[22 Paradise Rd., Northampton, Mass.]
This is a small letter to catch the Queen Mary, but I fear is the only letter possibly until next week, asMorleys, thetheir Thanksgiving parties;b2 on Thursday I have to go to the Morleys until Monday – my last weekend visit until after Christmas, at least, I am glad to think. MySociety of the Sacred Mission, Kelham Hall, NottinghamshireTSE's November 1938 weekend at;b6 visit to Kelham last weekend was pleasant and happy; though as you know, I think, visits there are not physically or mentally restful, they are spiritually refreshing. But I grudge the time so long as it means Saturday and Monday morning away from play-writing.
YouDukes, Ashley;d2 shouldMurder in the Cathedral1938 American tour;f6over which EH is consulted;a7 be hearing by this same mail from Ashley Dukes, who wanted your advice about a publicity agent for Boston. The troupe, under the auspices of Gilbert Miller, arrives in Boston in the middle of January, and expects to stop there for three weeks. I hope that you will be able to see them while they are there; but whether you or anybody else knows of a possible local publicity man I am doubtful. I told Ashley that the people among whom an audience might be worked up are the Irish-American catholics: and I have no idea how they are got hold of, or who could do it. Martin will go too, though he may not stay throughout the whole of the tour: butFamily Reunion, Theprojected autumn 1938 production;c2 I am not counting on the new play being produced until the autumn; though it is just possible that it may be ready for the spring – but I am sure that the casting and rehearsing ought not to be done hurriedly.
Your short letter of the 16th arrived very quickly, by the Queen Mary, last night. IHale, Emilyspends Thanksgiving in Boston;j8 shall think of you in Cambridge (I don’t know at what cousins’) over Thanksgiving (I hope that you will be able to let me know in good time where you will be over Christmas). You ask me – rather in a vacuum! – to discourse on following one’s own feelings or convictions against the most trusted advice. But advice is always relatively general – it can never be exactly for the particular you in the particular situation; and being a generalisation, is more apt to [be] valid as to what is generally wrong to do, than as to what is specifically right for you at the moment. Nobody ever can understand quite fully what you are at a particular moment or what the particular situation for you is. And, in the face of advice, our personalities assert themselves more often by arising and saying to us ‘I cannot do that’ (something that we have been advised to do) than by saying ‘I must do this’. But if we don’t ultimately go by our really deep feelings – when we recognise them for such, and distinct from something that we want and therefore try to persuade ourselves is right – what are we to go by? If they are wrong, nevertheless we must find out for ourselves by living them out, that they are wrong, rather than violate them. There are times, certainly, when it is right to act in accordance with advice which one has not succeeded in making one’s own point of view: those are the moments when one’s own deepest feelings tell one nothing or seem to be indifferent, and we must rely on our general valuation of somebody’s else’s judgement: but I am sure that one must not violate oneself …
Well, my dearest, this is perhaps not very useful – but imagine yourself as the person offering advice. If you knew that some person was sure to act on any advice you gave, wouldn’t you in the end refuse to give it? wouldn’t you be horrified by your own power, and say: I must withold [sic] the giving of advice to this person, because it is better that they should act for himself and be a person, even if doing something which I think wrong or injudicious? Nobody is wise enough to have his advice accepted always, and nobody is a real person who never acts against advice! Whose business is it to know you, so much as it is your own?
ISunderland-Taylor, Alice Maud Mary;a3 dinePerkinses, the;g8 again with the Perkins’s on Monday evening, to meet Miss Sunderland-Taylor, and I shall write you that evening or the next day, according to when the fast boat sails.
Thank you for the concert programme – a very mixed one, and new to me.
4.AshleyDukes, Ashley Dukes (1885–1959), theatre manager, playwright, critic, translator, adapter, author; from 1933, owner of the Mercury Theatre, London: see Biographical Register.
6.AliceSunderland-Taylor, Alice Maud Mary Maud Mary Sunderland-Taylor (1872–1942), owner of Stamford House, Chipping Campden, which the Perkinses were renting for the season. (Sunderland-Taylor, a spinster and retired schoolteacher from Stamford, Lincolnshire, liked to spend her summers in Yugoslavia.) Edith Perkins wrote from Aban Court Hotel, Harrington Gardens, South Kensington, London, to invite TSE to meet Sunderland-Taylor at dinner on Mon. 29 Nov.