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  late 19th & 20th century literature & art   To Robert Byron 12 Hill Close 1 ACTON, Harold. Aquarium. Duckworth, [1923]. First Charlbury edition. Inscribed by the author, in the month of publication, Oxfordshire ox7 3sy ‘To my dear vivacious friend – Robert Byron – student of the Tel: +44 (0)1608 811437 delicately grotesque and fumbler amongst the secrets of strange souls. With the humble and warm regards of Harold Acton. 1923. Email: [email protected] April’. Patterned paper boards. Backstrip lacking (as often), top www.paulrassam.com edge spotted, else a good copy. £750 Member: aba/ilab Though they had been at Eton together, Acton’s real friendship with Byron began at Oxford, where the latter’s ‘vivacity and pugnacity made him an invaluable ally’ to Acton and Waugh’s ‘campaign against false prophets’, as Acton later recalled in Memoirs of an Aesthete.

2 ACTON, Harold. Peonies and Ponies. Chatto & Windus, 1941. First edition. James Lees-Milne’s copy, with his bookplate. Cloth unevenly faded, else a very good copy. £75

3 ANAND, Mulk Raj. Three autograph letters signed, one with an accompanying 3pp. ms. autobiographical essay and signed covering leaf, seven typed letters signed (of which six are aero­grammes, most with ms. corrections), and three postcards, to Ernest Martin, London and Bombay 1937–1999. One postcard chipped at corner with the loss of a couple of words. £1500 A series of letters, spanning a period of over sixty years, to Ernest Martin, a writer with a life-long concern for the disadvantaged in rural society, and an antipathy towards fascism that led to fights with Mosley’s blackshirts. Aged seventeen, he had joined War Resisters International and was a conscientious objector during the second world war. ‘Dear Comrade’, Anand begins his first letter, ‘I enclose herewith a few facts about myself which Douglas Garman tells me you want for your essay. … I have been wanting to write to you, as I am just getting my bearings back to negotiate the difficult parts of a quarter million word novel of peasant life in changing India’. In his accompanying autobiographical essay, he describes his family circumstances and upbringing, his education and voracious reading (including a smuggled copy of Marx’s Value, Price and Profit), his disillusionment with national

1 politics in India, and his involvement with the the Indian Progressive the end of racialism. These eventualities in turn demand that the haves Writers Association. He also outlines his literary aspirations: ‘I set begin to share with the have-nots a modicum of worldly goods.’ Another myself to write a series of novels of India, which could be, like Balzac’s letter expresses his sense of the precariousness of human existence. ‘I Comedie, the picture of an epoch. Of the twenty volumes on the various feel often that human beings are so lost in the mundain [sic] existence aspects of Indian life which I planned, I have written ten, revised five, that they seldom think of the privilege given to men and women to be on published three. I hope, barring accidents such as the impending war this earth… and seldom value our survival on it for the the average three or imprisonment on one of my necessary visits to India, to complete the score and ten.’ In July 1996, he urges Martin to join him in campaigning series about 1945.’ for nuclear disarmament. ‘There is no other cause so sacred for us At the end of January 1944, he writes to praise In Search of Faith, a today as the deep feeling about nuclear threat’. He ends his last letter symposium edited by Martin, to which Anand had contributed a piece by commenting that ‘I feel that the climate may have been affected by entitled ‘I Believe in Man’, and adds that he was ‘very impressed with the bomb tests going on. Certainly our climate has been changed by the [Olaf] Stapledon’s essay, because I feel I have a great deal in common French tests in the lower Pacific.’ with him’. Anand subsequently extended his own essay into a short book Writing in March 1979, Anand wishes he had the time to write ‘a entitled Apology for Heroism: an essay in search of faith, published in Tolstoyan confession to demonstrate how we all failed in spite of our 1946, and returns to the subject repeatedly in his letters to Martin. In an consistent struggle for decency in human relations.’ Nevertheless, ‘I undated letter from the mid ’60s, he announces that ‘I am sending you a think our old friendship is a proof of the fact that among a few people draft of my new article in search of faith – a quite new, fresh article about in this bad, mad, sad world humanness is possible.’ Earlier in the letter, the whole series of questions. I still have to revise it, so keep it by for the Anand mentions having been ‘away in my homeland receiving a time you may compile your new anthology.’ In 1979, he declares that, honorary Doctor’s degree from a university of my brethren of the long ‘I want to write for you something like the surrealist confession, which hair. They had banned some of my books a few years ago, so to be called may go beyond the Apology for Heroism (in search of faith). I want to back and made Poo Bah, was very pleasing. On my return here, I have trace the emergence from Indian existentialism or fatalism into the been asked to go to Mauritius for the celebration of Independence Day. European kind of torment affected by Eliot, Kirkegarde [sic], Pascal, and The Prime Minister was a co-student of mine in London in the 20s. And others, into the vitalism akin to Bergson, Shaw and perhaps Santayana.’ there are a few other friends I have to see there, same vintage. It will In an undated letter from the mid ’90s, Anand informs Martin that he be happy to get together with monuments from the past. And not very has told a young enthusiast who is making a TV programme about him glorious ones, but one in which we shared the role of outsiders, trying to that ‘you are one of the few who noticed my attitudes in the thirties and become insiders.’ included me in your book’ and hopes that Martin can contribute to the Anand had returned to India in 1947, after over twenty years living programme. The essay crops up even in Anand’s final letter, again with in London. ‘I am afraid one of the penalties of returning home, has been the intention of revising it, this time in order ‘to acknowledge impulses that most of my English friends have been thinking that I have finished and ideas as also debts to various elders, specially to Gandhi and later as a writer’, he complains in August 1979. ‘In the ninth book on my in UK to people like Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells and my professor in books, a brown Englishman called Saros Cowasjee, has said that after Cambridge, Dawes Hicks.’ coming to India, my work is rubbishy, badly edited and a waste of time Politics inevitably forms a rich seam in these letters, with Anand and paper. You know that the snobbery with violence of the imperialist recalling his role in the struggle against fascism, which had led him to period has continued. Here, of course, the reaction is that I stayed too fight in the Spanish civil war, and despairing at the arms race between long in the west and that my humanism is away from Indian tradition, India and Pakistan, while millions starve. He also fears the threat of materialistic and debased, because I place too much emphasis on bread.’ nuclear war. If that could be averted, ‘there can be no going back to In a letter from November 1995, Anand discusses his horror of violence, narrow nationalisms, but towards a universal one-world culture.… Such ‘as in my novel: Across the Black Waters, in which I created the agony of a world, of course, cannot come from remnants of old consciousness, the Indian sepoys getting killed in the bogs of Flanders, fighting, as they the political myths of the 19th and 20th centuries, or even the were supposed to do, for the liberty of the British Empire, which denied rationalisations based on Europe and Asia or Africa. It can only come them freedom at home. Maybe that was the cue for passion from which I from the breakdown of frontiers, the abolition of passports and visas, became so intensely anti-Fascist. Of course, Indian critics, who matured

2 3 after the war, tend to say that my novels are Communist propaganda. The Communist critics say that I am not communist enough. No one has ‘I am afraid I got dead drunk in the afternoon’ used the word, Fellow Traveller. Perhaps you might recall the fact that 6 BACON, Francis. Autograph letter signed to Janetta Par­ people like me, from the Indian liberation struggle could not be neutral ladé, 2pp., 7 Reese Mews, London S.W.7., ‘Saturday morning’. against Fascism because the communists were foremost in fighting ‘I am so sorry not to have been at your party last night’, Bacon against Hitler, Mussolini and Franco…’ writes. ‘I am afraid I got dead drunk in the afternoon and was not He goes on to mention ‘an Indian scholar Dr. Abhay Sharma, forward fit to turn up. I would love to see you before you leave. Would you Indian woman’ who has ‘written the first draft of a long article of forty pages’ on Orwell’s friendship with him: ‘That essay brings out telephone me if you have a moment and we could have lunch or shared thoughts and feelings of Orwell and myself, which were great dinner. I was so furious with myself this morning as I was looking consolation, because he was a unique Englishman, who left the Imperial forward so much to seeing you. Love, Francis’. £975 Service and became a freelance ‘down and out in London and Paris.’ I Bacon and Parladé became close friends after meeting at the Gargoyle remember similar collaboration with Olaf Stapledon, Herbert Reed Club, in Soho, in the early fifties. [sic] and of course Day Lewis, Spender and Upward – also Jack Lindsay.’ Only one Indian writer, Nirad Chaudhuri, makes an appearance in these Inscribed by the author to himself letters. ‘Aggressive and confrontational he is an angry old man who 7 BARBELLION, W. N. P. The Journal of a Disappointed loves to hate’, writes Anand. ‘I am by habit and temperament frank, but Man. With an introduction by H. G. Wells. Chatto & Windus, not aggressive. I have shown the miseries of the poor and the rejected in my novels, without hatred but perhaps with contempt.’ 1919. First edition. The author’s own copy, inscribed to himself, ‘B.F. Cummings from W.N.P.B. 1919’’, and with his holograph notes and corrections. Spine slightly faded, spine label browned 4 ASHBERY, John. Wakefulness. New York: Farrar Strauss, and chafed, slight mark to rear board, else a very good copy.£1250 1998. First edition. Inscribed by the author to F. T. Prince and his wife, ‘For Frank and Elizabeth with love, John Ashbery, June 24 W.N.P. Barbellion was the pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings, 1998’. Very nice copy copy in dust jacket. £125 born in Barnstaple in September 1889. As a sickly child, he developed an intense interest in natural history. Aged thirteen when the Journal Ashbery held Prince, a still inexplicably neglected poet, in high regard, begins, he writes: ‘Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and describing him ‘as one of the major English poets of his generation’, and have abandoned for the time being the idea of writing on ‘How Cats publishing him in Art and Literature. Spend their Time.’’ By his mid-teens, boyish innocence had given way to keener ambition. ‘It is best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist 5 AYRTON, Michael. Giovanni Pisano, sculptor. Introduction – not too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things, or by Henry Moore. Photographs specially taken by Ilario Bessi in too much of a poet and so fail to understand them.’ He published his first collaboration with Henry Moore. Thames & Hudson, [1969]. First specialised paper in natural history in 1906 and took up an appointment edition. 4to. Plates. Inscribed by Ayrton ‘for Arnold Haskell, who as an entomologist at the Natural History Museum, in South Kensington, understands the nature of the art; with warm enthusiasm: sensus in 1912. Despite his perpetual ill-health, it was only towards the end of ratio quaedam est. Michael Ayrton, April 1973’ and by Moore ‘To 1915, when Cummings opened a confidential letter from his doctor to Arnold, Moore 73’. Haskell’s bookplate, designed by Ayrton, to an army recruitment officer, that he discovered he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or ‘disseminated sclerosis’ as it was then known. front pastedown; top edge spotted, else a very good copy in dust In June 1917, not yet 29 years old, his deteriorating health forced him to jacket, with a couple of very small spots of lifting to the laminated give up work. surface of the upper panel. £225 Largely bedridden, he continued with his diary, while selecting Though best known as a ballet critic, Haskell took a keen interest in extracts for publication. ‘My Journal keeps open house to every kind painting and sculpture, as notably evidenced in his collaborative book of happening in my soul’, he declares, conscious of ‘all the beastly with Jacob Epstein, The Sculptor Speaks.

