Trusting that this will find you alive, he writes 7.7.20, I write to thank you for your letter and to return the book. [The Diary of a Nobody]. It amused me, though I am not prepared to go as far as Rosebinger, Birringer or Bellinger. I could certainly furnish a bedroom without it; in fact, I hope to die before I read it again; I don’t rank it with Don Quixote; and I have never seen the statue of St. John the Baptist, so “can’t say.” I think that Mr. Hardfur Huttle, towards the end, does much to cheer the reader.
I have bought pahnds and pahnds’ worth of books; I am rou-inned; and yet I never have aught to read. Can you lend me Huxley’s Collected Essays? Can you lend me anything in which somebody “goes for” somebody else? I yearn to read savage attacks; you know what I mean: not attaxi-cabri-au lait, but attacks free from all milk of human kindness.
Here is a typical quotation from your favourite “poet”, whom, by the way, Benjamin Beaconsfield disliked as much as I do:
“Out of the wreck I rise, past Zeus to the P(sic)otency o’er him.”
Nice and typical, isn’t it? But you mustn’t use it, as the first six words form the title of a novel by Beatrice Harraden which I have been driven to read down here by the dearth of books.
My last two purchases have just arrived; series i and ii of the New Decameron. Shall I enjoy them?...
You will want something to read in the train, he writes on 10.7.20. Read this Muddiman’s Men of the Nineties. But please return it to me; it will serve to keep the child quiet when she next comes down. And it served to make me feel very young again (seven years younger than you are now) to read of all those remarkable men with whom I foregathered in the nineties.
They would probably have accepted Squire and Siegfried Sassoon.[16] None of the other poets; none of the prose-writers, painters, “blasters” or blighters....
In acknowledging the book, I objected to what I considered the excessive importance that is still attached to the men of the nineties and to their work: