BR TO EDITH RUSSELL, 13 DEC. 1949
BRACERS 20238. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #497
Edited by N. Griffin. Proofread by K. Blackwell

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Penralltgoch
Llan Ffestiniog
Merioneth
Dec. 13, 1949

Dear Edith

Thank you for your very good letter, which it was a great pleasure to get.

Helen Flexner wrote to me at last to say she could find no letters from me, and must have destroyed them. She wrote as if we had been casual acquaintances, and signed “faithfully yours”. I hope it was forgetfulness due to old age.

The present American witch-hunt distresses me. But we did just the same in the time of Charles II. The plague and the fire were obviously due to divine displeasure, so the House of Commons appointed a Dies Committee1 to inquire into un-English activities. It was decided that what the Lord disliked was the works of Thomas Hobbes, and it was decreed that no further works of his should be published in England.2 The event justified the decree: there was never again a great plague or a great fire in London. So perhaps if this is condemned there will never be another Mississippi flood.

I think your newspapers, for propaganda reasons, give a quite unduly gloomy picture of life in England. Our only real hardship is that it is difficult to get whiskey, because it is the only thing we export that Americans are really anxious to get. Wage-earners, who are a majority of the population, are happier than at any previous period in English history. Food is plentiful, though slightly monotonous. Owing to death duties it is not worth while to save, so people live on their capital, which makes life in London very gay. We expect a war any day, and we know most of us will be killed in it, so why worry?

Is’t not fine to dance and sing
While the bells of death do ring.3

I think of myself as like St. Augustine, putting the finishing touches to his work while the vandals were besieging Hippo. It is rather pleasant.

I forget whether I told you that Peter and I have separated — completely, though not legally.

I wish you would come to England — it would be delightful to see you. After January 15 my address will be

41 Queen’s Rd., Richmond, Surrey

where I am going to share a house with my son John and his family. His wife is a daughter of Vachala Lindsey who was some sort of poet. They are both very charming and both write.

What an epistle! Its length is partly due to an immense accumulation of duties that I am determined to neglect.

With much love,

Yours aff
B.R.

P.S. It doesn’t matter a pin whether you address “England” or “Wales”.

• 1

  Dies Committee The House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, usually known as the Dies Committee after its chairman Martin Dies, operated relatively quietly from 1938 to 1945 when it was revived as the infamous and much more aggressive House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA [often HUAC for “House Un-American Activities Committee”]).

• 2

  works of Thomas Hobbes … published in England In the panic attendant upon the plague of 1665–66 and the Great Fire of London (1666), a Bill for the suppression of atheism was passed by Parliament in the hope of improving God’s disposition. Afterwards a committee was set up to inquire into the supposed atheism of the philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. The committee decided against him and a group of bishops moved to have him burnt for heresy. Hobbes, however, took various evasive measures and in the end it was decided that God would be sufficiently mollified if only his writings were banned. Pepys complained in his Diary how the resulting increased demand for them had inflated their price.

• 3

  Is’t not fine … death do ring. From an anonymous sixteenth-century poem in The Oxford Book of English Verse (1904), p. 90.

Textual Notes

• a

  Vachal misspelling for Vachel