Thank heaven, the Life is practically finished with. I’m thankful to get rid of it. It has led me into reading a lot of scientific and metaphysical tripe which is of no use to anybody, and least of all to a creative writer (a fact I have taken delight in rubbing in, in the course of the work!) And the further you go with it, the worse it gets. Lucretius could make great poetry out of science, and Bacon got some good work in on it — and even Tennyson could screw some fine lines out of an unsound theory of evolution and perfectibility and all the rest of it. But now, oh, heavens! after the bio-chemist, the mathematician. What can you make out of the action of the glands of internal secretion upon metabolism, or Pi and the square root of minus one? Despair and a kind of gloomy grubbiness, that’s all. I’d rather have a Miltonian theology to make poetry of than all this business of liver and gonads and the velocity of light. Perry the parson gets out of it by pretending that the Catholic Church knew all about it from the beginning, and that inaccurate theological metaphors can be interpreted as pseudo-scientific formulae, which is a lie. The origin of life is our great stamping-ground for discussion. You can’t make life synthetically in a laboratory — therefore he deduces that it came by divine interference! Rather an assumption! But, after all, he is little worse than the man of science. ‘In some way or other, life came,’ they say. ‘Sometime, somehow, we may learn how to make it.’ But even if one could learn to make it, that doesn’t account for its having arrived spontaneously in the first place. The biologist can push it back to the original protist, and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch the real question of why or how the thing began at all. The astronomer goes back untold millions of years and ends in gas and emptiness, and then the mathematician sweeps the whole cosmos into unreality and leaves one with mind as the only thing of which we have any immediate apprehension. Cogito, ergo sum, ergo omnia esse videntur. All this bother, and we are no further than Descartes. Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn’t matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.
I wish I had Lathom’s robust contempt for all this kind of thing. His attitude is that bio-chemistry cannot affect his life or his art, so let them get on with it. I am tossed about with every wind of doctrine, and if I’m not damn careful I shall end by writing a Point Counterpoint, without the wit. You can’t really make a novel hold together if you don’t believe in causation.
Said a rising young author, ‘What, what?If I think that causation is not,No word of my textWill bear on the nextAnd what will become of the plot?’
Perhaps this accounts for my never having been able to produce a book with a plot — except, of course, the one Merritt wants to see me about. And that was a sort of freak book.
Well, never mind. Only a fortnight now and I shall be seeing you. Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about).Your ever faithful Jack
23. The Same to the Same
4.12.28
Bungie Dearest,
Just a line to say that the unexpected has happened! Merritt is all over the book!!! Thinks it’s the biggest thing that ever happened, and has offered me a first-class contract (£100 advance, 10 %, to 500, 15 % to 1,000 and 20 % thereafter, with a firm offer for the next two beginning at top previous rate), on condition he can get it into print instanter to publish before the end of Jan. The man’s as mad as a hatter!
I nearly sent round to get him certified, but instead found myself accepting the terms. When you consider the frightful flop Deadlock was, you realise that the thing is sheer stark raving madness, but who cares?
Damn it, I always believed there was something in the book, but I thought I was a fool to think so. But how can he ever imagine that it will sell!. . But that’s his funeral.
He says it must have a new title. Try and think of something that will look well on a jacket, there’s an ingenious cherub. It’s fearfully urgent, because he’s got to get his travellers out with it at the beginning of next month.
Lathom’s portrait of Miss Milsom is the wickedest piece of satire you ever saw. She, fortunately, does not see it at all. In fact, she lugged up the parson to have a look at it yesterday. Perry, though a parson, is no fool. He looked grave, said that it was a striking picture, and added that Mr Lathom had a great gift which should be put to great uses. Lathom grinned, and Miss Milsom began to babble about the Academy and Mrs Harrison’s portrait, at which Perry looked graver still. I suppose he thinks that idiots should be charitably protected from themselves. Lathom is in wild spirits and is working like something inspired. O si sic omnes, meaning me!
Jim reports that he is toiling away like stink and really sticking to it. I hope so. He will be at home when term ends, so you will meet the white-headed boy of the family. I trust you will be able to bear with us all. He is inflicting on us a friend of his who went down from Caius this year — man called Leader — one of those infernally high-spirited youths who bounce all over the shop like Airedale puppies — he rouses all my worst instincts, but is perfectly harmless. He is now in London, at St Anthony’s College of Medicine, and I suppose one of these days he will muddle through his hospital work and be turned out as a genial G.P. — ‘Dr Leader is such a nice, cheerful man; he makes you feel better the minute he comes into the room.’ I hate cheerful people. Still, he and Jimmy will amuse one another, and we shall have a chance to get off on our own a bit.