4 5 little subterranean atrocities’ that go on in his mind. Lamenting the 8 BARBELLION, W. N. P. A Last Diary. With a preface by arbitrariness of fate, he contrasts Rupert Brooke’s ‘perfect’ death in the Arthur J. Cummings. Chatto & Windus, 1920. First edition. Light Aegean with ‘Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at offsetting to free endpapers, else a very good copy in slightly Putney’ and, in this copy, adds in the margin, ‘Napoleon regretted that spine-browned dust jacket, fractionally chipped at head and tail of he had not died at Borodino. At St. Helena he is reported to have said:- spine, and to head and tail of upper edge of spine. £125 “To die at Borodino would have been to have died like Alexander.: to be killed at Waterloo would have been a good death: perhaps Dresden would have been better: but no, better at Waterloo.”’ There is also, 9 BARRIE, J. M. Auld Licht Idylls. Hodder & Stoughton, however, a great deal of sardonic humour. ‘Won’t all this seem piffle if 1888. First edition. Inscribed by the author, ‘George Meredith I don’t die after all!’, he writes. ‘As an artist in life I ought to die; it is the from J. M. Barrie’. Upper board lightly marked; prelims, final only artistic ending – and I ought to die now or the third Act will fizzle leaves, and edges foxed, else a very good copy. £500 out in a long doctor’s bill.’ Indeed, Cummings chose to kill himself off The first of the the author’s books to achieve commercial success, at the end of the Journal with a note recording his death on New Year’s inscribed to his literary idol. Eve 1917, subsequently remarking that ‘no man dare remain alive after writing such a book.’ 10 BARRIE, J. M. The dramatists get what they want: a play Collins initially accepted the book for publication but then withdrew, in one act. [Poulton-Lancelyn]: Privately printed for Roger fearful that its ‘lack of morals’ might injure their reputation. Chatto & Lancelyn Green, 1986. First edition. Half morocco, spine lettered Windus took it on instead but insisted on cuts, including, as Cummings noted, ‘two splendid entries about prostitutes’. He lived to see his Journal in gilt, printed paper label on upper board. The designer’s copy, published, with an introduction by H. G. Wells, on March 31st 1919, but with autograph letter from Richard Lancelyn Green, expressing not its sequel, A Last Diary, published the following year. The two are delight with the book’s design and layout. Fine copy in slipcase, currently published together as a Penguin Modern Classic. with a little light fading at one edge. £350 At the end of January 1919, in an entry published in the sequel, he The book was designed by Alan Bultitude at the September Press. ‘The describes his ‘fever of anticipation’ for ‘the constantly delayed publica­ play ... is now printed for the first time, in an edition limited to twenty- tion of this my Journal; how I strain to hold it, to smell the fresh ink, five numbered and signed copies.’ This copy is un-numbered. BL, to hear the binding crackle as I open it out, and above all to read what Oxford, Yale in WorldCat. one of the foremost literary men thinks about me and my book. … Will it come in time? I nearly died last month of ’flu, and get worse almost 11 BEERBOHM, Max. A Christmas Garland. Heinemann, daily. I am running a neck-and-neck race up the straight with my evil 1912. First edition. Some browning to endpapers, a few spots genius on the black horse. It is touch and go who wins’. On March 27th, of foxing to fore-edge, else a bright copy in an unusually nice Cummings is able to exclaim, presumably about the above copy: ‘I’ve example of the dust jacket. £750 won! This morning at 9 a.m. the book arrived. C. and W. thoughtfully left the pages to be cut, so I’ve been enjoying the exquisite pleasure of The best collection of literary parodies published in English, with its cutting the pages of my own book.’ Reading the introduction, he must affectionate parody of Henry James, ‘The Mote in the Middle Distance’. have been particularly gratified by H.G. Wells’ comment that: ‘a certain thread of unpremeditated and exquisite beauty runs through the story 12 BELL, Vanessa. A.l.s. to Thérèse Lessore, 2pp, large 8vo, this diary tells’. Cummings died seven months later, on October 22nd, 8 Fitzroy St, Jan 22nd 1936. ‘It was very good of you to write to me aged thirty. Aside from the ms. note mentioned in the second paragraph about the London Group. The rebels said they had pointed out above, there are corrections in the author’s hand to seventeen pages, and to Walter by telephone, however, just before the meeting, that a four-line note to another page, explaining that he had needed a second it was not possible to make conditions & that he had agreed not letter from his doctor when conscription came in; he has also noted three to make any. So of course he was elected unconditionally & they page numbers on the rear free endpaper. succeeded in turning out Mrs. Lee as secretary, which is I think

6 7 a pity & hard on her. Otherwise I daresay the changes are all to on half-title, ‘Caroline Grosvenor from Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the good. But some of us feel rather strongly that there was a good Mount Street, June 24. 1893’. Cloth unevenly faded, else a very deal of tiresome intrigue behind it all & that its difficult to work good copy. £250 with people who use such methods, which was quite unnecessary. Blunt had earlier enjoyed what his biographer, Elizabeth Longford, Therefore Duncan, Keith Baynes & I are are resigning from the describes as ‘a short but concentrated affair’ with the recipient’s sister, Group & as we were all elected to the working committee we are Margaret Talbot, wife of the Military Secretary at the British embassy writing to Mr Bedford to say so & would like also to send a message in Paris. She should not be confused with Margaret’s close friend, Lady to Walter. Please tell him with my love that we’re by no means Edmund Talbot, whom Blunt also chased. With an eye to Caroline flying from him as President! In fact, the one inducement to stay Grosvenor as ‘one I could be in love with if I had time’, Blunt read his would have been to see his methods of ruling the Group but I hope poetry to her in the woods. ‘Being Margaret’s sister,’ Longford writes, at any rate that we may hear about them. Duncan & I would of ‘Caroline gave him a feeling of Eastern symmetry, as in the ‘Arabic Ballads’ he had just finished writing.’ course love to come to lunch with you one day but may I write & suggest it a little later? Duncan is hard at work on huge panels for 15 BLUNT, Wilfrid Scawen. Esther, love lyrics, and Natalia’s the Queen Mary. They have to be sent away before very long & resurrection. Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892. First edition. then he will be freer & it would be the greatest pleasure to see you 16mo. With small card tipped in to hinge of front endpaper, with both again.’ £1500 an inscription by the author, ‘For Lady Edmund Talbot from the Lessore was both a fellow artist and Walter Sickert’s third wife. Despite author’. Spine slightly darkened, cloth soiled, light offsetting to the protests of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, a rebel clique within the London Group of artists had banded together to oust Rupert Lee free endpapers, else a good copy. £125 and his wife, Diana Brinton, from their roles of president and treasurer, Lady Edmund Talbot was one of many women pursued by Blunt in his and elected Sickert in his place. ‘Although he must have consented to most amorous phase. ‘I told her I should come to her room at night, and this arrangement’, writes Sickert’s biographer, Matthew Sturgis, ‘he she did not much protest’, he confided to his dairy when she came to stay. had drifted beyond the orbit of the capital’s art politics. He contributed She had, however, asked if he believed in the hereafter, to which Blunt nothing to proceedings, attended no meetings, and relinquished his had replied: ‘I say my prayers and hope for the best.’ Having failed to position (along with his membership) soon afterwards.’ Not in the grasp the nature of her question, Blunt thought he was on a promise. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, edited by Regina Marler. ‘I quite expected after this to attain the end of love’, he wrote, but would find her bedroom door bolted. As Blunt’s biographer, Elizabeth Longford, puts it, Lady Edmund was ‘one who went to Paris for her 13 [BETJEMAN, John.] A Handbook on Paint. Silicate bonnets, but on to Lourdes for her soul.’ Paint Co., 1939. First edition. Printed boards. Five coloured illustrations. Some foxing to edges, endpapers and prelims, else a A Christmas present for Jack B. Yeats nice copy. £350 Contains ‘Colour and the Interior Decorator’ by Betjeman and ‘Colour 16 BOSSCHERE, Jean de. The Closed Door. Illustrated by the and the Architect’ by Hugh Casson. Peterson B8. Rare; University of author. With a translation by F. S. Flint and an introduction by Victoria only in WorldCat. May Sinclair. John Lane, 1917. First edition. Illustrated. Inscribed by Elizabeth Corbet ‘Lolly’ Yeats to her brother and his wife, ‘Jack 14 BLUNT, Wilfrid Scawen. The Celebrated Romance of the & Cottie, with love from Lily Yeats [and] Lolly Yeats, Xmas 1917’. Stealing of the Mare. Translated from the original Arabic by Lady Nice copy. £250 Anne Blunt. Done into verse by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Reeves and Turner, 1892. First edition. Sm. 4to. Inscribed by the author

8 9 for a swollen ganglion. …I keep going with sleeping pills and drink ‘If you know of any way by which I could get hold of a revolver, which diminish my sense of reality, but oh, how shall I live without do tell me’ her?’ Woolsey died in mid January the following year. Shortly before 17 BRENAN, Gerald. Ten a.l.s. to Janetta Parladé, 17pp., receiving the diagnosis of his wife’s cancer, Brenan had met a young various sizes but mostly 4to., Alhaurín el Grande, August 12th woman named Lynda Price. Less than two months after Woolsey’s 1967 to July 16th 1981, together with a 2pp a.l.s. addressed to death, she moved in as his companion. The relationship remained platonic, despite Brenan’s infatuation with her, and appears to have ‘Rosemary’, and related correspondence. £1500 been the happiest of his life. Janetta Parladé, the Marquesa de Apezteguia, started life with the more On Easter Sunday, 1974, Brenan records a visit from David Garnett demure nomenclature of Janet Woolley. She first met Brenan when and his daughter, Harriet: ‘It has been entirely delightful having she was fourteen, accompanying her mother to Spain in the summer Bunny and Henrietta here. We have talked, and talked, and talked. of 1936. Ralph and Frances Partridge were staying with Brenan at He is the most amazing man, no older in mind than he was 40 years the time and found kindred spirits in Janetta and her mother, who ago. And Henrietta! I had scarcely seen here before and I find her the were escaping Janetta’s rigidly conventional father, the Rev Geoffrey most marvellous of girls – beautiful, intelligent, well read and very Woolley, Chaplain of Harrow. The Partridges were particularly drawn spirited and adventurous.’ Brenan’s publisher had shown Frances to Janetta, a girl not only possessed of a strong character but already Partridge the final draft ofPersonal Record, the second volume of his ‘lovely-looking, with dark blonde hair and long legs’, to quote Frances autobiography. Infuriated by Brenan’s portrait of her husband, Ralph, Partridge’s biographer. Brenan fell for her in a more physical manner, she had demanded a number of alterations. ‘Magouche [Magruder] tells confiding to Ralph that she had ‘set his heart on fire’. The Partridges me that Frances has been in a very bad state’, writes Brenan. ‘Lynda has very quickly became a second family for Janetta, and Ham Spray her had a phone call from our literary agent saying that she insists on seeing English home in half-terms and holidays. Frances would later declare my autobiography and censoring it, insisting that if she cannot do this herself ‘fonder of and more closely linked to’ Janetta than anyone that she will lay an injunction against the publication of the book on the other than her husband and son. Janetta at some point became an grounds that, when she returned to me my letters to Carrington some artist, married a number of times, had affairs with Arthur Koestler and ten years ago, she had not given me the copyright of them. … If she Lucian Freud, amongst others, and counted amongst her friends, Patrick should insist on this the book will not come out as I refuse to change Leigh Fermor, Francis Bacon, Cyril Connolly, and Sonia Orwell, at anything under pressure of this sort.’ The letter ends with a reference to whose marriage to the novelist she served as a witness. Evelyn Waugh, the artist, Lars Pranger, who would join the household and later marry shocked to find her opening the front door in her bare feet, nicknamed Lynda. ‘I have been seeing more of Lynda’s lover Lars and have become her ‘Mrs Bluefeet’, the misdemeanour also earning her a minor role in quite enthusiastic about him. He will look after her well when I leave Unconditional Surrender. the scene. How jealousy and misunderstanding warp the mind!’ Brenan’s first letter concerns his wife, Gamel Woolsey. ‘I have very Francis Partridge was not alone in being upset by Personal Record. sad news to tell you’, he begins. ‘Gamel has an inoperable cancer, in ‘No you were completely right to tell me about Cyril’s being so angry and an advanced stage, on her breast and below her shoulder. There seems hurt’, Brenan writes in his next letter. ‘One must know the worst about little hope of her living more than a few months. She has to have ray oneself. I couldn’t get up this morning for the guilt the thought of my treatment as there is a chance that that might delay it. But she is set on insensitivity had given me. But really I have a horror of the whole book. going to England and the doctor thinks that for psychological reasons It should have laid on a dusty shelf in the Texas archive till 2,000 years that is a good idea, so we plan to go if we can get a seat next week. … later – only then I shouldn’t have been able to give Lynda any money.’ Gamel, on the surface of her mind at least, has no idea of what she has Hearing of Connolly’s death, later that year, Brenan commiserates with and it is essential to keep her ignorant. For that reason I had not meant Parladé: ‘I feel very sad about Cyril’s death and I know how deeply you to tell anyone but Frances, to whom I have written about it. If people will feel it for you were, I imagine, his best friend. I had always a very round her know, their sympathy will make her suspicious. Will you great regard for him. I wanted his approbation for my books – a thing I please therefore tell no one at all. We tell her that she needs treatment have never felt for anyone else except Auden. His face and voice have

