TURVILLE HEATH 310

IBSTONE HOUSE,
IBSTONE,

Nº HIGH WYCOMBE,
BUCKS.

October 20, 1959.

I have retained this letter as it is an example of the troubles which Anthony had inflicted on us over many years, either from malice or from a real mental defect, or a combination of both.

The thing about the letter which is very characteristic is its plausibility. Anyone reading it would think that here was a sensible shrewd, good-natured person doing his best to help a couple of foolish and unpleasant people.

In fact: at the time Anthony wrote this letter we were seriously concerned about Cleasby, both for his own sake and because he had a very pleasant wife and charming step-daughter of nine or ten. Henry and I had found that Cleasby was not carrying out the necessary work, and we were constantly told that orders for food-stuffs, etc., and intimations to the slaughter-houses that we were sending animals to them, also to the auctioneers, which he had said he had attended to had never arrived at their destination. Henry had greatly liked Cleasby at first, and was puzzled by the breakdown of his work, and certainly never went down to make a row with him, or would have made a row with Cleasby in the presence of other people, but may well have visited him to ask for the explanation of some curious mishap.

The advice about respecting Cleasby's status as a bailiff was therefore quite unnecessary. The point, which worried us a great deal, was that Cleasby was not doing the work of a bailiff (or of a foreman either, for that matter). There was, of course, a charge account for farm goods. Henry's attitude to the German prisoners (who, by the way, were Roumanians for the most part) had been quite regular and their visits to camp were permitted). The smoky stove was indeed inefficient, but this was because at Cleasby's request it had moved from the room where it was to another; we were trying to get him an electric stove but it was impossible at that time. (Just after the war - 1945 or 1946). As for the road, we had arranged for a firm to metal it, but the firm and all other firms refused to do the work after the war as conditions had become difficult. (it never has been metalled, and none of the people who have happily occupied the farm have worried about it.) Cleasby knew the facts about the stove and the road.

Bodare,
Trebetherick,
Wadebridge,
Cornwall.

Received
Sep 3, 1949

Dear Henry,

I can't make head or tail of all this and I
wish you would let me know as soon as possible what this
thing you can't mention on the telephone or in a note is
that you want to talk about. I begin to suspect it is
something to do with the Eyre and Spottiswoode advertisement
in the TIMES LIT SUP. I hope not. If it is there is not
much to say. When I raised the question of the biographical
details Houghton Mifflin proposed to print on the back jacket
of my book I discovered with something of a shock that mother
was ashamed of having loved my father and borne me. I am
not able to put in words exactly how this strikes me. I find
it very sad not to be allowed to take a pride in her or to
say that she is my mother. Nothing however can induce me to
be ashamed of my father or my relationship with him or to
accept any version of that relationship which makes me
subscribe in any way, by implication or otherwise, to the
suggestion that it was a dishonourable one. If I do not
say with pride who my father was my silence says our
relationship was disgraceful. I will not do it. I hope you
will not ask me to.

Before I realised that my father and mother were
great people and that I was honourably born vulgar and beastly
people hurt me a great deal with the word bastard and more

2.

than half convinced me that I did not belong in the world
of decent human beings. I hope that I am not going to meet
those values again in the mouths of people I love. I love
you both. For that reason I cannot bear it that you should
suggest that my origins are shameful, that I am shameful,
and that I must discreetly live my existence down. I hope
you will not do so.

I hope I have not troubled you with something quite off
the mark - it is a question, however, that has been much on
my mind of late and if it should be the matter in hand I
think it best that you should understand my position. If
it is quite another matter there is no harm done in your
understanding me on this one.

my love to you both -

Anthony

Copy of Letter received by Henry Andrews on September 14.

Dear Henry,

I quite see that according to your standards Anthony has behaved
very badly and the only thing for you to do is to cut him out of your
will. I cannot see what purpose is served by this endless raking over of
motives. Anthony made the greatest possible mistake in alluding to that
letter of Rac's which was with all her other letters to H.G. in the papers
Marjorie gave him. Of course Marjorie couldn't possibly have read all
H.G.'s personal correspondence before handing it over - there were nearly
four suitcases full of letters and Anthony is only just now getting to the
end of them. I cannot at all understand your bringing the matter up with
Rac - it seems quite pointlessly unkind.

