Letters to a Sister (16 page)

Holy Innocents [28 December, 1953]

(I hear the Spanish call it All
Fools' Day, instead of April 1st)

Dearest Jeanie,

… Christmas already seems a long way back, how nice it was, talking, eating delicious food, and sitting with the lit Crib hearing the carols, so very peaceful and elevated and nice. I got home in good time for my dinner in Hampstead, where I collected some more comparisons, such as ‘as cool as a cucumber' and had more plum pudding, and next day went out to lunch and more p.p. again, & turkey & mince pies, so I have done well. Now back to normal, though many shops & public offices are still shut; we have decided on 4 days Christmas holiday each year….

I was told that there are plenty of 1928 Prayer Books about in the shops. A Prebendary told me that they all have the 1662 book printed with it; also that they still have [the prayer for] George V, as they mayn't move with the times. I'll remember to bring mine on Saturday.

I hope you have had a comparatively quiet time since Boxing Day. I am now very anxious that you shouldn't get worn out so that you retired and went to S. Africa,
¹⁴
I should feel so lost that I should probably go and do mission work in Tonga, and convert them to the C. of E. so that they needn't
keep Sunday so hard. I might even convert Salote.
¹⁵
I suppose you wouldn't care to come too? You nurse and I preach, and both of us eat sucking-pigs and yams with our fingers; which Nancy would cook for us. The perfect life, think it over seriously.... I got home laden with your presents—butter, shortbread, tea. You and Nancy are like good fairies. I shall like to hear what kind of Xmas your catechumen had.
¹⁶
I'm sure if anyone can convert her you will.

Very much love.

E.R.M.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 19 January, [1954]

Dearest Jeanie,

Thank you so much for returning the Prayer Book, which you ought to have kept till Saturday. What I am looking out for is the ‘Alternative Order', as printed in the large missal
¹⁷
that we use at the [Grosvenor] Chapel, with all the collects, prayers, introits, proper to each day; there is a small edition of this, but now out of print. I have it on order from Mow-brays in case it gets about again. At St Stephen's [Gloucester Road], where I went on Sunday, the Order is rather different, and threw me out. It is a beautiful church and a beautifully sung service. I am told… that in all those very extreme churches, a lot of ‘Roman patter' goes on among the priests under the shelter of the singing of the introits etc., but I didn't hear that. I hoped that T. S. Eliot, a churchwarden there, woul dtake the bag round, but he didn't... I feel that my spiritual home (outside the Chapel) is only among the Cambridge Platonists, whom I am re-reading now, or some of
them.
¹⁸
Their words shine among the tiresome theological discussions and pronouncements of their age, full of reasonableness and morality: ‘The pith and kernel of the Gospel consists in Christ inwardly formed in our hearts. Nothing is truly ours but what lives in our spirits. Salvation itself cannot save us so long as it is only without us.'
¹⁹

By the way, they would think the good agnostic in a more hopeful state of grace than the bad Christian: ‘He that endeavours... to comply with that truth in his life which his conscience is convinced of, is nearer the Christian, though he never heard of Christ, than he that believes all the articles of the Christian faith and plainly denyeth Christ in his life.'
²⁰
This kind of talk got them into trouble with both Protestants & Roman Catholics as heretics and ‘Bible-scorners', so did their praise of pre-Christian good men (except Jews, who were allowed goodness because in Scripture).

No, of course committing a sin is
far
worse than desiring it. But when people keep saying that we are more cruel than our ancestors because of bombing, there seems a fallacy in it, considering the appalling tortures they too perpetrated, both in war and peace; I mean, they did what they could, and I think were
more
cruel. I wonder if the atom-bombing
has
made us more cruel. Some people, perhaps; but in others there was a great horror of a revulsion from it, after Hiroshima when its human effects were described. I think if I had ever been for it (of course I wasn't) it would have changed my mind. I think I agree with you about our various moral improvements and declines, on the whole. I wonder if John Betjeman will.
²¹
He is against something he calls ‘progress';
I am never sure if this means moral, intellectual, economic, scientific, artistic, political, juridical, hygienic, or what. Whatever it is, he doesn't believe in it—but one can never bring him down to exact facts, he is apt to set up bogies and tilt against them.