10 11 haunted me since I heard of his illness. He expected to have lived to of financial support from his friends and themselves; and, in similar my age and he ought to have done so, for he was twice as alive, twice vein, a letter and postcard from Stuart ‘the Sarge’ Preston, a letter as impressive as anyone else. I gather he has left his affairs in great from Parladé’s half-brother, Mark, and another from an unidentified disorder.’ correspondent. The most striking of these letters is dated March 1st, 1981, and begins with an expression of gratitude for Parladé’s hospitality. ‘I simply do not 18 BROOKE, Jocelyn. Ronald Firbank. Arthur Barker, [1951]. know how to thank you for the delightful time you gave me and the First edition. Inscribed by the author, ‘To Richard Dawkins, delicious food I ate with you. You have a great art – that of reviving from the author, Jocelyn Brooke’, and with the recipient’s people and making them a little less displeased with themselves.’ He notes underneath, and a further four to the margins of the mentions the attempted coup d’état of the previous week. ‘And in those two days we were with you the whole face of Spain changed. But the text; subsequently Julian Mitchell’s copy, with his ownership next time one of those fierce generals will assassinate the King. I am signature, dated ‘14.i.56’. Spine faded, cloth slightly marked, else glad I shall not be alive to hear of it. I hate democracy and despise most a very good copy. £95 people’s political opinions. The best one can hope for is that some people Osbert Lancaster gives a lively account of R.M. Dawkins in the second should be left in peace to enjoy their lives in a way that satisfies them.’ A volume of his autobiography, in which he recalls that the Professor of little further, Brenan’s tone darkens. ‘But to speak of future plans, I fear Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford ‘was you have not converted me to your views’, he writes. ‘I feel it is in me to much in demand as a luncheon and dinner guest not only for the sake of live on for several more years and I cannot possibly impose myself on his engaging personality but also for his reminiscences of such figures as Lars and Lynda. And – the crowning feat – I have spent all my money. I Ronald Firbank and Baron Corvo with both of whom he had at various cannot strain other peoples’ kindness and generosity that far. Yet – and it times been on close terms.’ is this that frightens me – if I take my drug it might leave me paralysed as Bunny was, or an idiot. What right have I to to treat them like this? If 19 [BROOKE, Rupert.] Blank school notebook. [Ca. 1905.] 216 you know of any way by which I could get hold of a revolver, do tell me. x 135mm. Cloth-backed blue boards. 104 lined pages. One board Perhaps Jaime sometimes deals with antiques that still serve? Or just bears Brooke’s ownership signature, ‘C Brooke Esq. / WPB’; the a shot gun? Could I borrow one from someone? I really only want one other shows an illegible signature that has been deleted, with thing of life – to get out of all the problems I do not know how to solve. Brooke’s signature, ‘R C Brooke’, below. From the collection of I am not a death lover and have got over the worst of my feelings about my daughter: I am just, through my own stupidity and loss of memory in Geoffrey Keynes, who was at Rugby School with Brooke. ‘WPB’ an impossible position; I need, like any soldier, to fall on my sword. Until was their housemaster, William Parker Brooke, who was also a friend threw doubts on the efficacy of my poison, I thought I was safe.’ Rupert’s father. £650 Parladé must have replied with understandable alarm because Keynes hero-worshipped his former schoolfriend, later recalling that Brenan’s following letter apologises ‘for all this trouble. I have changed ‘Rupert, though a few months younger than I, was much wiser and more my mind again and definitely will not take this secret medicine of mine. clever and he soon became the friend to whom I turned with complete Thank you for your kind offer of lodging, but I must refuse that.’ confidence and admiration. I was at first unaware of the physical beauty Together with these letters to Parladé is an undated 2pp. a.l.s. for which he afterwards became so famous.’ As his literary executor, addressed to ‘Rosemary’, in which Brenan complains that he is ‘on the Keynes would assiduously preserve the image of Brooke as a young verge of a complete nervous breakdown. And I scarcely see. I look too in Apollo, dying in heroic sacrifice, a glorious literary future unwritten. a state of complete filth with cigarette burns in all my clothes. Lynda too has no time to tidy me up a bit. I am still a life-lover, but the time has come for me to end this.’ Also amongst the correspondence is a detailed four page letter from Lars Pranger about Brenan’s financial state, their search for charitable help and a suitable home in England, and offers

12 13 James Strachey’s copy A Christmas present from Strachey & Carrington 20 BROOKE, Rupert. 1914 & other poems. Sidgwick & Jack­ 23 [CARRINGTON, Dora.] Christmas Entertainments... Illus­ son, 1915. Second impression, published a month after the first. trated with many diverting cuts. Field & Tuer, Ye Leadenhalle Portrait frontispiece. James Strachey’s copy, with his pencilled Presse, [1883]. 32mo. Vellum-parchment wrappers. Inscribed ownership inscription, dated 1915. Spine label browned, and by Dora Carrington to Harry Norton, ‘Harry N. from G.L.S. & C. slightly chipped at tail, else a nice copy. £250 Xmas 1918.’ Spine chipped, some browning and dust-soiling to Friends from prep school, undergraduates together at Cambridge, wrappers, else a very good copy. £650 Strachey was Brooke’s closest confidante until sometime in 1912, when Essentially a reprint of the 1740 edition of Round about our coal fire: or, Brooke effectively ended their friendship. At Cambridge, Strachey fell Christmas Entertainments. Norton was one of Strachey’s closest friends, in love with Brooke but his physical desire for him was unrequited. and the dedicatee of Eminent Victorians. The previous year, Norton had Nevertheless, when Geoffrey Keynes came to edit The Letters of Rupert arrived on Christmas Eve with a turkey and four bottles of claret. Some Brooke, he refused to include any between Brooke and Strachey, though of the novelty of a traditional Christmas, along with the quality of the Brooke had written more letters to Strachey than anyone other than his provisions, appears to have been lost by the time Norton joined them mother. When they finally appeared in print, twenty years later, their again in 1918. ‘We eat large chickens,’ Strachey wrote to Lady Ottoline editor concluded that Keynes’ refusal to allow the letters to be printed Morrell, on December 27th 1918, ‘which pretend to be turkeys not very ‘was undoubtedly due to the strong homosexual current running effectively, and drink grocer’s wine. Such is the force of convention.’ through the correspondence.’ On holiday with Francis Bacon 21 [BROWN, George Douglas.] Famous Fighting Regiments. 24 CHOPPING, Richard. Autograph letter signed to Janetta By George Hood. Hood, Douglas, & Howard; Andrew Melrose, Parladé, 4to, 4pp., on paper headed ‘Mapotel Metropole’, Mont­ [1900]. First edition. Frontispiece and three plates. Paper stock pellier, and dated April 14th 1981, with original envelope.£250 browned, inscription erased from half-title, ownership signature A chatty letter, written on the artist’s 64th birthday. After apologising for to corner of title-page, else a very good copy. £150 missing the private view of an exhibition of Parladé’s work, Chopping The author’s pseudonymous second book, published a year before The gives an account of his holiday in France with his partner, Denis Wirth- House with the Green Shutters, and one of the handful of titles issued by Miller, and Francis Bacon. ‘We have been in France now for ten days’, the company he set up with Melrose and Howard Spicer. he writes, ‘and have stayed in five different hotels.’ He reminisces about Pérouges, for which he had ‘very tender memories’ from an earlier visit, 22 BYRON, Robert. Photographs and Drawings. Messrs. ‘a few days after I had met D.W-M. with two ladies in an Austin 7’, and Abdy’s Gallery, June, 1932. 4to. Printed wrappers. 16pp. With mentions going to look at some paintings by Courbet, but the recurrent a two page ‘Artist’s Apology’ by Byron. Staples rusty, else near focus is on lunch. ‘Denis has just gone to get an English paper and Francis fine. £650 is consulting the Michelin for lunch places at Palavas-les-Flots. Francis has just found that at Sète the “Restaurant du Gare” ‘has a special little 122 items are listed, many of them with descriptive or explanatory notes black thing’. He has a well tried rule that when in doubt try the station by Byron. Decidedly rare. University of Oxford only in WorldCat, and restaurant. Once years ago we had a five course lunch including wine from its description that copy appears to be incomplete and lacking its and coffee for eleven francs in the Station Hotel at Clissons; and we have wrappers. done pretty well at stations on this trip.’ Bacon’s long friendship with Chopping’s partner was close, destructive, and occasionally violent. ‘We all get on well as long as D. don’t drink too much’, Chopping comments. ‘If he does then sparks fly. F & I gang up and then he is worse. But he is very nice when sober. You know the whole story, only too well ------’.

14 15 25 CONNOLLY, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. Routledge, autobiographical, its eponymous femme fatale based on Daudet’s former [1938]. First edition. Inscribed by the author, ‘Tony and Cuthbert, mistress, Marie Rieu, an actress and courtesan to whom he dedicated his with much love from their old friend etc, Cyril Connolly, Paris only collection of verse, Les Amoureuses. By the time he came to write 1938/9, “I can imagine no better present for a nephew with Sapho, Daudet was suffering the tertiary symptoms of syphilis, which literary ambitions” W.H. Auden, in New Masses.’ Cloth very he had acquired during their relationship. Though venereal disease lightly marked, else a nice copy in lightly spine-browned dust is nowhere mentioned in the novel, lust is described in terms of vice, poison and contagion. jacket. £750 Daudet’s moral intention may have been lost on Harry Crosby, a man The quote is from the first line of Auden’s review of Enemies of Promise, even more drawn to self-destruction than he was to sensual debauchery, published in The New Republic. Tony Bower was an American friend but it is clear from his extensive underlining and marginal scoring that of the Connollys who later joined the editorial staff of Horizon. His Crosby closely identified with the narrative. Given his obsession with boyfriend, T.C. Worsley, was a writer and journalist. Though Connolly the Sun and its symbolism, it is little surprise to find him underlining and Worsley maintained a long friendship, its cornerstone, according to words and phrases such as ‘teint de soleil’ and ‘un triste soleil rouge’, and Worsley, was ‘mutual fear’. Connolly appears as ‘Cranshaw’ in Worsley’s numerous marked passages play to Crosby’s nature, as for example a line Behind the Battle. from the opening chapter: ‘mais il obéissait à une volonté supérieure à la sienne, à la violence impétueuse d’un désir’. 26 [CROSBY, Harry.] DAUDET, Alphonse. Sapho. Paris: Though the names are readily identifiable, Crosby’s list on the verso Alphonse Lemerre, [Ca. 1903]. Later edition. 16mo. Full morocco, of the rear endpaper is something of a conundrum. ‘Jacqueline’ was spine lettered in gilt, with Harry and Caresse Crosby’s coat of arms Crosby’s imaginary ideal lover, whose name he had tattooed across his and device in gilt on both boards, gilt dentelles, a.e.g., silk ribbon. chest, and who, if she had existed, would have inherited his gold sun- Inscribed by Crosby, on verso of rear free endpaper, ‘a Paris, ce cup and the five thousand dollars that he left her in his will. ‘Sun-pipe’ mois de decembre 1924’, followed by a 23-line list, with six entries may be a reference to an opium pipe, another of Crosby’s weaknesses, marked by a cross: ‘Mamma, Mamma, Mamma, Jacqueline, Sun- though boys, in general, were not. Caresse, needless to say, was Crosby’s wife. Ninon de Lenclos was a 17th century writer and courtesan, and pipe / Boys, Harry, Caresse, Ninon de Lenclos, Constance, Boys, Constance [Crowninshield Coolidge Atherton, Comtesse de Jumilhac] a Harry +, Caresse +, Boys, Caresse, Ninon de Lenclos, Mamma +, lover and close friend. Jacqueline, Caresse, Caresse, Mamma +, [double space], Caresse Towards the end of 1929, the Crosbys made a trip home to America. +’; additionally inscribed on first preliminary blank, ‘Henry Caresse later claimed they were happy there together, despite her Grew Crosby / A Paris ce 14 juin 1925, and with the letters of husband’s suggestion that she jump with him from their 27th floor hotel the ‘Crosby Cross’ written over an embossed image of a sun, and room in New York. Crosby, however, was preoccupied with another with his extensive underlinings in pencil, subsequently redrawn sexual relationship, this time notable for what his biographer described in ink matching the 1925 inscription, and occasional scorings to as ‘a violence he had never before experienced so consistently with a the margin, to 116pp. Crosby’s armorial bookplate to front paste- woman’. Young and wayward, Josephine Rotch Bigelow was fiercely down, gilt morocco ‘Crosby Cross’ bookplate to free endpaper; jealous of both Caresse and Constance, Crosby’s other great love. They, inscription in an unidentified hand to verso of front free endpaper in turn, would later blame her for what would follow. On December 9th, (‘Best wishes for a Merry Christmas, Franny’), initials in another Crosby received a thirty-six line poem from Josephine, hymning their shared sensual tastes and worship of the sun. It ended with the words: hand, ‘EB / NN’ on verso of final blank; upper board detached, ‘Death is our marriage’. The following day, Crosby accompanied Caresse else a very good copy. £1500 to an exhibition and then had lunch with a female friend, who wrote First published in 1884, and dedicated to his sons when they turned off his talk of suicide as ‘just literary’. He had arranged to meet Caresse twenty, Sapho is the tale of a young man whose philandering leads him and his mother for tea with his uncle, J. P. Morgan, to whom he would into an obsessive sexual relationship with an older woman, even as he give a copy of his latest volume of poetry, Sleeping Together, but after discovers her professionally promiscuous past. The novel was partly lunch Crosby went to meet Josephine. Sometime around five, in what

