out of the R.A. (to be an officer in that is the bedint?)
into the infantry seems extraordinarily hard. Also I
have to "prove myself" the colonel said, on the parade
ground; and show that I am better than other bombardiers
(I am that now; but only lance/bombardier) at squad drill
etc.; well, how can I? It is despairing isn't it, and me
I no longer care enough to feel strongly. I aim either
at the Oxford & Bucks (depot at Oxford; Clarissa etc. you
see what fun that would be) or at your guards. It is very
peaceful up here, never even a siren, no bombs during
the whole of this year, a complete change and I suppose
nerve rest after Chatham and those Kent aerodromes. I
am reading a lot of de Quincey and Tolcridge; how lovely it
would be to live in the lake country after the war and
write. Also Harold's trilogy, which he has sent me with
a kind letter; Peacemaking is brilliant, it impresses
and amuses me no end, and does thoroughly show how futile
and undisciplined the conference was, and how each government
was clogged and checked by fear of its own press and its
own democracy. It says the French news is "very bad
indeed"; but what do they expect after Dakar? How hopeless
they all are, how self-deceiving and foolish and irresponsible

What you said about the Abbey (that if
that went everything would go too from one's point of view) (

I could post this yesterday and the mail had meanwhile brought this from Gertrude S. -

My dear James,

It gave me a lot of pleasure having your letter and this is a time when a lot of pleasure is a lot of pleasure, I am awfully glad you liked the book so much and found it from your point of view so reasonable, do work at your book, I find that the only way to do these days is to write a lot, I am at present doing a book of Alphabets and birthdays and it goes on and I get lost in it and it makes Alice Toklas laugh and so there we are, we are here as peaceful as one can be and may we be more peaceful yet later on and then you will come to see us, it will like seeing you and you will like seeing it, I did like London Fabric and I do, so go on and go on and please remember me to all and any of the Royal Artillery who know me and I like you always liked the river in Dickens best and always do in all (2 words illegible) except lovely country houses they are not bad,

lots of love always,

Gtd St.

HENHAM HALL,
WANGFORD, BECCLES.
SUFFOLK.

Thursday 8th.

Dearest Jim -

I'm sorry not to have written before, but I have been lounging and reading and cdnt nerve myself to the effort undoubtedly required in writing to you.

This is such a hideous, enormous house; a Georgian shell reconstructed and embellished in the 'sixties; with every encrustation, trophy, balcony, colonnade and capital known to the Victorian architect. The park is also huge and very beautifully planted with cedars and elms; and I get a great deal of pleasure from wandering in it, as I do most of the day. The gardens are numerous and consist of arbor vitae policies, and bowers of grey wisteria, all of which is just to my taste. Ld Strathroke who is Ld Lieutenant is very old and very deaf, but kind and well-mannered. Lady S. is funny and charming. They have both gone to Scotland, and Mamma has come down here instead; but it has suddenly become bitterly cold and colourless, and an intermittent gale sweeps the park, and I cant help thinking London wouldn't be as nice. Not that I dont adore the country, for I do; but there is much more wind in the country than in London, isn't there.

I am reading Tom Jones for the first time (dont tell Stuart; it shocks Americans if one hasn't the classics at college) : and cannot lay it

aside. I was awake till one over Sophia last night and began
again at dawn this morning. Has there ever been anything so
vigorous, subtle, funny and gripping ? I suppose not.

The Toynbees are going to have a baby today or tomorrow. But you're
not interested in the Toynbees are you ?

Tom Jones is full of things you might take to heart; I did mark some
for you, but have now lost the places. About trying to change the
inclinations of those we love.

I am going on through Fielding, since the Library here contains
nothing later than Scott its an excellent opportunity. How have I
lived without Tom Jones so long ? How can I write to you instead
of reading it ? God Knows.

Dont write, Jim dear, as if this cold weather continues I may
pack my trunk and return on Saturday; otherwise I shall see you
on Wednesday I hope.

My fond love to Stuart, whom I may get around to writing to in time;
I dont feel like letters just now.

Love to you, and dont be too idiotic in my absence,
will you. Dont become distracted, I mean.

38, CHESTER SQUARE, S.W. I. SLOane 7839.

Thursday 2/4.

Jim dear -

Saturday the eleventh wd be quite perfect. Would you come here about 7.00 or a quarter after : we can dine, I think, at Calatta's, that cheap Italian restaurant you used to frequent in yr stretcher bearing days. It still has delicious escaloppe de veau and the most unlikely things for almost no money at all.