With regard to my conversation with Rac. After Anthony left the room
(obviously in a fury) I said that of course if she did not want the facts
published that was that. This was my immediate personal reaction but was
never intended as an u dertaking on Anthony's behalf. It still is my reaction
to the situation - the "instincts of a gentleman" have been more successfully
implanted during my childhood than they were in Anthony - but I would never
try to force any particular line of conduct on Anthony - nor I hope on any
other human being. He knew my feelings all along but acted on h is own. But
I have enough love and respect for Anthony to fell sure that what he does in
good faith and after giving himself time to think it over is the right thing
for him to do.

When Anthony saw you at Ibstone in August (when Rac guaranteed his
overdraft) I do not think he had made any decision about the advertisement.
This was decided at a last minute conference with Frank Morley just before
we went to Cornwall when Anthony made it quite plain that Rebecca did not
want the facts published but that he did. The advertisement was the result
of that conversation.

What you and Rebecca never seem to realize is that Anthony and I are
now middleaged people with fairly clearly defined views and that these
views differ fundamentally f om yours on many points. Till you realize
this any relationship between us must be a rather unrealistic one.

Please don't let us continue this correspondence, Henry. It is
so very exhausting. I find it takes me a day and a sleepless night to write
this sort of letter, and I am so overworked just now cooking for seven and
trying to get ready for a show in December - I do wish it had all never had
to happen.

Yours,
Kitty.

TURVILLE HEATH 310

IBSTONE HOUSE,
IBSTONE,
№ HIGH WYCOMBE,
BUCKS.

him that he had to take a hammer and smah up life whenever it formed the pattern that he most liked. If you saw him as a happy man it was because he was temporarily happy because he was seeing you. He was a witty and a humorous man, which is quite different from a happy man. I had an aberrant self, and the aberration was to burden with my demands for a common happiness a man who was committed to unhappiness. I wish that inglorious instead of ignoring hist tragedy you were sorry for him. I feel that you have let yourself forget what he was actually like and what you used to feel about him, I wish you would think back to it and get back to a sense of his private life.

All sorts of things have worried me lately in case they had fostered your feeling that I came between you and H.G.. After the cremation it struck me as a pity that you had not gone up with Gip and Frank and Marjorie and myself when to the last of the ceremony. But I had hated the whole ceremony and I so dreaded the last stage which we were drawn in to see, and I did not think of it as an experience to be shared, but as something that it was a pity for any of us to see, something H.G. himself would not have approved of. There is also a tiresome trivial matter about his carpet. I mentioned that I might give you it to you, and twenty times I have been about to tell you that I thought it would be better not to do so, as it is very long, has a short pile, and in any of your rooms it would have to be put under furniture, which the man who looks after our carpets said would ruin it in no time. I am taking it out of the hall and putting it in the library as even there it is wearing.

TURVILLE HEATH 310

September 14, 1949.

Dear Marjorie,

I enclose copies of the letters from Anthony and Kitty which Henry received this morning. They are a good deal worse than we thought they would be.

As you will see, the basis for Anthony's accusation was a request, very reasonable on my part, which he did in one of the letters from me to H.G. which you have handed over to him. It is most unfortunate that he should have these letters. It was inevitable that, if he read this passage from my letter, he would fly into a rage. He is not clever about business matters, really does not see why anybody should have any money except himself or obey any rules about money, and is always thinking that people are trying to defraud him. I had to give up my trusteeship of his trust fund on the advice of my solicitor because he made it impossible for me to carry out my legal obligations; and not long ago Henry had to step in to clear up an extraordinary situation which had arisen between his remaining trustee, the Westminster Bank, and Anthony - he had wanted to do something about buying his house which it was impossible to do under the terms of the trust, the Bank had told him that and suggested another way of doing it which was legal and advantageous, Anthony wrote them letters of maniacal fury telling them that they were obviously actuated by malice and were persecuting him by acting against his interests. If there is anything which can be made to sound damaging to me by the wildest perversion of truth, in any of these letters, it will be copied and hawked round London by both Anthony and Kitty. That is the simple truth, although this incident comes out of a clear sky, and though we all spent last Christmas here together in one of the happiest Christmases I have ever had in my life. When Anthony thought of leaving Kitty years ago, though my only offence was to try and see that he provided for Kitty and the children, he conducted the most insane campaign against me, in which Kitty, to please him and try to get him ack, joined with the utmost enthusiasm. I doubt if you will ever get these letters back from Anthony; and I haven't the slightest doubt that some day they will be sold.

