[22 Paradise Rd22 Paradise Road, Northampton, MassachusettsEH moves to;a1., NorthamptonAmericaNorthampton, Massachusetts;g3EH moves house within;a8, Mass.]
It was a happy surprise to find your dear letter to me when I got back to Emperor’s Gate, with my bag, at about ten on Sunday morning; and to see the note to be opened on the 26th; and tonight to get your letter from Cherbourg (with a German stamp and Columbus postmark[)]. I am relieved to know that you have your cabin to yourself, and from what you say of the conditions, I shall be still more relieved to know that you have arrived in New York – five more days – and hope that you will not again descend lower than Tourist, unless on a really up to date boat. Ianti-Semitism;b9 hope that the diet will not upset you, or the company – which at the worst is not, I suppose, likely to be Jewish.
I have not quite adjusted myself to life without you in the same country. IFaber, Enid Eleanorand sons at zoo;a7 got through in a kind of daze – an afternoon with Enid and the two boys at the Zoo, where we had tea (showers off and on) and then sailing on the lake (where we got rather wet) – the boys in a last-day-of-the-holidays state of mind, between depression and anxiety to get all they could out of the last free day, andSt. Stephen's Church, Gloucester Roadchurchwarding at;a5 then rushed back and changed my clothes, in to church just after the service in time to deal with the money, andHayward, John;h1 then supper with John Hayward – so that I did not get to bed as early as one should having risen at six – so yesterday was also a hazy numb day – to-day (after beginning the day by a visit to the dentist) more normal perhaps. DukesDukes, Ashleyplans for Murder;c9 to lunch: MurderMurder in the Cathedral1938 American tour;f6pre-tour dates in Golders Green, then Liverpool;a5 is to open again at Golders Green next Monday! then to Liverpool – he is sure that he will have one company working in the provinces andMurder in the Cathedral1938 American tour;f6opening in Boston in January;a6 another ready to go to Boston about January 15th – for what theatrical assurances are worth. He quite agrees with your suggestion about the Theatre Arts Monthly (of which he is the English editor) and I am to send him my Rochester paper. It appears that the monthly is run by the Dartington Hall people,1 and he wants to drive me down there to see them, or rather the place as a remarkable example of the modern ‘irreligious community’. I have bought also this morning a winter overcoat, andShakespear, Olivia;a9 thisPound, Dorothy ShakespearTSE bids farewell to;a7 evening after I post this I must pay a farewell call upon Dorothy Pound and her mother Mrs. Shakespear.
Thetravels, trips and plansEH's 1937 summer in England;c7moment of parting;b4 parting is so much like an operation in which a limb is removed – it takes one some time to come to after the anaesthetic – and the way I felt on Sunday morning is very much like being under an anaesthetic – one is not really feeling acutely then, because the beneficent instinct of self-preservation prevents that – and gradually one comes to into a strange world in which one has gradually to get used to doing without one limb which was there before. I still feel rather queer. Yet, dear, it is a happiness to know that this summer has brought a new and further stage of nearness to you, and that it is something which I shall not be able to understand and appraise until I see the year from a rather further perspective. It seems increasingly natural to have you here, and increasingly strange that you should be at such a distance. But it was a good summer! My love.
I shall send a draft on Northampton (or Boston) for your birthday present – and you may change your mind if you like, about what you want.
My love, I shall write more regularly this winter – and until we meet in the summer again –
1.The Dartington Hall ‘experiment’ was set up by the American Dorothy Payne Elmhirst (1887–1968) – wealthy daughter and sole heir of William Collins Whitney, financier, millionaire, and patron of the arts – and her English husband Leonard Elmhirst, son of a clergyman, with a view to furthering causes in education, research, rural regeneration and the arts. (Married in 1925, they forthwith purchased and developed the Dartington Hall estate.)
4.AshleyDukes, Ashley Dukes (1885–1959), theatre manager, playwright, critic, translator, adapter, author; from 1933, owner of the Mercury Theatre, London: see Biographical Register.
1.TSE was mistaken here. EnidFaber, Enid Eleanor Eleanor Faber (1901–95) was the daughter of Sir Henry Erle Richards (1861–1922), Fellow of All Souls College and Chichele Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Oxford University, and Mary Isabel Butler (1868–1945).
11.JohnHayward, John Davy Hayward (1905–65), editor and critic: see Biographical Register.
4.DorothyPound, Dorothy Shakespear Shakespear Pound (1886–1973), artist and book illustrator, married Ezra Pound (whom she met in 1908) in 1914: see Biographical Register.
6.OliviaShakespear, Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938), novelist and playwright; mother of Dorothy Pound, made an unhappy marriage in 1885 with Henry Hope Shakespear (1849–1923), a solicitor. She published novels including Love on a Mortal Lease (1894) and The Devotees (1904). Through a cousin, the poet Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), she arranged a meeting with W. B. Yeats, which resulted in a brief affair and a lifetime’s friendship. Yeats wrote at least two poems for her, and she was the ‘Diana Vernon’ of his Memoirs (ed. Denis Donoghue, 1972). See Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–1914, ed. Omar S. Pound and A. Walton Litz (1984), 356–7.