The book will be published on March 21st over here and, as I told Pop, I’m a bit regretful that I’m here at the same time, because I’m honestly just as fed up as I can be with having to read reviews. Of course, you don’t have to read reviews and for some reason I don’t think I’ll give the same weight to English reviews as I do American, but there they are nonetheless. What I imagine I’ll do is to go up to Durham, where I have a friend in the English Department, and to Oxford, where I have an acquaintance or two, and then head for Paris in the middle of April.
I do want to start to work again and I must say that this sort of travel, though it lessens the opportunity for writing, increases the desire. In a strange land one might not feel exactly lonely, but one feels a sudden strange urge to write, perhaps because the distance touches one with a certain nostalgia and a desire in the heart to say something about all those people and places that have been left behind. At any rate, I hope you’ll be seeing something of mine in print soon.
The English mail system is wonderful, but the radio, despite the occasional programs of good music, is dreary; I’ve heard in the last two hours three talks: “The Moral Politics of Gladstone,” “New Developments in Scandinavian Architecture,” and “Spring Prospects for Bird-Watching in Surrey.” Really.
Do write when you get the time. I’ll keep you posted about addresses. Thanks again for your check and the letter and please remember me to Buddy + Aunt Adelaide, whose letter I received yesterday, and to the Parshalls. I’ll try to get notes off to all of them very soon.
Love Billy
TO DOROTHY PARKER
March 15, 1952 London, England
Darling Didi—
This will have to be in pencil because I no longer have my Parker ‘57’—stolen on the day of my sailing—and the ballpoint which what’s hername gave me has run out of natural-born ink. I’ll buy a good one on Monday.
I got your letter this evening and it was a great joy to hear from you, a joy, however not unmingled with pain (I seem to be getting into the English habit of using double negatives) because reading the letter was like talking to you only having you very far away, unable to kiss you and touch you and hold you in my arms. Anyway, I read it about 10 times and looked at the Harper’s picture of myself—it really is pretty lousy, isn’t it?—and then read your letter about 10 times more. I love you.
I got your letter just before supper, after a long and fairly exhausting day, but an interesting one. Roger Machell (did you ever meet him? He’s a wonderful fellow, full of that marvelous understated British humor which is, I guess, characteristic of the English but which in his particular case seems to possess a warm, even slightly Americanized individuality)—well, I went on an expedition with him in his car to a place in Sussex to fetch back some eggs, which are strictly rationed here, but which he can get for himself through some sinister manipulations with a farm lady he knows who owns chickens. Anyway, we went by a roundabout route through Windsor about 25 miles from here, where we stopped at an inn and had a perfectly atrocious meal. But the day was sunny and mild and afterwards we walked up the hill to Windsor Castle (where King George was buried the other week) and it was a great experience—you feel that old ancestral shiver up the back—to see the walls and battlements and cobblestone streets still solid and standing after nearly a thousand years. It’s an enormous place, about the size of Stuyvesant Town in area and although it doesn’t have a moat (which all genuine moneyback guarantee castles should have) it’s a fine one and commands a magnificent view of all those distant sloping fields and hedgerows you see in an Arthur Rank movie. Right below the castle and less than half a mile across the Thames is Eton, where we went afterwards (Roger is an old Eton boy) and the sense of time there is much the same as you get at Windsor, bare rugged stone walls that enclose grassless courtyards so ugly they’re simply beautiful, shaded archways and ancient panelings of wood upon which the boys have whittled things like “A. Worthington April 1761” and “Thomas Lyttle A.D. 1644.” My God, just to stand there, watching the boys now alive hustling along in their toppers and tails, and to think of all those who’ve been there since 1441, touches you with such a sense of mystery and time that you want to break up and cry. I wish you could have been there, just as I wish you had been with me yesterday in Westminster Abbey, where I walked in the afternoon; there you run up upon little niches which say: “Here lies: Edmund Spenser, the sweetest singer among the poets,” and step upon the mortal bones of Tennyson and Browning (they’re resting chummily side by side), Coleridge, and Congreve and Hardy and Garrick and Ben Jonson (“O rare Ben Jonson,” says the inscription) and Christ knows who else, I wonder if they’ll let T.S. Eliot in.