I thought ‘Beg to differ' last night was good.
²²
I was glad Celia Johnson struck a more educated note when...[someone] said that wives, when their husbands were away, always ‘wondered what they were up to', and she said ‘That's just a music-hall point of view, surely.' She has a good influence on the team, I think; so have Joyce Grenfell and John Betjeman. Gilbert Harding is a very tiresome man, I can't think why the B.B.C. use him so much.

I hope you haven't been blown off your bicycle again. No big gales, but a tiresome wind; no frost, but chilly. I think people must come out to 8.15 church in order to cure their colds & coughs by prayer. They would cure them much quicker in bed, and not pass them on. But I must try and not become like mother about colds.
²³

Very much love.

E.R.M.

I think I shall keep a Nicest-Thing-Each-Day diary too. To-day, visiting Yugo–Slav Tourist office and seeing lovely maps and photographs of Yugo–Slavia. Or, getting a nice letter from an old clergyman containing some ruin-poems he had written, not good but enthusiastic. He says he read
The Lee Shore
in his first curacy, and has liked it ever since.
All
Ms poetry sent me is bad always….

Sunday [14 February,] 1954

Dearest Jeanie,

... Yes, I heard the two elderly ladies on the Welfare State.
²⁴
I used to know them both slightly. They didn't differ enough, I thought. How
good
that kind of person of our generation is apt to be! So high-minded and high principled. I have known, and fortunately still know, so many of them. They have a lot of inner light, and comparatively seldom commit the sin against the Holy Ghost. Their distinguishing mark, I think, is a sense of social responsibility and care for other people's welfare, and gentle womanliness….

I enclose an article on B.B.C. religion, which I think is too critical. I don't agree that it is a dilution of the tenets of the various Christian sects; though it is probably better to teach the things they agree about than to talk about Election and Papal Infallibility, both very minority tenets, and both pretty silly. (Which is the sillier, would you say? I think about the same!)….

Do you know what ‘the feminine role' is? I am accused of rejecting it, by a correspondent (a psychologist) who disagrees with me that men tend to be cleverer than women. She perceives evidence of this rejection in my novels. How does one reject it, I wonder? And what
is
it? Except being a wife & mother (as the masculine role is that of husband & father) I don't know what it is. And she doesn't seem to mean that....

My holiday plan is in the soup, as regards the Yugo-Slav villa: my publishers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) have offered to pay my expenses somewhere, if I write about it. I think of Russia, but fear it won't be possible. Of course really my next book should be a novel, for Collins. Mark Bonham Carter (of Collins) says that W. & N. are behaving like Satan, tempting me with the kingdoms of the earth to leave the path of duty…. Meanwhile I am writing poetry, which I like to
do sometimes. What a self-pleasing life I lead, while other people bicycle to sick people in the cold!…

Very much love.

E.R.M.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 g March, [1954]

Dearest Jeanie,

… No thank you, no more butter till after Easter (if then).

Faith, hope, and belief. I think (as I said) that hope is the first stage; hoping, against all probability, that what you would like to believe is true, even though almost knowing it can't be. Faith next; the affair still improbable, but worth accepting as a working hypothesis. Last, belief: really thinking a thing is true—it only (in my experience) comes by fits and starts, and doesn't cover the whole ground, at best. Perhaps I shall never exactly
‘believe'
in God, and shall always have to stick in the faith stage. Hope, of course, goes with all the stages.

