Letters to a Sister (31 page)

Today I am remembering your Baptism, but have forgotten mine, which was noted in my baptism Bible that Miss Currey
³⁵⁴
gave me and illuminated with the text about ‘remembering always our profession', but got burnt
³⁵⁵
in '41 so now I can't ever remember it. I don't think mother used to remind us of our days, which I should have thought she would.

What do the people round Aldermaston sit on? What would you do to call attention to the Jane Furse [Memorial Hospital] (say)?
³⁵⁶
I should drive round and round Manchester Square all day, never stopping, as I prefer to be under cover. I suppose I should have to have a flag about my Cause.

The book about U and non-U speech
³⁵⁷
was merely, of course, a study in the different words used by different sections of people; it was not meant to be about differences in outlook. That would be a much more difficult and profounder research, and probably not nearly so accurate. Anyone can hear the language differences and the different accents; the differences in mind and character caused by different educations are
much more complex, and are complicated by differences in character between members of the same social class.

I didn't hear the ‘Brains Trust'. But I think there is something in their view that spying shouldn't be done in the interests of other countries against one's own. After all, one accepts the benefits of social welfare, police protection, etc. etc., given by one's country, so it would seem mean to work against it while doing that, except when one thinks it very wrong in its policy, or a very corrupt government as Vichy was. But I wouldn't spy against Britain just because of Cyprus, Suez, Nuclear weapons, etc. Gerard Irvine, who was in Greece lately, had a conversation with Makarios, who called on the Archbishop of Athens while he was there. They got on quite well. Gerard told him that many of us regretted what Cantuar said about him,
³⁵⁸
and M. replied that he himself regretted some of the things said about us.

I am sending you the
Dome,
³⁵⁹
which I picked up in a very extreme church in—on Saturday. I don't know how wide its circulation is. It was their congregation who marched to Walsingham to atone for their new vicar, who had dropped some of their cherished rites. I ought to march to Walsingham to atone for my nearest church,
³⁶⁰
which has no weekday masses and only once a month on Sundays. Instead, they leave me notices about speakers from Keswick who function there. We certainly have a wonderful variety in the C. of E….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

Do read
Evelyn Underhill,
if you can get it.
³⁶¹
It is interesting. She was… very self-absorbed, and concerned with her spiritual state. There is an allusion to going to see ‘Deaconess Margaret' from Haslemere, but probably not Margaret, whom she would call ‘Sister Margaret' I think. Anyhow, M. would have mentioned meeting her.

6 October, [1958]

Dearest Jeanie,

... I enclose... an article from the
Times
Cyprus correspondent, saying that murder of women was planned by the Eoka leaders in order to infuriate the troops and provoke them to violence which they can then complain of. What a vicious circle it has all become.
³⁶²
…

Yes, I think the Lambeth Report is pretty unimportant, and says nothing but platitudes. Perhaps these were all they
did
say. They are hampered by disagreements among themselves, of course; e.g. about Nuclear weapons. (By the way, I am surprised you thought D. Soper
³⁶³
was for these; he has always been a pacifist.)

... I have a letter from P. Anson saying the book
³⁶⁴
is going well, tho' the Abbot of Prinknash was very vexed that a life of their disreputable but honoured founder should have been written at all. Their attitude towards him seems very ambivalent. They know how bad he was in many ways, but want to honour him all the same, and have enshrined his relics in the foundations of a huge Benedictine church they are building. They would rather he remained a pious legend than be revealed as a very faulty man. It makes one wonder how
many of the saints of the Church were similarly built up; it is an interesting thought. The
Tablet
review (by an oblate of Prinknash) calls P. Anson ‘waspish' towards Carlyle.
³⁶⁵
I thought he should have been considerably more so. I shall look forward to seeing the
Cath. Herald.
I am glad P.A. got in his Life before there was a pious one by some Prinknash monk.

I sometimes wish fools wouldn't talk so much on the wireless, I must say. One gets very sick of hearing them at it when one switches on. I suppose their egoism supports them thro' it and persuades them that they are liked. Anyhow, they get paid. In private life, we ought to talk in our natural manner whenever we like, so long as our natural manner isn't (it often is) too spiteful and unkind. Private
folly
in talk does no great harm. Anyhow one can't be always stopping to think ‘Is what I want to say sensible?' or one might be quite silent (as I am when I am among people who discuss things too high for me).

