NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON
233 H G S
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN · CONN

3 July 1954

Dear George Plank:

It delights me to have heard from you,
delights me to have the friendliness of your salutation,
and delights me that you like the lecture on "Antony and
Cleopatra."

One day I hope we may actually meet. It
would take my wife to exchange notes with you on daffodils,
though no one more than myself enjoys the blooms from Tren-
owith — at least those blooms which are in New Haven. For
I understand that all five fingers on your hand are green,
and I should relish the horticulture at Marvells.

I am glad that you liked Bryher's newest
novel. I join with you in my admiration for "Sands", and
certainly it is the book closest to Bryher's spirit in her
metamorphoses through time. Only the other day I was reading
again her "Development", and it was a curious reversal of
chronology to find so many echoes of these new novels then.
But how shall one choose? I relish the extraordinary mood
of "October," and the illuminated miniatures on her manuscript
when she pictures the monk in his garden. The best writing,
I think, is in "Sands"; but there is such an easful rendering
of complicated scenes in "Fabula" that I marvel at it still.

We should have much to talk about, and you
would find that I can bellow like a bull, or be still like an
autumn crocus, as the occasion demands. Is 71 old? I had
never thought so.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON
233 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN · CONN

15 October 1956

Dear George Plank:

The 14th of October is over, and the Swiss
girls have returned to their respective lakesides. It was a
splendid visit, one's heart was constantly warmed by Hilda's
pleasure in her birthday and her grandchildren, and the feeling
that she had found "home" again.

She called it a kind of "direct analysis",
in the spirit of her Freud book -- which by the way it was she
who sent you it, the card "from the author" unfortunately mis-
laid by the packers --, which means the exposure to things
themselves rather than the fancy of things. I suppose she meant
the eighteen cases of her life's work spread out before her,
the return to the sea-coast after so many years of mountains and
"london flats, the trees still full of flowers on Church Street
in Bethlehem and "God's Acre" still grass-green between the flat
Moravian tombstones. And of course her grandchildren and Perdita
as a mother in her own home. The two boys were charming to
"Grandma Hilda," offered her their seashells as "homage", and
regailed her with the excitement of Valentine's being in first
grade, and Nikki's privilege of staying at kindergarten until
four o'clock as his older brother had done. Elizabeth Bryher,
however, proved to be the true sorceress: lying there like a
metamorphosed Perdita, a girl baby again. Hilda seemed suddenly
to sense that she had wanted to recapture all this, but had been
frightened of it -- as I used not to dare to want a thing too
much lest it fly from my grasp. The polyglot nature of Switzerland
too has become confusing for her, who was never bi-lingual,
let alone tri-lingual, or quadro-anything but herself. What
counts now for Bryher and myself -- and you, too, I know -- is
that if a crisis should come, or before one comes, there is a
congenial solution of her return.

Bryher, I fear, in all the goodness of her
heart, had little time for herself on this ausflug, and for once
longs for the quiet and repose of Kenwin. She is not one to keep
her wings down, but I hope she will nest for a bit.

Hilda sent you a copy of the newspaper clipping
of her interview in New Haven, but I thought you might like to have
a true photograph of the two of them together. I can only apologize
for having been intruded, but you will forgive that with your wonder-
ful generosity.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

233 HGS

YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN • CONN

15 December 1956

My dear George:

Really I cannot address you otherwise, both
of us being as it were within the family. "We did meet once
actually, only once it is true in that sense, but we have
been meeting constantly for years with Hilda and Bryher as
our mediums or media.

Hilda's holiday seemed to be a great success.
She spoke of it as "direct treatment", and indeed she was
subjected to a series of stimuli which ran the line of years
from portraits of her father and grandfather, to the old
home in Bethlehem (which suddenly appeared gay and happy
after all the years), and to her special delight in a grand-
daughter. She has dedicated her Selected Poems, which come
out next autumn, to the three sprouts, and silently "to the
Future." I know you will be as happy as I am that she now
has her eyes in that direction; it is the knowledge that
bulbs will leaf and blossom, and that she is a perennial.
Now we will see what we shall see (if, professorially, I
have my verbs right); and I tell her that her period abed
is only an interlude before metamorphosis. Her cards show
a wonderful spirit and courage, even though Bryher reports
her as uneasily waiting (as who would not) to stand again.

I should have answered your letter long since,
had it not been written when my wife and I were in the midst
of playing Huck Finn and floating down the rivers for 1500
miles on a stern-wheeler, from Cincinnati to New Orleans.
Fortunately our raft had hot and cold running water; I am
a pioneer only in moderation. We had just returned, when
two days later my father died, but having been unconscious
since early January, he was given the blessing of release.

Your kindness in offering to send me Hilda's
letters to you quite touches my heart, and though I should
love to have them whenever you can give them up, would not
a note to say they were to come to me permit you the pleasure
of their company during the years to come? And I should not
be greedy but simply untruthful did I not also hope that there
might be other letters from friends to you over the years
which would give the warmth of your life and the sense of
England during the past decades, that would be like a Constable
landscape for another generation. I do not speak lightly,
but as within the family.

BALLAD OF THE UNMIRACULOUS MIRACLE

Sit under a pine on Christmas Eve,
Heart bruised like a fallen nestling,
And the angels will sing you—no song save
The wind in the branches wrestling.

Peer down a mystical well and see
Far down in its waters mirrored—
The only sign there imaged for me,
My own face mournful and harrowed.

Seek out a stable known of old
And see the oxen kneel— —
With me crouched here before the cold
And hunger sharp as steel.

Go wander through the winter snows
And spy the Christmas bud
Unfold itself—the only rose
The brambles bear, my blood.

Like wingless birds are wind and wood,
Well, oxen, flowering bush
Till Christmas Day when I see God
Plumaged in my plucked flesh.

VASSAR MILLER