I do not mind any effect that all these ongoings may have on Henry and me, they really cannot touch us, but I mind very much that Anthony should be able to behave like this.

As for the letter which Anthony sent Henry: it was one in which I spoke

critically of Henry, and it was most cruel to both of us that he should have
sent it. It did not really matter, as the understanding between Henry and me
is complete. But it was a cruel thing to have done, and the suggestion that
there are other letters of the same sort is very cruel.

As for Kitty's letter, you will recognise its spirit. It is most
untruthful. Anthony clearly gave me the undestaking, because I asked for
it, and it is quite untrue that she gave it to me after he left the room.
I also wrote a letter to him clearly stating that I had understood him to
make such an undertaking. But she will do anything to please him, and she
does notاري to help him and control these mad phases. If she were different
we could do something to keep watch over the family, but you will see from
this letter that we can do nothing. Her account of what Anthony said to
the publishers is quite untrue, he gave me a positive guarantee that
nobody concerned would raise any objection. Her reaction to Henry's warning
that Anthony's attitude meant that there could be no contact between the
two families is to say tersely that "I quite see that according to your
standards Anthony has behaved very badly and the only thing for you is to
cut him out of your will." She might at least have pretended that there
were other aspects. You will see in her reference to my backing Anthony's
overdraft - which has the essence of the real sponge in it, she takes it as
the workings of fate - how little help she is to Anthony in his particular
difficulties.

Probably all this will pass, and Anthony will come out again as he
really is, his own valuable self. But you see how it is, and why I fear
his being trusted with the biography and all that correspondence, or
putting himself forward as a figure apart from some definite sober achievement.

Yours ever,

TURVILLE HEATH 310.

September 15, 1949.

My dear Anthony,

You have taken quite a wrong view of this passage in my letter
of 1927. I was not trying to prevent H.G. making a settlement on you. I am
suggesting to him that if you and I had shared a common home - and I had no
reason to expect that you would marry so very early - it would be an absurd
and unnatural position that I had to come to you to ask you for money to pay
the rent, supposing that I had a run of ill luck or ill health. I explicitly
say that he could trust me to hand over the income to you. I don't think
that the financial relations between you and me can have led you to suppose
that I would have failed in this undertaking.

I hate to have the relationship between you and me resolved into
a matter of accounts, but surely you realise that I had before that - and
after that - contributed to your support much more than the income from this
stock. I do not mean that I would have wanted to repay this from that income -
I explicitly say that I would have turned it over to you. But it may give
you a sense of proportion to remember this.

I wish you would show this 1927 letter of mine to a solicitor.
He would tell you that there is nothing wrong or discreditable in my request,
but that it was a sensible and natural attempt to deal with a difficult
situation. Surely you understand that if Kitty were left to bring up Em,
and she had no income and he had, the question of controlling him in his
adolescence and youth might be troublesome. I am the more surprised at your
not seeing this, because I thought you were of the opinion that having the
uncontrolled disposal of your income from such an early age had been unsettling
and had prevented you from getting down to work.

I always told H.G. that it was unjust to you, and insulting to
me, that you were not to inherit on exactly the same terms as Gip and Frank.
I mention this to dispel any misunderstanding that may be tormenting you.
But I mention it with some diffidence, because it is obviously important
not to care too much for money.

