BRACERS Record Detail for 115501
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"Dearest Colette, Conrad's arrival is a little postponed so I have time for a short note, just to thank you for the typed extracts. Bits of the same letters are in the bundle you sent me to Peking, but less full than in what you have now sent. There is no hurry as my Autobiography won't be finished for ages."
BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 25 JULY 1949
BRACERS 115501. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell
<letterhead>
Pentrallgoch
Llan Ffestiniog
Merioneth1
25.7.49
Dearest Colette
Conrad’s arrival2 is a little postponed so I have time for a short note, just to thank you for the typed extracts.3 Bits of the same letters are in the bundle you sent me to Peking,4 but less full than in what you have now sent. There is no hurry, as my autobiography won’t be finished for ages.
All my love, dearest Colette.
B.
- 1
[document] Document 200888A.
- 2
Conrad’s arrival Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, born 15 April 1937 to BR and his wife Patricia. Colette and BR had agreed not to correspond during those periods when Conrad was visiting. Despite this agreement, Conrad felt the need to write to Colette in early August forbidding her to communicate with his father (BRACERS 118751). Colette, in turn, sent this letter to BR.
- 3
the typed extracts It is not known what typed extracts she sent him at this time. Later on in 1949 she sent him more letters. On 5 August 1949 (BRACERS 98489) she sent him a copy of letters he wrote in the summer of 1919 when he was at Lulworth as well as the memoir of it she wrote much later. She began wondering about that summer after reading the part of his Autobiography that dealt with that time when she was in Wales at the Pengwern Inn in 1948. It did not match her memory. In his letter of 26 October 1949 (BRACERS 19883), he acknowledges receipt of the prison letters she had sent him. Some of the letters that he used in his Autobiography are taken from typed copies in his possession, and they differ from his original letters.
- 4
bundle you sent me to Peking In his letter of 11 July 1949 (BRACERS 19879), he wrote that he was reading through “a bundle of old letters (typed)” Colette had sent to him when he was in Peking in 1920. These were edited letters, changed from the originals, as a literary project for publication which never took place. For information on their literary letters, see BRACERS 19585, n.6.
