BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 31 JAN. 1931
BRACERS 19792. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #392
Edited by S. Turcon and N. Griffin. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
Telegraph House
Harting, Petersfield.1
31.1.31.

Dearest Colette

Your letter and MS.2 both reached me yesterday. I meant to write at once in answer to your earlier letter, but I had bronchitis and a book to start3 at the same time, which left me no energy to spare. What a horrible business with Doctors! The tonsil operation is beastly, though not at all dangerous. What is it you have4 that makes the Dr. say you wouldn’t last 3 months if you lived in London?

I read most of your book5 last night, including all the parts about me. I will write again when I have read it all carefully. It is to me very interesting, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to judge it as if I didn’t know you. I think that it is intrinsically interesting: you have known many people whom readers will like to hear about, and you make them vivid. The story of your going to sleep during Ramsay’s visit6 is delicious. (I once meant to write a political satire in which he was to be called “Sheeptalk”; don’t you think it suits him?) You have avoided over-emphasis, to which you used to be rather liable, and I do honestly believe you have made a really good book. The “blurb” is all right — they are horrid things to do.

I had the strangest emotions of a personal sort in reading the part that involved me. I was so much more alive in those days. Part of my life is gone out into my children, and the joy they give me has diminished the ache that kept life vivid. The time when you and I were together was the summit of my life, and I no longer possess such fire as in those days.

I should not now be cruel from jealousy, but also I can no longer feel love or anything else (except parental affection) as profoundly as I did then. When I have been with you during the last 12 months, I have had a bewildering dual life: one in memory, passionate and ruthless and intense, the other in the present, affectionate and kindly but without the old quality, which seems to be dead. I had always a ghostly feeling, because the past was more vivid than the present.

Just now I am terribly busy with a book I have just begun and must finish in April or May. I shan’t have a really free mind till it is finished, so let us wait till then. Goodbye, dear Heart.

Your
B

• 1

  [document] Document 200798.

• 2

  letter and MS. Colette’s letter of 28 January 1931 (BRACERS 98407); the manuscript of her book, After Ten Years, was sent separately.

• 3

  a book to start The Scientific Outlook (B&R A61) published later in 1931 in September.

• 4

  What is it you have Her malady is unknown.

• 5

  your book  After Ten Years, at that point still in manuscript.

• 6

  Ramsay’s visit This anecdote is in After Ten Years (London: J. Cape, 1931), p. 119. It took place in her flat after an evening out. In Colette’s words: “Anyway, I went straight to sleep and woke up to find our present Prime Minister leaning forward in dramatic fashion, holding the lapels of his coat in both hands and asking if he might take his coat off. It seemed rather an odd request, but I politely said: ‘oh, please do —’ (I was not fully awake) and then realised to my horror that MacDonald, in telling one of his Scotch stories, was realistically impersonating a terrible nouveau riche, who after eating too much dinner, invariably asked permission to remove his coat.”