Rebecca West: Correspondence, 1936-1955: Letters to Charlotte [Ives] Boissevain and Jan Maurits Boissevain

Rebecca West: Correspondence, 1936-1955An extraordinary correspondence of the highest class, in which a major woman writer of the twentieth-century and prominent feminist speaks frankly and vividly to an intimate friend about her work, sexuality, family, personal relations with individuals of note on both sides of the Atlantic, travels and cultural activities. Had this material been known to previous biographers it would undoubtedly have been heavily cited. 'I would love a gossip', Rebecca West writes here, and among her subjects are her lovers H. G. Wells, Lord Beaverbrook and Thomas Pomfret Kilner, her son with Wells Anthony West, Noel Coward, Nancy Cunard, Somerset Maugham ('Willie'), Edna St Vincent Millay, Doris Stevens, G. B. Stern, Diane Forbes-Robertson, Pamela Frankau, Barbara Back, David Niven, Lady Diana Cooper and her husband Duff Cooper, Gertrude Lawrence, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Harold Ross, Janet Flanner, Jane Grant, Emily Grigsby, Ruby Ayres, Katharine Duff Church, William Shawn, Harold Guinzberg, Nelson Doubleday, Hawley Truax, Irving Thalberg, Vincent Sheean ('Jimmy'), Louis Adamic, Sir Roy Harrod and his wife Billa Harrod, Vyvyan Holland, Clive Bell, Ivor Novello.Thirty-five items of correspondence (mostly signed 'Rebecca', with a few signed 'R.', and one 'Rebecca West' and one 'R. W.'), almost all on letterheads of Ibstone House, Ibstone, Nr High Wycombe, Bucks (four on London letterheads of 15 Orchard Court, Portman Square, W1). The letters are almost all long, and always energetic. In good condition, lightly aged. With twenty items dating from between 1943 and 1955, and the other fifteen undated. A total of 69pp of text and four postcards, comprising:- 16 Autograph Letters Signed (eleven undated, one of which is in a postmarked envelope; the other five between 1943 and 1950), in a close, neat hand. 2pp, 8vo; 6pp, 4to; 35pp, 12mo.- 15 Typed Letters Signed (one undated; the other fourteen between 1946 and 1955), all single-spaced. 6pp, 8vo; 12pp, 4to; 8pp, 12mo.- 4 Autograph Cards Signed (three undated, all with legible postmark 1949 dates; the other one also from 1949). Seven of the letters are jointly addressed to CI and JWB (two in autograph, five typed, with one of the latter to 'My dears'), and one typed letter to JWB alone. The remaining twenty-seven items are addressed to CI alone (one autograph letter to 'Charlotte my lamb'). Four are in stamped envelopes with postmarks, addressed in autograph by RW. Three of these envelopes - all to typed letters - are to 'Mme Boissevain / La Houzee / Cap d'Antibes (A. M.) / France'. The other envelope carries an undated autograph letter, but has a New York postmark of 4 October 1940, being the earliest dated item. It is addressed to 'Mrs Jan Boissevain / c/o Fifth Avenue Bank / 44th. St. & Fifth Avenue / New York City / U.S.A.', and is redirected to '667 Madison Ave / NYC'. In addition to the thirty-five items of RW's correspondence are present two TLsS to JMB from RW's husband, both signed 'Henry'. Both from Ibstone House, and giving friendly advice with regard to CI's financial affairs and English banking. The first a long letter of 10 November 1949. 2pp, 8vo. The second, with autograph postscript, 25 March 1950. 1p, 4to.Introduction 'Rebecca West' was the pseudonym of the novelist, journalist, critic and traveller Cicily Isabel Fairfield (1892-1983), major writer and leading feminist voice in twentieth-century literature, who in 1930 married the banker Henry Andrews (1894-1968), and in 1959 was made a Dame of the British Empire. Among her acclaimed non-fiction works are the study of Yugoslavia 'Black Lamb and Grey Falcon' (1941), and her essay collections 'The Meaning of Treason' (1947) and 'A Train of Powder' (1955), the latter including revised versions of the accounts she had sent to the New Yorker from the Nuremberg Trials. Her novels include 'The Return of the Soldier' (1918) and 'The Fountain Overflows' (1956). Continuing success allowed her to live ostentatiously: she bought a Rolls Royce and a country estate, Ibstone House in the Chilterns. In 1947, at the height of her fame (the period covered by the present correspondence), Time magazine described her as 'indisputably the world's number one woman writer', and the following year, on presenting her with an award, President Truman called her 'the world's best reporter'. Among a number of youthful affairs were ones with Lord Beaverbrook and Charlie Chaplin, but the most prominent was her ten-year liaison with H. G. Wells, by whom she had a son, Anthony West (1914-1987), from whom she was estranged for much of her life. In recent years her stock has risen markedly, but there has been no noteworthy biography since Victoria Glendinning's well-received ' 'Rebecca West: A Life' (1987)'. RW displayed a fascination with the United States throughout her life (her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that she 'saw herself as an interpreter between American and British cultures'), and she had herself began her working life on the stage, so it comes as no surprise to find her associated with the American silent movie and Broadway actress 'Charlotte Ives', the stage name of Charlotte Danziger (1886-1976), who in 1921 married the Dutch-born importer Jan Maurits Boissevain (1883-1964). The Boissevains were prominent on both sides of the Atlantic: Jan's father was an Amsterdam newspaper editor, and one of his brothers was married to the American poet Edna St Vincent Millay. What is a surprise however, given the intimate and unguarded nature of a correspondence covering twenty years, is to find no mention of either Charlotte Ives or her husband either in Glendinning's biography or in RW's entry by Bonnie Kime Scott in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography. It may be that RW became acquainted with CI through H. G. Wells, since letters from him to the American actress survive from 1931, but however it is that the friendship began, by 1936, when the present correspondence begins, RW is unburdening herself with complete frankness. She has returned from a British Council tour of Scandinavia, and in two letters discusses the ending of an affair with her doctor - identified by Glendinning (who misdates the liaison to 1940 or 1941) as the pioneering plastic surgeon Thomas Pomfret Kilner (1890-1964), later an Oxford professor. 