BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 12 APR. 1919
BRACERS 19470. AL. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<London>
12 April1^, 2^, 3 1919

Colette my dear Love,

I wish I could make you understand my trouble, and the real deep difficulty that faces us.

I love you very passionately. You have power over my inmost soul. You can make me happy or unhappy in my depths, as religion makes mystics happy. When things are well between us, I love the sunshine and birds and flowers and the sea, and the contemplation of the ages of man’s life, and the striving after heroic achievement that makes a thread of shining glory though the ages. When things are not well between us, I cannot feel beauty or splendour or heroism — I can only feel the dead weight of the world’s misery, and a longing for death. This power you have over me.

I shall not seek again elsewhere what at times I have had from you. I shall know that the glory is no longer for me. I shall not seek real companionship. I shall make myself hard and prosaic and combative, and come to terms with despair as best I may.

You have this power over me, not through your character or your mind, but through your power of passion and beauty of body. Your love for me is necessarily different from mine for you, because of the difference in our merits. You admire me mentally, and the things you seek from me are chiefly mental things. But you have little to give me in that way. What I seek from you has to come by the way of instinct or not at all; if it cannot come by physical companionship, it cannot come at all. Given that, other things come with it: tenderness, and the gentler sort of love, and the feeling of comradeship that takes way the awful cold loneliness of endless struggle. But without physical companionship none of these things are possible. And they are not possible unless you yourself desire the physical companionship; nothing forced is of the slightest use.

Now, dear one, what are we to do? I had taught myself to think that all was over between us, and I had made myself a kind of existence more or less independent of you. But now that is destroyed, at least for the moment. The result is that I am good for nothing: I cannot force myself to think about work; at night I lie awake longing for you; street noises drive me wild; I am a quivering mass of sensitive pain. In that mood, one is a useless person. I honour and respect you for going back to Miles,4 but it has taken you away from me, and I do not see what is to be done. If you will try to remember how you have felt at times when you have been in love, you will understand the mad torture I underwent in having to leave you last night;5 you will understand also the terrible tension that comes of your physical withdrawal. I know you love me still, but you are no longer in love with me. And so my life is unbearable except when I can forget you. Can you see any solution? I had felt sure that there was none, but since the other night I am driven and tortured by a maddening hope that makes resignation impossible.

You hold my soul in your hands, to make or break as you choose.

• 1

  [document] Document 200458.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | The Cottage | Cox Green | Maidenhead. Pmk: BATTERSEA S.W.11. | 5.45 PM | 21 APR 19

• 3

  [date] BR wrote the date as “12 April”; Colette crossed out the “12” and changed it to “21”; this may well be the enclosure he mentions in his letter of 21 April (BRACERS 19469).

• 4

  respect you for going back to Miles There is a huge gap in the extant letters from Colette, from the beginning of March to the beginning of December 1919. The last letter before the gap, written on c.2 March (BRACERS 113178), contains information about her relationship with Miles. “Miles and I, as you know, have been more together than previously; not only working together, but also in non-working hours. He demands and desires nothing from me; he sees a great deal of the new young woman, of whom I told you when you and I were last together. He often stays at her flat and comes on here for breakfast. We lunch and dine and walk together; and he has the spare room here if he needs it … he and I have been on a platonic footing ever since he went to Glastonbury when you were in Brixton”.

• 5

  last night He had spent the day with her and her mother at her mother’s country cottage.