I am interested in what you say of Nancy Rodd: it seems to me very plausible: she does belong to a most unfeeling class and generation anyway. Yes I had a letter from Doreen too: her Ivory Tower wd annoy me, did annoy me in fact, were it not for the real horrors she went through with her sister dying in that Bristol air-raid in a cellar. Her letter to me was sweet, warm and reproachful, also a trifle remote and theosophical. I cant keep up a correspondence for 2 years without seeing somebody, and I havent tried with her. It doesnt alter my affection for her by one degree though. I sometimes think letters shd ideally be an extension of constant meetings, not (as most people seem to assume) a substitute. Dont you agree?

I have got the day off, and the sun is early and strong in the square, and I have just finished breakfast and am going to read de Quincey : what more could anyone want?

Love,

I know you doubt I can write a letter to you, but I will try.
I will try to show you why I can't write to Washington D.C.
My letter is short, but I hope you'll understand.

I will try my best to make it short, but I'm sure you'll understand.
I know you doubt I can write a letter to Washington D.C.
But I will try, if you will only hear me out.

My dearest Jim-
I will try my best to make it short, but I'm sure you'll understand.

Monday 22 January

there being an occasion to send a letter back to London I must just give you two lines of my love. I am not yet settled enough to write at any real length, but I can only say I am happy, comfortable and a little lonely in a nice melancholy way. Life here at present is compact of everything I most like in the world except for the friends. It is otherwise physical perfection and mentally (since I am free and unbothered) pretty perfect too. How are you? I am worried Mummy (she tells me by cable) has been ill. You will try to look after her, Jimmy darling, because John although excellent and reliable is a little infelxible about her sometimes it seems to me. She is my only anxiety.

Oh this is a lovely city, long straight streets, forests of trees, snow and frost and neon lights and sheet glass doorways through which the halls of big hotels glow like aquarium tanks. I have eaten so many eggs that I am now no longer sure what is called in scotland egg-bound. I have anyway a sharp jabbing pain in my stomach and an appetite with absorption the Eustace Diamonds. I would rather have married Lizzie Eustace than Alice Vavasour. I think Gareth is the reincarnation of Lord Fawn don't you. I have just written Joan Fawn a note.

I couldn't feel less sad or more unbedint. How are you? Neither or both? I was first class on the boat not middle class after all.

1. Don't tell Harold but the life

I was just about to go out to dinner with my best friend when I received an envelope in the mail. I was curious to see what it contained and opened it. Inside I found a letter from a friend telling me of an upcoming party at a nearby house. I was excited about going out to this party and wrote a letter to my friend telling him I would be late. He understood and wrote me a letter encouraging me to go out and have fun.

1732 Twenty-first Street, NW.

My best friend was going to have a party at his house. I wanted to go, but I didn't have enough money to cover the cost of the party. So I called my friend and asked for help. He told me that he had a friend who was a British Army Staff officer. I was interested in this and asked for the address. My friend told me that the party would be at 8:00 PM on January 30th. I was able to attend.

Monday 30 January, 10.30 pm.

Darling Jim -

that inconsiderate incompetent bloomsbury lady got a heavy cold as soon as she landed, and has been in bed a week and didn't bother to send me yr letter till today. I find her bedint dont you and thoroughly dank. But yr letter, which arrived with my first one from Mummy this afternoon, has given me such a lift I am really enchanted and I have thought so much of you while eating my solitary dinner. I feel myself in a suspended state of happiness, a state of suspended happiness I mean, in which I miss you and Bridget and Lady Fawn, quite apart from my family, inexpressibly but am otherwise floating idly, easily on the crest of an amber wave. I sent you a scrabbly sudden note last Thursday which you may even have got by now; dont jump to any conclusions, I only mean this city is just that much more blatant and depraved than anything we know of; but I am not involving myself, I lead a quiet idyllic life reading Tennyson and trying to write a novel and still persistently ruthlessly overfeeding and consequently dosing myself with salts and other squalors of that kind. I have stumped back from dinner up Connecticut Avenue to my little thin corner house (which is almost as narrow as that house we admired in Thames Street and which is now bombed; or did I tell you this last time?) and am now comfortably settled at my table with the photograph of John Stowe's effigy propped up in front of me. I have bought some pretty Audubon birds which are being framed and also a rather sharp jaunty coloured woodcut of a bunch of field flowers, sort of 1920's French, each flower made with a hand-block; either very naif and gay or else very art nouveau and I cant decide which. Yr cigarette case is with me always; you see one must give ones friends such personal objects; because I now think of you with the greatest regularity each time I open it to offer a cigarette to Hank or Ivan in the office.