16 17 appeared to be a suicide pact, he shot her with a small automatic that to oscillate between the vividness of Sartre and the schizoid confusions he’d had engraved with a sun. What he did for the next two hours isn’t of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square.’ known but eventually, in bed and with an arm around her shoulder, he placed the barrel of the gun to his head, and fired. With a scarce bookplate by Dora Carrington 29 DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor. Pages from the Journal of an Elizabeth David’s copy, subsequently from the library Author. Translated by S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry. of Richard Olney Maunsel, 1916. First edition of this translation. Inscribed 27 [DAVID, Elizabeth.] DUMONT, Emile. La Bonne Cuisine by Koteliansky on half-title to Montague Shearman, ‘To M. Française: tout ce qui a rapport a la table; manuel-guide pour la Shearman from S. Koteliansky, December 1916’ and with ville et la campagne. Paris: Librairie Henri Aniéré, Victorion Shearman’s very uncommon bookplate, a woodcut of a black Frères, [1928]. Thirtieth edition, ‘revue et augmentée’. With swan, by Dora Carrington, to front pastedown. Spine lightly over two hundred illustrations. Elizabeth David’s copy, with her faded, a little very light foxing to endpapers and blanks, else a bookplate; subsequently Richard Olney’s copy, with his pencilled very good copy. £375 ownership signature. A recipe for Boeuf à la mode has been Koteliansky probably met the art collector, Montague Shearman, heavily amended in pencil and numerous other recipes receive a through their mutual friend, Mark Gertler, to whom Shearman had tick, cross, or marginal lining; a note on the rear free endpaper given a key to his flat in the Adelphi. A couple of years after the above reads, ‘Hall cupboard third shelf’. Spine slightly faded, and split inscription, while the Russian Ballet was in London, Gertler took ‘Kot’, at either edge of headband; cloth soiled, front endpaper cracked, along with Beatrice Campbell and her husband, to the flat, after dinner contents browned at edges, but a good, sound copy. £650 in town. ‘On opening the door, we were surprised to find the whole place A delightful association between friends, and fellow Francophiles, who arranged for a party’, recalled Campbell (by then Lady Glenavy) in her were also two of the most important food writers of the last century. First book, Today we will only gossip. ‘There were flowers everywhere and published in 1873, Emile Dumont’s La Bonne Cuisine was a popular every sort of delicacy – sandwiches and cakes, bottles of wine, decanters cookery book for over half a century, and subsequently notable for and liqueurs, even a large bottle of eau-de-cologne. We guessed that Leonard Bernstein’s translation and setting of four of the recipes for Shearman was at the ballet with a party, and would be bringing them voice and piano. back, probably Lopokova, Diaghilev and half the company. For some extraordinary reason which has never been explained, Kot and Gertler seemed to go raving mad. It was really Kot who started it. They dashed ‘a female Dostoevsky of the coffee-bars’ at the bottles and the liqueurs, drinking everything and eating all the 28 DEL-RIVO, Laura. The Furnished Room. Hutchinson, sandwiches, holding them madly in both hands. They threw the flowers New Authors Limited, [1961]. First edition. The author’s own and cushions all over the place and Kot took a painted wooden tray made copy, with her pencilled ownership signature, address, and phone by Roger Fry at the Omega Workshop and smashed it down with both number. Very good copy in dust jacket, slightly dust-soiled at rear hands over Gertler’s head. I can still see Gertler’s startled, delighted panel, and with a single short tear. £75 expression.’ A debut novel of existential angst in seedy late ’50s London. ‘The pretentiousness of this young author who sets out to be a female 30 DREYER, Carl Th[eodor]. Om Filmen: artikler og inter­ Dostoevsky of the coffee-bars is breathtaking’, wrote a reviewer in the views. Udgivet af Erik Ulrichsen. Copenghagen: Nyt Nordisk TLS. In his view, she was ‘suffering like many of her sex and generation Forlag Arnold Busck, 1959. First edition. Large 8vo. Printed from over-emancipation’ and took particular exception to the anti- wrappers. Inscribed by Dreyer, ‘Med venlig hilsen til en ukendt hero’s ‘strenuously-described carnal relations with Ilsa, an Espresso ven [‘With best regards to an unknown friend’], Carl Th. Dreyer, slattern’. Reissued on its fiftieth anniversary, its latestTLS reviewer 12/2 1965.’ Bookplate of the Danish film writer, Carl Nørrested; found it a ‘beautiful performance’, with an attention to detail that ‘seems

18 19 two chips to the laminated surface of the spine, which has a 2 cm. 35 FINLAY, Ian Hamilton. 4 sails. Chelsea School of Art, tear at tail edge, else a very nice copy. £750 [1966]. First edition. Red folding card. One centimetre strip at tail The only book by one of the greatest of all film directors, most famous of upper panel lightly faded, else a very good copy. £200 for The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr. Inscribed copies are rare. Designed with and printed by Ed Wright at the School of Graphics. Loosely inserted is an a.l.s. from Dreyer to Nørrested, dated Copenhagen, Copies printed on blue or yellow card are more common variants. ‘10/8 1965’, thanking him for his letter and extensive analysis of Dreyer’s films, which he has read with great interest, and remarking on 36 FINLAY, Ian Hamilton. Ocean stripe series 4. Design and the difficulty of judging one’s own work. drawings: Emil Antonucci. [Dunsyre]: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1966. First edition. Printed wrappers. Fine copy. £85 31 EKWENSI, Cyprian. People of the City. Andrew Dakers, [1954]. First edition. Inscribed by the author to the radio producer, 37 FINLAY, Ian Hamilton. Canal Game. Fulcrum Press, Lawrence Gilliam, ‘For Lawrence Gilliam, “we heads must stick [1967]. First edition. Spiral bound. Unnumbered leaves, each together”, Cyprian Ekwensi, London, Jan 1960’. Upper board a divided into three sections, allowing the canal journey to be read trifle marked, ghost of a paper clip to head of free endpaper, else a in multiple sequences. Very nice copy. £200 very good copy in slightly worn and soiled dust jacket. £250 Edition limited to 1000 copies. Drawing together stories he had broadcast on Radio Nigeria, Ekwensi wrote People of the City during a two week voyage from Nigeria to London, where he was due to take up a scholarship to pursue his To Augustus John medical studies. The novel is dedicated ‘To ‘West African Voices, a 38 FIRBANK, Ronald. The Works of Ronald Firbank. Intro­ B.B.C. programme’’. A few years later, he came back to London to train duction by Arthur Waley. Biographical memoir by Osbert Sitwell. as a professional broadcaster under Lawrence Gilliam, head of Radio Duckworth, 1929. First collected edition. Five volumes. Portrait Features at the BBC. Ekwensi’s inscription refers to his promotion to frontispieces: three by Augustus John and one each by Wyndham head of Features at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, on his return Lewis and Charles Shannon. Inscribed, ‘For Augustus John with to Nigeria. homage, and great gratitude for his delightful information. Osbert Sitwell, 1929’. Yellow buckram soiled and marked, free endpapers 32 FINLAY, Ian Hamilton. Canal stripe series 3. [Edinburgh: very lightly spotted, else a good set. £1500 Wild Hawthorn Press, 1964.] First edition. Obl. 8vo. Plain In his biographical memoir, having given an account of the uncon­ wrappers, stapled, in dust jacket. Wrappers very slightly dust- ventional preliminaries to Firbank’s first meeting with John, Sitwell marked, else a nice copy. £125 writes: ‘Here I should like to acknowledge my debt to Mr. Augustus John for his great kindness. Remembering this story, and knowing of 33 FINLAY, Ian Hamilton. Autumn Poem. [With photographs Firbank’s tremendous admiration for him, I wrote to him, and received by Audrey Walker.] [Edinburgh: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1966.] in reply a most interesting letter, some of which I quote below, while First edition. Printed wrappers. Slight crease to corner of last two other anecdotes contained in it I have, for sake of context, incorporated leaves (a blank and the colophon leaf) and rear wrapper, else a elsewhere in this essay.’ Edition limited to 235 sets, of which 35 were for review purposes. Benkowitz A12a. very nice copy. £275 Henry James’s copy 34 FINLAY, Ian Hamilton. 6 Small Songs in 3’s. Linocuts by Zeljko Kujundic. [Edinburgh: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1966.] First 39 FLAUBERT, Gustave. Le Candidat: comedie en quatre edition. Plain wrappers, in printed pictorial dust jacket. Fine acts. Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1874. First edition. Sm. 8vo. Half copy. £275 red morocco, marbled boards, spine lettered in gilt. Henry James’s

20 21 copy, with his ownership signature on half-title. A later pencilled BL and LSE in Library Hub Discover, to which WorldCat adds a copy at note to the free endpaper records ‘Bought at Lamb House, Rye, the Library of Congress. Sept 1948, K. F.’ Spine a trifle rubbed at very head and tail, a little foxing (notably to endpapers, prelims, and final leaf), else a nice 42 FRY, Christopher. Open Door. [Goldings, Hertford: Printed copy. £1250 by the Boys at the Press of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, Ca. 1935.] First Zola enjoyed Flaubert’s theatrical début but almost no-one else did and edition. Brown printed wrappers. Wrappers slightly darkened at the play was withdrawn after its fourth performance. ‘I won’t have my edges and dust-soiled, with some wear and rubbing to spine and a actors hissed and booed’, Flaubert wrote to George Sand. ‘The second crease at one corner, else a very good copy. £750 night, when I saw Delannoy [the lead actor] coming off the stage with The author’s rare first book, a dramatised account of the founding of tears in his eyes, I felt like a criminal and decided that was enough.’ Dr. Barnardo’s Homes. ‘Although marginalized by the post-Osborne Despite being ‘flayed by all parties’, Flaubert rose to the occasion. ‘Never British theatre’, writes Michael Billington in the ODNB, ‘Fry remained have I been less upset’, he remarked. ‘I’m astonished by my own stoicism a magnanimous, cheerful figure who praised the work of such younger (or pride).’ Twenty-one years later, Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, writers as Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. He also brought colour, would earn a similar reception from its audience in the gallery. ‘Even spiritual fervour, and an irresistible verbal élan to post-war British now’, James wrote to his brother four days later, ‘it’s a sore trial to me to theatre.’ BL, V&A, and Universities of London, Indiana, and Alberta in have to write about it—weary, bruised, sickened, disgusted as one is left WorldCat; Library Hub Discover adds a copy at Eton College. by the intense, the cruel ordeal of a first night that—after the immense labour of preparation and the unspeakable tension of suspense—has, in 43 GARIOCH, Robert & MACLEAN, Sorley. 17 Poems for a few brutal moments, not gone well.’ 6d, in Gaelic, Scots & English. By Somhairle MacGhill-Eathain. Edinburgh: Chalmers Press, 1940. Second edition, ‘with some 40 FLINT, F. S. Economic Equilibrium. [For the author, alterations’. Printed wrappers. Alasdair Gray’s copy, with his 1940.] First edition. Printed wrappers. Inscribed by the author on initialed ownership inscription, dated 1951. Wrappers slightly the verso of the upper wrapper, ‘For Ianthe aged 30 from Dad. dust-soiled, slight crease to lower corner of upper wrapper, and May, 1940’, with three ms. corrections, and a ten-line explanatory with a few tiny tears to yapped tail-edge, staples rusty, else a very note to the tail margins of pp. 8–9. Wrappers slightly marked good copy. £125 and a trifle spotted, two corners slightly creased, else a very good An attractive association for this collaborative first book (for both poets), copy. £250 hand-set and printed by Garioch. The first edition, published earlier the Though remembered as a poet, critic, translator, and member of the same year, is rare. Imagist group, Flint earned his living as a civil servant and from the ’30s onwards, when he renounced poetry in favour of economics, worked in the overseas section of the statistics division of the Ministry of Labour. 44 GARNETT, David. Two autograph letters signed, with BL, Oxford, and Cambridge in Library Hub Discover; WorldCat locates original envelopes, to Janetta Parladé, Jan 20th & Feb 27th 1975, a copy at the Library of Congress, to which should be added another at 4pp., 4to., Le Verger de Charry, Montcuq. £500 Stanford. At the beginning of November, the previous year, Garnett had made an unannounced visit to his lover, Mougouche Phillips, in Spain. Not 41 FLINT, F. S. Paying for War and Peace. [For the author, only had he got ill while he was there but he discovered that she was 1948.] First edition. Printed wrappers. Inscribed by the author having an affair with Xan Fielding. Parladé and then Gerald Brenan put him up but even after two months he wasn’t well enough to return to his daughter, on the printed verso of the upper wrapper, ‘[For] to France. His daughter, Fanny, came to drive him home and the first Ianthe [with the compliments of] Dad’. Wrappers slightly soiled, letter gives a lively account of their trip back, including an extended else a very good copy. £250 detour through Portugal, a country upon which Garnett comments

