18, STATION ROAD

ECKINGTON

DERBYSHIRE

near Sheffield

CHESTERFIELD

Tuesday after Easter

ECKINGTON 33

My dear Hilda,

To welcome you at the White Cross - so funny to think of you at Lugano again, among those steps and that foliage which, being sub-tropical, means to me late summer - and yet, I am only just back, and only just before I went forth, I was in echt winter with you at the de la Paix.

I hope so much you like your new establishment, have a nice room and an amenable proprietor. I think you will find one great good thing in not being the other side of the railway lines - I think you will find so much energy saved on that little last bit after the steps.

I have had such a strange letter from a hotel we were at in Haiti. I mention this whilstv on the subject of hotels. Where we stayed in Port-au-Prince was run by a black woman who was a daughter of the last President. She had married a white man from Corsica, a funny little fellow whose French was imperfect and English non-existent. Both around 50. They had as manager of the hotel a German woman of 60 Or so - a refugee, to whom they had given a more or less honorary job so that she could stay in Haiti and begin life anew. She didn't really fit in, and you can imagine that George and I had some difficulty in placing her, we thought at one time she and the Corsican were married. But she had no real authority and seemed rather lost. She couldn't speak French, and only very little English. One day she heard George saying he liked Haiti because it had points of resemblance with Switzerland. She asked haltingly if we knew it, and mentioned one or two German-speaking parts. So then I spoke German and her story came out. She was a refugee. Her son and daughter had got out and were in States, she had only been able to get to San Domingo, and then got into Haiti. Her husband was in Hamburg, a professor and his hobby was - astrology.

She has now written to me to ask if I can send Raphael etc to her husband in Hamburg, as she can't get the books she wants in Haiti for him. It seems such a queer tie-up to have landed in, nipping to Haiti from Jamaica, to have refugees out there, too, writing to one.

18, STATION ROAD

ECKINGTON

DERBYSHIRE

near Sheffield

CHESTERFIELD

2.

ECKINGTON 33

It has been a quite wonderful Easter, warm as summer and sun all day long. The Cornish daffodils have been indescribable, I mean the ones Bryher gave me from Trenoweth each year. Just the right moment for them and I have never seen them so lovely. I have had 21 vases and bowls in the house, and even then still hundreds in the garden. Also scyllas and hyacinths and wallflowers and primulas and forget-me not.

I go down to-morrow to London, then to Stratford on Friday. Much ado that night, then Midsummer Night's Dream. In preparation, I have been reading Cymbeline, which is to be done later in the season. And I have many comments!

First, these fantasy plays which commentators find so difficult - of course, not to us at all NOW. I used once to find Cymbeline a bit odd, a bit confusing. But now I find it simple and absorbing - a dream, an analysis quite astonishingly CLEARLY seen.

I had forgotten what heaven Imogen is. I had always thought in retrospect that she was merely 'sweet', but she is decisive and vibrant as well as sweet from the word 'go'.

I was much struck by the resemblance to Winter's Tale. There is the idealised shepherd's life, in one, in Cymbeline the same in the Welsh mountains with Bellarius and the two boys, I can't help feeling this was wish-fulfilling from a hen-pecked New House, I mean (place). These occur, lit with radiance, in the midst of sorrow - the lost Perdita, the betrayed Imogen. I mean, they are in an ODD place for such joy, rather as if Shakespeare were looking back and remembering or looking forward and knowing that now, it would not happen.

I was struck by the Wicked Queen - the first time such a character comes out in true colours. The King is the same raging old man as Leontes, except that his rage is directed against Posthumous - who IS a Leonatus. Did you get that before? As if the Leontes name is displaced from the King. Then, Posthumous is a very odd name but somehow in application so like Perdita.

There is, as in Winter's Tale, the theme of the lost child - only here, intensified, doubled, trebled, almost quadrupled. Iachimo seems to me a Iago, and the mole is paralleled by the strawberry mark on Desdemona's handkerchief. I find Imogen has much the spirit of Desdemela.

18, STATION ROAD

ECKINGTON

DERBYSHIRE

near Sheffield

CHESTERFIELD

3.