As for your sending a letter of mine to Henry in the hope
that what it contained would be unpleasant news to him, this is the second
time that you have done this, and you should have found it impossible to
do this once. The trouble is that you live too much by yourselves,

September 16, 1949.

My dear Anthony,

You really must stop tormenting yourx If over these things.

You have wholly misunderstood this passage in my letter of 1927.
I was not trying to prevent H.G. making a settlement on you. I am suggesting
to him that if you and I had shared a common home - and I had no reason to
expect that you would marry so very early - it would be an absurd and
unnatural position that I had to come to you to ask you for money to pay
the rent, supposing that I had a run of ill luck or ill health. I explicitly
say that he could trust me to hand over the income to you. I don't think
that the financial relations between you and me can have led to suppose that I
would have failed in this undertaking.

I made this suggestion under the advice of Theo Mathew, who pointed
out to me that young people were often thoughtless about money, and that
this arrangement would perhaps be better for the relationship of a mother and
and son living together. So far from making this suggestion because I saw
in the settlement "a possible source of humiliation and mbarrassment" to
myself at some future date, I made it because an adviser who always was
careful of your interests thought it would remove a possible source of friction
between us.

I wish you would show this letter of 1927 to a solicitor and tell him
what I m telling you and what you think. I am sure he would tell you that
there is nothing wrong or discreditable in my request, but that it was a
sensible and natural attempt to deal with a difficult situation. Suely you
understand that if Kitty were left to bring up Em, and she had no income and
he had, there might be trouble in his adolescence and youth. I am the more
surprised that you do not see this, because I thought you were of the opinio
that having the uncontrolled disposal of your income from such an early age
had been unsettling and had prevented you from getting down to work.

I think it would be a good thing if you sat down and thought about the
financial side of your life, and asked yourself if you have any grounds
for suspecting that I or anybody else close to you has ever dealt with you
fairly or greedily over money.

I find it difficult to deal with the other matters which are troubling
because I really do not know what picture is in your mind. I gather that you
think that I came between you and your father. There is not one word of truth
in that. It is true that I left him, but that was in part because it was
clearly impossible to go on living with him and provide you with a stable
and orderly home. But I did everything I could to strengthen the tie between
you, partly because you were both at your most charming and your happiest when

you were together. Surely you realise that it must have been delightful for me too, when he used to do those little drawings for you. I would have thought it a dreadful thing, considering the intense affection you felt for H.G. if I had ever prevented you from seeing him when he said he wanted to see you; and I can safely say that not on one single occasion did I do so. As for material matters, I always told H.G. - and the last time I told him this was, I think, just before the war - that I thought it not just or kind or courteous to you or to me that you should not inherit on exactly the same terms as Gip and Franc. But his strange complex forbade him to do this though I am sure he was as fond of you as he was of Gip and Frank, and possibly more.

It is very hard for us to come to an understanding on this. You see, you were only ten years old when H.G. and I separated; after that you saw hi briefly during the holidays, and then occasionally till the end of his life. Obvio sly I couldn't describe to you when you were a child or adolescent wha was an intense and subtle and tragic relationship - I doubt if I could ever describe it to you in any fulness, obviously that too is an impossibility, at any age. But when you were twenty you went down to the country and lived away from me and from all the people from whom you could have gathered anything about H.G. and myself. So far as I can make out you have spent much of the fifteen years which have passed since then telling yourself a story about your parents and their relationship to you and each other. It unfortunately happens that part of this story is his representation of myself as a crazed old lady. This began, so far as I can remember, when I was about forty-two, and is unaffected by the fact that I carry on a fairly successful and active professional life. It means that you do not believe on word that I say; and when I tell you anything about H.G. you don't believe it. I can't enlighten you. I can't even convey to you that you are living in a dreamland. But surely it might occur to you that if Kitty and you parted in three years' time, Kitty and you might know more about the relationship between you than Caro ever would, however hard she might work on the subject later. It might occur to you that Caro would, almost certainly, be influenced by her fantasies.