Bless you, Bungie! I am counting the days till we meet.Your own Jack
24. George Harrison to Paul Harrison
15, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 20th December, 1928
My dear boy,
A line at Christmas-time to send our best love, and to say that all our thoughts are with you. Next Christmas, if all goes well, we shall have you back, and things will seem more like themselves. Here, of course, a sad shadow is cast on our festivities by the illness of the King. There are distressing rumours, but I feel a great confidence that he will pull through in the end.
In spite of this feeling of depression and anxiety, we have decided to make a little jaunt over to Paris. Margaret has seemed rather restless lately, and I think this small excitement will do her good. I am such a quiet sort of old fellow, that I fear she finds her life a trifle dull at times. A visit to the ‘gay city’ will set her up again, and it will be beneficial to me, too, to be shaken out of my rut. We shall be staying at the Hotel Victoria-Palace in the Rue —; it is a pleasant, respectable place, and not dear, as Paris hotels go. We shall do a theatre or two and perhaps go up to Montmartre to see the ‘night-life’ one hears so much about. Young Lathom says he may be running over to Paris for a few days, and, if so, will look us up and show us round the town. It is kind and attentive of him, and we shall appreciate having an up-to-date cicerone, for my own memories of Paris are very antiquated, and I expect everything is very much changed.
I was very glad to hear that your work was progressing so well and that your action in the matter of the man you dismissed was approved of. Leniency in such a case is always a mistake, as I have found out from bitter experience.
We are doing better over here than we had really any right to expect under the present depressed conditions. I think we shall secure the contract for the Middleshire High-Power Station. If so, that will mean a big job, which will probably take me away from London in the spring.
I am really wondering whether, before this happens, I ought not to take some steps about replacing Miss Milsom by somebody who would be a more suitable companion for Margaret. Miss Milsom has always seemed to me a very tiresome woman, and lately she has been getting altogether above herself. She consults these psycho-analytical quacks, who encourage her to attach an absurd importance to her whims and feelings, and to talk openly at the dinner-table about things which, in my (doubtless old-fashioned) opinion, ought only to be mentioned to doctors. Besides, she is very lazy and untidy, and, instead of putting her mind to the housework, she litters the place with wool and bits of paper which she calls ‘art materials’ and she borrows my paints and forgets to return them. There is no harm, of course, in her doing needlework and making calendars, if it does not interfere with her duties, but she has frequently been very impertinent when I have had occasion to speak about the unsatisfactory cooking. Lathom has been painting a picture of her — a very clever thing, certainly, but it seems to have turned her head completely. However, Margaret wishes to be kind to the woman, and says, truly, that she would find it hard to get another post, so perhaps it will be better to put up with her a little longer and see if the situation improves. She is certainly most loyal and devoted to Margaret, and that outweighs a great many drawbacks.
Well, I must not worry you with these small domestic matters. I hope that you will be enjoying a very happy Christmas in your exile, and that our little offerings have arrived quite safely. By the way, your plum-pudding was not, I can assure you, an example of Miss Milson’s culinary genius. I attended to that important matter myself — otherwise you might have found many strange things in it — such as glass beads or stencil-brushes! The calendar, however, was all the lady’s own work. She wonders regularly every day whether you will like it, and whether your colleagues will think it was painted for you by your fiancée. She means kindly, poor woman, so, if you have not already expressed your hearty delight, pray do so, and assure her that the masterpiece has an honoured place on your walls.With much love, Your affectionateDad
25. Note by Paul Harrison
I can find only one letter for the next few weeks with any important bearing on the subject of this inquiry. My father and stepmother were in Paris from the 15th of December to the 7th of January. I received a few picture postcards with accounts of places visited, but they contained nothing of any moment, and I did not preserve them.
Lathom joined them on or about the 28th of December, and spent the Jour de l’An in their company. I believe that Mrs Harrison wrote several letters to Miss Milsom from Paris, but these I have been unable to secure; in fact, I am informed that they have been destroyed. I visited Miss Milsom (see my statement No. 49), and questioned her as tactfully as possible on the subject, but could only get from her a rambling diatribe, full of the same demented prejudice she has always displayed against my father, and, in the absence of any direct evidence (such as the original letters would have afforded), I feel bound to ignore her remarks. Indeed, it is obvious that nothing which Miss Milsom says later than April, 1929, is of any evidential value whatsoever, and that all her statements, without exception, must be received with extreme caution, except in so far as they tend to prove the influence exerted, consciously or unconsciously, by her upon my stepmother.