ECKINGTON 33

mona in answering back, as well as her sweetness in love, but ALSO she has Rosalind's wit.

As Posthumous, being banished, has to be out of the play quite often I note the brilliance of having Pisanio, his servant, always on hand to keep us well in mind of him.

I note a hatred of drugs which harks back, via Othello, to Romeo.

Is this a plain fear of Italian knowledge in poisoning or W.S. knowing a bit more than he cares to say about witch-spells?

I think the last act, which the professo rs dismiss as artificial, quite masterly in its sweeping together of strands and clues, like that sudden way in which analysis becomes synthesis.

Finally, the grammatical constructions defy parsing - half as if W.S. were in a state of exalatation, mere meaning had ceased to matter, half as if he couldn't concentrate quite and was dashing ahead to get it down before he forgot.

O, is up here, but I haven't seen him and it is one of the few times he hasn't phoned, though he knows I am up. It's his first return since they got back, so I didn't feel it was for me to butt in. I imagine they have people up for Easter, or else are chewing over New York together.

Stratford opened the season with *Macbeth*, and on the first night Diana Wynyard, as Lady M, fell from the top of the staircase by mistake in her sleepwalking scene, onto the stage....I wonder if this is due to another of the revolving stage difficulties, and if in the dark she didn't know where she was when she was 'revolved to the top of the stairs? She continued as if nothing had happened!

I leave at 8.30 tommorrow, so will stop now. This is just to hope you had a happy Easter, will enjoy being back at Lugano, and to salute you on April 23.

Much love,

18, STATION ROAD

ECKINGTON

DERBYSHIRE

near Sheffield

CHESTERFIELD

May 27th

ECKINGTON 33

My dear Hilda,

I am here till June 1st, when I have to go down to London to see the Persian Ambassador, who has asked me to a garden party (and on the 9th, to a cocktail party chez Marie Stopes, which seems so queer).

It has been lovely here, all on my own and 3 cats, no interruptions, I've at last in my mind so to speak 'dealt' with the Tempest. Never a play I found I returned to very often, except for that strange presence-in-absence of Claribel that you brought out so well.

(An interesting essay, incidentally, on the characters that do NOT appear in Shakespeare - Roemo's Rosaline, of course; Hero's mother Imogen, in Much Ado; Roslaind's waiting woman, Hesperia, "me mother had a maid called Barbara" - Desdemona, but much the most powerful, Claribel and Sycomax in Tempest)

Well, I realised this week that 'the enchanted isle' of Tempest is not a very friendly place after all. Miranda was assaulted by Caliban; Caliban we know was always being maltreated by Prospero; Ariel was either locked up in a tree or worked to death; the wrecked people got drunk, fell in horsepond, were spellbound - NO one had a good time there....

I begin to wonder, vide Jack Lindsay's article on Shakespeare's fairies in August last year of L. and L, that the little fairies (W.S. was the first to make fairies little) as Tom Thumbs, were phallic - whether the enchanted island isn't a sexual zone; Ariel, locked in tree, obvious; and Prospero packs up when Miranda and Ferdinand marry - he hands her over with an even blunter series of remarks on virginity than usual. Miranda and Ferdinand both ARE Prospero, inasmuch as Ferdinand is the son of the Duke who took P's place, and Miranda is P's daughter.

Apart from which, the play is supposed to be W.S.'s farewell to the theatre, isn't it? But he wrote it from Stratford, it was one of the two plays a year he wrote when he went back. Might he not have found Stratford was EXILE, and it be his farewell

to that unhappy set-up in New Place? For Prospero hurries
from his island to Milan, which isn't exactly retirement.
For Milan, read London, for New World read New Place - is this
carrying it too far?

But I shall always want to know why neither Ben Jonson nor
Drayton were at his funeral, considering they were with him
when he had that too much sack of which he died - the answer
surely is that they were Toby Belch and Andrew A, not popular
in the Puritan household?