'I adored him', she writes ruefully, having had 'the supremest pleasure out of his brains and his wit and his love making'. '[I] got what I wanted, but it's stopped now. No more at my time of life, not a second H. G.' She makes a bitter comparison between Kilner and her previous lovers Wells and Beaverbrook, with a reference to the latter's 'psychological (but not physiological) disabilities' (Beaverbrook had proved impotent). She is equally forthright with regard to others. She announces that her best friend G. B. Stern's former husband 'has been cured of insanity by the new electric method - They give them terrific convulsions and it disperses the physical basis of the madness. And he haunts her to tell her how awful he was to her, but it wasn't much good, as now he is the most awful bore.' When the editor of the New Yorker Harold Ross dies in 1951 she is warm in her praise: 'I can't tell you how good he was to me. Or how warm-hearted. He was a Nannie to all his contributors. And his long letters showed always the most sweet concern for one's well being, absolute unselfishness.' On the other hand, the grief of Ross's former lover and collaborator Jane Grant is 'really pathetic, for he had no sort of affection for her. So too is Ariane, [Ross's wife the actress Ariane Allen] and that is true of her - he had no affection left for her either. So far as sex was concerned he never should have known any woman for more than twenty-four hours.' Likewise regarding Edna St Vincent Millay's poem on the death of her husband (and CI's brother-in-law) Eugene Boissevain: 'pitiful egotism. If you worked it out she was thinking of Eugene's death as Ulysses' voluntary desertion, for which she ought to be pitied. And equally obviously she had a fantasy that he was coming back again.' And she finds that the alimony arrangement between her friend Emanie Sachs and the banker Walter Sachs of Goldman-Sachs 'is not a comfy situation': their daughter and her husband have 'no money sense and are not at all buddies to Emanie, being very Red and not very brilliant or understanding'. Of her sister Winnie's daughter she writes similarly: 'Alison is married to a Communist, but he is a Jew, [as was CI] and has therefore a basis of common sense, and even of family affection. He had therefore confided to his father-in-law and mother-in-law his perturbation because Alison had said that she wanted this baby, and didn't care if they had to die in the workhouse, as they had always been sunk in bourgeois comfort all their lives. He has told them seriously that they must resist her demands.' Among several entertaining scenes are: descriptions of the banter following a sartorial faux pas at H. G. Wells's funeral ('H. G. would have enjoyed that. I miss H. G. very much, I had been into [sic] the Hanover Terrace house regularly every ten days for the last three years or so. But he was getting pretty miserable, so I cannot really regret it. He had tiresome days of something just uncomfortably short of coma. But he had days when he was as funny as ever.'); a 'Transatlantic Brains Trust' on BBC Radio, with RW, David Niven and others (nearly derailed by Cornelia Otis Skinner); Noel Coward openings (after 'Tonight at 8.30' in 1936 she finds that 'Noel is curiously tired and lethargic, but nicer than he has been for years.'; after 'Private Lives' in 1943 she reports that 'he's had flu and jaundice ('everything in technicolor, and all wrong. he described it'); and in 1952 she describes his play 'Quadrille' as a 'flop' ('He is selling his house in Jamaica, and keeping a bit of the grounds for a cottage. [...] But he is apparently very gay and smiling about it.' - and was very ill, and looks it'). She is never backwards in twisting the knife: following the death of Eva Peron, she shares an extended Italian joke on 'poor Eva' which the French actress Odette Arnaud has shared. The correspondence contains numerous references to the worsening situation between RW and her son Anthony West. In 1936 she is able to report with pride that the teenager is succeeding as an artist, with the promise of a show at a London gallery, but by 1949 she writes 'Anthony and I are the bestsellers of the season - which should be fun - but as Anthony has suddenly got a hate on Henry and me of a most extraordinary nature it is only rather dreadful.' The present correspondence certainly places RW in a far more sympathetic light, and AW in a worse one, than his writings. In 1950 she reports that he is 'not answering my letters and telling strange stories that I was preventing him from writing the biography of [his father] H. G. [Wells] (which I wanted him to do in fact - not a personal biography, that's forbidden in the will, a literary & political one.) [...] I am full of apprehensions & would go over if he were not so hostile to me. I have never been so agonized in my life.' And in 1951, after AW has decamped to America leaving behind his wife and two young children (whom RW supports): 'He doesn't want to marry anybody else, but he wants to be divorced - partly to be troublesome, apparently, because he is trying to be a Graham Greene character and to resemble Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe as much as possible, and partly because he is infatuated with everything American and most Americans he knows have been divorced. Well, well.' Previous to this she has discovered that 'Anthony has steadily torn up all demands by the Income Tax authorities and these demands amount to such a sum that he lost his nerve and got scared - but actually the Income Tax authorities owe him much more than he owes them!' He does not return for the divorce proceedings, and it is RW who is with her daughter-in-law as the matter is settled: 'I spent last Thursday morning in the divorce court watching poor Kitty get untied from Anthony. The judge blew up over Anthony's letters, which were pompous and silly and violent, and for that reason was very nice to Kitty and got the thing over quickly and quietly. I hope to God the boy now grows up.' In 1943 AW's wife the artist Katharine Duff Church is ' the wonder of the world - beautiful, slender, a good, really good painter, a wonderful housekeeper', but by 1950 she is 'hard to take, even harder, in the same way of silliness' than AW. RW's affection for her two grandchildren is evident, if somewhat ambivalent. 'I am a grand mamma', she announces proudly on the birth of the eldest child Caroline in 1941. But in 1946 she writes: 'Someday you must see the brats. The girl is delicately pretty, like a little Renoir child, the boy is a blond beast, who gave the Nazi salute from birth, and just rules the earth.' In 1943 the two-year-old Caroline 'is the spitting image of [her grandfather] H. G. [Wells] and wrings her hands just like H. G. having a row with Belloc whenever she drops her Golliwog'. In the same letter she states, 'I am fairly grey too. As becomes a practising grandmother.' RW's pride in Ibstone is equally apparent. During the Blitz she writes: 'The German aeroplanes come & mill round looking for an aerodrome. Last night one seemed to stick among the chimney pots for hours - and sometimes they unload their bombs, but nobody minds much, up till now they have done little harm here, though we fear that when they've got even more peeved we shall have low flying and machine gunning. If they get the cows they won't have to gun me - I'll die of fury!' Elsewhere she writes, 'these damn cows are heavy responsibilities'. In 1936 she announces that she is switching publishers: 'In March you will receive my new book ['The Thinking Reed']. In America Harold Guinzberg (The Viking Press) is publishing it, I parted from Nelson Doubleday after some harsh words - he heard The Harsh Voice all right. Of all the snobbish incompetent and big unstuffed shirts that is the biggest.' And in 1941 she is preparing her masterpiece 'Black Lamb and Grey Falcon' for publication, but not without difficulty. 