She
²⁵
won't stop being a catechumen until baptism; if, indeed, she qualifies for one now—but I think she does, as she is under instruction. She is still in the
audientes
stage, and is allowed to attend church services. You might take her to see a baptism, also get her to read the baptismal service (in 1928 [Prayer Book] version). If she gives in her name for baptism, she will enter the
competentes
class. ‘To catechumens in this class, the great articles of the creed, the nature of the Sacraments, and the penitential discipline of the church, were explained, as in the Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem,
²⁶
with dogmatic precision.' You won't have time for this, so you should pass her on to a clergyman. This stage lasts 40 days, and ‘special examinations and enquiries into
character were made at intervals during the period. It was a time for fasting, watching, and prayer…. Those who passed through the ordeal were known as the
perfectiores,
or
electi.'
If the catechumen lapses during the period into
idolatry or other grievous sin,
he is thrown back and has to go through a penitential discipline, varying, according to the nature of the offence, from a few months to 3 or 5 years. But they may still have baptism on their death-bed, as it is necessary to salvation. But if
through their own neglect
they die without baptism, they are buried without honour and not prayed for by the Church. You had better tell her all this, so that if she perseveres in wanting baptism, she will know what she is in for.

I made a mistake in mentioning my burglars
²⁷
to Father Johnson, he has become very nervy and anxious about it. He writes ‘you tuck in this horrid experience at the end of your letter, as if it were merely rather annoying, but not what so many of my penitents call “grievous”,' and he suggests all kinds of precautions against its recurrence. I usually try to remember not to tell him anything at all disturbing.

I am reading a book called
Myth and Ritual in Christianity
²⁸
.
It says ‘The word Myth is not to be used here as meaning untrue or unhistorical. Myth is to be defined as a complex of stories—some, no doubt, fact, and some fantasy—which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of life.'…

Very much love. Wet again!

E.R.M.

Stephen Spender thinks no strings are attached to the Soviet offer of fare-payment. It is a literary propaganda stunt, about Tchekhov.
²⁹
But I
might,
out of politeness, have to look at a
few tiresome things such as schools, hospitals, maternity homes and factories. It all depends how many. Most of my time
must
be spent in the Crimea & Caucasus, seeing things there. Tchekhov's home was in the Crimea, fortunately.

Rose finally decided to travel in Turkey, and spent about four weeks there in the summer of 1954.

Alexandretta
25 June, [1954]

Dearest Jeanie,

It was such a nice surprise to find a letter from you this morning at Antioch, forwarded from Trebizond…. Antioch was interesting, but nothing left of ancient Antioch except the Citadel on a high crag, which I didn't climb to. I saw the early church in a cave, (the earliest Christian church), and went out to Daphne. Antioch has an interesting medieval quarter, which used to be the whole town till a century ago or so; narrow twisting streets of little craftsmen's shops—coppersmiths (wasn't that where the malevolent Alexander lived, or was that Ephesus?),
³⁰
carpenters, jewellers, etc. I spent yesterday with a kind, intelligent, German couple, who talk English; he is an archaeologist, and she rides about the mountains with him bear-hunting. They are, I think, the only people in Antioch who know anything about the antiquities—Turks neither know nor care—so they were very useful. They said the Turks are rather anti-British, because of 1915 and the Dardanelles. But they like Germans, their allies. I spent 2 nights at Antioch. It was very hot.

Did you have time to listen to me and John Betjeman, I
wonder?
³¹
I had a letter about it from an unknown who said he had liked it, and was glad I had protested against J.B.'s view [that] we were ‘living on our spiritual capital'.
³²
By the way, have you a Koran? I shall like to see what it says about women in the mosques. The German archaeologist told me the men wouldn't let the women be photographed, because the Koran forbids anyone to be photographed, but men, being strong souls, can disobey without their souls being destroyed by it, whereas women, whose souls are very weak, can't. I wonder if the Koran also says women are ‘unclean'. Moslems think they are, but they may have thought of that for themselves.

I have just been talking to a young German couple in this hotel, who are touring Turkey on a motorcycle and writing a book about it. She wears trousers, and is much derided, but says she has learnt to ignore it. I wish all the Turkey guidebooks now in process had appeared in time for me to bring one. Suddenly everyone seems to be writing Turkey books, there having been none for about a century….