One other thing, and then I stop. Reading the comedies in order,
I find most noticably that as skill develops, the number of
pairs and couples gradually decreases. The Dream is a wild
orgy of couples, from Theseus and Hippolyta down. Four sets and
counting permutations, seven. As You Like It has Rsoalind-Orlando
Celia-Oliver, Touchstone-Audrey, Phebe-Silvio. The Merchant has
3 pairs. When you get to 12th Night, Viola is alone - the first
girl to have no confidante. And it is only one and a half
couples there, for it is Viola for Orsino, who is for Olicia, but
Olivia is for Viola.

By the time you get to Winter's Tale, there is only one - Leonte
and Hermione, for Florzel and Erdita are their young selves and
it is the elder who matter. In 'empest, there is only one couple
and neither Miranda nor Ferdinand have much to do - the play
is 'rospero - the finding of his own self, - the whole theme
of them all. But as with analysis, gradually the extraneous,
the 'covers', are discarded.

A queer phone call to Osbert this evening. He had sent me an
incscribed copy of the latest vol. of his autobiography. So I rang
to thank. When I said how moving I found it, he said 'Yes, isn't
it? I do think it's so good', which I suppose is all right. BUT.
There wasn't much one could say! He was very regal, only spoke
for 5 seconds - I don't know if David was in the room, but I
felt needlessly snubbed.

Otherwise, all lovely, The woods are a lake of bluebells. Tulips
have now given way to paeony and lupin( all my blue lupins
are going pink, bees' visitation, I understand) and two out of
the three cats have retired to the attic to salute me with
kittens.

I am translating some Eskimo poems and to-morrow take in Br's
BEOWULF and some Swiss mountain books to have bound in the
papers you gave me at Christmas.

I do hope you are well, and happy. My love, and all greetings,

8 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, S.W.3

FLAXMAN 8560

9.6.49.

My dear Hilda,

So many thanks for your letter....Yes, O's book! Short of a
Maggs binding, it could hardly have been more lavishly done, could
it?

I must say, I find the whole thing extraordinary. I DO, O yes I do,
think it wonderfully done, and fascinating to read - I keep saying
so to myself. But another part of me finds it such a strange thing
to want to do, and I do find I am rather glad it IS the last, or
almost the last, volume.

And really those end-papers, all the excerpts from years of Who's
Who. Isn't it a bit peculiar to print one's 'Who's Who' entries
over and over again as end-papers?

However, don't let me get started on the book at the *beginning* of
this letter! I have so much else to say!

First, I have managed to get another black chap's book taken. From
British Guiana this time. I've printed him once or twice, Edgar
Mittelhoelzer, and mentioned his novel once in an Editorial. Knopf's
asked to see it, but rejected. However, now the Hogarth have taken it
and he can hardly believe it.

Four others had turned it down, then I wrote about it and voilà.
Odd, isn't it? I can only others books published, not my own!

Then, a thing I am not so sure is good. I have got O.B.'s painter
friend an exhibition! I introduced O.B. to a friend of mine on the
Times, John Lawrence by name, and he introduced him to a man who
owns a Brook St, gallery - and he liked Max Chapman's paintings.
Which I must say, is more than I do!

But this gallery-owner looked at Max Chapman's stuff and told him
to paint landscapes. As he only does still life, it seemed a bit
double-edged to me! Anyway, he has rushed off to St. Ives to paint
and of course, it is a great thing to have a gallery waiting at
the end of it.

Meanwhile, after these plums, my own little currant or raisin is -
I am published in a huge tome which is for American school children
to explain to them the tradition of English literature. A school
book, but quarto size, about 700 pages, done by about 5 professors.
Illustrated with coloured pictures of what an English Village
Maypole dance is, and who Gulliver was. Excerpts from Chaucer, W.S,
so on right down, Tennyson, Keats, what are rather oddly called the
Housman Brothers, and then among the moderns, Masefield preceded
by me!

They took an Editorial I wrote after VE Day, in which I said more or less, NOW the real battle begins - the fight for peace. I then analysed how few people wanted peace.

Well, the editors of the book first say that the American children must read this 'brilliant Editorial' as it shows Europe was not defeatist, and that this Englishman was full of vitality. They then quote, after which 'Every sentence is worthy of discussion. Set up panels. Compare with Milton.' and so on!