Mr Munting, who spent the Christmas season with his family and in the company of his fiancée, not returning to town till the 15th of January, has handed to me the only letter which he received from his friend during this period.
26. Harwood Lathom to John Munting
Polperro 4th Jan., ’29
Dear Munting,
How are you? And how did the season of over-feeding and Christian heartiness leave your soul? Did honourable love survive the domesticities? If so, I swear that you and your intelligent young woman are either gods or beasts. Gods, probably — with that dreadful temperateness of the knowledge of good and evil, seeing two sides to every question. You will analyse your bridal raptures if you have any, and find the whole subject very interesting. You will have, Heaven help you! a sense of humour about the business, and your friends will say how beautiful it is to see such a fine sense of partnership between a man and woman. A copulation of politic tape-worms! But where is the use of being offensive to a man who will allow for my point of view? I hate being allowed for, as if I were an incalculable quantity in an astronomical equation.
Having (thank God!) no family, except my aunt at Colchester, I escaped good King Wenceslas and departed for Paris, where everything is jejune enough, and the weather just as snow-bound and bitter as our own happy island, but where at least the stranger is not sucked into the vie familiale. I found the Harrisons dismally vegetating in a highly respectable Anglophile hotel, and toted them round the usual stale shows, getting my pleasure from their naïve enjoyment. Or, at any rate, from her enjoyment; the old boy was as peevish as ever, and brought the blush of shame to my cosmopolitan cheek by walking out of a cabaret in the middle, trailing his wife and friend after him in the approved barn-door style. Being too wrathful for speech, I said nothing, and had the pleasure of sitting out a family row in the taxi afterwards. La belle Marguerite was actually quite as shocked as he was, poor child, but thrilled to an unregenerate ecstasy nevertheless. She has the makings of a decent pagan soul if one could teach her. However, I needed to do no teaching. His vulgar disgust (with which, if he had had the elementary tact to leave her alone, she would have agreed) drove her into an excited opposition, and she argued the point with an obstinacy and wholeheartedness which it was a pleasure to listen to. I wouldn’t be appealed to — I didn’t want a row, and besides she will learn nothing except by arguing it out for herself. In fact, I apologised and said, in effect, that an artist became rather blind to the properties, legs, as the bus-conductor said, being no treat to him. In fact, I controlled myself marvellously, and — went away and walked about in a fury all night!
After that we did picture-galleries, and I had to listen to Harrison’s lectures on art. Never have I heard — not even in Chelsea — so much jargon applied over so grisly a substructure of ignorance and bad taste. The man ought to be crucified in the middle of all his own abominable daubs. You would have enjoyed it, I suppose, or made copy of it.
We saw the New Year in with dancing and the usual imbecile festivities. Mrs H. thanked me with tears of excitement in her eyes — it was pathetic — like giving sweets to a kid. Even H. was a little moved from his usual grimth. I procured him a partner — no! I didn’t hire her, I knew her — a decent little soul who used to live with Mathieu Vigor and is now, I believe, Kropotzki’s petite amie — and she trundled him round in the most amiable way. He emerged from the fray quite sparkling (for him!), and solemnly led Madame out for the next dance! That didn’t go so well, because he found fault with her steps, so I pushed him back on to Fleurette, who could dance with a kangaroo, I think, clever little devil.
I crossed on the 2nd, and came down here for warmth and sunshine (what a hope!). The place has been ruined, of course, by ‘artistic’ tourists, and is lousy with Ye Olde Potterye Shoppes. The brave fishermen dangle around in clean blue jerseys and polish up the boats in the harbour, while they long for the film-season to start again.
I shall be back in Bayswater some time next week. I hope your sense of humour is feeling robust, for I am in a foul mood and nothing pleases me.Yours ever, Lathom
27. John Munting to Elizabeth Drake
15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater
[The opening sheets of this letter are lost, but the date is evidently some time in January.]
. . proofs coming along at express speed, I am enjoying a magnificent illusion of importance and busy-ness. The novel will be out before the Life, which is being held up considerably by copyright bothers over the plates. All the better, as it is a mistake to bung two books out right on top of one another.
