I must answer your letter immediately. It has dropped into the most heavenly fair morning. I wish instead of writing you were here on the terrace and you'd let me talk of your book which I far from detested. What an impression to convey! My trouble is I never have enough space to get going—to say what I mean to say—fully. That's no excuse, really. But to be called very unfair—that hurts, awfully, and I feel that by saying so you mean I'm not as honest as I might be. I'm prejudiced. Well, I think we're all of us more or less prejudiced, but cross my heart I don't take reviewing lightly and if I appear to it's the fault of my unfortunate manner.

Now I shall be dead frank. And please don't answer. As one writer to another (tho' I'm only a little beginner, and fully realise it).

The Captives impressed me as more like a first novel than any genuine first novel I've come across. Of course, there were signs enough that it wasn't one—but the movement of it was the movement of one trying his wings, finding out how they would bear him, how far he could afford to trust them, that you were continually risking yourself, that you had, for the first time, really committed yourself in a book. I wonder if this will seem to you extravagant impertinence. I honoured you for it. You seemed to me determined to shirk nothing. You know that strange sense of insecurity at the last, the feeling “I know all this. I know more. I know down to the minutest detail and perhaps more still, but shall I dare to trust myself to tell all?” It is really why we write, as I see it, that we may arrive at this moment and yet—it is stepping into the air to yield to it—a kind of anguish and rapture. I felt that you appreciated this, and that, seen in this light, your Captives was almost a spiritual exercise in this kind of page 63 courage. But in fact your peculiar persistent consciousness of what you wanted to do was what seemed to me to prevent your book from being a creation. That is what I meant when I used the clumsy word “task”; perhaps “experiment” was nearer my meaning. You seemed to lose in passion what you gained in sincerity and therefore “the miracle” didn't happen. I mean the moment when the act of creation takes place—the mysterious change—when you are no longer writing the book, it is writing, it possesses you. Does that sound hopelessly vague?

But there it is. After reading The Captives I laid it down thinking: Having “broken with his past” as he has in this book, having “declared himself,” I feel that Hugh Walpole's next novel will be the one to look for. Yes, curse me. I should have said it!

I sympathise more than I can say with your desire to escape from autobiography. Don't you feel that what English writers lack to-day is experience of Life. I don't mean that superficially. But they are self-imprisoned. I think there is a very profound distinction between any kind of confession and creative work—not that that rules out the first by any means.

About the parson and his sister. Yes, they are truly observed, but they wouldn't come into my review because I didn't think they really came into the book! What was Maggie to them—or they to Maggie? What did they matter to Maggie—what was their true relation? I can't see it. I can't see the reason for those two. I can imagine Maggie forgetting them utterly the moment she set foot in London. That their religion was more foreign to her than the other one doesn't need to be told. The point is Maggie never was in Skeaton; she was somewhere else. As to her holiday in that place where everything was green—I never knew what happened on that holiday? The parson's sister—what a story you might have made of her and Paul! (I don't think that Paul's passion for Maggie would have lasted, either. He would have page 64 become frightened of her, physically—and terribly ashamed). Yes, I feel Skeaton could have had a book to itself with Paul's sister—getting old you know, her descent into old age, her fears increasing, and then something like the Uncle Matthew affair breaking into her life…

And I stick to what I said about Caroline. Yes, you might have trusted Caroline, but a young female wouldn't. If Caroline had come to her father's door Maggie would have stiffened, have been on her guard immediately. As to trusting her with a letter to Martin—never!

Some of their love making was very beautiful—it had that tragic, youthful quality.

But enough. Forgive this long letter. I'll try to see more round the books. I've no doubt at all I'm a bad reviewer. Your letter made me want to shake hands with you across the vast.

I hope this isn't too illegible. But I'm rather a feeble creature in a chaise longue.