'I have had rather a tough time during the last couple of years. My secretary's [Margaret Hodges's] son was killed flying in February 1940, and she slowly collapsed into a nervous breakdown, and wouldn't take a holiday. She was at her worst when we were moving here in the blitz - she lost nearly all the photographs I took of Yugoslavia and two large box-files, containing most of my source material.' RW's sympathy with America is evident throughout, and there are several references to American feminists such as Doris Stevens and Janet Flanner. RW reports what Stevens told her of her last meeting with Edna St Vincent Millay. She was 'on her way back from a concert festival in New England she had called in on Edna, and had had a long visit with her, and how sweet she had been and glad to see Doris, but how odd it had all been, overgrown paths and ivy coming through the window and vast howling dogs and notices about keeping out at every yard.' In 1950 she sends 'two books by Orwell. Animal Farm is the best, the other is too grim, he wrote it when he was very ill with the T. B. which killed him.' An enthusiastic appreciation of Carol Reed's film 'The Third Man' ('I thought the Viennese landlady one of the best bits of acting I have ever seen on the screen or the stage') leads her discuss the source of another film of the season, David Lean's 'The Passionate Friends', and she gives an interesting (and unknown?) account of Wells's inspiration for writing the 1913 book on which the film was based. Given RW's interest in 'The Meaning of Treason', it is interesting to find a whole letter from 1952 devoted to the 'queer character' Whittaker Chambers, and the 'peculiar charm' of his fellow Soviet spy Alger Hiss. Of yet more interest are two letters from 1946, reporting to CI and her husband rumours that the latter was a Nazi spy. When the news is ill-received she exclaims: 'what a world of Judases this is'. It is to be noted that little if any of the above information features in the published accounts. The following selection gives an indication of the quality of the writing:1936. Undated letter from Orchard Court, written on her return from a British Council lecture tour: She has returned to England 'from a lightning tour lecturing for the Foreign Office in Scandinavia and the Baltic Provinces. You must go to that part of Europe some day. You would so love Stockholm - and Denmark is swell too. I had a positive lech for Finland and Esthonia. I flew from Stockholm to Helsingfor - three hours over an archipelago of islands covered with firwood lit up with scarlet & gold birches in a [?] blue sea. I'm crazy about that part & mean to go back every year. The people are so happy, and so competent, and so [?]. It's a Paradise compared with the rest of Europe.' She reports that HA has 'lost more money & is very well & as nice as ever. Anthony has done a lot of work and the Lefevre Galleries are so impressed by his last pictures that they're giving him a show next summer. I have just finished a novel & feel rather weak - & believe me you were in luck not having anything more to do with the art of surgery that you had. They are cruel bastards, and haven't enough time for me to get the possible compensation for their regrettable characteristics. I adore mine & got what I wanted, but it's stopped now. No more at my time of life, not a second H. G.' After a long reference to 'Ruby' [i.e. the novelist Ruby Ayres (1881-1955)], whose sickbed she has been attending, she concludes: 'I may be going to Hollywood some time soon - had a cable from Irving Thalberg [1899-1936, film producer with MGM] wanting to know if I could start if they wanted me any time during the next few weeks. As we need every penny I shall certainly go. G. B. [Stern] is in N. Y. and very sad at separation from Willy [i.e. Somerset Maugham]. What a story that would be for Willy to write if only he wasn't involved!'1936. Second undated letter, containing references to her book 'The Thinking Reed', and to Noel Coward's play 'Still Life' (part of the cycle 'Tonight at 8.30'), which date the letter to 1936. Of Coward's play she writes: 'Ruby [Ayres] and Henry and Rupert Somerville and I all went to Noel's triple bill the other night. The funny thing was one play reproduces line by line the situation with my surgeon. Actual words he had used. Noel is curiously tired and lethargic, but nicer than he has been for years.' Earlier in the letter she describes the ending of the unhappy love affair with the 'surgeon', whom she compares to her other lovers: 'I went back to my blighter of a surgeon and he has given me a hell of a time and we finally bust it on the day before my birthday in a 3 hour scene. He has all the logical, orderly, considerate, unselfish disposition of H. G. [Wells] combined with Max's [i.e. Lord Beaverbrook's] psychological (but not physiological) disabilities; a hell-cat. But I adored him, and in spite of everything still do. His line was to have a thoroughly good time with me - then reflect on the possibility of divorce and an appearance before the General Medical Council - then inform me he thought our relationship using, that his conscience pricked him regarding his wife and children, that he didn't love me - then after a bit come back and - well it might be put that he then pricked his conscience, and the whole thing would start again. I just couldn't help it. I've never seen through anybody so clearly as dishonest and caddish and grubby about sex, and at the same time I've had the supremest pleasure out of his brains and his wit and his love making. But it's over now. He's really scared, and he screamed and yelled and was as mean as Hell. He's got that curious lack of sweetness and generosity that both H. G. and Max had co-existent with a deep affection. It's evidently my type. I know every turn of his butchery but I wake up and howl because it's over every morning.' In what is clearly a reference to her book 'The Thinking Reed' she writes: 'In March you will receive my new book. In America Harold Guinzberg (The Viking Press) [Harold Kleinert Guinzberg (1899-1961)] is publishing it, I parted from Nelson Doubleday [(1889-1949)] after some harsh words - he heard The Harsh Voice all right. Of all the snobbish incompetent and big unstuffed shirts that is the biggest.'1940. In a letter postmarked 4 October 1940, she writes from Ibstone during the Blitz: 'The German aeroplanes come & mill round looking for an aerodrome. Last night one seemed to stick among the chimney pots for hours - and sometimes they unload their bombs, but nobody minds much, up till now they have done little harm here, though we fear that when they've got even more peeved we shall have low flying and machine gunning. If they get the cows they won't have to gun me - I'll die of fury! Henry is working hard, & needs a holiday - so too does Anthony, who after volunteering for the navy got stuck on farm work - rises at 4.30. every morning & works till 7. at night, looking after a dairy herd.'1941. Joint undated letter [late 1941]: 'I am to day repairing the most embarrassing error! I am sending the Viking Press a note telling them to include Jan's name among those who have helped me in the book about Yugoslavia (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.) The omission may mean nothing to you but it fills me with shame. This is how it happened. I have had rather a tough time during the last couple of years. My secretary's [Margaret Hodges] son was killed flying in February 1940, and she slowly collapsed into a nervous breakdown, and wouldn't take a holiday. She was at her worst when we were moving here in the blitz - she lost nearly all the photographs I took of Yugoslavia and two large box-files, containing most of my source material. This included