So I Have Thought of You

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  very best wishes – Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  22 September [1982]

  Dear Howard,

  This is to thank you so very much for the beautiful William Morris paper – all the finest and best-loved small-repeat designs, beginning with honeysuckle – they say to wrap things up in, but they seem much too good for that – one might paper the walls of a dolls-house, perhaps – true, all my descendants are grandsons not grand-daughters, but two of them do have dolls-houses.

  I have an old friend who is writing the book to end books about Morris – so perhaps I’ll take them down to Brighton to show them to him.

  I rang up Joy Grant (Vines) just to see whether there were any ‘ghosts’ anong the bits and pieces which Alida gave her when she (Joy) went to interview her, but there weren’t, only unsold copies of Harold M.’s poems. – Joy sold the letters connected with her book, (including one from T. S. Eliot and one from David Garnett) to Rota’s* for £200, which I suppose was not bad, as things go – the sale of letters is a strange thing, though, a very different matter, it seems to me, from books. –

  Best wishes to you and Bob –

  Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  9 March 1983

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou so much for your letter, it was nice to hear from you, and first of all may I congratulate you on finishing the Malcolm Lowry bibliography – in the end I think the bibliography is the most useful thing you can do for any author, and everyone who is interested in Lowry in the years to come will be grateful to you, and I hope that they’ll acknowledge your work.

  I’m also very glad to have your complete list of the Poetry Broadsheet titles (incidentally I see that no. 1 O what shall the man, which I didn’t recognise at all, is quoted by Sylvia Townsend Warner in the Collected Letters (out last year) as

  Oh, what shall the man full of sun do

  Whose heart is as cold as stone

  When the black owl looks in through the window,

  And he on his deathbed alone?

  This is p. 136 of her letters and she says it’s her favourite! I should have thought it was rather a depressing opening to a popular series, but it’s just like Harold Monro.)

  It’s interesting to see that he issued his Overheard on a Saltmarsh twice – I think that must have been because Charles Winzer’s decoration for the first one was so unsatisfactory.

  From a literary point of view there is a lot more interest in these writers – Anna Wickham’s autobiography and a selection of her poetry are being published over here by Virago, I’m half-way through a life of Charlotte Mew for Collins and hope to do something about that very interesting writer F. S. Flint for his centenary in 1985, but as for collecting, I’m meeting total failure. I consulted the Ephemera Society and made enquiries at the recent McKnight Kauffer exhibition and from various presses connected with Lovat Fraser, but none of them could produce any broadsheets. It’s most vexatious that one’s not allowed to reproduce the examples in the British Library, to give people some idea of what the series was actually like.

  Now I’ve hardly any room left to say how much I hope that you’ve finished your house and garden and that it’s exactly how you both wanted it, and that all the beans, corn, squashes, vines and zucchini are growing and flourishing. Here it’s spring, but still rather cold.

  Very best wishes for your PB bibliography and for all [incomplete]

  76 Clifton Hill

  London, NW8

  U.K.

  23 October 1983

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou so very much for writing and for sending the two Flying Fame sheets with the Claud Lovat Fraser head and tail pieces, I love the blue dog – they are sentimental, but people were allowed to be in those days – I don’t know whether it did any harm or not. The only thing I’m going to be able to send you in return is my biography of Charlotte Mew, which is going to press now and will be ready I suppose in the usual 8 or 9 months – I couldn’t do the book I wanted on the Bookshop because all the publishers (though you wouldn’t guess it from their appearance) say they are so poor they can scarcely carry on for another week, and in any case couldn’t reproduce the broadsheets and chapbook covers in colour, which was what I wanted: still Charlotte Mew was one of the Bookshop poets and in fact helped Alida Monro to colour the first seven sheets. Meanwhile I’m still trying to get up some interest in my favourite, Frank Stuart Flint, whose centenary comes up next year, and who certainly turned himself into a poet and translator the hard way, since he started as the soap-boy in an East End barbers.

  I’m trying to get them to produce my Charlotte Mew properly, that is, as much as possible like a chapbook, with printers’ flowers and the right typeface, but will they?

  I very much envy you the trip to California – I’ve got a note that there are 239 correspondents, many of them enraged poets I dare say. I’d also so much have liked to see the Maurice Browne/Harold Monro letters at Ann Arbor, (they couldn’t send me photocopies as they said the material was too personal) and then I think the Samurai Press material is there.

  It would be a real blessing if you would do a book on the period, with all your knowledge of it, and the bibliography. Otherwise one day people will wake up and try to find out about it and won’t be able to.

  Your house and garden must be lovely by now, and producing pumpkins I suppose, at this time of year, best wishes, Penelope Fitzgerald

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  1 June 1984

  Dear Howard,

  I want to thank you very much for the checklist of the Hogarth Press – I’m ashamed I didn’t know it before, but in any case it’s very nice to have it now. They did more publishing, and less hand-printing, than I’d realised – and I’m always interested in the phrase ‘having taught themselves the rudiments of printing’ – which is so much easier said than done, in my experience – I’m quite sure that Leonard must have done the inking and cleaning up and anything that needed accuracy. I’m not accurate myself – that’s why I admire your kind of work so much.

