Here we are again! Back home and full of beans and fit to face anything,
even Lathoms and Milsoms.
By the way, I’ve got to take back what I said about Lathom. I’ll forgive
him anything for being such a bloody fine painter. My God, he has made a
fine thing of Mrs. Harrison—old Halkett would grunt in his funny gruff
way and say, “It’s a masterpiece.” He wants to send it to the Academy
(where it would probably be the picture of the year, if the Committee
didn’t hang themselves in their own wires under the shock of seeing a
decent bit of painting for once)—only, of course, those imbecile women
have made a hash of it and put Harrison’s back up. Blether, blether
blether—rushing at the poor man with chatter about newspaper sensations
and standing under my portrait on opening day, blah! blah! blah! before
the poor man had finished reeling under the impact. Row, of course. I
told Lathom not to be a silly ass, and to go and apologise quietly to
Harrison afterwards and tell him there wasn’t the slightest intention of
showing it against his wishes. If he uses a little tact, the old boy
will take it for granted three months hence that the thing is going to
be shown and imagine he suggested it himself. I’ve got Harrison fairly
well sized up, but his wife is a silly egoist, and Lathom has no
practical sense at all as regards human relationships. Anyway, I hope
the thing will be there, because I’d like you to see it. It’s really
first-rate. And revealing, my God! only Mrs. H. doesn’t see that, and I
don’t think Lathom realises it either.
I’ve had a letter from Merritt—he “has read the book with much interest
and would be glad if I could find time to call and discuss it with him
at my convenience.” First time anybody’s even offered to discuss it. I
suppose that if I will consent to cut out all the “advanced” passages,
and “brighten” the style and give it a more “satisfactory” ending, he
will consider doing something with it. Well, he won’t get the chance,
that’s all.
Thank Heaven, the _Life_ is practically finished with. I’m thankful to
get rid of it. It has led me into reading a lot of scientific and
metaphysical tripe which is of no use to anybody, and least of all to a
creative writer (a fact I have taken delight in rubbing in, in the
course of the work!). And the further you go with it, the worse it gets.
Lucretius could make great poetry out of science, and Bacon got some
good work in on it—and even Tennyson could screw some fine lines out of
an unsound theory of evolution and perfectibility and all the rest of
it. But now, oh, heavens! after the bio-chemist, the mathematician. What
can you make out of the action of the glands of internal secretion upon
metabolism, or Pi and the square root of minus one? Despair and a kind
of gloomy grubbiness, that’s all. I’d rather have a Miltonian theology
to make poetry of than all this business of liver and gonads and the
velocity of light. Perry the parson gets out of it by pretending that
the Catholic Church knew all about it from the beginning, and that
inaccurate theological metaphors can be interpreted as pseudo-scientific
formulæ, which is a lie. The origin of life is our great stamping-ground
for discussion. You can’t make life synthetically in a
laboratory—therefore he deduces that it came by divine interference!
Rather an assumption! But, after all, he is little worse than the man of
science. “In some way or other, life came,” they say. “Sometime,
somehow, we may learn how to make it.” But even if one could learn to
make it, that doesn’t account for its having arrived spontaneously in
the first place. The biologist can push it back to the original protist,
and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch
the real question of why or how the thing began at all. The astronomer
goes back untold million of years and ends in gas and emptiness, and
then the mathematician sweeps the whole cosmos into unreality and leaves
one with mind as the only thing of which we have any immediate
apprehension. _Cogito, ergo sum, ergo omnia esse videntur._ All this
bother, and we are no further than Descartes. Have you noticed that the
astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the
lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale
makes them feel either that it doesn’t matter a hoot anyway, or that
anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.
I wish I had Lathom’s robust contempt for all this kind of thing. His
attitude is that bio-chemistry cannot affect his life or his art, so let
them get on with it. I am tossed about with every wind of doctrine, and
if I’m not damn careful I shall end by writing a _Point Counterpoint_,
without the wit. You can’t really make a novel hold together if you
don’t believe in causation.
_Said a rising young author, “What, what?_
_If I think that causation is not,_
_No word of my text_
_Will bear on the next_
_And what will become of the plot?_”
Perhaps this accounts for my never having been able to produce a book
with a plot—except, of course, the one Merritt wants to see me about.
And that was a sort of freak book.
Well, never mind. Only a fortnight now and I shall be seeing you. Praise
God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality
exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of
objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are
correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about).
Your ever faithful
JACK