the Merkus material Jan had got for me. Since my operation my memory has been vile, and I quite genuinely forgot where I'd got the Markus stuff - I would have said I'd found it in Thomas's book on the Bosnian Revolt. This morning for some unknown reason I woke up remembering it - and blushed. I am sending a note to Harold [Guinzberg, of the Viking Press], in case there's another edition and it can be rectified in that. Do forgive me if the negligence has struck you!' She ends by announcing: 'I am a grand mamma - a daughter called Caroline was born to Anthony & Kitty on October 2nd. [1941] - the mother says she wants fourteen more! I hope to God we get this war settled before any Americans get killed - I would like a continent free from the taint of death.'1943. In an undated letter [written after her grandson's birth in 1943], she writes of her grandchildren: 'I've never seen my second grandchild - Edmond [sic] Anthony - born two months ago [in 1943] - I can't get, [sic] yet he's only 30 m. away. The mother is the wonder of the world - beautiful, slender, a good, really good painter, a wonderful housekeeper - had only two whiffs of chloroform with the first child, none with the second. But has only a servant for two hours, and the older brat is only 15 months old. She, Caroline, is the spitting image of H. G. [i.e. H. G. Wells, her grandfather] and wrings her hands just like H. G. having a row with Belloc whenever she drops her Golliwog. She is blond with our family's black eyes, which is very effective. I hope she doesn't get darker.' She reports that she has taken part in a BBC radio programme: 'I had a Transatlantic Brains Trust - David Niven, Crowther (The editor of 'The Economist') and me talking to John Gunther, Russell [sic] Crouse, and Cornelia Otis Skinner. It nearly went wrong at the start because Cornelia Otis Skinner thought fit to ask us in a tired voice what has happened to the type of Englishman who lived on the Riviera - as it was interesting to know what happened to people of that calibre - [last two words underlined] It sounded as if we were a special breed of Delinquent, and of course the people who stayed behind were a poor lot, so we coldly answered that if they were any good they'd got out, English or American, long before the fall of France, (as you did) and that nobody much cared about what happened to the rest! But we settled down to amity, and it was quite fun. The Americans are well-liked here. Though there's some feeling because they get all the grub.' Coward's 'Present Laughter' is on at the Haymarket Theatre: 'it's like 'Private Lives' - the 'Cavalcade' play he does in between is a flop except for a gal called Judy Campbell. Noel is exquisite in 'Present Laughter' - The best he's done for years - but he's had flu and jaundice ('everything in technicolor, and all wrong. he described it) - and was very ill, and looks it. The real invalid, however, is Ivor Novello, who has had pneumonia and suddenly looks his age.'1946. Around November 1946 she write to CI that she has 'heard a rumour that you had both been repeating a story, floated by the infamous Adamic [i.e. Louis Adamic (1898-1951), Yugoslav-American writer and translator], that Henry had worked for the Nazis in S[chwedin?]: a story which as he left the City because he wouldn't work for the Nazis, was pretty poor. But I assumed my informants had been mistaken and let it go. I mention it to you now because it did cause some perplexity among various friends.' She concludes: 'I saw Willie [i.e. Somerset Maugham] recently, and thought him fantastically old for his age, but very gay. He spoke of you affectionately.'1946. On 29 November 1946 she exclaims in a joint letter: 'what a world of Judases this is', with regard to story promulgated by 'Doris [Stevens]', who 'thought she heard it from you'. RW and HA have heard it from two sources, one of them 'Adamic', the other 'a man who said it must be true, because he had a friend who had heard it from Jan, at a refugee centre at which Jan worked.' Turning to other matters she reports that HA is in Cairo, en route to see his mother in Australia: 'anywhere out of England is grand. The only solid comfort I have had for seven years was the time I spent at Nuremberg in a comfortable requisitioned villa, waited on hand and foot by German servants, who only once gave me sour looks, and that was when we acquitted Schacht and von Papen and Fritsche.' She wishes she could 'get out' to CI, but 'these damn cows are heavy responsibilities. And I must finish my book. But I would love a gossip. How I wanted you to hear the story of Barbara [i.e. Somerset Maugham's friend Barbara Back] turning up at H.G.'s funeral in a most extraordinary get-up - it looked as if Floradora had gone into mourning. G. B. Stern delicately asked her what exactly the get up was in aid of and Barbara said, Oh, I hope you like it. You see, I didn't want to miss H. G.'s funeral, but I have to go straight on to judge a Beauty Contest at Arding & Hobbs - our Bloomingdale's - and I had to work out a get-up that would do for both occasions. H. G. would have enjoyed that. I miss H. G. very much, I had been into [sic] the Hanover Terrace house regularly every ten days for the last three years or so. But he was getting pretty miserable, so I cannot really regret it. He had tiresome days of something just uncomfortably short of coma. But he had days when he was as funny as ever.' She ends: 'Willie [i.e. Somerset Maugham] and Harold Guinzberg [of the Viking Press] both told me that Charlotte looks grand with grey hair. I am fairly grey too. As becomes a practising grandmother. Someday you must see the brats. The girl is delicately pretty, like a little Renoir child, the boy is a blond beast, who gave the Nazi salute from birth, and just rules the earth. The girl at six models with clay all the time and well, the boy can make anything with his hands, so they ought to be able to make a living.'Undated (circa 1946?). With reference to G. B. Stern (novelist Bertha Gladys Stern (1890-1973), described by Victoria Glendinning as RW's 'best friend'): 'G. B. Stern inherited a little money from an old aunt - has a flat in the Albany (her old one was blitzed, with all in it) and has bought a house in the country, small but pretty. She is very fat and quite white haired, but keeps cheerful and is gayer than she has been for a long time - I spend a night in town in every week & often see her. As she dictates the secretary shortage is very hard on her. Her former husband has been cured of insanity by the new electric method - They give them terrific convulsions and it disperses the physical basis of the madness. And he haunts her to tell her how awful he was to her, but it wasn't much good, as now he is the most awful bore.'1949. Joint letter of 19 August 1949: She discusses her stay with CI and JMB, and the journey to see 'poor Romney', i.e. the Mexican director and dramatist Romney Brent (1902-1976). Her only sadness is that 'the Villa Mysto and Chateau d'Agay are now no more. A woman in the plane to whom I spoke about the damage says that she thinks St Exupery (who was the brother-in-law of the Comte d'Agay and wrote many of his books - not that there were many - in the chateau) wrote a long article about the place in some well-known review. It is odd that you two should have eyed it covetously.' After a mix-up at Nice airport she caught a late plane, and 'flew alongside a superb scarlet sunset'. Then 'when we were driving along the highroad from Le Bourget some people rushed at the bus out of the shadows and we stopped. At first I thought it was a hold-up and said wearily, Ah, it's the Aga Khan again, but they had detected some damage to the bus, and we had to wait till another one came.' Despite being late for their meeting, she had 'a lovely yammer' with Brent: 'Alas, the news Jane had heard about his directorial post on the Theatre Guild was not true, and he rather mournfully said that at his age he wished that he was more settled.' While shopping on the Champs Elysees she 'ran straight into Hawley Truax, the business manager of the New Yorker.'1949. 