Silly, but pleasing.

Another rather nice thing. A poor muddled old friend of mine, Lorna Lewis, many years ago, when she was less muddled, wrote for children a life of Nansen, whom she called 'Man of Peace'.

The Foreign Office have decided this is just the thing to show German schoolchildren that you CAN be a man, can have adventure and yet be peaceful - they have ordered 10,000 copies as part of re-habilitation of the German schoolchildren, or rather of their pacification.

All these are tiny matters, but straws, perhaps.

And as far as I am concerned, have been celebrated in the gayest possible way by George. - We have a sort of joke about ties. He gave me for my birthday a plain pale grey tie on which he had had painted, on the broad end, which isn't seen, a portrait of - Shakespeare. He did it AS a joke and FOR a joke, but with serious intent, if you see what I mean. 'You like Shakespeare, we both like extraordinary ties, so I thought you had better have that'.

But he didn't buy it, he ordered it - it was his own idea while at Stratford. He went to someone who does hand-painted ties in Reading, and ordered it. It is thus the only one of its kind in the world. The painter wasn't sure of being able to do a 'likeness' off-hand (queer word) so George was faced with providing a portrait - and of course isn't as used to that sort of research as you or me. He had to decide between the Droeshout or Chandos. But being George, he said 'You'd better paint in a few books, to make clear'.

I think it was the gayest and most engaging thing, 'You love Shakespeare, so I thought you'd better have a tie to make you happy'.

The thing being, he is so frank that W.S. is a bit beyond him, but yet he 'plays' our kind of game, and that, after all, E. and O. won't. As regards Stratford, I mean.

He said something too at Eck, when we were walking through the bluebell woods. We decided that if we were en Suisse, we would be collecting every flower we saw, and so we treated England as Engadine, so to speak, and picked one of as many wild flowers as we saw. We found 15 G, said "And yet, the thing that seems to mean spring more than anything to English people is Shakespeare. They will go miles to be at

8 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, S.W. 3

FLAXMAN 8560

2.

his birthday, almost as if he were a flower, too'.

Gentle Shakespeare, indeed!

It certainly is incredible that anyone, W.S.I mean, has left behind
him such an atmosphere of love. I don't mean 'incredible', but that
in our sorry day, he still can be so loved.

So few pilgrimages remain, and this yearly Stratford one is so un-
forced, so clearly helps people and clarifies them.

Yes, I am sure you are right. There IS something very odd going on
in Shakespeare. I think it may be the old religion. Or rather, I
am sure it is, and wonder only - which.

One reason why I am so sure is that all the characters take such
care to stress they are NOT going in for magic! Yet they all do. They
usually say this, to allay the unitiated, just at the moment at which
they embark most patently.

One of the plays I only begin to see straight is _As You Like It_.

One has to get away from school performances, from Bergner, wanting to cross dress. But Rosalind, the most boyish of the lot, surely, refers often to magic, and then of course does that strange entry with Hymen, and no amount of merely superficial scholar stuff can alter the fact it WAS a bit early for masque. At the other end, when Prospero says 'This rough magic I abjure', I am sure the accent is on the 'rough', not the magic - he is abjuring only the rough, clumsy kind, he is progressing into real magic. The whole stress of what he is going to abjure is on the 'rough'. The word is placed so in the line.

M.O.V. seems to me to become more full of hints the more one goes
into it. I have all the Casket Scenes one on 6 records by, I think,
Fay. The thing that emerges is not only that she _knows_, but that

Bassanio is led to her. He is approved of. By Nerissa in description,
by Portia in agreeing, by the implicit fact that he and he alone
had previously been to her father's house. Of all other suitors. He
thus had the dead father's approval.

When one plays or reads those bantering opening lines between Portia
and Nerissa over and over again, it becomes quite clear why she
geerts the servant who announces Bassanio's herald in terms Cleo,
later greeted Antony with.

All that build-up also takes some of the edge off Bassanio's own
evil, 'In Belmont is a lady richly left'. He says a lot of other
things about her, including that she is a priestess, but we are usual-
so appalled by the 'richly left' we dismiss him as a cad.

