BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [28 SEPT. 1916]
BRACERS 19046. ALS. McMaster. Auto. 2: 74–5
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
57 Gordon Square
W.C.
Thurs. aftn.1 ^, 2

My Darling Colette —

This morning my brother3 came and interrupted me — he is a person who scatters one’s thoughts by his presence, so I couldn’t go on. Then I sent a man off the street with some flowers, not that they were as nice as I wished, but he had such a charming smile and such a sense of humour that I couldn’t resist him, though I had no guarantee that he would ever deliver them. — Then Miles4 came with your dear dear letter5 — I feel with you in every word. You can do much more for me than I can ever do for you. You are already where I have struggled to be, and without the weariness of long effort. I have hated many people in the past — the language of hate still comes to me easily, but I don’t really hate any one now. It is defeat that makes one hate people — and now I have no sense of defeat anywhere. No one need ever be defeated — it rests with oneself to make oneself invincible. Quite lately I have had a sense of freedom I never had before — it has come through the N.C.F.6 largely. I don’t like the spirit of Socialism — I think Allen7 has come to see that freedom is the basis of everything — I have immense hopes of him.

“The keys of an endless peace”8 — I am not so great as that, really not — I know where peace is — I have seen it, and felt it at times — but I can still imagine misfortunes that would rob me of peace. But there is a world of peace, and one can live in it — and yet be active still over all that is bad in the world. Do you know how sometimes all the barriers of personality fall away, and one is free for all the world to come in — the stars and the night and the wind, and all the passions and hopes of men, and all the slow centuries of growth — and even the cold abysses of space grow friendly — “e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.”9 And from that moment some quality of ultimate peace enters into all one feels — even what one feels most passionately. I felt it there by the river10 — I thought you were going to withdraw yourself — I felt that if you did I should lose the most wonderful thing that had ever come to me—and yet an ultimate fundamental peace remained — if it hadn’t, I believe I should have lost you then. I cannot bear the littleness and enclosing walls of purely personal things — I want to live always open to the world, I want personal love to be like a beacon fire lighting up the darkness, not a timid refuge from the cold as it is very often.

London under the stars is strangely moving. The momentariness of the separate lives seems so strange. In some way I can’t put into words, I feel that some of our thoughts and feelings are just of the moment, but others are part of the eternal world, like the stars — even if their actual existence is passing, something — some spirit or essence — seems to last on, to be part of the real history of the universe, not only of the separate person. Somehow, that is how I want to live — so that as much of life as possible may have that quality of eternity. I can’t explain what I mean — you will have to know. Of course I don’t succeed in living that way — but that is “the shining key of peace”. For me, a terrible amount of pain was necessary before I found out anything about peace — but that was only because I was stupid — pain is not necessary — it is not necessary for you. You start farther on than I did.

My dear one, I love you now with a love that I feel belongs with the things that have the quality of eternity — and I shall love you more and more as I know you more fully. Your beauty haunts me, like the most wonderful cadences of old songs — it moves me deeply, almost religiously. And I know it is the outer garment of an inward beauty — but I have not the courage to speak of that yet. You must guess at my love, for, my dear one, I cannot express the heart of it, only a few outer fringes.

Oh I am happy, happy, happy —

Your
B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200009. There are two typed copies of this letter: document 201105, numbered “4”, and a literary version which is misdated and condensed (document 007072ey, pp. 540–3). Document 201105 also contains the first line of Leopardi’s poem “L’Infinito”. The letter is published in Auto. 2 with the incorrect date of 29 September.

• 2

  [date] Colette wrote “Thurs. 28 Sept. 1916” on the letter.