19 September 1949: Following the death of her brother-in-law Eugene, husband of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay: 'This is very sad news about Eugene, bless Jan's poor heart, I hope it won't ache too much. Last week at a cocktail party given by Pamela Frankau I overheard an American girl saying that she had met Edna and Eugene for the first time not long ago - but I didn't gather whether it was weeks or months - and that she had thought they both looked terribly ill and worn. This may explain why you haven't heard from Edna.' She says that HA will assist CI with her banking problems ('international stuff', and the theme of HA's two letters accompanying this correspondence) with Goff & Goff. Discusses the marital problems of the novelist Emanie Sachs (1893-1981; née Nahm, subsequently Philips): 'Emanie was grand. She enjoyed everything and ran back and forth between here [Ibstone] and London like a two-year-old. I got a more intelligible account of her troubles than before. What worries her about her alimony is this. Walter Sachs is the senior partner in Goldman-Sachs, (Henry agrees that this is so), and has a very large income, he pays taxes on something over three hundred thousand dollars a year and I can't consider that small. His taxes are ot so large as you might think, because he belongs to that favoured class, dealer in securities. He had less money at the time of the divorce, as Goldman Sachs were still patching up after the disaster of 1929. She settled for an alimony of something - I gather, for she didn't tell me the exact figures - like twenty thousand dollars, free of tax.' Continues with discussion of the Sachs's daughter: 'Janie and her husband have no money sense and are not at all buddies to Emanie, being very Red and not very brilliant or understanding; Emanie adores her grandson. It is not a comfy situation.' RW and HA 'are crazy about The Third Man [Carol Reed film with Graham Greene screenplay]. I thought the Viennese landlady one of the best bits of acting I have ever seen on the screen or the stage - and the child was a superb invention. The only thing I didn't fancy was Valli, I thought the part quite blank and so was she.' Regarding Wells's 1913 novel (no doubt prompted by the 1949 film version by David Lean), she writes: 'The Passionate Friend [sic] was about a Jewish woman, very handsome, who died in something like the circumstances of the story. H. G. and I both knew her, but not very well. What started him off on the story was that he had been asked by her to lunch and when he got to the house the footman opened the door in tears and told him she was dead. I cannot remember her name.'1949. 1 November 1949, postcard: 'I really want to see you soon. We have had a lot of trouble this summer, indeed since I left France life has been horrible. Anthony and I are the bestsellers of the season - which should be fun - but as Anthony has suddenly got a hate on Henry and me of a most extraordinary nature it is only rather dreadful.'1949. 20 November 1949: 'I thought the Edna poem extraordinary in its pitiful egotism. If you worked it out she was thinking of Eugene's death as Ulysses' voluntary desertion, for which she ought to be pitied. And equally obviously she had a fantasy that he was coming back again. It really is most odd that you have heard nothing from her.'1949. Postcard postmarked 21 December 1949, regarding the remarriage (after divorcing three years before) of Diana Forbes-Robertson and her husband the American journalist [James] Vincent Sheean (1899-1975): 'You are PPSSYCHIC, for this afternoon Dinah & Jimmy bought Linda out here for tea and broke the news they had remarried on the previous day! All three looked very well and happy.'1950. 4 May 1950: 'I am very troubled about many things. Anthony is working on Time in New York and took a house for Kitty [his wife the artist Katharine Duff Church (1910-1999)] & the children - not answering my letters and telling strange stories that I was preventing him from writing the biography of H. G. (which I wanted him to do in fact - not a personal biography, that's forbidden in the will, a literary & political one.) Suddenly he told Kitty not to come - he could not bear family life any more. She had let the house, taken the children out of their day-school, and booked passages. She is greatly distressed, poor dear. Meanwhile Anthony is living in Dorothy Thompson's house in N.Y., and she tells me she thinks him very ill. So do I. [...] I am full of apprehensions & would go over if he were not so hostile to me. I have never been so agonized in my life. Also there is great financial confusion about his wife which has to be settled'. She has received a long letter from 'Dorothy [Stevens]', telling her that 'all the Hollywood Commies (L[awson?] & so on) who are appealing against the verdict of contempt are settling down at Croton, so I should think there will be something like the H-bomb!'1950. 19 May 1950, from the Metropole Hotel, Montpellier. The family situation has not improved since the last letter: 'I found letters here telling me no fresh bad news but showing that I had better get back and settle things. Anthony, poor devil, has been silly, primarily - and has got into a position where he has been virtually blackmailed into taking up this extraordinary business over the advertisement for the novel and the biography. But I can't mentally cope quite with the situation of [sic] presented by such silliness. Anthony has steadily torn up all demands by the Income Tax authorities and these demands amount to such a sum that he lost his nerve and got scared - but actually the Income Tax authorities owe him much more than he owes them! But, oh, my daughter in law is hard to take, even harder, in the same way of silliness. Can I come and stay with you in September? By which time I shall have more of my book done, and this mess cleaned up, so far as it can be cleaned up.' Later in the letter she writes, 'Don't think too harshly of Anthony. He's just been an ass, and he's developing late. I have an idea that if he gets through this phase he'll be all right.'1950. 