Nerissa, however, calls him 'a scholar and a soldier'. That is always Shakespeare's favourite combination, his idea of a man. His scholars fight, his soldiers talk like angels. Orlando will beat a professional wrestler - and then write poems.

I think when Shakespeare introduces a man as 'a scholar and a soldier' we are meant to like him.

I think also a lot of the 'clues' lie hidden in the simple fact that it isn't the words we do NOT know the meaning of that bother us, but the words whose meanings have gradually changed. Words whose import was _terrific_ to his audience have lost those overtones to us.

One can only guess them by noticing very very carefully the words he uses at critical moments.

A word is an image, and an image becomes an act - I would instance the way 'rospero shuts Ariel up in a tree and then makes Ferdinand haul _logs_. Here is the _tree_ again. Ferdinand is, so to speak, shut up in lumbering. Is the _tree_ phallic? Was Ariel only a 'good' sprite because, as sex, he was shut up? And Caliban 'bad' because he wasn't? Is the game of chess at which M. and F. (Male and female) are discovered a mental sublimation?

Neither Ariel nor Caliban can be trusted, if they are just to fly around by themselves - Ferdinand couldn't be, till he and Miranda had the old old symbol of chess to meet on. But those chessmen are so to speak the sublimation of Ferdy's logs, and Ariel's captivity, which Caliban couldn't reach? ...

The _tree_ thing is very interesting, from Orlando's sonnets down to I chimo being hidden in the _trunk_ - surely, so obvious, the body? Won't they ever realise W.S. wrote in words, and words were new then, and meant everything - but everything, anything, simultaneously? _Trunk_ meant dead tree, living body, and piece of luggage, with variations on each which was part of the thing the audience relished. It was their speed in relishing and his speed in supplying, that made him rich, surely?

The trouble, I find, is there is so much one wants to say. It has been there of years. All one can do is, say it. But then one has to sort it out. That's where the hard work begins.

***

***

***

Now O! - WELL. When I rang him up, he took all the words out of me mouth, said it was wonderful, he had done it well, hadn't he, and so I was dismissed, - royally. I had had my one minute. In fact, I had very nearly had two.

I think it's _interesting_, Hilda. I think it's moving, and tragic and sad. It is the motive of it seems so mixed. All that elaborate machinery of writing to present only a Punch and Judy show of Sir George and Henry Moat, whom the author manipulates whilst remaining out of view! NO.

8 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, S. W. 3

FLAXMAN 8560

3.

I CAN'T see the book, because I remember always his saying "But, if I WERE analysed, I might not want to write".

And then when Sir George died, 'Ginger's dead, NOW I can say what I LIKE'.

But writing is not a form of revenge. You can't write until you have stood up to the enemy, and it is unfair and wrong if O. not to tell us as we know, all the things that he had stood up to so long that he was tired.

The plot-hook thing is very funny, so is the idea of being Town Clerk of Scarborough.

But it doesn't really make amends to turn yourself into a self-wished Town Clerk of Posterity (and that has a habit of changing its viewpoint; O's posthumous volumes, I 'apprehend' will have a value rather different from that intended).

I think, or at least I devoutly hope, O. knows that his inertia implies how much he was hurt.

If so, I then find fault with the architecture of the book. I think the end-piece about Sir George climbing the tower is out of key - I remember O. bringing me some snapshots in '40 or '41, and saying 'doesn't he look like King Lear?'

And I think the other young man as which O. presents himself in that Edwardian age he loved so bears no relation to anything but psychological fact - the one kind he won't admit.

So, ultimately, I find the whole set of vols. are a form of compulsion You will cry 'Yes, of course, that is their charm'.

I echo; and find it also their tedium.

But memain shocked, a sort of ethics in me are galled.

To use his own idiom, I don't think you ' do'that. If you do, then I orfer it on the other level - Havelock Ellis, Shaw, even the Webbs, Meynells, all the 'messes', but messes because they had fought and wabted peace.

Osbert's Edwardian age, which he thinks so wonderful, wasn't only an age of hostesses, balls, stephanotis and ballet.