At any rate, to shorten the story a bit, the ride from Eton back down into Sussex for the eggs and on up to London was lovely and I repeat, I wish you’d been along, except that it might have been uncomfortable for English cars are as small as a peanut.
My itinerary for the next three weeks is pretty well mapped out. Monday night I’m going to Hamilton’s for dinner, Tuesday to Roger’s for dinner with Eric Ambler and his wife, Wednesday to dinner with a friend of Hank Simons, Thursday to a play with Roger, and Friday there’s to be some sort of publisher’s cocktail party, because the book is coming out that day. Saturday this actor I was telling you about, Brian Forbes, and myself are renting a car and are going to tour the south of England for a week—the Cotswolds and down to Cornwall with stops in Somerset and in Lincolnshire, where some of his family lives. Then that week-end—the 29th—I’m going out to Surrey to visit another friend of Hank’s, followed by three or four more days in London and then in the first week of April, to la belle France.
London can be heavily depressing if you allow it to be. The English are the only people who seem to be individually wonderful while being collectively half-dead. There is really a great truth in the classic descriptions of the present-day English: of people who seem literally to be gritting their teeth in the midst of the pain of a gray and unlovely way of life—of a world of tiny pieces of bread and tiny martinis, ill-lit roads and rooms, bad paper, bad plumbing, seedy clothes, no eggs, little milk and chilly corridors. It will be an achievement if they aren’t utterly warped by the experience—already they seem to be more + more becoming Colonial, in an odd reversed sort of way, in that the French are taking over their cuisine, the Italians are their waiters, and most importantly practically any commodity, gadget, or piece of machinery is an imitation of, or otherwise derivative from, something American. And America is in their speech, their manners, their imitation-Hollywood magazines. Maybe they won’t be completely taken over; no, I don’t guess they will: they’d come last of all, after the French, the Germans and even the Russians, because the hotel porter just came in the room and when I gave him a sixpence he said, “Thank you, sir,” and there was something about him—maybe a visibly stiff upper lip—that precluded his ever paying allegiance to Truman. A great country, only I haven’t got guts enough not to want to go to France in just about three weeks.
BBC just signed off, and I must, too, my darling. How I wish you were with me tonight. Tomorrow is my day of Spartan duty, when I start to create again. Wish me well. I love you, darling.
Bill
TO ROBERT LOOMIS AND JOHN J. MALONEY†o
March 17, 1952 London, England
Dear Bob + John (a joint letter, because Didi wrote me that you two had joined forces at 117); if there’s one city on the face of the earth that’s deader than Durham, N.C. on a Sunday afternoon, it’s London, England. The bars are closed, the stores, the restaurants and I tried for a whole half-hour, vainly, in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, to get a drink of water. However, being the resourceful American that I am, I spent the afternoon in a moderately entertaining fashion, walked over to Buckingham Palace to watch the parading of the guards. The palace is huge, just as in the pictures, and monstrously ugly with an enormous asphalt courtyard, utterly without grass. I didn’t see the Queen Mother or Margaret Rose
but I saw, for the first time in England, a really beautiful English girl. Then I walked through Green Park, through crowds of Englishmen and Englishwomen and Englishchildren (I’ve never seen so many sprats in my life, even in Central Park on a Sunday in June), and on up to Trafalgar Square, where there is an ugly monument to Lord Nelson, with his back turned to the National Gallery; and everything—streets, Lord Nelson, and National Gallery, is covered with more pigeonshit than I’ve ever seen in my life. The paintings in the National Gallery are marvelous—especially the Rembrandts—but the Gallery itself is a monstrosity; like practically every structure in London, it seems to have been built by a nut. Did you ever see a picture of the Albert Memorial, built by Victoria in honor of her departed consort? I have drawn a picture of it on the other side of this page for your pleasure.