3 October 1950: Begins: 'My dears, / I have sent you two books by Orwell. Animal Farm is the best, the other is too grim, he wrote it when he was very ill with the T. B. which killed him.' She reports that since her last letter 'Addams of the New Yorker has taken charge of my life. My dear little housekeeper had a stroke a day or two after I got home and is still speechless in the hospital. Her husband who does the cooking then engnaged a man who had been under him in the R.A.F. and had been invalided out and become a hotel servant, to help us out. A lunatic fired into the carriage in which he was sitting coming down here from London in the train, and he arrived here shattered. Then, coming away from poor old Sybil Colefax['s] memorial service, Henry jerked his knee stepping on to a curb and has injured himself quite seriously - he is quite helpless and in great pain. / Meanwhile poor old Pamela [Frankau] has gone down with very bad flu and sinus trouble. We never should have left the Boissevains.' She reads that 'Dickie Benson is going a motor tour of England and Wales with Merle Oberon, which seems a strange adventure for this Arctic autumn. I cannot tell you how icy it is.' Postscript: 'People are fighting in the streets in U.S.A. & Canada about that article I gave you about the N.H.S. in the Ladies Home Journal. Everybody is unanimous that my article is not fair - but the people who are against the N.H.S say I am unfairly for it and the people who are for it say I am unfairly against it. Most peculiar.'1950. 21 October 1950: 'We see Edna's death in the Times today. It is odd that I have been involved in a correspondence about her of a fantastic sort with our Doris [Doris Stevens (1888-1963), American suffragist and author]. Doris wrote to me a little time ago - either I found her letter when I came back or she wrote since - saying that on her way back from a concert festival in New England she had called in on Edna, and had had a long visit with her, and how sweet she had been and glad to see Doris, but how odd it had all been, overgrown paths and ivy coming through the window and vast howling dogs and notices about keeping out at every yard.'1951. 28 September 1951: Begins by describing the unhappy end of her holiday ('My feelings can hardly be recorded') before turning to her son AW's marital difficulties: her sympathies lying with her daughter-in-law Kitty, who arrived at their West Country home with the children, 'and found that the people they had let it to for the summer had left it dirty and damp and had let the Aga stove go out; while lighting the Aga they all smelt smoke, and the children ran upstairs and found that by some mysterious process a mattress had gone on fire; and as their house is isolated poor exhausted Kitty had to rush upstairs and singlehandedly thrown the mattress (she herself wrapped in a wet towel) out of the window; in the violence of the throwing her favourite ring fell off her finger and has never been found. I know Anthony couldn't have foreseen this but I can't help charging it up against him. He doesn't want to marry anybody else, but he wants to be divorced - partly to be troublesome, apparently, because he is trying to be a Graham Greene character and to resemble Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe as much as possible, and partly because he is infatuated with everything American and most Americans he knows have been divorced. Well, well.' Next turns to a long discussion of the writer Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) and her mother Lady Cunard (1872-1948), mistress of the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. 'The impression here is that Lady Cunard's death meant quite a bit of money for Nancy, because Nancy inherited a settlement made on Lady Cunard by her husband. My informant ['one of my newspaper buddies'] says that the popular belief in the past was that Lady Cunard was a wealthy American girl who had married a penniless Englishman with a title, but that this was quite wrong. She turned up here many years ago, I suppose more than fifty years ago, must be, considering Nancy's age, with a disreputable mother who had got enough money from some source to bring herself and her daughter to Europe, and then married Cunard, who was a not very important country gentleman of substantial though not sensational means. My informant's theory is that about this time there appeared in London Emily Grigsby [(1879-1960)], whom I knew, a marvellous red-headed being, who had inherited a huge fortune in queer circumstances from Charles Yerkes, who had salted it away safely for her when ruin came, and that the Grigsby story transferred itself to Lady Cunard.' After describing Lady Cunard's involvement with Beecham ('he was Beecham's Pills'). She now turns to Lady Diana Cooper (1892-1986): 'As for the Cooper poverty, she had a marriage settlement, of which Max [i.e. Lord Beverbrook] was trustee, I know quite definitely. I don't think this was very large, and it was explained to me by persons intimately concerned that she had accepted the Miracle job [ in order to salt by a substantial piece of capital on which she and Duff [Lady Diana's husband, sometime British ambassador to France] could live while he pursued his political career. She was the daughter of a Duke. She has all her life had things free from firms and been given handsome presents, and during the last twelve years or so the film connection must have been very lucrative. For while he was still in politics del Giudice [Filippo del Giudice (1892-1962), Italian film producer in England] bought a book of his for a fantastic figure in order to secure a sort of social backing for the Rank enterprises - one of those damn fool things that film people do - and since h[e] left politics there has been a salary. Altogether the idea of Diana having been conditioned by poverty into a state of concern about nailbrushes is hooey, but it is a line of theirs.'1951. 8 December 1951. 'My dearest Charlotte, / Alas, no chance of Spain. Here I am with a novel 150,000 words long and 30,000 more to come before it is done, and I shall [h]ave to cut the whole to 125,000 and rewrite the first quarter which is now out of key with the rest. No Spain for me, but hard labour till the Spring. I have got into a hopeless mess with my work through constant worries about Anthony, the amount of trouble I have had over the state he left the settlement in regarding in come tax and so on is fantastic, and I have had to make a hell of a lot to pay Kitty's allowance [i.e. that of AW's wife] plus the taxes. I am having a cheerful old age.' Turning to the recent death of the editor of the New Yorker Harold Ross (1892-1951), she writes: 'I am wretched about Ross's death. I offered Hawley Truax [Ravaud Hawley Truax (1889-1978), chairman of the New Yorker board] to go out in October, if he would like to see me and if he were seriously ill. Truax wrote back that he was recovering, and Ross himself wrote and said he was tempted to say he was ill, that he could see me, but the truth was he was recovering and would look forward to seeing me in Spring. (When I am supposed to go out for the Presidential Conventions). He told me, poor devil, that he thought he had had what our King had but had got over it without an operation as he had had better doctoring and nursing! Then yesterday I went up to London and at the club was called up by Mollie Panter Downes [(1906-1997), novelist] who said she had had a cable from Shawn, [William Shawn (1907-1992), appointed editor of the New Yorker after Ross's death] the assistant editor, that Ross had died after an operation. Then Curran [her friend the lawyer Charles Curran, features editor of the Evening Standard] rang up and asked me to do an obituary on Ross - which I did, vilely, because I minded so much, but it was necessary because Ariane's account of their married life [the actress Ariane Allen, Ross's wife] has been all over the press. Then when I came back here today I found a sweet but shattering cable from Shawn saying that Ross had talked much of me till the very end. So now I wish I had gone over. But Anthony's business has been too much for me. I think it a cruel joke that Ross should have given Jane Grant her enormous alimony twenty-five years ago or so because he thought she was dying of cancer (and so did she) and it has got him first. I can't tell you how good he was to me. Or how warm-hearted. He was a Nannie to all his contributors. And his long letters showed always the most sweet concern for one's well being, absolute unselfishness.'1952. 