22 23 largely unfavourably, though he enjoys ‘Al[co]baca and Batalha – which 45 [GARNETT, Edward.] Lords and Masters: a play in three are wonderful. Lytton once gave me Beckford’s book about them.’ After acts. By James Byrne. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1911. First edition. confessing a preference for the north of Spain over Andalucia, Garnett Printed wrappers. Wrappers slightly browned, tiny chip to tail- recalls ‘Hell & Horror’ in Bilbao, an excursion to San Sebastian to corner of upper wrapper, else a very good copy. £350 buy olive oil and cigars, ‘& then France and a meal of fresh crab and A rare, pseudonymously published play. WorldCat locates copies at mayonnaise & an entrêcote of exquisite tenderness.’ He ends by urging BL, University of Manchester, as well as Regensburg, Auckland, Smith Parladé to visit so that he can return her hospitality, an occasion for College, and Toronto Public Library. which he promises to save a bottle of Bucelas, which he has brought back from Portugal. Garnett remained obsessively aggrieved by the infidelity for several weeks. Despite friends urging him to forgive her, 46 [GASCOYNE, David.] LEOPARDI, Giacomo. A Se Stesso / he never saw Mougouche again. The second letter mentions Brenan, and To Himself: after Canto XXVIII. Translated by David Gascoyne. a visit from Angelica, ‘which has much cheered me. She has become the Printed for the author and the Enitharmon Press, 1985. First spitting image of Vanessa’. He ends: ‘I have become a different animal edition. French fold bifolium. Inscribed by the author, ‘To Edward from that feeble mouse you nursed back to life & comforted in Spain. and Hilda Upward, affectionately, David Gascoyne, December What an odd talk we had about forgiveness!’ 1985.’ Very good copy. £75 Included with the above is an unrelated colour photograph, in the Both residents of the Isle of Wight, Gascoyne and Upward became style of a still life, with a lengthy note from Angelica Garnett to Parladé friends after being introduced to each other in 1968. Printed at the on the verso, and three a.l.s., from Garnett’s daughter, Henrietta, two Tragara Press in an edition of 120 copies. with original envelopes, 6pp, March 24th 1980 to Feb 7th 1981. Very affectionate and predominantly high-spirited letters, the first written while ‘very late to be off to have supper with Frances [Partridge] Inscribed by Mark Gertler whom one mustn’t be too late for’ and describing her visit to see Parladé’s 47 [GERTLER, Mark.] Mark Gertler. [With a preface by newly born grandson in the maternity ward, ‘Harriet and I think Rose’s Hubert Wellington.] The Fleuron, British Artists of To-day, son has a whopping great cock but Rose takes this in her stride & says it Number 1, 1925. First edition. 16mo. Patterned boards. 17 is normal’; the second giving news of their mutual friend, ‘Frances has monochrome plates. Inscribed by Gertler, ‘To Beatrice from become wildly famous. On Monday she was interviewed at breakfast Mark. October 5th 1927’. Boards slightly rubbed and soiled, else a time on the wireless where she aired her views about sex & privacy with very good copy. £750 Edna O’Brien in public’, and an account of a party for the second volume Beatrice Campbell, later Lady Glenavy, was an artist with a circle of of Partridge’s memoirs, with ‘Frances in a very elegant grey silk frock & friends that included D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and S. S. red stockings like a French partridge’. The third letter is written from Koteliansky, amongst others. Her close friendship with Gertler began in her father’s house in France: ‘Bunny had a bad arterial stroke on Sunday. 1913 and lasted until Gertler’s suicide in 1939. … B’s stroke has left him paralysed on his left side & at first it was very touch and go. But although these days are still critical the doctor is optimistic & believes that unless he has another stroke within the next 2 48 GHALI, Waguih. Beer in the Snooker Club. Deutsch, days he will be able to walk, although not recover the use of his left arm. [1964]. First edition. Edges spotted, else a very good copy in He can speak. Sometimes it is rambling baby talk but sometimes he is slightly worn dust jacket, with one tiny tear and one very short clear, cogent & lucid. I have had conversations about Wyatt, Peacock, tear with related crease. £125 Powys, the future of The Times, Sophie [Harriet’s daughter] & absent The Egyptian author’s only published novel, highly regarded and friends. He spoke of you last night & flattered me by saying I was as surprisingly scarce. good a nurse as you were when he was taken ill at Tramores. I promised I would send you his love, so here it is.’ Garnett suffered a further stroke and died ten days later.

24 25 49 GOETHE, J. W. von. Don Stefano’s Paper Mill: from the 1840. 12mo. Full morocco, raised bands, a.e.g. John Gray’s copy, Biographical Sketch of Philipp Hackert. Translated by Giles with his bookplate on front pastedown and the later circular MacDonagh. Illustrated by Geri Waddington. [Binham]: Front rubber-stamp of the Dominican Fathers, Edinburgh, on free Street Editions, 2017. First edition of this translation. Frontispiece endpaper. Spine and corners slightly rubbed, else a very good and six wood-engravings tipped in. Quarter black morocco, copy. £750 spine lettered in gilt, with patterned paper boards reproducing a nineteenth century Italian design, in matching cloth and board 53 [GRAY, John.] D’OFFAY, Anthony. Books and autograph slipcase. Fine copy. £95 letters, mainly of the Eighteen-Nineties. Anthony d’Offay, July An anecdote about two of Goethe’s artist friends, searching Naples for 1961. Printed wrappers, bearing an 1882 photograph of Marc- fine paper for their printmaking. Geri Waddington’s wood-engravings, André Raffalovich. Very good copy. £75 inspired by her visits to an old paper mill in France, show the process D’Offay’s first catalogue, notable for its selection of books and autograph of paper manufacturing at that time. From an edition of 150 copies, letters from the libraries of John Gray and Marc-André Raffalovich. designed and printed by John Grice at the Evergreen Press, on Magnani Pescia Editions paper, this is one of 125 numbered copies. 54 GREEN, G. F. In the Making. Peter Davies, [1952]. First edition. Signed by the author underneath his printed name on 50 GOETHE, J. W. von. Don Stefano’s Paper Mill: from the the title-page, and inscribed ‘Malvern Wells revisited – October Biographical Sketch of Philipp Hackert. Translated by Giles 1958.’ Very good copy in chipped dust jacket. £175 MacDonagh. Illustrated by Geri Waddington. [Binham]: Front Described by Peter Parker as the author’s masterpiece, the novel draws Street Editions, 2017. First edition of this translation. Frontispiece upon the author’s recollections of his schooldays at Wells House prep and six wood-engravings tipped in. Quarter black morocco, school, in Malvern Wells. spine lettered in gilt, with patterned paper boards reproducing a nineteenth century Italian design, with cloth portfolio enclosing 55 GREEN, Henry. Nothing. Hogarth Press, [1950]. First full-page prints of the engravings, in matching cloth and board edition. Inscribed by the author to J. B. Pick and his wife, in the slipcase. Fine copy. £225 month of publication, ‘For John & Gene with love from Henry, One of 25 deluxe copies, with an extra set of the engravings. 27/5/50’. Spine a trifle creased, fore-edge slightly spotted, else a very good copy in slightly spine-faded dust jacket by Lynton 51 GRAVES, Robert. Sixteen Poems. Illustrated by Romayne Lamb, slightly soiled at spine and rear panel. £750 Dawnay. Oxford: Oxford College of Technology, 1967. First Sixteen years younger than Green, most of Pick’s literary career lay edition. 4to. Pictorial cloth. Offsetting from endpapers to half-title ahead of him at the time of this inscription, though he had already co- and colophon page, browning to verso of half-title and opposite edited the short-lived literary magazine, Gangrel, where he published blank page, else a nice copy. £250 work by George Orwell, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell. When the Scarce; edition limited to 75 numbered copies. second world war began, he had left Cambridge University to volunteer with the Friend’s Ambulance Unit, serving in London during the Blitz. John Gray’s copy As Green was a volunteer for the Auxiliary Fire Service, it’s conceivable that he met Pick during that period. Later in the war, Pick volunteered 52 [GRAY, John.] The Book of Common Prayer, and admin­ to work in a coal mine. His account of the life and conditions of a miner, istration of the Sacraments, and other rites and ceremonies of the written from the perspective of a middle-class volunteer in a Midlands Church. According to the use of the United Church of England and mine, was published as Under the Crust, in 1946. Ireland: together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, founded as they are to be sung or said in churches. Oxford: University Press,

26 27 him ‘the wickedest man in the world’, was written with Hamilton’s paid ‘To Graham Greene, with apologies’ consent. 56 GREENE, Graham. The Power and the Glory. Extraits Blood Royal concerns itself with the alleged illegitimacy of Prince présentés par Robert Escarpit. [Paris]: Hachette, Collection Albert, and the effect that Queen Victoria’s haemophilia-carrying Atlantiques, [1951]. First edition of this partial translation. daughters and grand-daughters had on the various royal families Printed wrappers, stapled. Photographic portrait of Greene, into which they married. It was described by a reviewer in the Daily Telegraph as ‘a rare combination of snobbery, ill-nature and pointless six photographic illustrations, and two pen and ink drawings. reminiscences’. A more teasing jibe came in a letter from one of the Inscribed to Greene by the translator, ‘Ambrose Bierce somewhere author’s friends: ‘I am at the chapter where the third illegitimate son defined a saint “a dead sinner revised and edited” – you did the of the second Duke of Seville has had a mild car accident and, due to revising – this is the editing. God help us both, and may you bleeding, has broken off his engagement with the second illegitimate forgive me. To Graham Greene, with apologies. Bordeaux 2d July son of the third wife of the Fourth Duke of Madrid by his second 1951. Robert Escarpit’. Wrappers lightly dust-soiled, else a very mother’s uncle’s grandson.’ nice copy. £375 An English primer utilising extracts from Greene’s novel, with numer­ 59 HANBURY, Thomas. The Garden at Mortola. Photograph ous notes, and examination questions of various kinds: ‘How does Greene Album of 17 albumen prints, roughly 18 x 24 cm or vice versa, explain the lieutenant’s political attitude? Does the explanation seem mounted on 14 thick card leaves, most with a printed caption satisfactory to you? ‘Why does an animal never know despair?’ pasted at tail of mount, three with the caption supplied in manuscript. Oblong folio. Original half morocco, spine ruled, 57 HAMILTON, Gerald. Mr Norris and I: an autobiographical lettered, and decorated in gilt; upper board blocked with a gilt sketch. With a prologue by Christopher Isherwood and an vignette of a woman with a parasol, walking in a garden with epilogue by Maurice Richardson. Allan Wingate, [1956]. First date palms, and titled in gilt, ‘the garden at mortola’; edition. Inscribed by the author, ‘For Roger Senhouse, in gratitude a.e.g. Inscribed on free endpaper, ‘Henry Fryer with love from & friendship, from Gerald’ and with the recipient’s ownership Thomas & Katherine A. Hanbury, in remembrance of the visit signature, dated October 1956, and his pencilled note, ‘even this of M. A. Fryer to Mortola, 24 January to 6th February 1873’. book carries his peculiar scent’ and partial index. Very good copy Leather slightly rubbed, a little light foxing to mounts, else very in lightly spine-faded and slightly dust-soiled jacket. £125 good. £2000 Thomas Hanbury had amassed a sizeable fortune in Shanghai by the 58 HAMILTON, Gerald. Blood Royal. Times Press / Anthony time he bought La Mortola, in May 1867. The property consisted of a Gibbs & Phillips, 1964. Second impression. Inscribed by the dilapidated palazzo and a steep, rocky hillside but the setting, between author, ‘For Robin Maugham with much affection from the Menton and Ventimiglia, overlooking the mediterranean, was spec­ author, Gerald Hamilton’. Spine slightly browned, boards lightly tacular. Still only thirty-four years old, Hanbury conceived the idea of soiled, else a very good copy in slightly worn dust jacket. £75 creating a botanical garden with the help of his eldest brother, David, ‘Disreputable’ would be a euphemistic term to describe Gerald Ham­ a distinguished botanist. It became one of the greatest gardens in the ilton, the model for Isherwood’s Mr. Norris. In 1959, having returned world, described by Sir Joseph Hooker, director of Kew, as ‘a garden from a trip abroad during which Hamilton had had the run of his house, of exotic plants, which in point of richness and interest has no rival Maugham made the chance discovery that the £50 bequest that he had among the principal collections of living plants’. For Augustus Hare, it made to Hamilton in his will had been expertly altered in his absence was ‘more beautiful than anything out of the Arabian Nights’. Charles to £5000. Maugham’s later five-part exposé of Hamilton in The People, Quest-Ritson devotes a chapter of The English Garden Abroad to La advertised under the title ‘Gerald Hamilton Confesses’ and heralding Mortola, judging the garden to be ‘the finest ever made by Englishmen abroad’. ‘No visitor to La Mortola ever forgets his first sight of it’, he

