me a reason for taking an interest in female dress: but I should like to keep you Up to the Mark. Now while I approve of Campden well enough as a place in the country, I should like it to be possible for you to come up to town from time to time during the season, without its being too costly for you – and the country can be Hateful if you can’t get away from it – NOT ONLY for selfish reasons, butHale, Emilyfamily;w4EH encouraged to keep younger company;a4 because of theatre and ballet and occasionally to mix with people of your own age. Can this be possible? One must be as happy as one can, in the circumstances.
I hope the photographs arrived – though they may give you an unpleasant shock: being startling realistic.
1.To the editor, Time & Tide 16: 8 (23 Feb. 1935), 272: Letters 7, 536.
2.MargaretTrouncer, Margaret Trouncer (1903–82), author of A Courtesan of Paradise: The Romantic Story of Louise de la Vallière, Mistress of Louis XIV (F&F, 1936). See http://archive.thetablet.co.uk/article/18th-december-1982/23/obituary-margaret-trouncer
3.Frascati: city and commune in the Metropolitan City of Rome.
4.From Baudelaire’s ‘Les Petites Vielles’, a line that TSE cited in ‘Baudelaire in Our Time’ (CProse 3, 136). ‘Of the old enamoured vestal Frascati’.
5.Robert Nichols’s Fisbo, or The Looking-Glass Loaned: A Satiric Poems in Five Books (1934) – a knowing and humorous but heavy-going account of the career of a modern poet running to 164 pages – mentions TSE only in passing:
Leave moralising to professionals –
His gloomy Dinginess of grimy Paul’s,
Middleton Murry and that other dreary un
Empties his ash-can in the dry Criterion.—(p. 12)
– an allusion qualified in the ‘Textual Notes’ (p. 174):
Muse, I can’t let this pass and make no sign.
I respect your opinion but it isn’t mine.
I fear we must agree to disagree.
I have a great regard for T.S.E.:
An adroit super-subtle melodist,
A scholar and an uncommon humourist,
Defeatist, of course – but true to his defeat –
The Charlie Chaplin of a Bloomsbury Street,
The last Romantic – though he doesn’t know it –
A true-blue Bostoner and a true-born poet.
6.Julian Morrell was married to Victor Goodman (1899–1967), who had served in WW1 in the Coldstream Guards (MC, 1919). From 1920 Goodman worked in the House of Lords, becoming Judicial Taxing Officer from 1934; Clerk of the Parliaments, 1959–63. OBE, 1946; KCB, 1959. The marriage was to be dissolved in 1946.
4.JulianMorrell, Julian Morrell (1906–89) married Victor Goodman, 1928–46; she subsequently married Igor Vinogradoff (1901–87), son of Sir Paul Vinogradoff (1854–1925), Professor of Roman Law at Oxford.
1.RobertNichols, Robert Nichols (1893–1944), writer; war poet; author of Wings Over Europe (play, 1928).
2.MargaretTrouncer, Margaret Trouncer (1903–82), author of A Courtesan of Paradise: The Romantic Story of Louise de la Vallière, Mistress of Louis XIV (F&F, 1936). See http://archive.thetablet.co.uk/article/18th-december-1982/23/obituary-margaret-trouncer