I am sure I don’t know what we should do if it were not for Mr. Lathom. He often drops in of an evening now and cheers us up immensely. The Bear is always dragging the poor man off into his studio, as he calls it, to twaddle about art, but Mr. Lathom has most delightful manners and puts up with it heroically. He thinks my scarf-patterns and stocking-tops show great talent, “a very good sense of design.” He is a real artist, so I am sure he wouldn’t say so if he didn’t think it.
We do not see much of the objectionable Mr. Munting, I am glad to say. He often doesn’t come home till very late. You never know what these men are after. It is a good thing that he shares the maisonnette with Mr. Lathom, who I am sure would not allow any undesirable goings-on under our roof.
I hope darling Joan is quite strong again now. Give her my love, and say I have started on the scarf. I am doing a pattern of purple and white clematis, which will be very chic, I think.
11
John Munting to Elizabeth Drake
15a, Whittington Terrace
Damn it all, yes, Bungie—I suppose you are right. Our ideas are always ahead of our actions, or rather, askew to them, and we move lopsided, like a knight on a chessboard. We get somewhere, even if it isn’t the place we thought we were aiming for. By the time the next generation has come along, the ideas which were new and strange to us have become part of its habitual commonplace. It goes straight along them, even when it imagines it is rebelling against them.
And after all, this business of imagining that one is one kind of thing and being actually another—we all do it, all the time, so why shouldn’t whole nations and periods do it? Have you read J. D. Beresford’s Writing Aloud, by the way? It is enormously fascinating, and I delight in the bit where he tells how, in his callow youth, he had a “passionate impulse” to “save” a young prostitute he had talked to, and then prayed desperately to be delivered from the sin of hypocrisy and be made single-hearted and all that—only to be delighted, later on in life, with the discovery that he was “not one person but fifty.” One imagines—one dramatises oneself into the belief that one is going one way, and lo and behold! the path “gives itself a little shake” like the one in Alice and one finds oneself walking at the front door again.
Our friend Mrs. Harrison is a perfect example of this dramatisation business—and is quite capable of dramatising herself in two totally inconsistent directions at once, rather like the Victorian age. Any attitude that appeals to her sense of the picturesque she appropriates instantly, and, I really believe, with perfect sincerity. If she reads a “piece in the paper” about the modern woman who finds spiritual satisfaction in a career, she is that woman; and her whole life has been ruined by having had to give up her job at the office. Capable, intelligent, a comradely woman, meeting male and female on a brisk, pleasant, man-to-man basis—there she is! If, on the other hand, she reads about the necessity of a “complete physical life” for the development of personality, then she is the thwarted maternal woman, who would be all right if only she had a child. Or if she gets a mental picture of herself as a Great Courtesan (in capital letters), she is perfectly persuaded that her face only needed opportunity to burn the topless towers of Ilium. And so on. What she really is, if reality means anything, I do not know. But I can see now, what I didn’t see before, that this power of dramatisation, coupled with a tremendous vitality and plenty of ill-regulated intelligence, has its fascination. If ever she found anyone to take one of her impersonations seriously, she would probably be able to live very brilliantly and successfully in that character for—well, not all her life, perhaps, but for long enough to make an impressive drama of it. Unfortunately, the excellent Harrison is not a good audience. He admires, but he won’t clap, which must be very discouraging.
You will gather from this that I have been seeing a good deal of the Harrisons. Quite right, Sherlock, I have. When you once make up your mind to look on people as social studies, you can get quite reconciled to their company. Mrs. H. cornered me in the artistic sitting-room last night, while her husband was telling Lathom about aerial perspective, to tell me about her own personality. She feels cramped in her surroundings, it seems. Her mentality has no room to expand. It is so hard for a woman, isn’t
