Correspondence – Page 33

To H. Williamson (ctd.) 2/4/28

tried to write, is a technical delight, all the more
perfect, for being imperfect, here and there. If you
write it out again, and make a rounded and gracious
thing of it, you’ll rob us of the object lesson, and
deprive us of what might have been a new and very
lovely book, an another subject.

Now a confession. In the R.A.F. we live in a com-
munity: miniism “idth is voluntary and great. So as soon as the
old stag arrived he disappeared.[note to myself] I haven’t an idea
who has him, out of the seven hundred fellows of us in
camp. He will, inevitably return, after a few days, or
after many days; nothing ever goes wholly astray, nor
is anything wasted. They are like townsees on a desert
island, longing to taste all the book fruit they see
on ^ the shelves of all the shops, but afraid to
taste, without some guide to tell them what’s what.
Being almost book-blind, themselves, any guide is wel-
come. So they assume that all my books are edible.
I suffer, once in a way, as now; but generally I’m
delighted that they should find me of use. I like
these fellows enormously. We are really the same kind
of creature – or would have been if I’d had a natural
life, and not a sort of extravagant experience – and
the nearer I can creep back towards them the safer I
feel. They give one a root in the ground.

Your philosophy interests me. I haven’t got so far
myself; being so English as ’em, gives one a distrust
for systems of any kind, and I don’t believe I could
think out anything worth while. When I try to think,
it lasts about five minutes, and then digresses along
some pathway of dream. And if I try to understand any
reputable philosopher, I find myself either lost or
yawning in half an hour. You seem to have dramatised
yourself with some success. I judge only by what you
tell me of your novels. I would like to see them:-
but will not ask you for them. If you’ll take the
risk of sending them – well and good. They will be
borrowed, and read to death by all the oily-handed, and
discussed crudely in half a dozen rooms; and I’ll do
them just that justice, for all my reading has to be
done where I live and sleep, on my bed in barracks.
This common life is not fit for literary gens; but
seven gents who aren’t by nature literary from the
folly of thinking themselves so.

I’ll promise to tell you what I think of anything
of yours I read; the old Stag for certain, and others