  Anna Wickham is out now under the title The Work of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet – by the way I expect you know Anna Wickham’s son James, who has worked like a beaver getting this edition out, because he was the person who found Malcolm Lowry in a distressed condition in a Bloomsbury bed-sitter and took him back to their house in Parliament Hill, Hampstead where Anna provided meals at all hours for writers and poets. (I don’t think there’s anyone who’d do that now.) But I remember that you’ve sold your Malcolm Lowry collection now, so all that’s a thing of the past. Meanwhile, best wishes for the future – Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  6 January 1985

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou so much for the Warning to Strayabouts, which, apart from anything else, brings the whole Eleanor Farjeon atmosphere back to me again – (her Nursery in the Nineties was reprinted recently in paperback) – they were all such an impressive family – it was enough in the Hampstead of those days to ‘know the Farjeons’ – but she was splendid, and it’s no easy thing to write for children as she did.

  About your very kind offer of rhyme-sheets at cost – unhappily I’ve had to give up collecting anything at the moment, as although what I write doesn’t do too badly, I seem to have rather a lot of commitments. But all the same if you ever have any duplicates of the early numbers of Series 1 (I know that this isn’t at all likely) do please let me know as I would so much love to see them again.

  Thankyou so much for your kind words about At Freddie’s, and please, I hope you won’t be so busy that you give up your Bookshop book altogether. There really is something needed there, while on the other hand there’s almost too much about Bloomsbury and even about T. S. Eliot., if one is allowed to say so.

  I’m glad you had such a mild winter – white with snow here in London –

  Very best wishes for 1985

  Penelope

  The
ale Post Office Stores

  Wedmore, Somerset

  11 May [1985]

  I’m down here at my daughter’s village shop and do hope you will have better weather in Cornwall than we’ve got here and that you and Bob will have a very successful trip. – Some PB rhyme sheets were advertised in the Times, but only odd numbers of Series 2, no Series 1, so I didn’t do anything about them – perhaps I was wrong –

  best wishes, Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  14 August 1985

  Dear Howard,

  Congratulations on finishing the Samurai Press* and many thanks for your PB rhyme sheet section. You don’t know what a pleasure it is to me to see them listed properly and professionally, much more professionally than the Monros ever did it. I don’t know how one trains to be a bibliographer, but it must need a certain temperament, I only wish I had it.

  Just one or two things –

  p.2 para.5 I’m sorry that I called Allingham’s A Memory Ducks on a Pond – it’s the same, of course, and I suppose the others aren’t PB, although they were certainly bought there. I notice that in the diagram Alida gives in her letters to Harold of the new PB (March 1927) there’s a space for ‘rhyme sheet duplication and special orders’, which may account for why some were issued without series numbers. –

  Series 1 no 3 I’ll have to check the reference for Wordsworth when I next go down to Somerset, as most of my notes are there. I think it’s on one of the lists in the chapbooks, but I’ll check.

  Series 1 no 4 Many were disappointed by Winzer’s decorations in which the ‘green glass beads’ are shown as blue wooden ones. This is not a bibliographical point, I know, but I feel that Harold Monro was always hoping to make it ‘look better’ by slight alterations.

  My collection doesn’t get on! certainly not series 1, but when I get to the country I’ll send you a bit of what I do have. As to reproduction permission, I agree it’s a problem. I couldn’t get any answer to requests for permission to quote from Alida’s letters, and finally went ahead without it. Nothing happened! – It seems to me that colour reproductions (costing heaven knows what!) would be, not essential, but a very great asset to your book, still I suppose that’s only one of many decisions you have to make.

  If you got as far as Plymouth you might have got to Somerset – we’re only 7 miles from Wells!

  very best wishes –

  Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  14 January 1987

  Dear Howard,

  How kind of you to send me the NYR of Books notice of Charlotte Mew, which I certainly hadn’t seen and was very glad to have – but when you say it made you feel your Hogarth Press book ‘might yet get some notice’ I was taken aback, as I’m re-reading V. Woolf’s Diaries (a sobering thing to do if you’re beginning to write another novel) where of course your book is mentioned all the time,* as it is in the Charleston Newsletter, which is sent me (although I’m not a friend) by the secretary, Hugh Lee, who I’ve known for more years than I like to count. I’m glad he and the trust have got such a long way with the restoration, and yet, about Charleston, I don’t know, I’m just not sure. A lot of the decorations weren’t up to much in the first place, and were probably done with the idea of painting them over whenever they felt like it. And then I can remember what it was once like from a visit when Duncan Grant was there – admittedly a dreadful mess – but it doesn’t seem at all right either now that it’s clean and tidy – the same is true of William Morris’s house at Kelmscott (I don’t remember him, but I do know he kept an Iceland pony in the kitchen). Tolstoy’s house in Moscow I liked, largely because the curators had got out of hand and were making tea all over the place. – But perhaps I’m ungrateful to feel like this.

  Thankyou for your kind word about Innocence. I thought the jacket was good – it was quite difficult getting the colour transparency from Florence, and when it came the dynamic art editor (a newcomer to Collins, with a pigtail) tore round the edge, which I thought made it look exactly right.

  Siberian conditions here, and there’s only one tap working at the moment, in the basement, so I have to go up and down with a bucket. That’s the end of the twentieth century in St John’s Wood.

  I’m so glad that the Poetry Bookshop material is still on your shelves, (and my word, was there ever a more difficult subject to research?) The sign was by McKnight Kauffer, wasn’t it? That, certainly, would make a good jacket.

  Well, I hope to see you in the spring. Surely the taps will be working by then –

  with all best wishes for 1987 –

  Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  3 April 1987

  Dear Howard,

  Thankyou so much for your letter, and for sending me the cutting. I never knew that publishers had a weekly, but of course they must have trade papers just like grocers and every other professional, and it was a very nice review.

  PEN has just had its Writers’ Day in London – Doris Lessing spoke, and rather unexpectedly said that the novel of the future would be in computer language – not the language computers use to each other, but the language computer operators use to each other, which she said could be ‘blackly satirical’. Next year we’re host to all the other countries for the International congress (it wasn’t a success last year in N. York where the authors knocked each other out) and we’re going to have it in Cambridge, where they can walk about and see the colleges and have real English tea and fruit-cake. But we feel nervous.

  I’m glad your birds are back. The various pesticides in the country here, and the hedge-cutting, seem to have driven large quantities of birds, as well as squirrels and foxes, into London. I saw a kestrel over a church in Hampstead the other day. But they haven’t started to build because of the cold.

  I’m sorry I was so ignorant about your new edition of the (indispensable and invaluable) Hogarth Press book, I hadn’t seen it. I suppose that someone must be at work on a bibliography of David Garnett (though I don’t know anything about this either) and they certainly won’t be able to manage without it.

  Please do tell me when you can face coming to this cold, windy island –

  best wishes, Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill

  London, NW8

  2 June 1987

  Dear Howard,

  I want to thank you so very much for Susan and After the Wilderness (The Challenge Book and Picture Store must have been pretty well opposite the 2nd Poetry Bookshop and shows the kind of competition there was, I suppose) – I was so very glad to have a sheet printed by Tolmer Et Cie – they did Finland, didn’t they, and sent out a beautiful trade card, which is in the BL.

  I wish that I knew who Edy Legrand was, but possibly I could find out.

  I always have to pluck up courage to go to Rota’s because of the security precautions, (which I daresay they’re very wise to have), which mean that bells ring loudly even after you’ve shut the door behind you, and more disconcertingly still, no-one looks up from their scholarly work at the shaded desks and tables, however I felt this time I’d be all right if I mentioned your name, and I was.

  I have so many things to thank you for and do wish I hadn’t missed you on this visit. Your kittens will have grown up by now, and you’ll be considering where to hang your new pictures. I’m so glad everything’s going so well. It seems a long time since you were putting up your own house from an instruction book (if I remember right).

  I had a nice trip to France, but the Proust mania seems to have got much more so. They were selling madeleines (in plastic bags) outside the cathedral at Chartres to raise funds for some charity or other (not for needy writers, as I think it ought to have been).

  best wishes and many thanks

  Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  12 July 1987

  Dear Howard –

  Wonderful that you’re starting to put the PB book together and even getting the illustrations, partic. the bookshop sign, (thou
gh I also like the photograph of Harold Monro holding it up, with his usual expression of embarrassment). As to a short account of the Bookshop, of course I would be glad to do it and certainly wouldn’t want to be paid for it. I’m very grateful to you for so many things. But I should like to know exactly what length you have in mind, and whether you want footnotes and references such as Mary Galther gives in her HP checklist introduction?

  I’m glad that Shem and Shaun are doing well – I thought that it was deer that caused trouble on your property, not moles, but I suppose you are pushing back the forest frontiers on all sides –

  best wishes

  Penelope

  76 Clifton Hill, NW8

  28 July 1987

  Dear Howard, I’m now trying to get on with a draft of an introduction to your PB bibliography to send you. I take it that you don’t want much about HM’s poetry? or about his life, except for its connection with the Bookshop? – but in any case I will send you something as soon as I can.

  Meanwhile thankyou so much for the various enclosures you’ve sent me – particularly for the del Ré articles which, as you say, have to be extracted with difficulty from the BL. – (If del Ré had been accepted as an assistant by V & L Woolf in 1919 (or rather as she put it ‘to relieve us of all the business of the Hogarth Press’) he could have appeared in both your books) – thankyou too for Alida’s announcement, and the notice from Publisher’s Weekly, wh. I hadn’t had.

  Could I just ask one or two things (four) about the bibliography itself?

  1. I want to apologise about Love Among the Haycocks (GS). I realise now that Housman could never have written a poem with such a title, and that in fact it’s B2: 24, Song by Ralph Hodgson.