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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

December 1921

To Lady Ottoline Morrell

I have just found the letter I wrote you on the first of November. I would send it you as a proof of good faith but I re-read it. Grim thing to do—isn't it? There is a kind of fixed smile on old letters which reminds one of the bridling look of old photographs. So it's torn up and I begin again.

I don't know what happens to Time here. It seems to become shorter and shorter; to whisk round the corners; to become all tail, all Saturday to Monday. This must sound absurd coming from so remote a spot as our mountain peaks. But there it is. We write, we read, M. goes off with his skates, I go for a walk through my field glasses and another day is over. This place makes one work. Perhaps it's the result of living among mountains; one must bring forth a mouse or be overwhelmed.

If climate were everything, then Montana must be very near Heaven. The sun shines and shines. It's cold in the shade, but out of it it is hot enough for a hat and a parasol—far and away hotter than the S. of France, and windless. All the streams are solid little streams of ice, there are thin patches of snow, like linen drying, on the fields. The sky is high, transparent, with marvellous sunsets. And when the moon rises and I look out of my window down into the valley full of clouds it's like looking out of the ark while it bobbed above the flood.

page 159

But all the same I shall never get over my first hatred of the Swiss. They are the same everywhere. Ugly, dull, solid lumps, with a passion divided between pigs and foreigners.

Foreigners are what they prefer to gorge themselves with but pigs will serve. As to their ankles—they fill me with a kind of anguish. I should have an ankle complex if I lived in Switzerland long. But one never lives anywhere long

M. and I are reading Jane Austen in the evenings. With delight. Emma is really a perfect book—don't you feel? I enjoy every page. I can't have enough of Miss Bates or Mr. Woodhouse's gruel or that charming Mr. Knightley. It's such an exquisite comfort to escape from the modern novels I have been forcibly reading. Wretched affairs! This fascinated pursuit of the sex adventure is beyond words boring! I am so bored by sex quâ sex, by the gay dog sniffing round the prostitute's bedroom or by the ultra modern snigger—worse still—that I could die—at least.

It has turned me to Proust however at last. I have been pretending to have read Proust for years but this autumn M. and I both took the plunge. I certainly think he is by far the most interesting living writer. He is fascinating! It is a comfort to have someone whom one can so immensely admire. It is horrible to feel so out of touch with one's time as I do nowadays—almost frightening.