Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

January 31, 1920

To Sylvia Lynd

I can't tell you how pleased I was to get your letter—how sorry to know that you've been so ill. You're better now? It's a cursed thing to have. I had an attack once—ten years ago—above a grocer's shop in Rottingdean; no more than ten years ago or less, the year our great Edward the Peace Maker died. He died when I was in the very thick of it. But it's an absolute mistake that you should be ill. You're not at all the person to be ill. I always see you in my mind's eye sitting up and laughing, but sitting up in a way that few people have any idea of—delightfully.

Look here! I'm coming back to England in May for a few months at least. Let us meet. Let us arrange it now. Will you come and spend the whole day? That is not half big enough, but my plans are so vague. I don't know where we shall be living. J. seems to be either camping in a waste-paper basket at Adelphi Terrace, or walking the country looking for a real country house far from station, church and post-office. But I don't want to miss you, so spare a day for me. I'll look for the review of. I did it badly—very badly. The trouble with the book is it's over-ripe. It's hung in the warm library too long; it's gone soft. But that's the trouble with that whole set of people and with all their ideas, I think. One gets rather savage living in a little isolated villa on a wild hillside and thinking about those things. All this self-examination, this fastidious probing, this hovering on the brink—it's all wrong! I don't believe a writer can ever do anything worth doing until he has—in the profoundest sense of the word—accepted life. Then he can face the problem and begin to question, but not before. But these people won't accept life: page 10 they'll only accept a point of view or something like that. I wish one could let them go, but they go on writing novels and Life goes on—big, expensive; so poor little K. M. goes on lifting up her voice and weeping—but she doesn't want to!

I've left Italy (Italy is a thoroughly bad place at present), and as you see, I'm in France. It's lovely weather—warm, mild. The air smells of faint, far-off tangerines with just a touch of nutmeg. On my table there are cornflowers and jonquils with rosemary sprigs. Here they are for you. The flowers are wonderful. How lovely the earth is. Do you know that I had fifteen cinerarias in Italy, and they grew against the sea? I hope one will be able to call these things up on one's Deathbed.

This is not a letter. It's only to say I have yours which arrived to-day. It's only to greet you and to send my love and to beg you to get better quickly. All those things! Good-night.