I sent Lady Fawn some nail varnish which I hope she got and Bridget some combs. You I'll send some food which Miss thing can hot up doubt. American books are a washout, square, shiny, heavy, illiterate; a great disillusionment.

I wont take Lord W. as Byronic. And to me a relationship confined to things of the mind with someone under 25 is of dubious value. Oh dear what a tarnished character I am, the cheapness, the cynicism.

Each day in this city is visually and climatically different to the last. They are all sparkling, clear, bright; but some mornings I peep out of my attic window to see thick snow and the next it is like a mild April day. The snow is so decorative, and the Potomac a wide sweeping river with great white bridges across it, is frozen like the seventeenth century Thames.

I have almost

1732 Twenty-first Street, NW.

April 24,1945.

My dear Jim - your letter of 24th March reached me just as I had posted a sharp snappish reminder that I was still on this planet though in another hemisphere. You have saved my life, for I have lately got sogged down into a state of naivete as soft as Dix's; had in fact lulled myself into believing that the world of people like you and Mrs Daisy Fellowes (Hon Mrs Reggie F.) was decadent and contemptible. And then your letter with its quiver of jokes and real delicious malice and the Baron de Charlus and the McCrackle in plaster came like a huge tumbler of the rankest poison and I feel so well, so subtle and so European again. You see here everyone is like Sarge and George; everyone is an angel; even the vice is cosy and quite undestructive; and this affects a person of my natural goodness quite acutely, and I have become good too, and kind, and simple, and keen on the Heart and the People and the Home town boy. Being vaguely involved emotionally with someone, who might have stepped out of Mrs Gaskell (one of the villages), dont you know) is deleterious too and has made me suffer from a distended soul; a sort of cardiac affliction you will be unable to imagine; in which I am so dropsical with goodwill and real old-fashioned unselfishness that I fear I may die of it. I have considered becoming an american of course, quite seriously. All one has to do is reject Malice and hope for the best. And you with yr Chips and Rattigan and all of them. Oh dear but you put me in a quandary.

I am off to Alabama by air on Thursday for a short hol: of a couple of weeks or so; Montgomery, Mobile, New Orleans (look it up on a map if you care to picture the itinerary of your little old friend). It is between ourselves a really Sentimental Journey, and I am thoroughly over-excited about it.

I hear 9 Lagbroke Grove is a monument to Paper-Mash and full of painted chairs, stray duchesses and Charles Fry's friends. Is this true? And is that dear albino happy? I am swimgloating here you know and can never criticise the Sarge again (you see how my character has rotted for I now think criticism must be Justified and Justifiable); tonight at 5.30 one party, 6.15 one in Georgetown, 7.15 dinner, 11.00 drinks with Joe. My evenings are spent curled up in the back of a taxi racing from one bosom friend to the next. You would scream with mocking laughter if you knew how intimate and how many are the New friends; and so appreciative; I shall never want to see sharp-eyed ones like you and Claritsa again. Tell Lady Fawn I am now wildly in love with her after her last letter which I kept in my pyjama pocket for four nights and still carry in my note-case. Yr cigarette-case has broken, typical isn't it. The lapis lazuli fell off with a tinny noise at the Spanish Embassy. Emerald's friend Madame Cardenas has a huge white poodle called after I'd Chichester; it has six-inch wide patent leather collars which it changes to match its mistress's dress. I pine for Emerald with very great longing; tell her I am going to write her a book of letters from the south; here I am too mixed up and mixed in to settle down to write. Couldnt Lord Fawn come out on a mission? Tell Joan that I have made my pilgrimage to the Raleigh Hotel and consider it an unsuitable milieu for anyone so beautiful; not that there is anyone so beautiful. Be sure to tell her you dont understand the message or she may be embarrassed.

Write, write again, do write, dear Jim. Write and save me from salvation and simplicity and almost everything beginning with S, but not quite everything.

My love to the MacNichol.

Did he go on the atrocity mission

1732 TWENTY-FIRST STREET
WASHINGTON, D. C.

2nd June 1945.

Dear Lees-Milne,

What a heavenly long letter it
was that reached this house last night. You envy
me, indeed, I who have missed Tudor (VE-day)London
and will never see such sights again. I was
lying in a chaise-longue amongst the morning-glory
in Alabama while you were all prancing around the
bonfires (and pouncing around my flat). I cannot
bear to have missed the victory, and here people
only think moodily of the Japanese war so it was
no fun.