He thinks he saw the collapse of his world in 1918; it really began in 1908. He was ten years too late. When he laughs at Lady Ottiline Morell for being a merely 'Bloomsbury' patron of ballet in 1918, he is only saying his own lot had been found wanting.

It seems to me there was a LOT going on in his day, which he didn't notice. It seems to me that if you are going to put in the front of that last vol, that patehtic Ascot frontispiece - which WAS his own choice - you WERE missing most of the serious stuff going on then.

He seems to me in short to refuse to be the Father he refused to
kill, and therefore, having made a conscious guy of Sir George, to
make an unconscious one of himself.

Which we know.

But - But - BUT!

****

***

***

***

Apart from which, my purely outer sense of ethics don't approve
of anyone so hating the public, taking the public into their
confidence.

I know it's an illness on his part, but an illness which takes 4
vols. becomes rather more than a display.
But perhaps I take it all too seriously!
The book is in all the shops, in piles, it is Book of the Month of
EVERY Book Society, and there are column-length reviews everywhere.

This letter has been held up by Trooping of the Colour. The King got
his way this year! Full dress, and the Guards are now back in scar-
let again at the Palaces. The Trooping was a bigger show than usual.
He took the salute from a landau, Princess Elizabeth rode, in uniform;
even old Queen Mary attended, and the crowd was the biggest since
VE Day - 40 deep! The whole thing was very much the King as Father
of his people. The whole Royal Family had to keep coming out on the
balcony, and the crowd kept calling for Prince Charles!
People waited overnight in the Mall. A most spontaneous demonstration
which rather took people by surprise.

This occurred just at last minute panic over my currency allotment.
So I had to do a lot of running round. Ena Molesworth was not originally as helpful as might be, and we have had to take some of it in French, which means going to Chamonix.

We leave on Monday - I do think it funny, we are staying in Kenwin
that night. Then on up the Loetschtal for Corpus Christi. Shan't be
able to get down to Lugano this summer, - but I am asked out, you
know, for the birthdays. Can you bear it?

I have been reading Caroline Spurgeon on W.S's Imagery. So meticulous
all that counting of his metaphors, but interesting. So odd to think
he on y used the word 'moonlight' 8 times in all his plays and 6
times in M.N.Dream.
Also, Ariel occurs Isaiah 29.1.7. 'Victorious under God'. I didn't
know before that in Hebrew Ariel means 'Lion of God'.

8 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, S.W.3

FLAXMAN 8560

4.

I booked to-day for 'Henry Vlll' and 'Cymbeline' at Stratford on
July 29th-50th. This year, one can book at Keith Prowse in London,
which is a help.

And the next Old Vic season, icahel Redgrave is going to do _Hamlet_
and _Love's Labour's Lost_.

I have _Magister Ludi_, but have been so deep in W.S., I have not dared yet to embark. No one seems to know anything of the translators.

I will weary you no longer, but think of you a lot - and O, please think how happy I shall be to be back in Switzerland by the time you get this!

My best greetings, and much love,

8 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, S.W. 3

PLAXMAN 8560

Thursday night

My dear Hilda,

I type under the shade of a huge white cyclamen, for a gip-
sy came to the door, selling just those - nothing else but. It
seemed so strange, and too good to ignore. I mean, 'good' as an
omen or 'shower'.

One needs such an extravagance too (though only six bob) as we have
been frozen ever since I got back, and are now revelling in fog.
But I don't mind - I have 48,000 words behind me, plus all that
health from Lausanne. London isn't too bad, the shops are full of
flowers, I had forgotten how much one missed not those one had in
one's home, but the shop-displays, during the war. Now there are
nice banks of mimosa, mauve tulips, jonquils and so on, all of which
give one cause to make detours on one's way, for instance one
will change buses in order to have an excuse to pause, whilst
waiting, outside some specially lovely window..... I always have a
feeling that flowers in London never look out of place, as they
are apt to do in big cities. Sometimes, the lovelier they are, the
more they are apt to look like trophies for a prima donna or
as measures of a mistress's favour.