• 3

  my brother John Francis (“Frank”) Stanley Russell (1865–1931; 2nd Earl Russell from 1878), BR’s older brother. Author of Lay Sermons (1902), Divorce (1912), and My Life and Adventures (1923). BR remembered Frank bullying him as a child and as having the character and appearance of a Stanley, but also as giving him his first geometry lessons (Auto. 1: 26, 36). He was accomplished in many fields: sailor, electrician, house builder, pioneer motorist, local politician, lawyer, businessman and company director, and (later) constructive junior member of the second Labour Government. Frank was married three times. The first marriage involved serious legal actions by and against his wife and her mother, but a previous scandal, which ended his career at Oxford, had an overshadowing effect on his life (see Ruth Derham, “‘A Very Improper Friend’: the Influence of Jowett and Oxford on Frank Russell” [2017]). The second marriage was to Mollie Sommerville (see Ian Watson, “Mollie, Countess Russell” [2003]). The third was to Elizabeth, Countess von Arnim. Despite difficulties with him, BR declared from prison: “No prisoner can ever have had such a helpful brother." Biography: Derham, Bertrand’s Brother (2021).

• 4

  Miles William Miles Malleson (1888–1969), actor and playwright, was born in Croydon, Surrey, the son of Edmund and Myrrha Malleson. He married his first wife, a fellow actor, Lady Constance Annesley (stage name, Colette O’Niel), in 1915. They had met at Tree’s (later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). Their marriage was an “open” one. In 1914 Miles enlisted in the City of London Fusiliers and was sent to Malta. He became ill and was discharged, unfit for further service. He became active in the No-Conscription Fellowship and wrote anti-war plays as well as a pamphlet, Cranks and Commonsense (1916). In the 1930s he began to write for the screen and act in films, in which he developed into a very well-known character actor, as well as continuing his stage career at the Old Vic in London. He married three times: his second marriage was to Joan Billson, a physician (married 1923, divorced 1940), with whom he had two children; his third wife was Tatiana Lieven, an actress (married 1946). He died in London in March 1969.

• 5

  your dear dear letter 28 September 1916, BRACERS 112934.

• 6

  N.C.F. No-Conscription Fellowship.

• 7

  Allen Reginald Clifford Allen (1889–1939; Baron Allen of Hurtwood, 1932) was a socialist politician and publicist who joined the Cambridge University Fabian Society while studying at Peterhouse College (1908–11). After graduating he became active in the Independent Labour Party in London and helped establish a short-lived labour newspaper, the Daily Citizen. During the war Allen was an inspiring and effective leader of the C.O. movement as chairman of the NCF, which he co-founded with Fenner Brockway in November 1914. Court-martialled and imprisoned three times after his claim for absolute exemption from war service was rejected, Allen became desperately ill during his last spell of incarceration. He was finally released from the second division of Winchester Prison on health grounds in December 1917, but not before contracting the tuberculosis with which he was finally diagnosed in September 1918. He was dogged by ill health for the rest of his life. BR had enormous affection and admiration for Allen (e.g., 68 in Papers 13, 46 in Papers 14), a trusted wartime political associate. From February 1919 until March 1920 he even shared Allen’s Battersea flat. A close friendship was soured, however, by Allen’s rejection of BR’s unforgiving critique of the Bolshevik regime, which both men witnessed at first hand with the British Labour Delegation to Russia in May 1920 (see Papers 15: 507). Yet Allen was far from revolutionary himself and did not even identify with the left wing of the ILP (which he chaired in the early 1920s). He was elevated to the peerage as a supporter of Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, an administration despised by virtually the entire labour movement. Although Allen’s old intimacy with BR was never restored after the Russia trip, any lingering estrangement did not inhibit him from enrolling his daughter, Joan Colette (“Polly”) at the Russells’ Beacon Hill School. Biography: Martin Gilbert, Plough My Own Furrow (1965).

• 8

  “The keys of an endless peace”. In her letter of 28 September 1916, BRACERS 112934, Colette wrote that she feels he holds “the shining keys to an endless peace”. The phrase “the shining key of peace” then appears later in the letter.

• 9

  “e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare” The last line in the poem “L’Infinito” [The infinite] by Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1839). BR wrote out the poem for Colette in Italian (BRACERS 107339). The line translates into English as “and to shipwreck is sweet for me in this sea”.

• 10

  the river Thames River, at the Westminster Embankment.