28 29 writes. ‘One of the great experiences of a garden lover’s life is to pass through the gates of Villa Hanbury and discover the garden spread The author’s own copy out below, a great wooded hillside dropping first steeply, then gently 61 HANLEY, James. Ebb and Flood. John Lane, 1932. First down 259 steps to the rocky shore beneath, an enchanted landscape edition. Buckram-backed boards. Alan Odle’s dust jacket design of palms, cypresses, olives, cycads and Judas trees that stretches to the for the trade edition tipped-in, as issued. White buckram spine pines by the end of the sea.’ The Prince of Wales made his first visit slightly dust-soiled, couple of small marks to tail of rear board, else in 1878, four years earlier than Queen Victoria, who made up for her a very good copy. £375 tardiness by making an impromptu return three days after her first tour of the gardens. Hanbury was knighted in 1901 and his considerable local The author’s third novel. Edition limited to 105 signed, numbered philanthropy also earned him a number of Italian honours. When he copies; this copy numbered ‘1’ and inscribed by Hanley, ‘Author’s copy’. died, in 1907, his funeral was a notable event. ‘As his body was cremated He has also filled the entire free endpaper with a 24-line passage from at San Remo the funeral procession passed from here all along the coast the book, which he has further signed. and in every place the shops were closed and the whole population joined the procession’, wrote La Mortola’s curator. ‘It is said nearly 7,000 people ‘The performance was history made and in the making’ were present.’ 62 [HARDY, Thomas.] The Dynasts by Thomas Hardy, In La Mortola: in the footsteps of Thomas Hanbury, Alasdair Moore presented by the O.U.D.S. & produced by A. E. Drinkwater at remarks on ‘just how isolated La Mortola must have been in 1867’, Oxford, Feb 10–14 1920. Manuscript title and 29 photographs, observing that: ‘Nearly 150 years after Thomas first set foot on the various sizes from 215 x 276 mm to 255 x 353 mm, laid onto headland, it is hard to appreciate the great changes that have occurred.’ thick card, with printed captions of the scene numbers and titles The great pleasure of this album is being able to see the garden at such an early stage in its development. The captions of the photographs read pasted above or below. Gilt-ruled half morocco, cloth boards, as follow: 1) The Village of Mortola, as seen from the Corniche Road. 2) t.e.g, with the small printed label of the photographic firm, Hills ‘after alterations and additions effected 1876’. 3) The Palazzo Orengo, and Saunders, in Oxford. Inscribed on free endpaper, ‘To A. E. with Ventimiglia and Bordighera in the distance. 4) ‘the east side of Drinkwater in remembrance of his production of the dynasts the house, with the ‘pergola’ or covered walk’. 5) Gardener’s House 1919–20 from the O.U.D.S.’ Stitched between rear blanks is the and Olive Trees. 6) Ancient Arch leading to La Pergola (the Topia). main section of the original programme; loosely inserted is a 7) Woodwork for training Vines in La Pergola (the Topia). 8) View of copy of the programme from which the above captions have the Castel d’Appio, and the Bay of Latte, from the end of La Pergola been clipped, a printed advertising postcard for the play, and the (The Topia). 9) The Cypress Walk and Vineyard. 10) ‘Groups of Agaves menu, ribbon-tied within printed card wrappers, for an OUDS before the marble terrace’. 11) The Jet d’Eau before the Hall Door. dinner following the last performance. Bookplate and ownership 12) The Bed of the Torrent near the Sea Shore. 13) Mentone and the signature of Albert Drinkwater’s son, John, to front endpapers. Mountains beyond, as seen from Cape Mortola. 14) The Palazzo Orengo, Spine and corners slightly rubbed, (inexplicably) three mounts old Palm Tree, and Village Church. 15) The ruined Watch Tower and Bay of Mentone. 16) View from the Garden looking towards Ciotti and wavy, else very good. £1750 the “Berceau”. 17) Mentone, as seen from Ciotti above Mortola. The Dynasts, Hardy’s epic drama of the Napoleonic Wars, was the first play by a living author to be staged by the Oxford Union Dramatic 60 HANLEY, James. Boy. Boriswood, 1931. First edition. A Society. Six years earlier, Harley Granville-Barker had adapted it for its first production, at the Kingsway Theatre in London. Prior commitments little very light mottled fading to boards, free endpapers faintly prevented Barker from being involved with the Oxford amateur revival browned, else a nice copy. £350 but Albert Drinkwater, stage-manager for the Kingsway production, From an edition limited to 160 copies, this is one of 145 numbered and took on the role in his place. signed by the author. Granting permission for the re-staging of Barker’s adaptation,

30 31 Hardy had asked if indoor and outdoor scenes could be more clearly differentiated than in the original production. In his ensuing correspondence with the President of OUDS, he wrote: ‘Your plan for showing the out-of-doors scenes is very ingenious and attractive and more elaborate than I imagined . . . It will be of the greatest interest to me… to see how the questions that arise in doing the thing have been grappled with by younger brains than mine.’ The photographs in the album above provide an engrossing visual record of the result. They begin with a signed photograph of the Strophe, Antistrophe, and reader, and end with three photographs of the cast: the first captioned ‘Dress Rehearsal (Closing Scene) 11.59 PM. Feb: 9th’; the second showing them gathered outside the theatre; the third, captioned ‘Feb: 14th 1920 (12 P.M.)’ with everyone seated for dinner in a panelled hall. The chief interest, however, lies in the remaining twenty-five photographs, which show indoor and outdoor scenes, including a battlefield, the deck of the Bucentaure‘ ’, and the cockpit of the ‘Victory’, where Nelson was brought after being shot during the Battle of Trafalgar. Each actor and actress is identified beneath every photograph, either through the 131 signatures of those involved or the further 55 pencilled identifications where unsigned. In a full-page lead article for the Times Literary Supplement, Alan Clutton-Brock noted that the scenery ‘was right in principle, just enough to show what kind of place was intended and no more’ and praised in particular the crowd scenes: ‘We have never seen anything so well done by professionals, though the same scene was good enough in London’. For Clutton-Brock, much of the production’s power lay in its timing and in the lived experience of the actors and much of the audience. ‘It would have seemed incredible six years ago that The Dynasts should be, so soon, played after a war greater than the war it commemorates and by and to undergraduates, many of whom had fought in that war. Yet its interest and success were not adventitious. To those who have lived through these years of history, it was history repeating itself. Again and again there were strokes applauded for their likeness to reality, things said on the battlefield, in the crowd, which were recognized to be true, and by those who knew their truth only too well.’ Summing up, in his closing paragraph, he writes: ‘at Oxford The Dynasts was received as it was meant, not as flattery to England past or present, not as a song of victory or a requiem, but as a statement of the truth about England at War. The audience, boys who had fought themselves, saw the truth and welcomed it with laughter or silence or cheers, as was meet. The performance was history made and in the making.’

32 Item 59 Item 62 63 HART, George Vaughan. As Fresh as an Ostrich, as Hungry as Paint: five letters from George Vaughan Hart, Regius Professor of Feudal and English Law at Trinity College, Dublin, to his daughter Ethel in Brussels. [Binham: Front Street Editions, ?2014.] First edition. Green cloth boards, inset printed paper label to upper board. Tipped-in frontispiece portrait of Hart by Jack B. Yeats, and a tipped-in photographic portrait of his daughter. Fine copy in cloth slipcase, with matching inset printed label. £35 Printed at the Evergreen Press on BFK Rives paper in Caslon type in an edition of 100 numbered copies and bound by the Fine Book Bindery. ‘Family letters, particularly Anglo-Irish letters, make compulsive reading, even if from long ago and people you know nothing about... The whole has been elegantly printed by letterpress...’ – Nicolas Barker, reviewing the book in The Book Collector.

64 [HEPWORTH, Barbara.] BOWNESS, Alan. The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, 1960–69. Edited by Alan Bowness. Lund Humphries, [1971]. First edition. 4to. Pictorial cloth, blocked and lettered in gilt. Profusely illustrated. Some light foxing to spine, and head and tail of upper board, else a nice copy in dust jacket and original slipcase, the latter slightly rubbed at spine. £1750 One of 150 numbered copies with a signed screenprint by Hepworth, ‘Winter Solstice’, of which 75 were published by Lund Humphries, in London, and another 75 by Praeger, in New York.

65 HILL, Geoffrey. The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Agenda / Deutsch, [1983]. First edition; trade issue. Printed wrappers. Inscribed by the author to a colleague at Leeds University, ‘Jack Hallas with best regards, 8.vi.83’. Spine bumped at tail, else a nice copy in original glassene jacket, torn at rear panel. £175 Hill’s Canaan, published in 1996, was dedicated: ‘In memory of Jack Hallas’.

66 HILL, Geoffrey. The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Item 64 Péguy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. First American edition; wrappers issue. Inscribed by the author to a colleague at Leeds University, and his wife, ‘Jack & Edna [Hallas], kind regards, Geoffrey, 23.ix.85’. Nice copy in dust jacket. £125 37 67 [HOLLINGHURST, Alan.] RACINE, Jean. Bajazet. Trans­ 71 [JAMES, Edward.] Certain poems that trace the record lated by Alan Hollinghurst. Introduction by Francis Wyndham. of a journey twenty years ago from Vienna to Greece, and back Chatto & Windus, [1991]. First edition. Printed wrappers. Very through Albania. By Edward Silence. [No place: for the author], good copy. Scarce. £75 1957. First edition. Folio. Dusty rose pink printed wrappers. Inscribed by the author, ‘For Mr and Mrs C. Frank Fox, from The author’s own copy the author, with best wishes for Christmas 1957, Edward James 68 HUGHES, Richard. Burial & The Dark Child. Privately Silence’. Wrappers slightly dust-marked, slightly marked at head printed, 1930. First edition. Decorated paper wrappers; printed of upper wrapper, with a couple of small chips and short tears at paper label. The author’s own copy, with his armorial bookplate. very head, else a very good copy. £450 A little very light foxing to title-page and final leaf, else a very Scarce; Oxford, UCLA, Yale, Emory, and Northwestern in WorldCat. good copy. £350 By the author, needless to say, of A High Wind in Jamaica. Edition 72 [JOHN, Augustus.] DODGSON, Campbell. A Catalogue limited to sixty copies, printed at the Curwen Press, numbered and of Etchings by Augustus John, 1901–1914. Charles Chenil, signed by the author. 1920. First edition. 4to. Gilt-lettered cream buckram. Etched frontispiece, and plates. Christopher Lennox-Boyd’s copy, with 69 [HULME, T.E.] The Philosophy of Henri Bergson. During his occasional light pencilled notes. Cloth slightly soiled, free the last two weeks of November and the first two of December endpapers slightly browned, else a very good copy. £950 a Course of Lectures on the Philosophy of Bergson will be given Special edition limited to 105 numbered copies, bound as above, and by Mr. T. E. Hulme at 6, Scarsdale Villas, Kensington. [1911.] with an etched self-portrait by John, signed and dated, as a frontis-­ Four page prospectus, with an introductory paragraph on Hulme piece. followed by ‘The scheme of the lectures’ and ‘Synopsis of the four lectures’. Slightly creased and foxed. £450 To John Todhunter The lectures, which were attended by Pound, were published in 73 JOHNSON, Lionel. Poems. Elkin Mathews, 1895. First Speculations but this prospectus, almost certainly written by Hulme, trade edition. Boards. Inscribed by the author, ‘To Dr [John] appears to be unrecorded and unknown. Not in WorldCat or Library Todhunter with kind regards from Lionel Johnson, 1895’, and Hub Discover. with ms. corrections by the author to pp. 6, 40, 41, 93, 95 and 103, in the latter case inserting the line, ‘To gather in the fruit 70 [HUXLEY, Aldous.] 1935 Exhibition : Artists Against of summer days’, after the 8th line of the first stanza of ‘Harvest’. Fascism & War : 28 Soho Square, London W.C.1. [With a foreword Boards slightly darkened and lightly dust-soiled, with small chip by Aldous Huxley.] Artists International Association, November to head of spine, some browning to endpapers, else a very good 13th to 27th, 1935. Self-wrappers, stapled. 8pp. With loosely copy. £1750 inserted broadside, ‘We believe that no Intellectual Worker wants An attractive association between fellow members of the Rhymers’ war!’, and errata slip. Upper wrapper foxed at head, else a very Club, and mutual friends of W.B. Yeats, upon whom both were a good copy. £125 significant influence. The author’s first collection of poetry, containing ‘The exhibition was called together by the Artists International all the poems for which he is now generally remembered. 750 copies Association & Eric Gill, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Laura Knight, were printed at the Chiswick Press, after the large paper edition limited Henry Moore and Paul Nash’. Rare; V&A and Emory University in to 25 signed, numbered copies. Though sometimes described as the WorldCat; Library Hub Discover adds a copy at the Tate Gallery. second issue or impression, the type for the regular edition was partly reset and the typography altered.

