Very much love.
E.R.M.
1949-1950
Rose finished writing ‘Fabled Shore’ in 1948 and then, recuperating from the strain of the war years, turned again to a novel. The devastation caused by the bombing still haunted her, however, and Barbary, the heroine of ‘The World my Wilderness’, the child of a broken marriage, is shown among the bombed ruins of the City of London, as well as among the ruins of human lives.
This book by no means exhausted Rose’s obsession with the theme of ruins—their history, their nostalgic evocations, their symbolism, and their beauty. In 1949 she was asked to write ‘a short book on the pleasures of looking at ruins’, a subject which proved so fascinating that the book eventually took her three years and became the longest she ever wrote. The research for it involved many pilgrimages both at home and abroad, and in the summer of 1949 she went over to Ireland on one of these intriguing quests.
Eccles Hotel, Glengariff, Co. Cork1 16 July, [1949]
Got here at 4.0 this afternoon, after a night at Bowen’s Court, 90 miles away.2 This is a lovely little bay, with little islands scattered about it, and woody shores and rocks—lovely for bathing. Unfortunately the warm spell is over (as elsewhere) and it is cold and wet but they say will improve. Boats for hire; the boatmen say it would be ‘unfair’ to them to swim to the islands. But I expect I shall. It was a lovely drive from Cork, and a nice crossing. Radio not much good here, as my set can’t get London, but we can get Dublin, which gives some news, though mostly about Ireland….
Very much love.
E.R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 11 July, [1950]
Dearest Jeanie,
... Is it Miss K——who has proposed herself? People shouldn’t do it. The only safeguard is not to have a spare room, like me. I suffered terribly when I used to have one. I hope one day to find an equally nice flat with one more room (some in Hinde [House] have) but shall use it as a work-room, and keep the spare bed under my own as I do now, to be only used by you. Nearly as tiresome as self-asked visitors are the people who invite you to some meal to meet someone else, and, when you say you can’t go, press you as to which day you can go—a very low trick. Harold Nicolson told me of a worse one: a writer who asks him to review his book for The Observer, and, when he says he is sorry he can’t because it has been sent to another reviewer, writes to the editor and asks him to get it back for H.N. I certainly shouldn’t review it after that. But the writing world (like other worlds) is full of low ruses.
You may be right that Frank Swinnerton partly means a pessimistic answer by a lemon.3 I think what I mean is mainly an uncertain answer. Sometimes, of course, an answer may be both.
I’m glad you were interested in re-reading The World my Wilderness, and found the people real. Some reviewers found them so unconvincing as to be little more than puppets—but people’s points of view about characters in novels are quite incalculable, so all one can do is to convince oneself that they are real and write accordingly. Of course one may quite fail to put them across, and I am always pleased when readers think I have—particularly, of course, you.
Korean news still bad.4 Dreadful to think of all the American wounded and captured in the enemy’s hands.
Did you read Ian Mackay on Russian Discoveries, which included America?5 As he says, ‘they brought it on themselves’.
Very much love.
E.R.M.
[Hotel Cappuccini, Amalfi]6 17 August, [1950]
Spending 2 nights at Amalfi, in this old monastery-hotel, high above the sea, with cells turned into bedrooms, cloisters, magnificent views, water that only occasionally runs; inconvenient but wonderfully beautiful. No monks left, in spite of picture [on this postcard]: Garibaldi turned them out in 1865. They probably used little water. Bathing all along here is perfect. On 15th we went to a procession and fireworks for the Assumption. No one seemed interested in Mary, only in fireworks. Italy seems less devout than in our day….
V. much love.
E.R.M.
PS. Little chapel off the cloisters has a wonderful presepio.7 Contadini8 coming in from the hills with oxen & mules & wine-carts, the first I have seen.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 14 September, [1950]
Dearest Jeanie,
Many thanks for [the] King-Hall [news-letter], and UNESCO on Race,9 which seems a very ignorant composition. Surely they should know that body & mind are mixed up together, and that the genes which transmit physical characteristics transmit mental ones too. And what a dull theory !10 One of the most interesting things about the human race is its racial differences. In America, e.g., the differences between the immigrants of different stocks, however long their ancestors have been there, is said to be marked—Irish, Scotch, English, German, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Negro, Mexican, etc, all with different characteristics. And even in G.B., how different the Welsh are from the Anglo-Saxons, & the Scotch, & the Irish, & even the northern and southern English, descended from Danes, Saxons, Jutes, etc. And what a dull affair the world would be without different racial contributions to it! I wonder why they think that a Jew by race, though he inherits his nose, hair, and general look, doesn’t inherit, say, his musical gifts, or his commercial cleverness, 01 his sense of God. On looking at the list of authors of the statement, however, I see that there are 3 Jews, one Mexican, one Brazilian, one Indian... all races which are self-conscious and fear the contempt of the races they live among, and have been despised and ill-treated in the past. This may account for it. I remember a Jew, Dr Singer,11 during the Nazi persecutions, who was always trying to get me to sign statements about there being no such thing as race. I never did, as it seemed to me nonsense. They mix up racial sameness with ‘the social bond between men’, as they put it, which exists among different races quite easily. It just shows the danger of grinding axes in scientific matters….
