BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 7 JAN. 1918
BRACERS 19266. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<London>
Monday. 7.1.181 ^, 2

My Darling

Your beautiful letter written in the train3 reached me this morning — bless you for it. Yes, let us go away as soon as ever your work is over — the first moment after that I am free. I hope I shall be able to go to the sea, if you think the Cat and Fiddle4 too cold. But I mustn’t go for very long, until my book is finished5 — I shall have a job to get it done in time, particularly as my Tuesday lectures6 begin again soon, and are more difficult than the ones I gave before Xmas.7

Dearest, I did feel absolutely near you the last time we were together. But it is very difficult to keep the feeling when you are away. I feel that you and I have such absolutely different objects in life that when I begin thinking about you from a distance I am conscious of a gulf. This may be delusion, and if we can get time to talk, and if you can explain yourself, it may come quite right. But we must go through some discussions that are bound to hurt. I will begin them now.

A great deal of the trouble with me is hurt vanity, and if I could get that isolated I could deal with it; but it is mixed up with other things that touch love more nearly. I will put it to you this way: You remember the platform at Lewis,8 the bacchanalian horror, the dance of death, the brutality and destructiveness of it all. I felt at the time a shrinking from the crowd, and yet a great pity for them; a longing to make their lives less sordid and suicidal, and an inability to find any language that they could understand. In such moments, loneliness assails one unbearably. You seemed to me then a comrade: I thought you wished the same things for them as I wished, and felt the separation as I felt it. Since then, I have often felt you one of them, a person on the other side of the gulf. The gulf to my mind is between those whose fundamental impulse is to get as much out of the world as they can, and those whose fundamental impulse is to give the world as much as they can. By your own account, Maurice9 is one of those who want to get: in regard to the war he is a shirker, and I gather that his main object in life is to make money. The fact that you love him puts you beside him in my mind, on the other side of the gulf. It makes me feel as if your pacifism and democracy did not go very deep, as if they were more or less sentimental. I had imagined you loved me on account of those qualities in me; now that I see you do not need them in a lover, it seems to take away from the value of your love, and I wonder why you care for me.

That is why I should not have minded in the same way if you had taken up with a different kind of man.

But all this line of thought gets its edge from jealousy. I realize, when I think calmly, that you are young and full of life, that self-expression is an urgent need with you (which I respect), and that Maurice helps you to self-expression, whereas I never can. But this line of thought, though it takes away the bitterness, does not remove the gulf: it leaves me feeling kind and paternal [don’t laugh!], but really outside. I was in this mood when we were together at Xmas.10 In this mood, I can behave quite nicely, but I am not getting anything from you for my own life; and a relation like ours is not satisfactory unless each gets something from the other.

My Darling, I know all this that I have written must hurt, but I had to say it if we are to keep a sense of nearness. I want you to explain away the things that trouble me, and so I have to say what they are. I do really profoundly love you — I do, I do. And I want most passionately to keep you on the same side of the gulf. I want religion (in some sense) to fill your life. Dearest Love, my heart is with you, and I am sure the real deep union is possible between you and me. Perhaps I am tyrannical, and have not enough understanding of the springs of your life. If so, I will learn not to be. Goodbye my Beloved —

B.

Notes

• 1

  [document] Document 200253.

• 2

  [envelope] Miss Colette O’Niel | Royal Hotel | Falmouth | Cornwall. Pmk: LONDON. W.C. | 1 AM | 7 JAN 18

• 3

  Your beautiful letter written in the train  Her letter of 5 January 1918 (BRACERS 113111). She was en route to Falmouth to act in the film The Admirable Crichton. In it she writes: “Let us soon be off to the moors together.”

• 4

  Cat and Fiddle An isolated pub on the moors near Buxton, Derbyshire. For information on it, see BRACERS 19065, n.5.

• 5

  until my book is finished Roads to Freedom, which was published late in 1918.

• 6

  Tuesday lectures BR lectured on “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (Papers 8) at Dr. Williams’ Library, 22 January–12 March 1918.

• 7

  the ones I gave before Xmas BR had lectured from 30 October to 18 September 1917 on the philosophy of mathematics at Dr. Williams’ Library.

• 8

  you remember the platform at Lewis BR should have written “Lewes”. This is the first mention of this event which shook up both of them; they reminisced about it several more times in 1918 and even as late as April 1920 (BRACERS 19643).  BR writes about it in his Autobiography. He and Colette had spent a Sunday walking on the South Downs. They were on the train platform waiting to return to London. “The station was crowded with soldiers, most of them going back to the Front, almost all of them drunk, half of them accompanied by drunken prostitutes, the other half by wives or sweethearts, all despairing, all reckless, all mad. The harshness and horror of the war world overcame me, but I clung to Colette” (Auto. 2: 26).

• 9

  Maurice Maurice Elvey (1887–1967), film director. For information on him, see BRACERS 19056, n.5.

• 10

  together at Xmas Colette’s mother, Priscilla Annesley, had invited them to spend Christmas with her.