[No surviving envelope]
This is a line to thank you for your reply to my cable (whenever I am anxious I shall send you reply-paid wires). IHale, Emilyas teacher;w1post at St. Catherine's rejected;c1 am now disappointed that you are not going; IHale, Emilyas director ('producer');v9possibly temporarily at St. Catherine's, Va.;a5 suppose the hitch came over the question of their paying your fare, but if they baulked at that, they are either very niggardly or very poor indeed, because I know they would have been getting much the best of the bargain in having you there to produce two plays. Well, I hope something better will turn up, and perhaps Penelope’s suggestion will be useful in the interim. I await news impatiently. I feel that you are wasted in Boston! If my letter to Richmond never reaches you, don’t regret it, it wasn’t a very important one; but I did make it clear on the envelope that if you were not there it was to be forwarded to Brimmer Street.
TheMurder in the Cathedralabortive 1936 New York transfer;e1its usurper founders;a4 secondMurder in the Cathedralunsolicited 1936 New York production;e2seemingly withdrawn;a3 part of your cable is mysterious: MURDER WITH BRAWN I interpret as ‘Murder Withdrawn’, but for what reason I am curious to know. Perhaps Ashley Dukes, when I see him tomorrow night, will be able to explain.1
MyHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3more delightful since EH's reciprocation;g5 Love, my Love, you cannot know how lovely it is for me to feel, whenever I write to you, that it is my duty to write to you – to feel that what I most want to do is also something that I ought to do – to think, still rather shyly, that it is almost as great a joy to you to get an envelope from me, as it is to me to get one from you. Every night, if I am out, I climb the stairs eagerly to peep to see if there is a letter on my table; every night, if I am in, I keep peeping out into my little entry to see if a letter has been laid there while I have been typing and haven’t heard. So many years it seems that I have been writing to you, because I wanted to write and had to write, knowing that it meant little to you to receive the letter, compared to what it meant to write it – that you must let me delight in the feeling that it means as much to you to get a letter from me, as it does to me to send it, and that it means as much to you to post a letter to me, as it does to me to get it. I am so very proud to feel, that you depend upon me at all. But you have got to learn to like to have me kissing your feet!
LetterPerkins, Edith (EH's aunt);c2 from Mrs. Perkins just received
1.AshleyDukes, Ashleyexplains miscarriage of 1936 American production;b3n DukesMurder in the Cathedralabortive 1936 New York transfer;e1quashed by Federal Theatre production;a3n was to recall, ‘At some time in the near future we had hoped to transfer Murder in the Cathedral to America with the English company, playing it from coast to coast without too much consideration of Broadway; but this plan miscarried because a New York production by WPA (Federal Theatre Project) had been authorized just before our success in London with the play. I made an American visit early in 1936 without being able to influence this decision. The WPA production was already well advanced, it could not be stopped except by a legal pressure we were unwilling to use against such an enterprise, and it eventually succeeded on its own merits’ (The Scene is Changed [1942], 207).
4.AshleyDukes, Ashley Dukes (1885–1959), theatre manager, playwright, critic, translator, adapter, author; from 1933, owner of the Mercury Theatre, London: see Biographical Register.