Forgive me if I say that I don't like what you have done with the story of us three. So far as I can make out you have painted a picture of H.G. as a great man and a healthy, normal character, with whom you might have had a happy life had it not been for my aberrant self. This disregards the real and suffering self of H.G.. It really was a source of misery to him that he had to take a hammer and smash up life whenever it formed the pattern that he most liked. If you saw him as a happy man it was because he seeing you and was temporarily happy. He was a witty and a humorous man, which is quite different from a happy man. I had indeed an aberrant self, and my aberration was to burden with my demands for a common happiness a man who was committed to unhappiness. I wish that instead of ignoring his tragedy you were sorry for him. You should be letting yourself forget what he was actually like and what you felt about him, I wish you could think and get back to a sense of his private life.

All sorts of things are worrying me in case they have fostered your feeling that I came between you and H.G.. After the cremation it struck me as a pity that you had not gone up with Gip and Frank and Marjorie and myself to see the last stage of the ceremony. But I had so hated the whole service and knew you were hating it, and so dreaded the last stage we had to see, that I did not think of it as an experience to be shared, but as something that it was a pity for any of us to see, something H.G. himself would not have approved of. I should perhaps have spoken of this, but I thought you felt as I did. There is also a trivial matter about his carpet. I mentioned that I might give it to you; and twenty times I have started to tell you and been interrupted that I thought it would be better for me to keep it, it is very long, has a very short pile, in any of your rooms would have to be put under furniture, and would be ruined in no time, according to the man who comes and cleans our carpets in situ. I am taking it out of the hall, as it is wearing out even there, and putting it in the library. I now feel that all sorts of things that mean nothing to me because I didn't feel this sure to separate you and take from him what should be yours for that very reason may seem to you evidence of that nightmare.

I think it is better that we do not see each other or write to each other for some time. You know quite well that H.G. would prefer you to get on with your life and not worry about the life that he and I lived. I realise fully that what I say has not reality to you just now, so don't trouble to set down my wishes for the book and your future.

Yours ever,

Savile Club, 69 Brook Street, W.1

Mayfair 5462

Secretary's Office

Mayfair 6449

21st October, 1954.

Your

H.M. Andrews, Esq.,
c/o Barclays Bank Limited,
54 Lombard Street,
London, E.C.

Dear Mr Andrews,

I write in regard to
the membership of Mr Anthony P.West.

I understand that you
have directed Mr Messrs Barclays Bank
Ltd., to make an annual payment of
£18-18-0d on behalf of Mr West, this
representing annual subscription to the
Savile Club. The annual subscription
was increased from £18-18-0d to £21
as from 1st January, 1951, but that is
not the reason for writing this letter.
The point is that Mr West has not used
the Club for some time and I am not
quite certain what his intentions are
in regard to membership, since I am
not in touch with him. I am concerned
to see that the £18-18-0d is still
forwarded but in fact I have no power
to alter this and I wonder whether you
would review this question as to the
continuation of the payment, bearing in
mind all the circumstances.

P.T.O.

IBSTONE HOUSE: IBSTONE:
IBSTONE: BUCKS.

September 24, 1964

My dear Anthony,

You do it your way. But I do want to correct what I think is an misapprehension on your part. You say that Kitty "acquired by H.G.'s will what would otherwise have been my share in his copyrights." This is not so. You were never left by any will of H.G.'s any share in his copyright. He thought he had adequately provided for you, by the £14,000 which was the original amount of the settlement you afterwards transformed into the marriage settlement. If you will cast back your mind, you will realise that such a supposition was not unreasonable considering how his capital had shrunk at that time. It happened that at the time when you wished to get a divorce to marry Audrey Jones I was not permitted to give any financial help to Kitty because, by an idiotic quirk of the law, this would have been considered evidence of collusion, and the divorce could not have gone through. Kitty then very sensibly applied to H.G., who gave her some money and then added the bequest of £2500 and a share in the copyrights to his will. He did not tell Kitty he had done this, nor did he tell me, nor Marjorie, who though you did not like her always watched quite keenly over your interests. The responsibility rests solely on H.G., who, it would seem to me, was simply providing for Kitty so that you did not have to worry about that, as you had also the settlement, and together they made a satisfactory income. I realise that it must be intensely annoying for you that you have none of the capital left you by H.G.. But on the other hand I think you ought to remember that if her spending income is, as you say, two thousand pounds a year, she could hardly provide a home for Em and Caro such as you would wish them to have, for much less. Money is not worth what it was when you left England; and it is unfortunate that while you took the children on for the summer they needed a home at other times of the year, and Kitty for all the year. She didn't inherit anything from her mother till about two years ago; and she has not shown the slightest reluctance to comply with your desires regarding taking the costs of Em's college fees from the marriage settlement. I don't know what you mean about " a stop-gap solution that will mean reopening the question and going cap in hand to Kitty and the trustees all over again in two or three years," because she wanted to make the arrangements for the whole education programme here and now, which I thought was perhaps unwise. I think any reluctance she showed up till now was due to the fact that she thought that Caro might have some further expenses. But But I've not seen, from the first moment she told me of your request, the smallest desire to make difficulties.