Jim, I am so sad for you over Tom Mitfords death,
and for poor poor Nancy too. I didn't know whether
to write to her, but think perhaps not? Those
letters from acquaintances are sometimes an intrus-
ion rather than anything else I think. And poor
Lady Moray what is happening to her and why is she
is coming over here?

Lanning, now, I'm enchanted about. An American in
ones life is what each of us needs, I have at
present just the two, concurrently and simultan-
eously, a new experience to me and/ rather enerv-
ating. But I am so pleased to think that Pounce-
broke Grove is being used as it should, was it
the red room or the yellow room or the room with
laurel wreaths. Is George a bore? It is quite
conceivable but what a sweet albino bore and how
considerate and soft too. And as for bores I
still think Stuart Preston the all-time high in

boredom. I wonder if you would think Joe and Bill
bores; I hardly think you would.

Now fancy living with Houghton-Danckwerts, I expect
you are right though because one must have somewhere
to sleep and keep books and jewelry and that piece
of the True Cross. I never heard of Alexander Place
in all my life though.

Sunday morning, what bliss, sun out of the window and
I shall have a bath presently and then go to lunch
in an apartment full of orchids and Utrillos
overlooking the Potomac River and eat French food
and be flattered.

Jimminy, I am in a frenzy of anxiety over Mamma who
seems so low and unwell and lonely in spite of John
and all her friends. I am fixing to come back to
London in the winter, irrevocably before the end of
the year, as I am truly anxious and alarmed about
her, reading between the lines of her letters and not
even between. Surely the cessation of the rockets and
the end of the war ought to make some difference
to her life? It is so naughty of her to be gloomy,
though I suppose living-conditions over there are
pretty good hell.

Do write quickly again (by air mail). And do do do
continue to see George's ledger because that is what
we all need. Poor Macnichol you are too
unkind about him.

This is only a note, but I must get up and dress
and I did want to thank you for yr lovely letter
and send you my fondest love,

38 Chester Square S.W.1.

(SLOANE 7839).

Jimothy dearest - I havent neglected or forgotten you, or been
in the least ungrateful for your two comforting letters : but
the last 3 weeks have been swallowed up, pulped down, by petty
business : moving here, and helping Mummy and John move to Ladbroke
Grove : and all the time extra pressure of work in the office (I
deal with East India now).

I would so much much rather talk than write to you : in fact I
must talk to you. Will you ring me up at the office? And
then we can arrange for you to come up.

Your letters, and your presence that morning, were such a great
great help. I always supposed letters even from ones dearest
friends would seem beside the point, but they do not. The extreme
suddenness of his death was stunning but not terrible. Death is
nothing but a transition I now see most vividly. The body is so
little as to be nothing at all, the dead body I mean.

Mummy is an anxiety, but I imagine she will have to recover
slowly in her own way : I don't precisely mean recover, I mean
absorb the sharpness of it, and grow accustomed to what will be
incurable loneliness. I wish you would go and see her when you
come up.

I saw Nancy Rodd the other night at dinner : she was I thought
excruciatingly funny all evening : she is exactly us isn't she,
or should I say we are exactly her -- in humour. She talked of the
Scott expedition etc. etc. Her article in the New Statesman is
cruel and very funny, but will surely wound your friend Lady
Kennet?

Dear Jim, please do come and see me : I miss seeing you regularly
as you know : and now this enforced interval is over, we can
meet with the greatest frequency & precision. My rooms look I
think ravishing, but you must come and say.

All my love, and my thanks, dear dear Jim,

Ladbroke, Wednesday.

Dearest Timothy -

A line or 2 to welcome yr return, and to say that my night
on the river has given me laryngitis and I am cosily settled
in my white and yellow bed reading Miss Mitfords letters.
"In our still-life way, nothing has occurred" her mother
writes to her in 1802. Rather heaven ?

I love being 111, dont you ; a mild, relaxing malady like
a sore throat. I love my bedroom and my bed ; I live now
in a state of perilous delight. Will it last, will it last ?

I dined with the dear, dear Sergeant, and enjoyed it more than
I can say. He is more now, and more sympathique than
ever : just occasionally he says something I disagree with
terribly (about people, trivial disagreement really) and I
can't not tell him off : he's so good about it.