We have fruit too. Don't think me provincial, but I know you worry
hyper much over us here. So I report that at this moment there are
oranges, pears, apricots, grapefruit, plums and that pineapples are

down to 4/6.

One can also get frozen foods off the ration - since I have
been away, these frozen foods, which you thaw and cook, have
increased to steak, beef, chops, mutton. The prices are high. One
can only afford them as a treat, but it is psychologically good
to *know* they are there.

I tell you this, so that you won't be distressed by Coles or any-
such writing that life is AWFUL, *dear* H.D.

Life is, as ever, and whenever, and however, what one makes it. There
IS a bit more to make it with, that's the main thing.

I'm glad you got the Wilson Knight book. My reactions are exactly
yours. I think one *can* get too deep in what he is doing, - and lose
W.S. in the process.

I think he is lovely and stimulating, too much so, but that fin-
ally one is a little frigthened *for* him.

It seems to me that what Wilson Knight is, ultimately, writing
about is *himself*.

He is finding himself in Shakespeare, and though that is very good,
he is losing Shakespeare in the process. Losing, I mean, the actor-
dramatist in the seer with whom he identifies himself.

That is why I draw away sometimes, feel Wilson Knight 'dangerous'.

Now, with YOU - your Avon is first and foremost a Poet to a Poet.

In exactly the royal way in which he disdains all kinds of matters of plausibility in his plays, you disdain all things that lesser people pick on and use your stature, as a poet, to write TO him as a poet.

Yours seems to me the only book written *to* him.

8 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, S.W. 3

FLAXMAN 8560

2.

Edie seems to me, on the other hand, to be giving him the O.K. All her verbose 'humility' seems to me quite false. I feel, I don't think it, but inside me I feel, she is the poet telling us to keep off him. I see her as an Irish traffic cop in New York, in robes of course, directing the plays, and not allowing those she doesn't like or hasn't read into the main avenues.....

Wilson Knight I think one has to be careful about as a kind of Coleridge. I mean, I think to him W.S. IS a "person from Porlock", and I DON'T think said Porlock person interrupted Coleridge at all on Kubla K. I think the Porlock person was the same old figure as the Mariner, but that in Kubla K, Coleridge deliberately did not want to finish it - or rather, that the pattern of Kubla K. was one in which the person from Porlock was also created as an ending to a poem which, by its nature unable to be completed, was completed by that.

This all of course something different.

I do feel though that Wilson Knight does occasionally use W.S. to prove theories which only originate in Knight's brain. Admitted, W.S may have caused them to.

But if I may say so humbly, I think the virtue of my method - of taking play by play - is that at any rate it keeps the plays before one, and therefore W.S.

George and I went to a strange Italian film yesterday. He liked
Venice; apparently there is a cinema at Reading which plays for-
eign films and he goes sometimes to hear the sound of the lang-
age (they are of course sub-titled, so can be followed). Do you
know an actress called Anna Magnanini? If one shuts one's eyes,
one hears Duse - if one opens them, one sees Anna Magnani, and she
is *une jolie laide*, with that lovely liquid language running over
and through her face, so that the mere physical act of speaking a
vowel is like blossom unfolding and while she is doing that, and
the sun is coming into dark eyes, hands begin moving - like dried
branches the sun has reached, through the sheer warmth of syll-
ables.

A queer film. A half-wit peasant girl, spurned by the village, living
a dream life of her Saint, Joseph, meets a shepherd, thinks he is
the Saint; she passes out in ecstacy. Later, finds she has been
seduced. She thinks her pregnancy is a miracle. The village play
up, she is the Village idiot. They crown her with garbage. They
empty an old tin basin on her head, and that basin she thinks is
a halo. Then she realises. Then her pains come on. No one will take
her in. The nuns have told her to make peace with God. She says
she IS at peace with god, because she's making life. No one takes her
in, but there are some goats, and one of them is pregnant. That
goat has a bell, and that goat keeps on wandering round, and so
ringing the bell, and so keeping her going, and so, finally, she
reaches a mountain chapel (where the goat always has her litters)
and there she is delivered.