38 39 Allen Jones to Elisabeth Frink 74 [JONES, Allen.] Allen Jones: sheer magic. Text by Marco Livingston. Thames & Hudson, 1979. First edition. 4to. Pictorial wrappers. Inscribed by Allen Jones to Elisabeth Frink, ‘For Liz Frink / Allen Jones’. Very good copy. £175

75 [KEYES, Sidney.] Eight Oxford Poets. Edited by Michael Meyer and Sidney Keyes. Routledge, [1941]. First edition. Printed wrappers. Inscribed by Meyer, ‘Eric Gillett, in return for an afternoon at the New Theatre, Oxford – March, 1941 from Michael Meyer’, followed by Sidney Keyes’ autograph signature, and then Meyer’s further inscription ‘December 1941’. Spine creased, else a very nice copy. £375 ‘Sidney Keyes conceived the idea of compiling an anthology to be entitled Eight Oxford Poets. My name appeared on the title-page as co-editor, but the choice was entirely his’, recalled Michael Meyer, in his autobiography. ‘Those omitted included Larkin, John Mortimer and Francis King; Larkin never forgave Sidney for this.’ Aside from the editors, contributors include Keith Douglas, John Heath-Stubbs, and Drummond Allison. Meyer later edited Keyes’ Collected Poems. Of the three most notable English poets to be killed in in the second world war, Keyes was the youngest and the first to die. He joined the Army in April 1942 and was killed a year later, one month before his 21st birthday. As might be expected, Keyes’ signature is scarce. The recipient was a writer, critic, and reviewer.

The author’s own copy 76 KING, Francis. The Dark Glasses. Longmans, Green, [1954.] First edition. The author’s own copy, with his ownership signature, ‘F. King. May 31st 1954’. Spine slightly cocked, else a very good copy in dust-soiled jacket, a trifle chipped at head and tail of spine. £175 The author’s favourite amongst his own books.

77 KIRKUP, James. Zen Gardens: poems by James Kirkup; Item 72 with original prints by Birgit Skiöld. Guildford: Circle Press, [1973]. First edition. 4to. With seven coloured photo-etchings by Skiöld, with blind-embossed patterned borders. Loose folded

41 sheets in cloth solander box, blind-stamped on upper board. Upper 82 [LARKIN, Philip.] POTTER, Stephen. Some Notes on board of box just very lightly marked, else a fine copy. £200 Lifemanship, with a summary of recent researches in Games­ Edition limited to 100 numbered copies, signed by the author and artist; manship. Illustrated by Lt.-Col. Frank Wilson. Hart-Davis, 1950. this copy an Artist’s Proof, unnumbered but marked ‘A/P’. First edition. Philip Larkin’s copy, with his ownership signature, dated ‘Ludlow /12/50.’ A Ludlow bookseller’s small printed label 78 KITCHIN, C. H. B. Streamers Waving. Hogarth Press, to corner of front pastedown; top edge spotted, else a very good 1925. Spine faintly faded, top edge slightly dusty, thin strip of copy in slightly worn and spine-faded dust jacket, a little chipped faint offsetting to free endpapers, else fine in dust jacket, lightly at very head of spine, and with a few short tears and a couple of rubbed at spine. £750 very small chips to extremities. £500 The author’s first novel. 1000 copies were printed. This cataloguer can’t improve on Seamus Perry’s advocatory summary of this book, for the TLS, earlier this year: ‘Potter is hilarious and 79 KOCH, Kenneth. IO. Linocuts [by] Dale Deverux Barker. brilliantly cynical about the polite belligerence of the English middle [No place: for the artist, 1955.] First separate edition. Small folio. class, offering numerous ploys to put you “one up”, such as Lowbrow­ ­ manship (strategic philistinism), the “Canterbury Block” (whatever­ With nine linocuts. Pebbled blue cloth boards, lettered in red on is being discussed, you observe with – utterly spurious – authority, spine and upper board. An extremely nice copy. £250 “Yes, but not in the south”), of quoting unanswerable tags in a fatally The first separate edition of a poem published in Koch’s 1994 collection, “plonking” voice (“Where equal mind and contest equal go”). It is a One Train. The silk-screened text is accompanied by Barker’s hand- deeply literary book, devastatingly funny about reviewing and the printed reduction linocuts. Edition limited to only 22 copies. NYPL and devices of criticism, for which he drew on Betjeman’s conversation.’ University of Colorado in WorldCat. In December 1950, Larkin was in Ludlow with his girlfriend, Monica Jones, before suffering Christmas with his family. ‘For some reason I 80 [LARKIN, Philip.] AUDEN, W.H. & GARRETT, John. have got Ludlow on my brain’, he had written to her the previous month. The Poet’s Tongue: an anthology. G. Bell & Sons, [1935]. ‘Could we try for there?’ Seventh impression. Philip Larkin’s copy, with his bold owner­ ship inscription to free endpaper, thirty-nine pencilled line 83 LEFROY, Edward Cracroft. Undergraduate Oxford: articles ticks to the index of first lines and authors, and a pencilled note re-printed from The Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates’ on the first page of that index, ‘- = in OxBoLV = 39’. Very nice Journal, 1876–7.’ Oxford: Slatter & Rose, 1878. First edition. Stiff copy. £450 cloth wrappers. Spine lightly worn, crease to lower corner of rear Larkin’s inscription presumably refers to Auden’s Oxford Book of Light wrapper, but a nice copy. £450 Verse, published in 1938. In 1877, while still an undergraduate but already a keen exponent of ‘muscular christianity’, Lefroy had inveighed against two of the 81 [LARKIN, Philip.] MAUROIS, André. Voltaire. Thomas candidates for the Oxford professorship of poetry, Walter Pater and J.A. Nelson, ‘Short Biographies’, [1938]. First edition thus. 16mo. Symonds, finding in their Hellenism an encouragement to ‘the worst Philip Larkin’s copy, with his ownership signature, ‘P. Larkin. passions and most carnal inclinations of humanity’. Though his Echoes 1938.’ Strip of light browning to free endpapers, fore-edge spotted, from Theocritus was published in 1885, it wasn’t until after his death in 1891 that Symonds encountered Lefroy’s distinctly ‘Uranian’ poetry else a very good copy in lightly chipped dust jacket, torn at spotted and recognized Lefroy’s ‘sympathy with youthful strength and beauty, rear panel. £350 his keen interest in boyish games and the athletic sports of young men’. Larkin would have been 15 or 16 at the time. Perhaps of particular interest in the present volume is an essay on aestheticism. BL, Oxford, Cambridge, NLS, Trinity College Dublin in Library Hub Discover.

42 43 84 LEHMANN, Rosamond. Autograph letter signed (as 86 LORCA, Federico Garcìa. Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Rosamond Runciman) on blue paper, to an unnamed publisher, Mejías. Translated by Neil Crawford; with five woodcuts by Anick Cottage, Hexham, Northumberland, 4th Sept 1926. Sandy Sykes. W S A P editions, [1987]. First edition of this ‘I enclose the MS of a novel, which I wish to submit for your translation. Large 4to. Illustrated. Loose folded sheets within red approval. Would you read it and let me have your opinion of it as paper wrappers. Short tear at tail edge of spine, else a fine copy in soon as possible’. Folded and slightly creased. £250 slipcase. £250 Written while she was still married to Leslie Runciman, this letter Printed at the Wimbledon School of Art in an edition of forty numbered presumably accompanied a draft of her first novel, Dusty Answer, a copies, signed by the translator and artist. revised version of which was published by Chatto & Windus in April 1927. 87 LOWELL, Robert. Typed postcard signed, to Peter Russell, 1 May 1964, 15 West 67 Street, New York. ‘It wasn’t my note, but On the deaths of Virginia Woolf and Walter Sickert I first read and admired Mandelshtam through a translation of 85 LESSORE, Thérèse. Four a.l.s. to Vanessa Bell, 5pp., yours. Mine came out in the Atlantic Monthly a year ago. I wish St George’s Hill House, Bathampton, & 10 Lansdowne Road, I had copies handy to mail you. We have many ties, good ones, London, W.11, April 6th 1941 to April 11th 1944. £1250 Pound, Santayana, the Carters. I lok [sic] forward to your future As a note in sympathy for Virginia Woolf’s recent death, the first letter work, and hope we will meet. ... P.S. In my translations, I was is a model of tactful concision: ‘Dear Vanessa, Walter & I send you our trying to give of [sic] portrait of M by using various fragments and love. Affectionately, Thérèse.’ ending up with the Unknown Soldier, his witty harrowed life, the On 22 January, the following year, Sickert died. In the second of these most we know in poetry about living in such a state’. £250 letters, dated February 1st, Lessore responds to a letter of condolence Poet, critic, editor and publisher, Peter Russell was Mandelstam’s first from Bell: ‘Yes, I always knew that Walter meant a great deal to you. English translator. He had a very special place for you. Your bust by [Marcel] Gimon[d] is still on the mantelpiece of his last studio. I was so very touched by your letter – first that Walter should have asked your help for me & that 88 LYE, Len. No Trouble. Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press, 1930. you should remember this after so many years and wish to act. Walter First edition. 4to. Buckram-backed gold foil boards, with a design was asking for your friendship which I have always delighted in. I feel in red and brown by the author. Bookplate of Jonathan & Phillida my inheritance is a very rich one, in the affection of his friends. These Gili, by Reynolds Stone; some inevitable tarnishing to the foil last years have been very happy ones for him. When the war started he boards but an exceptionally nice copy. £575 left off reading the newspapers and so was saved much sorrow. He tried Edition limited to 200 signed, numbered copies ‘hand-set and hand- to sing a song the week before he died. He did not suffer much & the printed by ourselves’. end was a very peaceful fading out.’ Death casts a further shadow in a letter from January 1944. ‘I came upon this diary;’ writes Lessore in her The dedication copy opening line, ‘it has a drawing in it of your son, perhaps you may like to have it.’ Bell’s son, Julian, had been killed in Spain, in July 1937. The 89 MACHEN, Arthur. Holy Terrors: short stories. Har­ final letter comments on Bell’s aborted plan for an exhibition in Lewes, mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946. First edition. Printed expresses the hope that they might meet in London, and responds to the wrappers. The dedication copy, inscribed by the author under­ news that Bell’s daughter, Angelica, has had a daughter, before ending neath the printed dedication [‘To C.A. Lejeune’] ‘and again from with a reference to the renewed Blitz: ‘The noise is ghastly when they Arthur Machen to C. A. Lejeune, March 13. 1946’. Wrappers raid.’ Lessore died towards the close of the following year. soiled, foxing to half-title, else a good copy. £250