Very much love, & do take care.

R.

20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 27 October, [1958]

Dearest Jeanie,

Many thanks for yours and for sending Andrew Duncan-Jones.
³⁶⁶
I think the condemnatory and self-righteous verses in the Psalms can only be used about one's own worse self, and when it comes to helping them and giving them kindness,
it makes nonsense, as in Ps. 35, v. 13
³⁶⁷
etc. It is obviously an offended human being who speaks. But the simple denunciations and resolves to do injuries to one's foes can be applied all right in the sense I mean. I told A. D-J. when I answered him
³⁶⁸
that I didn't think they were true to the mind of Christ, and that I felt rather the same about some parts of the Gospels, in which the Evangelists seem to have let their own annoyance colour their reports.

I was rather exhausted on Friday, and began to think I was breaking up. But on Saturday I started a bronchial chest with slight temperature, which explained it. The temperature didn't last long, and now Dr B——has sounded my chest and given me something for it, so I am really all right again. I spent Sunday morning in bed, which is rather nice and peaceful, except that I had about 50 letters to write. I enclose Trevor Huddleston's exasperated letter to
The Times,
³⁶⁹
the [Times] Saturday sermon, and an interview with Aldous Huxley,
³⁷⁰
at part of which I was present, as it was at dinner with Julian H. They must have gone on with it after the women had left the room.

When I have prepared my talk on ‘Sacrament and Image', I will show it you.
³⁷¹
It is an interesting subject, tho' vast, of course, and one can only touch on it. Gilbert Murray has a passage about what the statues of the gods were to the later educated Greeks—fables, but a way to the apprehension of the true God.
³⁷²
He quotes Maximus of Tyre, who said ‘God, who is greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being,
is unnameable, unutterable, not to be seen by any eye. But we, unable to apprehend his essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory, etc. etc., yearning for the knowledge of him. Why should I pass judgment upon images? If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire, I have no anger for these divergences, only let them know what is divine, let them love', etc.
³⁷³
Someone else wrote ‘God is invisible, but the mind of man demands a visible symbol.'
³⁷⁴
And so on.

I am not sure that I will come this week, as my cough may be catching, and I am also rather tired. But I am picking up fast, and taking good medicines. I told the chemist he must label my tablets and medicine with their names and what they cure. He said there was a law against this, as patients might guess what illness they had. I said that if my doctor hadn't told me that, I should change him, and that Dr B. always does. He thought that if someone had a heart in [a] poor state, doctors should say it was muscular strain. I never heard anything sillier. The poor patient might drop dead from running for a bus, owing to not having been warned. I told Dr B. afterwards and he quite agrees with me, and says of course there is no such law; how could there be?

I have a long letter from Dorothea. She says that Mabel (widow of Bruce [Conybeare]
³⁷⁵
) thinks no one could guess from
Trebizond
what religion, if any, I had. That seems to me so odd. On the other hand the clergy think I am very Anglican, and Fr Ross of All Saints' [Margaret Street] asks me to open the All Saints' historical centenary exhibition next June. I can't of course. He would probably be shocked if he knew I was an intercommunionist. A friend of Dorothea's
³⁷⁶
who heard our Religious Brains Trust at Bognor
³⁷⁷
was rather shocked by my suggesting this as my contribution to our discussion about the way to union. I dare say the Bish. of Chichester
³⁷⁸
was too; but the Presbyterian
³⁷⁹
and the Methodist
³⁸⁰
agreed with me. So does D. but she thinks lots of Anglicans wouldn't.

The white smoke has gone up !
³⁸¹
I hope at 6.0 we shall hear who he is. Several cardinals have died of excitement since the conclave began.
³⁸²
Now the news is announced,
³⁸³
and none of the favourites have won. I expect the younger ones all voted for one of 76 in hopes their turn would come in 2 or 3 years. I know nothing about him, but hope he is rather mad and will utter strange things.

Deep fog coming down again.

Very much love.

E.R.M.

It was three days after this letter was written, on 30 October 1958, that Rose's death took place, suddenly, after a heart attack.

