BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [7 DEC. 1917]
BRACERS 19255. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

Friday night.1^, 2^, 3

My dear Love

Thank you for writing tonight4 — I have hated myself for having talked as I did — and yet it has freed me from hostile feelings which would have grown stronger if I had not spoken.

Dear one, please believe me that the root of my feeling was not hostile, but an unwillingness to let our love sink into something second-rate, which I felt you would make it if I left you alone. Perhaps it has already irrevocably become so on your side, owing to my hostility — but I know it hasn’t.

I can’t feel love is satisfactory between two people when they cannot rely on each other for sympathy in trouble. If you could bring yourself to forget how horrid I have been, I would deserve your trust.

I won’t force you. I can wait easily now that I have spoken. I can wait and see whether it is possible for you again to give me your intimacy. But if in the end it proves impossible, I should feel that loyalty to our past happiness would make it best to part — Meanwhile I should wish to continue as we had planned before today, and see what time will bring.

Colette, you do not realize either what you have been to me or how you have changed — I know it is my fault that you have changed. I will struggle to be different; but I could only be all you want in the way of kindnessa by killing all passion towards you — if I did that, I could be always kind.

I want to find rest with you again. I had so hoped it would come when we had the Studio,5 but it didn’t. Something was lacking in your love which had been in it before — I tried not to feel it at the time, but in the days since it has grown more and more definite to me.

With you I have touched regions of strange joy that I had not known before. There have been moments when I felt not lonely, especially at Ashford.6 Now, I never feel so lonely as when I am with you — (that was not so when you came back from Manchester.)7 — I simply dare not spend a night with you until things are different between us, for fear of the horror that came upon me our second night in the studio — the horror of loneliness.

If I can make Christian love towards you overpower passion, I can win you back — but if I do that, I can’t ever again give you the passionate love of the heart — my love will no longer be a flame from the central fire of the world — so I am loathe to take that way. And out of Christian love there is no relief for loneliness.

Please come to the Studio Sunday. It is ruined for me as a place of happiness by that horror in the night, and if we ever grow happy again I shall want to move to another place. But I want to be alone with you within walls — otherwise things will grow more tense than I can bear. If we are in the studio, I would read poetry to you, and come gradually to talk of impersonal things, and be full of large thoughts instead of the petty struggle for private happiness, which I always feel rather shameful.

When I wanted to part from you, I could have built up some sort of life without you — Now, I don’t feel I could — but perhaps if it were really necessary I should find a way.

Dear, you don’t realize how differently I regard Maurice8 from the way I did. I do absolutely realize how he fills a part of you that was not filled before. I do most truly and sincerely want you to have a full life, and to develop in every way. I do not seek to share your joys so much, but I do wish you to feel that you can let me share your sorrows. You are naturally reserved, and my attacks have increased your reserve. I feel that if I acquiesce, you will shut me out more and more. It is really and truly for the sake of our love and its future that I spoke today. But one can’t force things, and now that you know what I feel I am content to wait a while.

You are much too full of self-reproach. If all my life from now on were nothing but pain, the joy and glory I have known with you would far outweigh it all, and I should bless you for having come into my life. And even the pain you give me is worth having — it is deep and real and vital, and part of the depths of the world — it is life, not death.

Dear, if you were here now and I could hold you in my arms, all troubles would melt away and be forgotten. I feel such an aching tenderness to you, such a horror of the pain I have caused you — such a longing for you to have everything that is worth having.

All that I have written and said otherwise is not the ultimate truth.

And now I feel I must have nights with you in the studio. And I feel now that I can give you what you want —

Dear, when I am unkind, remind me of my deepest belief, that one should never fight for oneself — that one should keep one’s thoughts on others, realizing and imagining their life and what will make it full and fruitful. I do not want anybody’s wings to be clipped through me, I do not want to build a prison round you or anyone. I will try to deserve your confidence. I know it is good for your life to have some one in it to whom you naturally tell everything. It is good that you should have something stable and deep to which you come back again and again. Perhaps I am incapable of being that to you, but you do need that from some one. I will try. It is only patience that is difficult.

Colette, do not lose faith in me. There is something deeper than all these storms, which loves you with quite another love — an infinitely tender love, gentle, wanting you to live nobly and fully and freely. That is the love that made me shrink so long from growing really intimate with you, because I dreaded the hurt that the rough side of me would bring. But in the end I came to love you so utterly that I could not keep any barrier.

I do have the sort of love that Allen9 has. But loneliness and the pain of it make me cruel at times. Have pity, and have faith to appeal to my deeper love.

If you can bring yourself to come to the studio Sunday I can promise not to fight. Otherwise I may be all raw nerves. And do give me all the time you can. I desperately want just time with you. I would rather you did not try to talk about Maurice just to please me — put it off, and see whether later on it comes naturally.

My real love for you, apart from everything personal, hopes that in the end it will come naturally, for I feel that otherwise the whole of your future life will be more trivial than it need be. This is really said simply out of true, deep love for you. I believe for your sake as much as for mine we must give each other the very very best, and that is impossible with an impulse to reserve. But forced confidences, I know, will be worse than useless.

Dearest, you are the sun of my world, and when you are eclipsed my world is cold and dark.

B.

Let me know your decision about Sunday.

• 1

  [document] Document 200243.

• 2

  [envelope] There is an envelope with the letter, but it is unaddressed.

• 3

  [date] Colette wrote “Friday 7 Dec. 1917” on a note kept with this letter.

• 4

  writing tonight Her letter of 7 December 1917 (BRACERS 113100).

• 5

  the Studio The name given to the place that BR and Colette had rented on the ground floor at 5 Fitzroy Street, Soho. For further information on it, see BRACERS 19240, n.9.

• 6

  Ashford For further information on the house in this Shropshire village, see BRACERS 19214, n.4.

• 7

  back from Manchester Colette returned from Manchester on 31 October 1917; their reconciliation took place on 1 November 1917 at the Attic (a flat she still shared with husband) when they decided to get their own place.

• 8

  Maurice Maurice Elvey (1887–1967), film director. For further information on him, see BRACERS 19056, n.5.

• 9

  Allen (Reginald) Clifford Allen (1889–1939). For information on him, see BRACERS 19046, n.7.

Textual Notes

• a

  in the way of kindness inserted