What are we to do to get out of Korea with dignity? It is too awful. There is a horrible account of it in Picture Post.12 And there seems no reason why it should ever stop. America should never have rushed in like that, dragging us after her. No wonder the soldiers have no idea what they are fighting about.
I am seeing Gilbert Murray next week and must ask him how he feels about it. But of course he is tied up with U.N. and likes them to try out their paces. I say, let Russia take anything, rather than send people to join in these barbarian wars….
Very much love.
E.R.M.
8 October, [1950]
Dearest Jeanie,
Many thanks for your letter. I don’t think you are fair to the Life of Florence Nightingale.13 See enclosed review, which gives a good idea of it. I don’t think anyone could think it ‘spiteful’. The author admires her tremendously: of course she doesn’t make her perfect, but her faults emerge almost entirely by her own letters, journals, and comments, and aren’t emphasised by the author at all. It would be dull if she had been faultless. She had an irritable and unforgiving temper, a good deal of self-pity, intolerance and contempt (especially for those who she thought were not doing all they could for the reforms she wanted, and who said they were tired or ill) and much too much anger with (a) her family and relations, (b) women who wanted to be doctors not nurses. She was temperamental & neurasthenic. But, with it all, she had no mean faults, and was a magnificent person both intellectually and in hard work and persistence. One would have loved her if one had been working for her, but less if one gave it up, or (like her aunt)14 left her to return to her husband & children, which Florence thought was a betrayal of affection. She was too stormy to have been an easy companion; but all her friends loved her. You should read the book, and see for yourself what it’s like.... If it15 said she nursed in order to leave home, the reviewer can’t have read it. On the contrary, she ‘heard the call’ to go and do some work (she wasn’t sure what) when she was 16, but for years after that didn’t go, because she thought her parents needed her.
I have been looking up the history of Englis
h hospitals. Apparently the voluntary ones in the mid [nineteenth] century were very well supported—and from 1901 on the King Edward Hospital Fund was a great gift-raiser. It was those on the rates that were so unhygienic—the fault, I suppose, of the Councils responsible for them. What puzzles me is why the doctors who had to work in such conditions didn’t insist on better arrangements, if only for selfish reasons. Of course hygienic notions were very poor compared with now, but even so it is surprising. I think the 1850’s can’t be called (relatively) poor in social conscience—it was a time of great progress in the poor laws, factory laws, laws about children’s labour, etc. But of course social conscience has never been good, in a general way, though now improving.
I had a lovely day at Bath—really warm; I hoped a little Indian summer was starting, but it was only one day, it seems. I went over the Roman baths, and saw the hot spring coming up; what wonderful engineers the Romans were. Apparently there are many more Roman baths under the town, which can’t be excavated. The Northanger Abbey people who went to the Pump Room knew nothing about them. Then I climbed a hill and saw Sham Castle, a ruined façade built there by a Bath citizen for him to look at from his house, in 1760.16 Altogether I had a good day, and did a lot of work in the train too.17…
I like the new Sunday Express serial about the Saucers18—much more amusing and interesting than the Abdication. What can they be? Do you think they come from Higher Intelligences who are spying on us? Or are they American experiments?
Very much love.
E.R.M.
1953–1958
For over two years after late 1950 there is a gap in the series of surviving letters to Jean. The course of Rose’s life is, however, clearly delineated in her correspondence with Father Johnson (Letters to a Friend’ and ‘Last Letters to a Friend’). Against the secret background of contrition and penitence, and her return to the Anglican Church after a lapse of thirty years, she busied herself with all her usual activities, and in spite of bad health—for six months she suffered from persistent attacks of undulant fever—she toiled on undefeatably at ‘Pleasure of Ruins’. Early in 1953, embarking on yet more research for ‘Ruins’, she made ready for a trip to Cyprus and the Middle East.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1 9 March, [1953]
Dearest Jeanie,
Very many thanks for letter and King-Hall. Yes, his account of Cyprus was very nice, so far as it goes, but he only touched on the beauties before going off (as I knew he would) about the political position, and Enosis.1 Still, of course that is the object of the News-Letters —the physical descriptions one can get from books. It is a most enchanting & exciting & wonderful island, which I have always longed to visit. I see his boat went from Athens, hence the islands. Boats from Britain, or Marseilles, or Genoa, go more directly. Though I believe there is one from Venice that goes via the islands. But it means first a train journey then a boat, and it is all much longer and more complicated than air, and, with all the meals, sleepers, etc, is just about as much, or nearly. I am just going to book my seat, May 16th, 9 a.m….
Yes, Bp Cockin2 was quite interesting. But he tends to imply that non-Christians are apt to be scientific. Any number of non-Christians are literary, classical, what is called humanist; I know very many, and I know very few scientists. So long as they are aiming (as he says) at what is good, better leave them to it, and not bother about trying to persuade them that Christianity is true. Much better for Christians to spend their energies converting other Christians... to decent ideas.