1st East 75th
N.Y.C. N.Y.

my dear Rac,

I am indeed sorry that you found
my letter of November 3rd so extraordinary as
to call for "an honest account" of the situation
that led me to write it.

The situation is rather simply that
I am your son and that I am still fond of you. I
do not write to you as often as I should, or as
often as I feel obliged, or with any freedom and
confidence, because whenever I take pen in hand
to do so I am overwhelmed by my knowledge that
no matter what I say to you or how I say it the
result is likely to be just such a reply from you as
I have received today.

9 November 67.

November 6, 1967.

My dear Anthony

I am entirely mystified by receiving this morning in an envelope postmarked November 3 a letter which seems to have been written months ago. Pamela died in June. You must know quite well that I need no news of Em's exams, as he has been heresince, and at any rate we are in correspondence over the money I allow him. You also write about your "unhappiness at being estranged from" me. I do not know why you should write this in summer or now! What has happened is that since our meetings in New York, which seemed to me very pleasant, I have written to you friendly letters which you have not answered. The letter you now send me, were it shown to someone else, would suggest that it was I who had been responsible for an estrangement, and this you know to be grossly untrue.

I am not angry with you. This tortuousness has been the mode of our relationship for so long that I would be stratled if it disappeared. But as you know quite well that in all your life I have never done you any harm, had you not better be frank about what is going on ? You talk of "our complexities of feeling and emotion about each other," but such complexities have been on your side only. I started out with a straightforward love such as a mother feels for a son, and since you have not succeeded in killing it I would still give you straightforward help, if you would give me an honest account of the situation which makes you write such an extraordinary letter.

Yours ever,

IBSTONE HOUSE: IBSTONE:
N AR HIGH WCOMBE: BUCKS.

November 251967.

My dear Jamie,

I am sorry to worry you about a business of which I
you are probably as tired as I am!

This morning the November 11 issue of the New Yorker
arrived, and I found in it a story by Anthony called "Miss
Millard," which, like the story," Mr Jeogh," which he published
in the New Yorker in the summer, is probably one of the short
stories you are considering publishing when there are enough of
them to make up a volume.

To deal with "Miss Millard" first. It hink this is a
very good short story, one o the best Anthony has written.
But I am not at all happy about the fact that he has called the
woman who is its subject by her real name. What he says about
her is charming, but you know what our libel laws are, and
the trouble that can be caused by th threat of an action,
and this woman was not at all as Anthony represents her. She was
a teacher who was a fellow-patient pf his in a sanatorium, and
she had just passed her final examination, by which I conclude
she was twenty-one or so. She could perfectly well be alive today
she could be as young as sixty-two. Anthony was very much smitten
with her, and after he came out of the sanatorium I had an urgent
need to go to America to earn some money, as his illness had been
very expensive, and I went for a twelve-week job from the Herald-
Tirbune. He was taken as a weekly boarded by his school, and at
Anthony's suggestion I engafed Miss Millard, who had come out of
the sanatorium at the same time, to tay in my flat in Kensington
at the weekends, and look after Anthony. When I came back at the
end of the period, which was also the end of Anthony's school ten
to find