I am feeling a great deal more sympathetic with Lathom just now. The earnest Harrison has transferred his attentions, for the moment, to me, because, as a literary man, I can, of course, tell him exactly how best to prepare his fungus-book for the press. He comes teetering in at my busiest moments to discuss points of grammar. I tell him my opinion and he contradicts it at great length, pointing out subtleties in his phrasing which I have not grasped. At length I either tell him that his own original idea expresses his personality best, or fall back on The King’s English if the error is really too monstrous to let pass. This works all right for a time, and he carries the book off with much gratitude — returning later, however, with the demurrer to Mr Fowler carefully written down on paper. I once made the foolish suggestion that he should write to Fowler and thrash it out with him direct; this was fatal, as I had to listen to (a) the letter; (b) the reply; (c) the rejoinder — so I now fall back as a rule on the phrase about expressing personality. There was also a dreadful day when a water-colour picture of fungi came out too green by three-colour process. Lathom and I suffered dreadfully over this abominable toadstool, and were at length forced to go out and drown the recollection in Guinness.
All the same, I try my best to be helpful, because I am the only person who can enter into Harrison’s interests, and he has really written a very entertaining little piece of work, full of odd bits of out-of-the-way knowledge, scraps of country lore and queer old-fashioned recipes and things. He must have made extraordinary good use of his holidays, and there’s not a plant or animal in the country fit for food that he doesn’t know the last word about. He has made a wonderful collection of botanical diaries, which ought to be of considerable scientific value, and he brings a really scholarly mind to his rather unscholarly subject. His water-colours, though too prim considered as pictures, make really rather attractive book-illustrations, and his drawings of plants and fungi are beautifully accurate in line and colour — far better than the stuff you find in the usual textbooks. And, indeed, the vagaries of the three-colour process are enough to make Job irritable. I told him that he should take as his motto for the book the famous misprint in the Bible, ‘Printers bave persecuted me with a cause’ — which pleased him.
Profiting by my position as literary guide and mentor, I have (with colossal tact) persuaded him to let the famous portrait be shown. We got around to it by way of cookery, oddly enough. I said that cookery was really a very important creative art, which was not properly understood in this country, being chiefly left in the hands of women, who were not (pardon me, Bungie) as a rule very creative.
That led on to a general discussion of Art, and the yearning that every creative artist feels to obtain a public response to his art. And so, by devious ways, to Lathom and his picture. I said that, while I entirely understood Mrs Harrison’s quite natural feeling that to exhibit her portrait would be, to a great extent, exhibiting herself, to Lathom it was, of course, quite a different matter. It was his work, his handling of line and colour, for which he wanted public recognition. But I admitted that a woman could not be expected to appreciate this point of view.
As I had foreseen, Harrison took this as an indirect criticism of his wife, and promptly reacted against it. She was not, he said, like the ordinary woman. She had a remarkable gift for artistic appreciation. He felt sure that if he put it to her in the right light, she would see that it was not a personal question at all. Indeed, she had made no objection herself — it was he who had been afraid of exposing her to unwelcome notoriety. But it should be made quite clear that the painting was the important matter, and that the subject had no personal bearings of any kind.
It was very odd, Bungie, to see him reassuring himself in this vicarious way. And it was still odder that I had a feeling all the time as if I was doing something unfair. His attitude about the thing was preposterous, of course, but I have a queer feeling about Mrs Harrison. She isn’t so stupid that she can’t see Lathom’s point of view. It would matter less if she were. It is that she is clever enough to see it and adopt it when it is pointed out, and to make it into a weapon of some kind for something or other. Not knowing that it is a weapon, either; practising a sort of ju-jitsu, that overcomes by giving way — good God! what a filthy bit of obvious journalese metaphor!
Anyhow, Mr Harrison worked off my little lecture on the creative artist with great effect under my very nose the same evening, as though it was all his own work. Mrs H. started off with her usual lack of tact by saying: ‘I thought you said,’ and ‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ but, catching my eye, resigned herself to listen graciously and give consent. So the Hanging Committee is, after all, to have the happiness of gazing upon the portraits of Mrs Harrison and Miss Milsom — blest pair of sirens — and I hope they will be duly appreciative. Lathom is pleased — and so damn well ought to be! I hope it will calm him down, for what with the portraits and the fungus-book and one thing and another, he and I are both getting into a state of nerves.
I want peace and quiet. Damn all these people! Thank Heaven I’ve got the proofs to see to, because I’m in no fit state to write anything. My ideas are all upside down. I can’t focus anything. I suppose it’s just the usual ‘between-books’ feeling. I am going to take a few weeks’ lucid interval and read astronomy or physics or something. Personally, I’m dead sick of the blasted creative instinct!Yours all-of-a-dither, but still devotedly, Jack