Your illuminated precepts are under my eye, propped open at
an orange lily and leaning against the wall by my lamp. Few
presents have given me such sensible pleasure ; it adds to
the gaiety of my life ; I love presents anyway, but that
little book above all.

And where will you take the Sergeant now Cumberland Lodge
has closed its heavy gates ? I dont, in any case, think it
an appropriate nid d'amour. Take him, anyhow, to have
that chicken and pastry dish at the old ladies' ; Ned Gwynn
is it called or some such ; good food still, I went there
in October.

My voice has faded away, and I have been talking all afternoon
on the telephone. Lady Cunard rang up to ask if I could
keep my own counsel and whether I knew how dangerous it was
to trust people and whether I believed in mental catharsis
and had we any need for religion ? I croaked a series of
rejoinders. I repeated a bit of Tennyson I'd just found to
her : "the music of the moon / Sleeps in the plain eggs of the
nightingale", but she said nothing with eggs in it could be
beautiful. I also told her a phrase of Togan's Ifound
yesterday --- "the fever of perfection is not catching" --
I repeated it to the Sergeant last night too. I have suddenly
become all full of maxims and aphorisms and little stiff
principles and opinions and rules. Why ?

I send the photograph you said you hadn't got. What a lovely
face ?

Ever yr attached,

LA MÉRIDIENNE
ROQUEBRUNE-CAP MARTIN
ALPES MARITIMES

Friday
6 Nov 1953.

Dearest Jim -

I never thanked you for your telegram, which as you see has been effective. I got here last night at 7.30 having left Rome at 6.00 a.m. which was exhausting - no wagon-restaurant - a sandwich at Genoa - some chianti at La Spezia - and then immense comfort here. I do like your new room more than I can say, and it looks as if it had always been here : I was just saying to Alvilde (who is gardening down the steep, while I am typing on the marble table on the terrace) that this is now indistinguishable from Sissinghurst, so many little houses and hedges everywhere.

Alvilde seems very well and has been angelic and let me go to bed early last night. It is a nice blind sort of day, with a sensation of the sun being behind thin clouds and patches of sunlight on the sea and no horizon visible so that the sea itself seems an extension of the sky. Walterine looks younger than I remembered, and dear little Foo seems chastened by his illness : he has sky-blue ointment round one eye which gives him a rakish air; but *kissxexatxix* he is as prodigal as ever with his coat and I am already covered head to foot in foochair. I think it ought to be collected seriously and woven into something useful or domestic.

I cant describe to you how serene and marvellous
Rome was all this last fortnight : perhaps it is
the only place to live : it has a great effect
on one, too, one feels so good there and not in
a tiresome way. There is something in modern
England which drives one to silly vices - it is
no good Lord Samuel lecturing us about Sodom
and Gomorrah - they are now reaping the benef-
its of the reformation & the industrial revolution
- it is the collapse of religion that seems to
me responsible ? I always suspected the
Queen would bring a new Victorian age of prudery
and repression in her train, and to judge by the
English papers this has already begun. I see
Edward Montagu is returning which is courageous
but possibly he could do nothing else.

I have been reading your Imitation of Christ in
bed this morning, a book I never liked but now
see is most pointful. I nearly went to confession
in Rome - but only nearly.

I shall be back 11th or 12th and will telephone
to you next day. Do lets be what Bridget Parsons
calls 'rather inseparable' this winter. I may be
going away for 6 or 7 months in the New Year,
on a job in the Caribbean, so you must make the
most of me.

Love from
January

but otherwise I didn't react much. I got rather tired of all
that grime in Glasgow I must say, & those delicious slums.

Did you know that Andrew(Porter) fell in love with Alvilde this
summer ? Did she know ? He spoke of no-one else on his return,
beginning a sort of hymn of praise at the breakfast-hour, to
which I responded with friendly enthusiasm. He thinks her the best-
looking girl he has ever seen, amongst other things. It is quite
serious.

I think Longman have sent her & you the Provence book, I put
Roquebrune on the map in the end-papers ; it is really une carte
à clef, featuring places where Marie-Laure & I got refused entrance
into Italy (Tende), where Maurice tried to kill me (Vaison), where
Len got roaring drunk (Martigues), where I had measles, where
Bridget Paget took an overdose and tried to kill herself etc.etc.
etc. None of this, alas, can go into the book.

Do write again. Of course I wasn't cross with you about the car,
only cross that cars makes people careful; I would have done the
same. Your discretion cost me, let me add, eleven pounds ten
(car hire).

Lots of love to Alvilde and to you -