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Yes, I’ve read Anna Karenina. Twice. I don’t like it as much as War and Peace; though I can’t judge it as severely as you do. I feel a strong personal affection for Tolstoy (which few people seem to share) and enjoy him even at his silliest; as in The Kreutzer Sonata and the notes to What is Art?
Certainly, Anna is a failure: Partly, I think, because Tolstoy tried, consciously or unconsciously, to write a “great” novel in the French manner which he pretended to detest. And so there has to be a “great” tragic theme.
The moment he had written “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” on the fly-leaf, he had doomed the whole book to disaster; though the heaviness is eased off a bit by the confused ending, floating the reader back into life again, after the suicide. Any of the French masters would have closed on Anna’s death, I believe; and left one feeling as though one had swallowed a plum-stone. Nevertheless I am very fond of it, it patches. The row at the opening and the horserace and the haymaking and Anna’s thoughts as she is driving to the railway station for the last time (one of the earliest examples, perhaps, of the modern technique of reported thought?) And Vronsky nearly comes off as a great comic character. There is a scene when he’s already had Anna once or twice and is being very polite about it: “For an instant of this bliss . . . ” which makes me smile whenever I think of it. Of course all this retribution stuff is nonsense. Tolstoy can’t seriously have believed in it, himself. There is a bit where Dolly comes to visit the guilty pair when Tolstoy makes obvious, brilliant efforts to save the book by prov-ing that the liaison was bound to be unhappy in the long run. But he doesn’t prove it, because it wasn’t.
Today, I am thirty. Did Villon say that, at thirty, he had drunk all his
“hontes”?25 Or was it thirty-three? I feel as if I still had some pretty unap-petizing ones in store. Like you, I am aware that this is the moment for a pronouncement. Like you, I fail to make it. I have no message whatever to the British Public or the boys of the old school. At forty, if spared, I’ll try again.
[handwritten postscript:] Heinz returns the greetings. Please remember me to Bob.
Yours ever,
Christopher Isherwood
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16-1-35
West Hackhurst,
Abinger Hammer,
Dorking.
Dear Isherwood,
Dr Norman Haire26 has lettered to William [Plomer] that if my novels were analysed they would reveal a pretty mess, and that the works of H.
Walpole and S. Maugham would be even prettier. So I thought I would set to myself, and began last night in a lockable book. There are things in my earlier stuff which are obvious enough to me now, though less so when I wrote them—e.g. the rescue of Eustace by Gennaro in the Story of a Panic, and Gino’s savaging of Philip in Where Angels—, and there is one curious episode: the sacrificial burning of a number of short stories in 1922 in order that a Passage to India might get finished. So I thought I would put all this down, but soon got tired and am unlocking myself to you instead. I wish you were in England for several reasons. For one thing we always agreed to spend January together—do you remember—and it’s already half gone. For another thing[,] I would very much have liked your advice over the Council for Civil Liberties. Can I work with people like Claud Cockburn or not?27 You could have told me. I can’t be a communist because I can’t apply my mind to communism. There may be other reasons: you could have told me. And oh my god tomorrow evening we are to consider what my committee calls a “Charter,” and to specify what bless-ings in the way of free speech[,] free thought and free assemblage we propose to confer not only on Great Britain but on North Ireland, India, and West Africa. Substitute “f ” for “ch” is my own thought, but even thus emended the charter will not carry far, for it has no guts behind it. We have not money, or if we have immediately spend it. The evening after that will be better—a play by Virginia [Woolf] called “Freshwater” (or “an evening at the bay”), and the evening after that will be best, for Bob comes.
Dr Norman Haire, about whom William has already made numerous puns, leads one a circuitous course I must say. To start again at my own writings, I am trying to put together a volume of reprints. There is plenty of stuff and much of it quite good in patches, but slight terrors steal over me.
It’s been so ineffective, when one considers the course of affairs, and it’s so imperfect when compared with real writing. I was very pleased to hear from you. I “owed” you a letter as a matter of fact, and had it been written at the proper time should have told you how much I liked Little Friend. It was wonderfully little spoilt. I went three times. I wish that Len would act again. I hardly ever see anyone whom I care to look at on the films. My other news would have been that, last November, I went for a day to the Saar. It was more pal-zeik-01 4/21/08 10:51 AM Page 41
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like some one else’s expedition than my own, but a great success. Thence I proceeded for a week to St Remy de Provence, where I often go. This was a great success too, but sunshine and calm instead of fog and romance.
Well it is 1.0 A.M. and I seem to have written nothing at all. Day after day goes by in a muddle. We had curried eggs for supper, I have read half a letter of Horace Walpole’s, Mrs O’Brien and Miss Pollak think Mrs Morgan is going to be married, the wireless is less good for regional, Sir Akbar Hydari writes on gold-speckled paper which was used for ancient Moghul documents. What is one to do with all that? I will go to bed. I am at last getting a few dreams again about lovely landscapes and trying to remain very quiet when I wake up so that I may remember them.
Please give my remembrances to Paul Kryger28 and my regards to Heintz.
I do hope you will both get to England sometime soon. I don’t suppose I shall get to Denmark unless I can do so with or without Bob—i.e. during his holidays, which again I have not much chance of spending with him.
With love,
E.M. Forster
17-1-35
The Danes, always thoughtful, have decided this morning to translate A Passage to India and I am signing the contract. Or was it that you gingered them? They are Berlingske Forlag, 34 Pilestraede, Copenhagen K.
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Classensgade 65
Copenhagen
February 7 [1935]
Dear Forster,
Thank you for your letter. I have been a long time answering it because I had to finish typing the play Auden and I have written together.29 Also I have been to the dentist.
First, I must warn you that you will shortly receive a review copy of my novel.30 Please don’t misunderstand this. It is in no sense a hint that you shall “do anything” about it. But merely a device for saving money at the Woolfes’ expense; I am sending review copies to all my friends who can be classed as “literary”: as the six copies I get free don’t go far, and, this time, there is a more than usually large number of libelled persons to be propiti-ated with suitably inscribed volumes.
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How like Dr Haire to “titter” to William abut the unconscious content of your novels. I met him once in Berlin. Really, these sexologists are hardly adult. As if all of us hadn’t made these momentous “discoveries” while still at school! However, it’s an amusing game. The Gino-Philip savaging is perhaps your classic instance, but I can think of two others: The death on the football field in “The Longest Journey” (very fishy) and the moment when Rikky (spelling, or am I mixing it up with the mongoose in Kipling?) faints on hearing that he has an illegitimate brother (obviously because he was in love with the young man all the time and was horrified to discover that his passion was incestuous). So, you see, Dr Haire is not the only smut-hound on the beach.