Then back to my hotel for an evening with Gore Vidal’s new novel, which is either a brilliant satire or a piece of dull and tawdry exhibitionism—I haven’t decided which.†p
Actually, this is the first really dull day I’ve had since I’ve been in England. Roger Machell, who is Hamish Hamilton’s partner, has been most kind. We’ve had dinner together a number of times and yesterday we went for a long and quite lovely drive through Berkshire and Sussex in search for some black-market eggs. We stopped at Windsor Castle, where the King was lately buried and which, unlike the Albert Memorial, has good sense enough to be a monument of real, almost incredible grandeur. It’s enormous and stands on a high hill commanding a magnificent view of hedgerows, the Thames, rolling countryside, and the playing fields of Eton. Later we went down to Eton and saw the boys, who look pink-cheeked and not too happy in their frock-tailed uniforms, and saw the ancient carvings in the walls and on desks: “Alexander Bycroft, Oct. 1652,” and such. It seems to have even more of a sense of tradition than Davidson College, and is twice as beautiful.
I won’t go into English cooking. I think it’s safe to simply say that that part of it which I’ve tasted so far is unspeakable, loathsome, and I’ve confined myself to eating in Italian and French and one or two of the better hotel restaurants, where you can get as fine a meal as in New York, though unfortunately at New York prices.
The book is coming out Friday the 21st. If both of you will pardon my sudden excursion into Art, I have traced a reasonable facsimile of the jacket on the back of this page.†q I think it’s atrocious, but I’ve been polite with Roger + have not told him.
I’m being well entertained in the evenings. I’m booked up solid this week with dinners at Hamish Hamilton’s and elsewhere—one of them to meet Eric Ambler and his wife—and there’s going to be a cocktail party in connection with the book on Friday. Next Saturday a guy I met, an actor my age who’s a friend of Roger’s, named Brian Forbes, and I, are going to hire a car and take a 6-day tour of Southern England—to Somerset and Cornwall and South Wales—and return on the 29th, in time for me to go on a weekend out in Surrey with friends of Hank Simons, and in time for Brian to fly back to Hollywood to his wife, who’s an actress named Constance Smith. Ever heard of her? I hadn’t. Except that she’s in a thing called “Red Skies of Montana” with Richard Widmark and was in “The Mudlark.” I expect that after the 29th I’ll stay for a few more days and go to France toward the end of the first week in April. I just really can’t say that so far I’ve found London the most fascinating city in the world, though all the stories are true about England being a charming place in the countryside—at least what I’ve seen of it. My hotel is quite nice, though I have an idea that my bill is going to be very high. It has lots of hot water, modern plumbing and waxed toilet-paper which seems to be an austerity measure though you’d think that waxing it would be more expensive than just going on and let it be absorbent. The radio in my room is generally very fine but pretty erratic—a Haydn and Bach program followed by some asshole talking about steel production in Lincolnshire, or someone singing a terrible thing which seems to be very popular now over here: “As I was strowling down Pic-pic-adilly, the bright mahning air.” The English, in spite of such indigenous ditties, seem really to be going quite madly American; all the magazines are Hollywood movie magazines, most of the radio songs are from Broadway, and all the literati read Time and the New Yorker. It’s sort of like stepping into a foggy American colonial possession, surrounded by people who look like seedy Vermonters with bad teeth. But I don’t mean actually to be disparaging because all that I’ve met have been hospitable, communicative, and generous.
I got a card from George and Gerda Rhoads.†r They have a tiny apartment in Paris and headcolds, which they maintain they caught over here. But they seem to be doing well. I caught a slight cold myself, on the boat, probably a result of standing at the rail trying to look like a man of mystery. It didn’t work, and my sex-life aboard was circumvented, although I did dance with both Lena Horne and Mrs. Gene Kelly. Lena is going with her husband (who is white and wears a goatee) to Copenhagen, and apparently the Kellys are going to make a movie version of “Brigadoon” in Normandy, though it seems a non sequitur, and when I asked if they were going to do “La Gaiete Parisienne” in Dublin, Mrs. Kelly didn’t think it was clever at all.
