BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [14 OCT. 1919]
BRACERS 19573. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

Battersea1^, 2^,3

Beloved

Heart of my life, your little letter just came.4 Why, oh Why did you think you were bad in Helen?5 You were not, honestly — You were very good — Truth.

Yes, Darling, come to lunch tomorrow 1.306 — you are quite right to go back to the Attic7 and have a real good sleep tomorrow night — You must be worn out and ill and overwrought to think you were so bad in Helen — it is delusion. My dear loved one, my treasure, I long to hold you in my arms and comfort you and warm you and give you confidence in yourself — Don’t lose heart, my Beloved —

Dear one I have been feeling so full of tender love these days — so bound to you by deep ties — so anxious to bring happy and good things into your life it I could — I am tired and busy and not very happy, feeling I have been ruthless and selfish all through the summer — wishing I were a more decent person — but through it all, clinging to the thought of you, loving you with all my heart and soul —

Dear Darling, sweet joy of my life, don’t be mizzy — There is no need —

B

• 1

  [document] Document 200562.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 6 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C.1. <it is not franked.>

• 3

  [date] The date is based on the assumption that it was written just after her performance in The Trojan Women on 14 October.

• 4

  your little letter just came None of Colette’s letters from this period has survived. She and BR either did not have tea at Fuller’s after the play as planned, or if they did, she disclosed nothing of her feelings about her performance.

• 5

  bad in Helen According to Colette in After Ten Years [London: J. Cape, 1931], pp. 133–5, she again acted in a trance, as she had in Oxford, but this time the result turned out wrong. The reviews that Colette remembers are those praising Sybil Thorndike as Hecuba; Thorndike had not been in the Oxford performance. (Hebuca was played by Evelyn Walsh Hall in Oxford.) Colette brushes aside that the important drama critic William Archer wrote: “Miss O’Niel’s Helen was the next best thing to Miss Thorndike herself. It had a certain uncanny charm.” This comment presumably appeared in The Star where Archer was then writing. The remarks she quotes from T.S. Eliot come from an article he wrote after seeing a performance at the Holborn Empire which did not take place until December 1919 and was not printed until the Spring of 1920 in Arts and Letters (not The Athenaeum); the article is reprinted as “Euripides and Professor Murray” in Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (London: Metheun, 1920). This performance of the play was reviewed the next day in The Times (“Euripides at the Old Vic”, 15 Oct. p. 10), with the reviewer writing that Colette was “catlike and significant” in her role. This is no small achievement, as Helen is not a large role in TheTrojan Women, having four speeches, only one of them substantial, but the role is pivotal. The Sunday Times’ review of 19 October (p. 6) does not mention Colette at all, and of Sybil Thorndike it notes that she, along with Beatrice Wilson, were “valiantly endeavouring to grasp the unattainable”. Colette does not mention either of these reviews. The important thing to Colette was that she believed she had failed, and it was this perception that was to colour both her life and her career from then on. She decided not to act in London but join touring companies, a decision that would take her away from BR.

• 6

  lunch tomorrow 1.30 Colette was to act in an Indian play, The Ordeal, by K.N. Das Gupta and K.C. Chunder, presented by Dennis Bradley and staged by her husband, Miles, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, on 16 October in the afternoon, only two days after the first Old Vic performance of The Trojan Women (The Times, 13 Oct. 1919, “This Week’s Productions”, p. 10). Thus the lunch reference must be to 15 October, if this letter has been dated correctly. BR had noted the performance of this Indian play in his pocket diary.

• 7

  the Attic Colette’s flat at no. 6 Mecklenburgh Square.