BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [24 SEPT. 1917]
BRACERS 19218. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #298
Edited by S. Turcon and N. Griffin. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<London>
Monday morning.1 ^, 2 ^, 3

My Heart’s Love

It has been dreadful not knowing your address4 these days — I longed to write, and it would have been a relief even to telegraph.

I am afraid you have wondered why I wrote such wretched scraps. I have been thinking about you the whole time, to the entire exclusion of everything else — except when I forced myself to think about work. I have lived a sleep-walker’s life — not seeing or knowing what was going on around me, merely thinking and feeling. The outcome of it all is that I love you far more profoundly than I ever did before — but in a rather new way — with more sense of responsibility, and with a great longing to bring you into closer union with what makes up my religion — if I can.

I have been realizing, against my will, that I have been intolerably selfish towards Miles, and have encouraged you to be sometimes less tender with him than he deserves. I have a great affection for him, and I have made him go through hell — I must try to amend. I do want and need your love, but I want it as little as possible at his expense.

Thank you, my Beloved, for what you say about the thing we talked of that last night.5   It would mean so much to me that I hardly dare to think of it in advance.  I wonder if that would be cruel to Miles?

Anxiety on the question of Maurice,6 for the reason I gave you, upset me a good deal — it robbed me of sleep, and when I don’t sleep I cease to be quite sane. I couldn’t write about it while I was anxious, because I didn’t know your address, and then I didn’t know but what it might be too late.

From something you said our last evening, I gathered you thought I idealized you — this is not so, and I began to be afraid I must have not been as fully sincere as I ought to have been. I don’t as a rule see much use in telling people their faults, but perhaps I am wrong.

For all these reasons, I have lived through a great deal while you were away. It seems to me, in the end, that there are still further regions of love that we can get to know together — I want to go with you into still new worlds. I took away from you something of what you got from Carpenter,7 and I feel you haven’t yet quite got anything to take its place. I believe together we could find something that would be truer and deeper, and take more account of what is grim in the world, but would be equally sustaining. One does want to live for the world, and one wants love to illumine the world and help one to see how to live for it. There are things to be discovered about how to live, and I feel together we could discover great things — Without you, I should feel life an empty waste — there would be nothing left to live by but naked will.

I am utterly worn out with the longing for your arms and your lips — it has been terrible — I do not know how to live through the hours that remain.  Till then, goodbye, my soul cries out to you — I want you.

B.

Notes

• 1

  [document] Document 200198.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 6 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C.1. Pmk: LONDON.W.C | 1.15 PM | 24 SEP 17B

• 3

  [date] The date is taken from the envelope postmark.

• 4

  not knowing your address Colette had not been able to send BR her address in North Wales where the film company moved after their shoot in Lancashire.

• 5

  the thing we talked of that last night Before Colette left for the film shoot, they had discussed having a child (BRACERS 113065). The subject of their discussion is only made clear in a footnote to “Letters to Bertrand Russell from Constance Malleson, 1916–1969” which was edited decades later. She writes there is “a great deal to be thought over and talked about.” But she wants to give him everything that he wants.

• 6

  Anxiety on the question of Maurice In his letter of 17 September (BRACERS 19213) BR expressed his worry that Maurice Elvey, Colette’s director, might be suffering from syphilis and would infect her if they had an affair. BR alludes to it here without using the word “syphilis”.

• 7

  Carpenter Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), author, socialist, and moral reformer. Openly homosexual, he advocated the reform of sexual relations in a number of pamphlets. He had been one of Colette’s heroes before she met Bertie. In After Ten Years she said that after she got to know Bertie “I knew that Carpenter’s creed meant nothing to me any more. I had found something stronger.” (London: Cape, 1931, p. 109).