[No surviving envelope]
Letter 47
YourHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3varied with airgraph;h7 letter of July 13 came last week, and this week the delightful surprise Airgraph: a surprise also because I had supposed that this service only applied to England and the Middle East – IBritish Council;a3 have used it to soldiers and to young friends working for the British Council in places like Cairo and Ankara. But I remember that it was a long time before I was aware of Air Mail at all. Your Airgraph bore no date, unless it had been blacked out; I presume it was some time during this month!
I did not write last weekend, as I was in another paroxysm before speaking in public. TheBooks Across the SeaAGM;a4 affair, to be sure, was not what one would call terrifying: the Annual General Meeting of the members of ‘Books Across the Sea’; my Presidential Address only had to occupy twenty minutes, but I was very much in the dark as to what sort of audience it would be – and still am. There were only about forty or fifty people, enough to sit round a long table and around the sides of the room; mostly Poor Souls, I should say, including one person I knew, and that was a poor demented woman who writes to me constantly and wants me to take over a poetry magazine (a very bad one) which she owns. Whether my address was what they wanted or not, I cannot say, and doubt whether they could. TheWarde, Beatrice (née Becker);a2 B.A.T.S. is not quite such a picayune affair as you would imagine from this; itStreet, Alicia;a3 is run by several energetic and I think able American women, and they have a corresponding organisation in New York. At any rate, it is a demonstration of the transatlantic cordiality, and might in time become something very useful.
Iwritingand public-speaking;d8 have, in the past, tried preparing my speech well in advance; and I have also tried leaving it to the last moment (I mean the day before). Neither way works very well; in the first case I go on worrying about improving it, and in the second case I can’t keep my mind off it. Even in a formal lecture, when I have everything written out, there is similar trouble. If I write it too far ahead, I always find something, when I come to read it, about which I have changed my mind; if I try to leave just enough time, I find that I could have made it better if I had started sooner.
Anyway, I have recovered from that, and I don’t have to speak again for some weeks: myMostyn Red Cross Clubsome of whom visit him;a3 chief apprehension at the moment (of that sort) is about the six American soldiers who are coming to spend Tuesday evening with me to talk about Poetry. But I can’t do anything about that in advance. The worst of that is that I am sure that each one of them, on leaving, will press a sheaf of manuscript poems into my hand. This criticising young people’s poems (and especially trying to be both honest and gentle) is a great burden. And one has to be more generous to soldiers than to others.
I think I did get the letter from Lyndborough, because I think I said in replying that I had never heard of Lyndborough. If it wasn’t Lyndborough it was some other place. In that case, you don’t seem to have had my reply! I shan’t be sure about this until I go through your recent letters; and I have spent a couple of hours to-day, simply going through and destroying other people’s letters, so as to have a second deed box to put yours in as I sort them and destroy and retain. OneHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3again, EH's to do with as she pleases;h8 sentence in your letter of July 13 suggests that perhaps you think that I wanted you to keep my letters for the sake of posterity. Perhaps you are referring only to your own, but the sentence seems to embrace both sides of the correspondence: if so, Madam, may I say firmly that my letters have been and will continue to be written for you alone; that, for my purposes, it is quite sufficient that a selection of your letters should be preserved. I should certainly like to think that you cared enough for them to preserve some of them during your lifetime, but I shall not regret it if you have them destroyed at your death; but that I consider the disposal, destruction or preservation, and destination, of these letters entirely your business and not mine. All I asked, I think, was a certain privacy for a certain number of years, on account of references to other people, relatives and friends. So.
IHale, Emilyleaves TSE portrait in event of predeceasing him;p6 should, of course, love to have your portrait (in the event of my surviving you) but in that case I should like to be told who is to have it after my own death. TheHale, Emilybirthdays, presents and love-tokens;w2EH gives TSE a signet ring;c4 signet ring has not been off my finger since the summer of 1940: that being the last time I had any bathing; and bathing being the one occasion on which I put it off, as the cold water makes my fingers shrink and I am afraid of the ring slipping off.
IEnglandChipping Campden, Gloucestershire;e1treasured in TSE's memory;b2 am dreadfully distressed about Stamford House. If I had known, I might have tried to get down to the auction and bought something for each of us; but in these times when so little that is new can be bought, the second hand dealers swarm like harpies to any auction, and prices might have been fantastic. It is very sad to think of the desolation of the house and garden. Those undoubtedly were the happiest days I have ever had. The house will change hands again, I feel sure: the Fish Inn will eventually sell it – at a huge profit. I feel dreadfully sad over it.
I am glad that you are well; your description of the Anchorage sounds very pleasant. I shall write again this weekend, my Dear: no speech.
JohnHayward, Johnprotector of TSE's literary remains;l6 Hayward is only in charge of my literary remains, which does not include letters to me from other people. MyBodleian Library, Oxfordintended repository for EH's letters;a1 letters to you would not come into his province, either, unless somebody got hold of them and wanted to publish them. His business (as he understands) is to prevent my unpublished works from being published. YourHale, Emilycorrespondence with TSE;w3still intended for Bodleian;h9 letters would go in a box, not to be opened, to the Bodleian.
11.JohnHayward, John Davy Hayward (1905–65), editor and critic: see Biographical Register.
BeatriceWarde, Beatrice (née Becker) Warde, née Becker (1900–69), influential American scholar of typography; author; proponent of clarity in graphic design; publicity manager for the Monotype Corporation and editor of The Monotype Recorder and the Monotype Newsletter; associate of Eric Gill. Her works include an acclaimed essay on typography, ‘The Crystal Goblet’, which started out as a speech to the British Typographers’ Guild and has been widely reprinted. Founder and Vice-President of the cultural movement ‘Books Across the Sea’, which worked to secure a regular interchange of books between the USA and the UK during the wartime ban on the import and export of non-essential goods. TSE was presently to become chair of the formal organisation, which by 1944 had swopped up to 4,000 volumes between the two countries. See Warde, ‘Books Across the Sea: Ambassadors of good will’, The Times, 2 Jan. 1942, 5.