The idea of a novel with Venice as its setting had been taking shape in Rose's mind for more than a year before she died. During her stay there in 1957 she was already jotting down some rough notes. But various writing commitments kept her from starting on the book until she was in hospital after her accident in the Spring of 1958. Before her death she had completed the first chapter, ‘Midsummer Moon', which gives a dramatic beginning to the plot (a road accident near Stonehenge), includes a satirical sketch of the doings of latter-day Druids, and introduces some of the main characters. This and Rose's miscellaneous notes provide many clues as to how the novel might have developed. They show that ‘Venice Besieged', like ‘The Towers of Trebizond', was to combine flights of fancy with familiar scenery and facts, and suggest that in parallel with the main plot (evidently involving blackmail) there would have been a portrayal of conflicts at a deeper level of consciousness.

It appears from the notes that the theme of a beleaguered city held several allegorical meanings for Rose. ‘Venice Besieged' represents not only mankind encompassed by the powers of spiritual evil, and civilization threatened by barbarism, but also the individual soul locked in desperate warfare with itself, barricading itself against the torments of a guilty conscience. There are also hints that the eventual overcoming of the deadlock was to be, first of all, by means of a cataclysmic disaster. A terrible destruction had to take place before new life could begin. Rose had, in
this context, apparently been toying with the idea of a second Deluge, caused by a great tidal wave sweeping in from the Adriatic and submerging the lagoon islands and then Venice itself Clearly the portrayal of this allegory and also the main plot were still evolving in her mind; on the other hand, she had already visualized the personalities of several of her characters in some detail.

There was to be a bouncing ingénue, Sukey Bun-Flanagan, daughter of a nouveau riche father and an aristocratic mother, owners of several Venetian palazzi; and there was her friend Emily Hyde, ‘pretty and white and round', whose fiancé, Henry Tarrant, a barrister-novelist, takes to drink after the accident in which he killed a cyclist. Then there is their friend Peter Luckles, who subsequently collided with the dead cyclist and was accused and tried for manslaughter; and Danby, a cool, enigmatic writer in her late sixties, sardonically amused by the foolish conversation of her friends. Obviously, as in the ‘The Towers of Trebizond', there was to be a strong flavour of religion, and also an unusually talented animal, this time a budgerigar which could memorize and repeat telephone numbers.

Peter Luckles rode his Vespa from Great Gussage in Dorset towards Stonehenge in Wiltshire on the night of June 20th-21st. The sky was overcast and dark, the windless air was laden with fugitive drifts from the sultry day. The road twisted between broad grass verges and hedges pink and white with dog-roses and honeysuckle; beyond them the downs heaved rounded shoulders against a brooding sky.

Peter Luckles rode in a mellow dream, and sang, from time to time, snatches of opera. Taking a sharp bend on its off side, the Vespa crashed into a pedal bicycle and overturned. Peter, having passed out, came to, and he was lying beneath his Vespa, with the pedal bicycle and its one-time rider in a grim tangle of buckled wheels and blood beside him.

‘Oh Lord,' cried Peter. ‘Oh Lord, what have I done?' Trying to sit up, he fell dizzily back, and lay still, breathing heavily, supposing that someone would before long arrive. He guessed rightly, for the roads to Stonehenge were by no means empty to-night. A car presently appeared, stopped, and emitted three people, all eager to assist at an accident, for the world has greatly altered since the days when priests and Levites passed by on the other side, and now it is all the police can do to keep the crowds back. So one of them drove on to Amesbury to fetch the personnel essential to incidents, such as doctors, police, and ambulance, while two remained on the troubled scene, endeavouring to recover the injured and comfort them with the coffee and champagne they had brought with them for their sustenance through the night.
The pedal cyclist was past this, he lay in stupor, or else was it death; but Peter, whom they already knew, copiously drank, and the more he drank the more his mind cleared and the blackness of his situation impressed itself on him, so that soon he was groaning aloud. His friends, who were a brother and sister called Tim and Sukey Bun-Flanagan, tried to cheer him up, but they knew him to be in a pitiable case which could have no happy issue. They could only murmur dubiously, ‘I expect hell come round soon', and ‘They never look where they're going, these pedallers', and ‘They never have their lights on', and similar consolations.