John, please ask Sally to forward all mail from now on which comes in to Hamish Hamilton, as I think I’ll be moving from the Staffords soon. Drop me a line and let me know how things are going on—both of you. Give my best to Hiram, Louis, + all.
—Bill
TO DOROTHY PARKER
March 19, 1952 London, England
Dearest little crumpet
I saw T.S. Eliot in the subway this morning. Imagine coming all the way to England and running into the Bard, not at a Cocktail Party, but under Piccadilly Circus. I didn’t talk to him—I was too bashful, I guess—but there he was, as large as life (bigger, in fact, than I’d imagined him) with a kindly, sad face and a sort of melancholy stoop. Odd thing was that no one else except myself, and friend Bryan Forbes who was with me, seemed to recognize him at all. Or maybe it isn’t odd.
Monday night there was a drunken dinner party at Hamish Hamilton’s. Present were the Hamiltons (he has an attractive, vivacious Italian wife), a man called Leonard Russell, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and his wife Dilys Powell who is a film critic. Also a rather voracious woman novelist, Emma Laird by name (“Of Former Love”) who invited me to her house in Sussex weekend after next, if I’m still here. I detected a carnal gleam in her eye but if I go—which I doubt, since I think I’ll be in France—I don’t think I’ll have any trouble holding her at arm’s length, since I’m bigger than she is. Hamilton is a sort of whimsical, nervous fellow—even more nervous than I am—and the austerity doesn’t seem to have had any marked effect on him, since he turned out a marvelous meal, complete with butlers and footmen, and the hangover I had the next day testified to the size of his supply of Scotch.
Last night Roger Machell had a small party complete with Eric Ambler, who seems to me frankly to be one of the less disagreeable brands of jackass. His wife is from Nutley, New Jersey and he has a really terrible propensity for talk and for getting drunk, and we had a long pointless argument about who won the American Civil War, and was McClellan really the bad general everyone made him out to be. The party broke up at 2:00 A.M. and every one was fairly polluted, except myself, of course, who held my liquor like a Virginian. Today had lunch with Roger and Mollie Parker-Downes, who is very likeable except that she, like practically all the London literati, puts terrible emphasis on the value of The New Yorker as a journal of opinion …
Bill
TO ROBERT LOOMIS AND JOHN J. MALONEY
March 26, 1952†s Cornwall, England
Dear John + Bob. The Austin really rolls. We’ve been to Cambridge and all the way up to Lincolnshire in the north of England, back down to London and then Cornwall, where I am now, in four days. The scenery here is marvelous and I’m staying with a vicar, his insane wife and 90-year-old Aunt. Made a horrifying trek at 3: 00 A.M. night before last across Dartmoor, but was neither ac
costed by escaped convicts nor Baskerville hounds.†t Saw Stonehenge, which is disappointing, being very small + surrounded by wax paper + apple peels, but saw the Cambridge chapel, Ely Cathedral and a 10th century castle, called Tottenhall, on the Lincoln trip and all are magnificent in their various ways. Tomorrow I’ll see Daphne du Maurier’s in Devon. God!
TO ELIZABETH MCKEE
March 27, 1952 London, England
Dear Lizzie:
I haven’t received any communication from you regarding the money I asked for, but I expect it will come in today’s or Monday’s mail.
We got in from our grand tour last night. Stopped over in Par, Cornwall—which is near the village where we were staying, Porthleven—and were well fed by Daphne de Maurier, who is really quite charming, I guess, and put out a wonderful meal but who makes a terrific fuss about being impoverished, this being all highly incongruous considering the fact that she lives in the most enormous house I’ve ever seen (about the size of the old Raskob mansion on Riverside Drive, only larger) and that she’s #1 on the current list.†u Oh to hell with it; life is a mystery. The stay in the vicarage in Cornwall, something straight out of Evelyn Waugh, was hilarious; I’m writing Dorothy all about it and I guess she’ll tell you about it.†v But Cornwall really is lovely: with tremendous, breathtaking seas.