I went to the licensing of Gerard Irvine to his new charge the other night—a mission church near Hounslow.3 Rather a picturesque ceremony, he knelt before the Bp of Kensington4 and answered questions about how he was going to try to behave in the new parish. ‘Will you use the Book of Common Prayer as authorised, adding nothing to it?’ That, however, is qualified by the clause ‘except by lawful authority’…. Actually the parish is very extreme in its services, and obviously the congregation (a kind of factory-working new town, grown on to the old parish) likes it, and was very cheerful and friendly. There was a bun-fight after the service, and Gerard made himself popular at once.…We are mourning the death of the [Grosvenor] Chapel Sacristan, an extraordinarily nice woman5 who was also a church cleaner…. How much she… liked something… once quoted [in a sermon] about there being no dust in heaven.6 She was a very clean, tidy, conscientious, kind person, and always found and kept safe the oddments I left in church.7 She has a Requiem Mass tomorrow; and lies in the Chapel to-night, covered with flowers. I hear from Fr Johnson8 that the new R.C. fasting rules have gone a long way, and they look forward to very full congregations at evening Communion. Will the Anglo-Catholics follow suit soon? I expect so…
Very much love.
E.R.M.
Thursday [19 March, 1953]9
... I have missed seeing Tito and his bodyguard sweeping thro’ London, I expect they went too fast. What with Catholics and Communists, no doubt he does well to go fast.10 I met Lord Pakenham last night, who always tries to convert me. But he said he had been delighted to hear that I was now a practising Anglican, which was big of him. I fancy he thinks it is [a] step nearer Rome. He asked me what I did for a central Church authority, did I go by what Canterbury said. I said I didn’t need an authority, and that if I was R.C. [I] shouldn’t take any notice of what the Pope said. What about the interpretation of Scripture, he said. I said I read Bible commentaries by good scholars, if anything puzzled me, but didn’t think it mattered a lot, and what I believe in was the Light that lights every man, trained up by reason, and the Bible after all, and the Church too, were only products of the Light, not its sources. However, he kindly said he still had hopes of my conversion. He is really a very nice, nave man, and seems to take a genuine interest—tho’ he ought to know that I am a hopeless proposition. But who knows, I might come back from Cyprus a Greek Orthodox. I am going to Cyprus at the right time; they say next year it may be submerged by the Army, who regard it as an ‘outpost’. What a point of view!
Love...
E.R.M.
King George Hotel, Famagusta, Cyprus 17 May, [1953]
Dearest Jeanie,
I got here last night at 8.0, after a very smooth and beautiful journey: I spent last night in Nicosia, and came on here at lunch-time. Nicosia is inland, and is the capital, but quite small. When I went out last night to see it, the hotel manager said ‘You will have to be careful, or you may be killed.’ I asked why, and he said there were the municipal elections on, and people got very excited and stampeded. (Very different from London ones!) However, the streets were actually extremely quiet. There is a beautiful Greek medieval cathedral, turned into a mosque by the Turks, like so many Greek churches, when they took Cyprus 300 years ago. They whitewash the inside and take away all ornaments, monuments, and stained glass, and put in vulgar-looking patterned white glass instead. I don’t care for mosques inside. The man who drove me to Famagusta to-day said it would be ‘boiling’ with election excitement. Cypriotes, he said (being one himself) are excitable. There are 2 parties, Communist and Nationalist. He is Nationalist. The Nationalists officially want Enosis (union with Greece), but he says most of them don’t really, as without the British occupation they would probably starve. One noticeable thing about the streets of the towns is that there are practically no women. None at all last night in Nicosia. My driver said Cyprus women don’t go out alone, and never in the evenings. What would happen to a woman who went for a walk alone, I asked. He said, her father would beat her. Also they never walk out with boyfriends. The British soldiers must miss this. There is a lot of Turkish blood, obviously; the people are much darker than Greeks, and some have a Turkish look. No wonder, after so long an occupation. No doubt they absorbed rather a Turkish view of women, too.
This hotel is right on the beach, and about 2 miles from old Famagusta, the walled town. The walls are splendid, and the citadel, and St Nicholas’s Gothic cathedral, a magnificent buttressed 13th century church
, now a mosque, with a perky minaret on it. Inside it was white-washed and carpeted, and Moslems were praying aloud in corners—all men, of course, unlike R.C. churches, where they are mostly women. Round the cathedral stand ruined fragments of medieval churches, and some domed Moslem buildings, in a littered desert of thistle and grass and palms. There are a few streets, and a square. Otherwise all is desolation. It was, seven and six and five centuries ago, a very flourishing and rich city, and thick with churches and convents built by the crusaders. But it was devastated and thrown down by the Turks, and later nearly all the buildings were torn up and the stones taken to build Cairo. It seemed haunted by the rich life that went on once, the trading in the harbour, and the bells of all the churches; and now nothing but the sound of the wind in the palm trees and among the grass, and the rustling of the sea. ….
There is no way of getting about Cyprus but on foot, bicycle, or car. No buses—or scarcely any, and the few there are get filled up with goats & hay & hens and now and then a camel. So I am hiring a self-drive car, to explore in, making Famagusta my base this week.
Letters to a Sister Page 11
