[No surviving envelope]
NowCriterion, TheJanuary 1935;c7TSE ordering;a1 the day is over, and I have just time between making out the order for the December Criterion andHinks, Roger;a3 dining with the Hinks to write you a letter. May I be so daring as to say, not only that you will not be surprised, but that you will be expecting it? If you will reflect upon that question, you will realise its full presumptiousness [sic]. Well, my darling, it is a very long time since I have written you a letter – either I have been seeing you or I have been prevented from seeing you by engagements which prevented me from writing; and now that I am writing again, it seems more like a fresh beginning, than beginning where I left off. ThoughHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9EH 'kisses' TSE;d9 it seems a long time since I have written, it seems only a very short time since I was able to keep the number of times I had kissed you, chalked up on a slate in my mind, or rather as a small set of tastefully framed pictures on my mental wall. And yet it isn’t very many, after all. I feel a queer shyness now, in writing to you, a shyness which merely marks a change from one phase to another, and will pass off. I have so long had such a very definite picture of the place I occupied in your affections, that I find it difficult to change it for another. I may have had a few premonitions: therePerkins, Edith (EH's aunt)dislikes Jeanette McPherrin;b8 was not only the moment when you said that the day before you had been so distressed (about your aunt and Jeanie) that you had thought of coming up to town to talk to me about it; but another moment on the station platform at Gloucester Road, when you said that perhaps we should become more and more alike. But these moments passed. LastHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2irrespective of physical beauty;d6 evening, when you said that you didn’t care whether anyone thought you beautiful but myself, and I said that I didn’t care, for myself, whether you were beautiful or not (though I wouldn’t have said it unless I knew that you knew that I knew how beautiful you are), that is something that remains, and the others come back. It is very strange, now, to be writing to you. Because I have always felt, in writing to you, simply that I was satisfying my own need to write to you; and it makes everything quite different to feel that you have a need for me to write to you. Oh dear, indeed, even in writing that, I feel an impulse to begin to make excuses and say, Excuse me for having this fancy, you don’t need to tell me that I am wrong and that I am being presumptuous etc. But I am NOT saying all that, I am going to take the full risk of the wound to my vanity of the reply that I might get – or rather the absence of reply that I might get. If I am not wrong, then I have got to practise in the new way. I wonder how much my letters will change. Will I leave out all the gossip and information of day to day small events and personalities that I have always provided, I think, as a way to compel you to share my life with me when apart: so that I would, but for time and being boring, have even put in every event or every day from the alarum clock to turning out the light? IHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9as consubstantial union;e3 suppose that I shall come back to these things, in a new way; but at the moment I don’t feel like talking about anything in the least outside of ourselves or self. IMilton, Ernest;a1 amMurdocks, the;a4 not going to make any comments on Ernest Milton,1 or the Murdocks, though I should if I was with you. I only wish for you a happy and peaceful and inwardly serene weekend, and I hope the lump on your heel, the size of a humming bird’s egg, will decrease, and I long to see you again on Tuesday. But what a wretched week, as I shall hardly see you again after that until Sunday (concert). And then one more week, and then a few sad days, and then I shall have to discipline myself to the winter. But now, until Tuesday.
1.ErnestMilton, Ernest Milton (1890–1974), American-born British actor; member of Old Vic company.
4.RogerHinks, Roger Hinks (1903–63), Assistant Keeper, 1926–39, in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, from which he resigned in consequence of a scandal caused by his arrangements for deep-cleaning the Elgin Marbles. He later worked at the Warburg Institute, at the British Legation in Stockholm (where he met TSE in 1942) and for the British Council (Rome, The Netherlands, Greece, Paris). His writings include Carolingian Art (1935) and Caravaggio: His Life – His Legend – His Works (1953). See also ‘Roger Hinks’, Burlington Magazine 105: 4738 (Sept. 1964), 423–34; and The Gymnasium of the Mind: The Journals of Roger Hinks, 1933–1963, ed. John Goldsmith (1984).
1.ErnestMilton, Ernest Milton (1890–1974), American-born British actor; member of Old Vic company.