Many many thanks for your book. I am delighted to have it, and I think it looks awfully nice. I've read it again from beginning to end. How good it is! (Here, as you don't believe in such a thing as modesty you will say, “Yes, isn't it?”) But I can only agree. Don't change, Mr. Gerhardi. Go on writing like that. I mean with that freshness and warmth and suppleness, with that warm emotional tone and not that dreadful glaze of ‘intellectuality’ which is like a curse upon so many English writers… And there's another thing. You sound so free in your writing. Perhaps that is as important as anything. I don't know why so many of our poor authors should be in chains, but there it is—a dreadful clanking sounds through their books, and they never can run away never take a leap, never risk anything… In fact, it's high time we took up our pens and struck a blow for freedom. To begin with—What about? He is a ripe, fat victim. I agree with every word you say about him, his smugness is unbearable, his “Oh my friends, let us have Adventures!” is simply the worst possible pretence. You see the truth is he hasn't a word to say. It is a tremendous adventure to him if the dog gets into the kitchen and licks a saucepan. Perhaps it is the page 226 biggest adventure of all to breathe “Good Night, dear Lady” as the daughter of the County hands him his solid silver bedroom candlestick. All is sham, all is made up, all is rooted in vanity. I am ashamed of going to the same school with him—but there you are. And he's Top Boy, with over 7,000 a year and America bowing to the earth to him… It's very painful.

But after this long parenthesis let me come back to Futility one moment. Shall I tell you what I think you may have to guard against? You have a very keen, very delightful sense of humour. Just on one or two occasions—(par exemple when you took Nina into a corner and slapped her hand to the amusement of the others) I think you give it too full a rein. I wonder if you feel what I mean? To me, that remark trembles towards … a kind of smartness—a something too easy to be worth doing.

I hope one day, we shall have a talk about this book. Let me once more wish it and you every possible success.

Now for your photograph. It is kind of you to have sent it to me. I am very happy to have it. When I possess a room with a mantelpiece again on the mantel-piece you will stand. Judging by it you look as though you were very musical. Are you?

I am extremely interested to hear of your book on Tchehov. It's just the moment for a book on Tchehov. I have read, these last weeks, Friday Nights, by Edward Garnett, which contains a long essay on him. Garnett seems greatly impressed by the importance of T.'s scientific training as a doctor, not the indirect importance (I could understand that) but the direct. He quotes as a proof The Party and T.'s letter in which he says “the ladies say I am quite right in all my symptoms when I describe the confinement.” But in spite of T.'s letter, that story didn't need a doctor to write it. There's not a thing any sensitive writer could not have discovered without a medical degree. The truth of that “importance” is far more subtle. People on the whole understand Tchehov very little. They persist in looking at him page 227 from a certain angle and he's a man that won't stand that kind of gaze. One must get round him—see him, feel him as a whole. By the way, isn't Tolstoi's little essay on The Darling a small masterpiece of stupidity.

… And when you say you don't think T. was really modest. Isn't it perhaps that he always felt, very sincerely, that he could have done so much more than he did. He was tormented by time, and by the desire to live as well as to write. ‘Life is given us but once’… Yet, when he was not working he had a feeling of guilt; he felt he ought to be. And I think he very often had that feeling a singer has who has sung once and would give almost anything for the chance to sing the same song over again—Now he could sing it… But the chance doesn't return. I suppose all writers, little and big, feel this, but T. more than most. But I must not write about him, I could go on and on…

Yes, the title of your novel is lovely, and from the practical standpoint excellent. I see so many pretty little hands stretched towards the library shelf… About Love. I don't see how any body could avoid buying a copy. But très sérieusement, I am so glad you are at work on it. Do you intend to ‘adopt a literary career’ as they say? Or do you have to make literature your mistress. I hope Bolton is not a permanent address if you dislike it so. I was there seventeen years ago. I remember eating a cake with pink icing while a dark intense lady told me of her love for Haydn Coffin and that she had thirteen photographs of him in silver frames in her bedroom. I was very impressed, but perhaps it wasn't a typical incident. I meant to tell you of the lovely place where I am staying but this letter is too long. The flowers are wonderful just now. Don't you love these real summer flowers? You should see the dahlias here, big spiky fellows, with buds like wax and round white ones and real saffron yellow. The women are working in the vines. It's hot and fine with a light valley wind. Goodbye. I am so glad we are friends.