3 March 1952. Explains how they have 'spent the winter being ill at Antibes' ('Our trouble consisted of my catching a thing called Bornholm Disease'). 'I got to Paris for three days to see Janet Flanner [(1892-1978), American writer and journalist], who had been called back to see her new boss - our new boss, I suppose, I hope - Bill Shawn. She was marvellous, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I saw Monica, who is quite restored and making a success and getting on her feet. By the way, Janet Flanner tells me that there has been a mix-up about [added in manuscript: '(There wasn't any other, indeed)] even the money Lady Cunard had from her husband, and that while there is more coming when his brothers die at present there is only twenty-one thousand pounds, which is unfortunately free from any settlement, and so the other legatees have to get a cut, which leaves Nancy with something between five and seven thousand pounds. All Diana will get is the same. Apparently Nancy is relieved because for a time it looked as if there would not even be that.' Turning to another subject: 'Janet [Flanner] and Doris Stevens [(1888-1963), suffragist and campaigner] agree that Jane Grant [(1892-1972), journalist] is hideously distressed by the death of Ross. This is really pathetic, for he had no sort of affection for her. So too is Ariane, and that is true of her - he had no affection left for her either. So far as sex was concerned he never should have known any woman for more than twenty-four hours. Yet all his friends, men and women, had nothing but the warmest affection and loyalty for him.'1952. 12 May 1952. 'Doris [Stevens] sends me a copy of a paragraph from a letter of yours and says I am to answer the enquiries about Hiss and Chambers [Soviet spies Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers] when I see you in July. But I am writing to you about them now, because you can answer the fundamental doubt about Chambers - or understand it better - when you read his book, Witness. It is an enormously long book, I should think about 300,000 words, containing much, much more than the Saturday Evening Post serial, and it gives a picture of a queer character - queer in the sense of odd, not homosexual. It is magnificently written, the picture of the run-down Chambers home is superb, and also the character-drawing - you will also understand the peculiar charm of Hiss.' She has written a review of the book on the subject by Alistair Cooke, which she finds 'very inaccurate, you cannot make head or tail of the case from that. There is a better book by two men called Toledano and Laski, badly written, but it tallies with the records. Hiss was not sentenced for espionage because in America the statute of limitations apples to all sorts of offences, whereas in England it applies only to a few offences connected with property and the recovery of debts. The only espionage proved in the Chambers case was covered by the statute of limitations, so far as both of them were concerned.' She explains her reasons for dismissing the suggestion that 'Chambers had cast a lecherous eye on Hiss', concluding 'This is a very tortuous path for a peeved pansy to follow.' She continues: 'I am told that I met Hiss twice, once with Biddle, years ago, in Washington, and once at a dinner-party given by the famous Mrs Moorhead. And I cannot remember him. Not a trace remains. Most annoying.' She turns to Roosevelt and the FBI, concluding: 'Roosevelt and the Department of Justice never touched a Russian spy, even a professional like Arthur Adams.' Postscript: 'I spent last Thursday morning in the divorce court watching poor Kitty get untied from Anthony. The judge blew up over Anthony's letters, which were pompous and silly and violent, and for that reason was very nice to Kitty and got the thing over quickly and quietly. I hope to God the boy now grows up.'1952. 23 September 1952: Very long joint letter. Begins with plane journey from Paris, and reference to 'Rosy Dolly [one of the vaudeville dancing duo Dolly Sisters] and [her husband] Irving Netcher'. Then: 'I had supper with [French actress] Odette Arnaud and Monica, who had just got back from Italy. They told me a nice story about Eva Peron. When she died she went to the gates of Heaven, and St Peter said, You are a bad girl, and she said, No, I was once, but I have been quite good lately, and then his heart softened, and he said, Well, we'll give you the test we reserve for girls who have been bad and say they've become good, and he led her into the heavenly mansion, and showed her a corridor fifty yards long, and said, If you can manage to walk along that corridor right to the end without having an impure thought, you can stay in heaven. But if one impure thought crosses your mind, you will find that the floor opens and you fall straight through into Hell. The poor girl went ten yards, twenty yards, thirty yards, forty yards, then the floor opened and she went through. But St Peter, who had been following just behind, had gone through himself a minute before. I think this a charming tribute to poor Eva.' RW has met her niece (daughter of her sister Winnie) in London: 'Alison is married to a Communist, but he is a Jew, and has therefore a basis of common sense, and even of family affection. He had therefore confided to his father-in-law and mother-in-law his perturbation because Alison had said that she wanted this baby, and didn't care if they had to die in the workhouse, as they had always been sunk in bourgeois comfort all their lives. He has told them seriously that they must resist her demands. But my poor sister, who has very high blood pressure, was shattered. The next morning I had to go and give my lecture on a course at Oxford in Jesus College. All very high-brown, I attended the lectures the other people gave and pretended to understand, and was delighted by the distress of a Trade Union leader who was among the lecturers. Henry had booked a room for me at a hotel, and the Trade Union leader expressed his envy for me. It's terrible, he said, to get to a toilet I have to go down two flights of stairs, through a bloody beautiful quadrangle, and up two flights of stairs, and let me tell you that if mines were housed like this they'd blow their top off. The food served (I ate lunch and dinner with them) also outraged the trade union leader. No woonder the gooverning classes are foony in their heads, he said, in a good North Country accent, if they have half an ounce of cold ham and a nasty little rabbit food and a bit of pie hat wouldn't have satisfied me when I was three years old for their main meal when they're yooung. I liked his reaction to the conditions provided for the sons of the rich. It was quite hard work, and I was dead tired before the end of it - and we had a party at the end, or rather a few of us who knew each other did, and broke up at half past twelve, and found that though we were adults the college had been locked up as if the undergraduates were still there. One of us had to go through all the staircases in two quadrangles to find if there was a don who was sleeping there although it was the vacation and had a key, and we did not find one till ten to one. I sat in the quadrangle with some of the boys beside a bed of night-scented stock, and I can't tell you [how] beautiful it was. But I was dead tired, and nearly wept when suddenly my spectacles broke on my nose.' Her daughter-in-law informed her that 'Anthony was very prosperous and that she really thought he was very sensible to have gone to America since he could make so much money there, and that he wanted to marry a girl of nineteen (who, incidentally, has no money). I had to raise the point as to whether she had tried to get him to give her any money and while she intimated that she did think she ought to get more from him there was a frosty suggestion that it was not my business.' She continues with 'A little gossip' about Noel Coward: 'Alas, Noel's play ['Quadrille'] is a flop, it has had appalling notices, and I gather it is not expected to last long [added in autograph: 'for him']. He is selling his house in Jamaica, and keeping a bit of the grounds for a cottage. Not that I think that this has anything to do with the flop of Quadrille! For the advance bookings have carried it on to December. But it isn't the success he and the rest of us had hoped for, the Lunts got rave notices and he only cold words. But he is apparently very gay and smiling about it. Gertie Lawrence's death was due to some queer condition of the liver, possibly infectious jaundice, but it seemed to be connected with injections she had to have for a scratch which was infected by something like poison ivy. (This from John van Druten, in whose production she was appearing, who saw her the day she left the cast.) Since I wrote this G. B. [Stern] rang up, tells me that Noel's play makes a bad impression through a technical fault, there is an interminable opening in which the Lunts don't appear, which gets the audience bored and resentful and nervous.' Following on from 'a subject we discussed in the course of our reconstruction of our times', she mentions HA's 'great friend', 'Dinah Sheean's [i.e. the writer Diana Forbes-Robertson (1914-1987)] cousin, Roy Harrod [(1900-1978)], the Oxford Economist', whose wife has rung from Washington to ask RW to 'look in on her mother-in-law (Frances Harrod, Sir J.'s sister) who is old and ill, and has known Henry since he was a boy. I know Billa Harrod [(1911-2005), architectural activist, wife of Sir Roy Harrod] very well [so] asked her straight out whether the Forbes-Robertsons had been well-to-do or poor. She replied without any hesitation that they had certainly been well-to-do. They worked year in year out under their own management in the days when it was possible to keep the money one earned. Sir J. and Gertrude [i.e. Gertrude Elliot (1874-1950), American-born actress] had made a fortune together out of the Passing of the Third Floor Back, and after Sir J. retired during the First World War Gertrude Elliot went on and had considerable financial success out of colonial tours and various enterprises, up till 1925. They lived in solid comfort with a house in Bedford Square (I think next door to Lady Oxford) and another at St Margaret's Bay. This is certainly the impression I got from my few meetings with them (not that they had these houses, my syntax is not good today, but that they were well-to-do, not rich rich, but comfortable) and that was what my cousin Mary Mackenzie, who was not poor herself, always conveyed to me. So if Maxine [i.e. American actress Maxine Elliot (1868-1940), aunt of Diana Forbes-Robertson] told you she paid for the girls' education, it must be true, but if anybody else told you I would think it was a mistake. When Gertrude died in 1940 she left the girls something round thirty-five thousand pounds, but this was the end of the estate, they had had some before.'1954. On 5 December 1954, to JMB: 'Here are two thrillers, I hope you have not already got them. I have no continuation of my thriller about the gardener, there is stalemate, he is still living in a garage at Wargrave over some beautiful cars, and the police are still looking at him with their beautiful round eyes. I have been very glad to learn from Charlotte that you are doing well on your diet of blood transfusions and detective stories'. Concludes: 'We have been coping with bad weather here, the floods are just at the bottom of our hill; and very beautiful they sometimes are, I looked across a flooded meadow the other day, red willows standing up amongst slate-blue waters, and twenty dazzling white swans lying in a fleet, and I thought I had hardly ever seen anything stranger and lovelier.'1955. The last dated letter, a joint one of 13 April 1955. Begins by apologising for not having a copy of her book 'A Train of Powder' to spare: 'I have only one copy of the American edition [...], for I always send my American friends the English edition - and the English edition is held up in definitely by the newspaper strike. I think - and indeed I hope - that the book will now be postponed till the autumn. I cannot tell you what this newspaper strike has done to books and plays. It has closed down not only the London daily papers (all except the Daily Worker) but The Times Literary Supplement. Monica Stirling's new book has been postponed indefinitely - [...] I heard the other day that Margolo [sic] Gilmore was opening in The Bad Seed on Thursday - they are going through with it, but there will be no notices. And it is a completely bogus strike - cooked up by the Communist-dominated Electric Trade Unions. There are only a few men in each newspaper office and it would not cost the owners much to raise their wages by the L3 [i.e. £3] a week they ask, but it would be so grotesquely unfair that these men should get this raise and not all the other office workers that the thing can't be done.' She ends with a reference to Oscar Wilde's younger son: 'Do you remember Vyvyan Holland? I took you to lunch with him years ago. During the war he married a woman thirty years younger than himself, and they produced a little boy, now nine years old, and the three of them came down and stayed the Easter weekend. Monday we spent very happily, amusing him, we had the nerve to pretend, sailing paper boats on the Thames.' An undated letter from Orchard Court contains another reference to Holland: 'I'm expecting you and B. B. [i.e. Barbara Back] and Willie [i.e. Somerset Maugham] to lunch tomorrow with Vyvyan Holland (Oscar Wilde's son) and Clive Bell (I can't think who can have done that) - both darlings.' Note: These letters derive from an archive purchased at auction, and also including letters to her from H.G. Wells, Somerset Maugham and H.L. Mencken which are catalogued separately. There was a note attached to the archive: : Letters from Rebecca West | H.G. Wells | Somerset Maugham | H.L. Mencken.| To Charlotte Boissevain. | Charlotte Boissevain gave these documents to Paul Gallico to 'keep safely'. [Signed] V.G. [Virginia Gallico presumably], of which a copy would be provided if requested.