I wish you could see this place at present. The birch wood is a black bristly mass with here and there a last red leaf. The lake is cold, cold lead colour. The new moon comes out over the fir trees at the top and a glorious wail of wind comes down from them. I certainly like my garden better at winter than any other time.
I hope I shall soon have a letter from you. This, by the bye, is not a letter, but a note of acknowledgement. And I hope you will not think me any less grateful for your criticisms because of what I have said. I do appreciate your pains most deeply.
Do you ever take a run down to your cottage in winter. It would be ‘rather lovely’.
Yours
Jack
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
The Kilns
Dec 12th 1932
My dear W–
A thousand welcomes to Havre (of hated memory.) We have had so many alarms about you that I shall hardly believe it till I see you with my own eyes. But on that score, and on all your last six month’s adventures there is so much to be said that it is absurd to begin. You would be amused to hear the various hypotheses that were entertained during your long summer silence—that you had been captured by bandits—were in jail—had gone mad—had married—had married a Chinese woman. My own view of course was ‘Indeed he’s such a fellow etc,’ but I found it hard to maintain this against the riot of rival theories.
I think you will find us all pretty ship shape here. The only two things to complain of are, the presence of Vera,87 and the threatened arrival of Lings to pay me a visit—both, of course, arranged before we had any hopes of seeing you this year: indeed, when we were beginning to wonder if we should see you at all or not. However, Lings is not going to be allowed to interfere with any jaunt of yours and mine, having made himself such a friend of the family that I can be away even while he is here. (He shows a tendency to play duets with Maureen which Minto thinks ought to be encouraged.) But how differently all such interruptions will henceforth appear to you—like church going to the Superannuated man—no longer hewing great cantels out of tiny leaves, but punctuating a leisure sine die. It all seems too good to be true! I can hardly believe that when you take your shoes off a week or so hence, please God, you will be able to say ‘This will do for me—for life.’
I have not had any opportunity to reply till now to your questions about money. We shall do very well on what your percentage comes to: the only request I have to make on the bursarial side is that you must wash less (I mean your clothes, not your person)—your present standard of shifting being the one item in which you live beyond our scale. Minto says I ought not to mention this, but I expect you would prefer to know. (Of course if you like to wash any number of clothes yourself, no one will object!)
I have just planted a holly tree—the one we got last season being, despite our order, a bush, not a tree. I have also successfully resisted an attempt made by old Jacks to abbotsford88 us (I owe this delightful verb to you) into going shares with him in buying, if you please, the whole of Phillips’ (deceased—did you hear?) property, on the ground that gypsies wd. otherwise buy it. A ramp, I think.
Talking of abbotsfording I am now reading Lockhart through, and am just at the Shetland and Orkney diary:89 which you will constantly have been reminded of if you have read The Pirate.90 It is a capital book.
I am examining at the moment, but lightly as you can see from the fact that I manage about an hour’s Lockhart per diem. I hope to finish my papers on the 21st: but the Award is not till the day after Boxing Day, so that it looks like Jan. 1st for our walk, ‘from which I promise myself more satisfaction, perhaps, than is possible.’ The date will be a good omen. I am so stiff from carrying that infernal tree up that I hardly know what to do with myself.
The only thing that can really dash your home coming will be the cold: you will have to ‘cokker’ yourself like anything for the first few weeks, unless this frost breaks. Well—and now to Chaucer’s papers. But even they can hardly depress me at such a moment as this
Yours
Jack.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns
17 December 1932]
My dear Arthur,
You really must forgive me for being a slack correspondent in term time. I think we have talked of this before! However, I was much to blame for not at least letting you have a line about W. who, thank God, turned out to be well though he had been ill, and had had a worreying summer in various ways. He had also warned us, he said, (wh. was quite true, though we all forgot it) that he might not keep up his regular correspondence during the hot weather. We were all greatly relieved.
I am sorry to hear about the flu’—one of the few ailments of which I can speak with as large an experience as your own. We have both talked of it and agreed often enough about its pleasures and pains. I hope you are quite set up by now. It was, in any case, almost worth having for its throwing you back on the old favourites. I will make a point of telling Foord-Kelsie—how pleased he will be. I wish I had your early associations with Pickwick:91 and yet I often feel as if I had. So many scenes come to me with the feel of a long since familiar atmosphere returning after absence—I suppose because even without having read it as a boy one has drunk in so much of the Dickensy world indirectly through quotation and talk and other orders. Certainly what I enjoy is not the jokes simply as jokes—indeed the earlier and more farcical parts like the military review and Mrs Leo Hunter’s party are rather unpleasant to me—but something festive and friendly about D’s whole world. A great deal of it (in a way how different from Macdonald’s!) the charm of goodness—the goodness of Pickwick himself, and Wardle, and both Wellers.
Thanks for your criticisms on P.R. The detailed criticisms (the ‘passages where one word less wd. make all the difference’) are what I should like best and could profit by most. Perhaps when you sent the MS back (there is no special hurry) you wd. mark on the blank opposite pages any bits that you think specially in need of improvement and add a note or two in pencil—but don’t let it be a bother to you. As to your major criticisms
1. Quotations. I hadn’t realised that they were so numerous as you apparently found them. Mr Sensible, as you rightly saw, is in a separate position: the shower of quotations is part of the character and it wd. be a waste of time to translate them, since the dialogue (I hope) makes it clear that his quotations were always silly and he always missed the point of the authors he quoted. The other ones maybe too numerous, and perhaps can be reduced & translated. But not beyond a certain point: for one of the contentions of the book is that the decay of our old classical learning is a contributary cause of atheism (see the chapter on Ignorantia). The quotations at the beginnings of the Books are of course never looked at at all by most readers, so I don’t think they matter much.
2. Simplicity. I expect your dissatisfaction on this score points to some real, perhaps v. deep seated, fault: but I am sure it cannot be remedied—least of all in a book of controversy. Also there may be some real difference of conception between you and me. You remember we discussed last summer how much more sympathy you had than I with the Puritan simplicity. I doubt if I interpret Our Lord’s words92 quite in the same way as you. I think they mean that the spirit of man must become