44 45 atque vale, Ragusa, Juan R’. Subsequent bookplate of Peter Apap ‘To Cyril Connolly, without whom’ Bologna to verso of free endpaper. Spine very lightly faded, upper 90 MACLAREN-ROSS, Julian. The Stuff to Give the Troops: board a trifle marked at tail, edges slightly browned, else a very twenty-five tales of army life. Cape, [1944]. First edition. Inscribed good copy in lightly dust-marked jacket. £750 by the author, ‘To Cyril Connolly, without whom I might never Gawsworth signed the book as the King of Redonda, in which role he have been published, and for whose encouragement at a most had given Maclaren-Ross the title of Grand Duke of Ragusa. difficult time I shall always be grateful, with best wishes from J. Maclaren-Ross, 17.7.44’. Spine slightly darkened, else a very good 92 MACLAREN-ROSS, Julian. Autograph letter signed to copy in dust jacket, slightly soiled at rear panel. £1750 Philip Lindsay, 29 Norfolk Square, W.1., 9th July 1951. ‘Thank The author’s first book. ‘Cyril Connolly’s book Enemies of Promise you so much for sending the the books; I’ve only just got back remains a landmark to members of my generation’, wrote Maclaren- from casing some locations in the country (not for Wild, another Ross in his autobiography, Memoirs of the Forties. ‘I was still on the story) and I found them waiting for me. ... Enclosed are your notes Assistance and very dispirited; the outbreak of war seemed to put the on Weidmann: did you see Tennyson Jesse’s account of him in lid firmly on any chance of a literary career, and finding a book like this “Comments on Cain” (Heinemann, 1948)? I’m sorry you’re broke was a tremendously invigorating experience. Here, I felt, was someone – who isn’t? Wish I could help but until we set up the production who might see merit in my work, if merit was indeed there to be seen, which I was seriously beginning to doubt: I’d even ceased to send my of “Wild”, there’s almost no money about. The London pubs stories out, and there still weren’t enough of them to make up a volume. are deserted – or else full of people drinking bitter: spirits are a If only Cyril Connolly were an editor, I thought, and a few days later the thing of the past. Wish we’d met when you were up here; ring first advertisement for Horizon: a Review of Literature and Art, edited me at above address when next you come, and we’ll take a glass by Cyril Connolly, appeared like an answer to prayer in the sixpenny together.’ Creased and slightly marked, else good. £375 weeklies. “One last chance, if this doesn’t come off I’ll pack it in”.’ Philip Lindsay had earlier worked as a scriptwriter at the Strand Film The first story that Connolly accepted was ‘A Bit of a Smash in Company, alongside Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas (see item 128). Madras’, though the location had to be altered for legal reasons, and ‘Wild’ must have been abandoned as a project; there’s no reference to the jaunty opening line, ‘Absolute fact, I knew fuck-all about it’, was it in the biography by Paul Willetts. Eugen Weidmann was a serial refused by two sets of printers, whose sense of propriety also required murderer who in 1939 became the last person to be publicly guillotined substitutions to be found for ‘Pissed-up’, ‘By Christ’, ‘Balls’, and ‘Bugger’. in France, and about whom Maclaren-Ross had planned to write a novel. The story’s eventual publication in Horizon, in June 1941, brought Maclaren-Ross immediate attention, most notably from Rupert Hart- 93 [MARINI, Marino.] The Sculpture of Marino Marini. Davis, at Jonathan Cape, who, after the next tale appeared in August, Photographs by Helmut Lederer. Text by Eduard Trier. Thames offered to publish what would become the above collection of army & Hudson, [1961. First English edition. 4to. Pictorial cloth, stories. lettered and blocked in white. Illustrated. Very nice copy in dust jacket. £500 91 MACLAREN-ROSS, Julian. Of Love and Hunger. Allan One of 40 numbered copies with a signed lithograph by Marini. Wingate, [1947]. First edition. Pasted to the front free endpaper is a two-column manuscript list entitled ‘Books by J. Maclaren- Ross’, in the author’s hand. From the library of John Gawsworth, with his bookplate, and ms. note identifying six titles that ‘never appeared, alas, owing to the author’s premature death; but 4 other volumes not listed above were published in his lifetime and at least two translations I recall from Simenon and Queneau. Ave

46 47 Henig to Mirrlees, with the latter’s ms. answers. 15) 17pp of notes A significant literary archive, with a recording of Paris recording Henig’s encounters with Mirrlees, and their sometimes 94 MIRRLEES, Hope. An archive comprising: 1) Fifty-two candid dialogue. 16) 7pp carbon typescript of Henig’s preface unpublished autograph letters signed from Mirrlees to Suzanne for her proposed biography of Mirrlees; 17) 16pp photocopied Henig, The Firs, Headington Hill, Oxford, May 13th 1972 to Dec type­script of her essay, ‘Queen of Lud: Hope Mirrlees’, with 27th 1974, 4to or 8vo with the exception of seven aerogrammes, ms. corrections and revisions in ink. 18) Draft and carbon copy all bar the latter with their original envelopes, 122pp in total, letters to various recipients, including Rebecca West, and related plus 2 postcards. 2) Unpublished autobiographical manuscript incoming correspondence. £15,000 entitled ‘Childhood’, 19pp, A4. 3) Manuscript résumé of the Suzanne Henig, a professor of English at San Diego University, wrote author’s novel, Madeleine, 2pp., folio. 4) Manuscript of a 14 to Mirrlees in the summer of 1972, as part of her research into Virginia line revision to the original text of Paris. 5) Typescripts of four Woolf and the Hogarth Press. They arranged to meet that August. poems, ‘The Glass Tánagra’, ‘A Skull’, ‘A Doggerel Epitaph for Quickly realising that she had stumbled upon a remarkable figure my Little Bitch, Sally’, and ‘The Legend of the Painted Room’, whose work had vanished from sight, Henig set about Mirrlees’ literary the latter (cropped at head) inscribed in upper margin, ‘To Sue, a resurrection, and a biography. Mirrlees’ letters are full of interest but supplement to ‘Moods & Tensions’ with love from Hope’, with a the correspondence also charts a friendship, verging on infatuation, that correction in her hand, and three in Henig’s, 4pp. 6) Three page is fatally soured by a remark made by Virginia Woolf, in a letter, half a century earlier. ms. transcription of published accounts of herself by Jane Ellen Written in the spring of 1919 and published in May 1920, Mirrlees’ Harrison and Elsie Butler. 7) Autograph testimonial on Henig’s poem, Paris, was the fifth book to be hand-printed and published by behalf, for a Guggenheim grant. 8) Photocopies of thirteen a.l.s. the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press. Writing to a friend before publication, to her sister, Margot, addressed to her under her nickname or a Woolf described it as ‘a very obscure, indecent and brilliant poem’ but it variety of whimsical alternatives such as ‘My Hideous & Filthy attracted limited attention and wasn’t republished until Henig printed Sister’ or ‘My Squish-webbed Wench’, from three addresses in a slightly bowdlerised version in the Virginia Woolf Quarterly in late Cambridge, two in Paris, 11 Mecklenburgh Street in London, and 1973. More recently, it has earned the reputation of ‘modernism’s lost Hardelot Plage, south of Boulogne [? Feb 1917] to Aug 21 1929, 4to masterpiece’. ‘Only the smallness of the edition’, wrote Julia Briggs, & 8vo., with an accompanying photocopy of a 6pp ms. identifying ‘can explain the subsequent neglect of this extraordinarily daring and nicknames and explaining jokes, 55pp in total. 9) Photocopy of brilliant poem’. ms. genealogies, ‘Moncrieff Descents’ and ‘Royal Descents’, Mirrlees’ first novel, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, was 3pp. 10) T.l.s. to Mirrlees from her literary agent, regarding published in 1919, and was followed by The Counterplot, the next year. Her fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist, published in 1926, is regarded publishing matters, and a photocopy of a t.l.s. from Valerie Eliot. as a classic of the genre. A Fly in Amber, the first volume of Mirrlees’ 11) a ninety minute tape cassette, and cd t ransfer, biography of the antiquary, Sir Robert Cotton, appeared in 1962, after of mirrlees reading ‘paris’ and other poems’. 12) Ten friendly pestering by T.S. Eliot, to whom she had read it chapter by small photographs and eight Kodachrome transparencies of Hope chapter. The second volume, The Lost Pearl, remains unpublished. Two Mirrlees, the largest inscribed ‘Property of Valerie Eliot’ in the slim poetry collections were privately printed for the author in the early latter’s hand, another showing Mirrlees and Henig together, the 60s and a subsequent collection, Moods and Tensions, was published in remainder with Mirrlees either on her own or with one or two a small edition in 1976. Though Mirrlees worked for many years on a of her domestic staff. 13) Fifteen letters from Henig to Mirrlees biography of her friend, the classical scholar Jane Harrison, it was never (1 typed letter signed, 13 carbon typescript letters, one with an completed. additional ms. draft, and one six-page corrected ms. draft letter), While reading Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1910 Aug 6th 1972 to July 12th 1973, 4to. 14) 2pp list of questions from to 1913, Mirrlees had come under Harrison’s tutelage. Though almost forty years apart in age, they developed a friendship that would continue

48 49 after Mirrlees left Newnham. In 1918 they spent a year together in Paris, & Adrian Stephen came to our hotel and we saw a lot of them. Karin studying languages, and in 1922 they began living together, first in Paris and Adrian, though they later married, quarrelled like cat and dog. and then in Bloomsbury, until Harrison’s death from leukemia in 1928. Karin & I used to go a great deal to Gertrude Stein’s “evening at home”. The nature of their intimate friendship has been the subject of endless There was hardly ever anyone there (she was not yet famous) but an speculation, though Virginia Woolf was in little doubt. Commenting obscure American art-student or two. The huge studio that they used as on Madeleine in a letter to Clive Bell, Woolf remarked that Mirrlees’ a sitting room was closely packed in with paintings by Matisse & Picasso: first novel was ‘all Sapphism as far as I’ve got – Jane and herself’, and to I remember one afternoon when we looked in we found Matisse there. Mary MacCarthy, about an impending visit to Paris, she wrote: ‘There I He was delightful to meet – so friendly & unpretentious. I remember his shall stay a few days & meet Jane Harrison & Hope Mirrlees who have a standing for about half an hour gazing at a painting of Picasso’s without Sapphic flat somewhere’. Shortly after Harrison’s death, Woolf recorded saying a word. It was a poignant experience – rather like watching a chance churchyard meeting with Mirrlees ‘who cried that Jane was “stout Cortez” “staring at the Pacific”.’ The following year, during a just dead and would we come to the funeral: never have I seen anyone so visit to Paris, Harrison ‘came to my hotel (Karin was no longer there) mad, wild, frantic: and we kissed among the tombs’. & we went about together for a fortnight & our previous relationship of Before getting to the main correspondence, I should outline three pupil & teacher turned into friendship.’ other parts of the archive. Vivaciously entertaining and revealing There’s an account of a lunch at Lady Strachey’s summer rental though they are, little needs to be said here about Mirrlees’ letters to her in Cambridge, with André Gide and Marc Allégret as guests. ‘After sister. Characteristic of their tone is her report that: ‘Bertie Russell & his luncheon Lady Strachey insisted on reading aloud Lear’s nonsense wife are starting a school & Logan Pearsall Smith’s joke about it is that poems to Gide, who struggled manfully to understand them, as an the three chief subjects in the curriculum are to be: Atheism, Adultery, earnest Victorian lady might have done with Browning.’ André & Communal Singing!’ Another letter discusses her reaction to the death Maurois makes more than one appearance in the text, along with his of their father, and, three months before Harrison’s death, she writes first wife: ‘She loved him but she was a nympho-maniac’. Mirrlees also that: ‘We have been lent a gramophone & Leonard Woolf is very kind in writes vividly about her conversion to Roman Catholicism, following coming & changing the records & bringing fresh ones. Jane adores it & so Harrison’s death. ‘From my earliest years I had had an ambivalent do I. … It is too divine to be able to to have, say, the Ninth Symphony as attitude to the Church – it both fascinated & repelled me. This is seen many times a day as one likes.’ in The Counterplot. When I was in Munich with Fredegond we hunted Of considerably greater importance is Mirrlees’ eighteen page high & low for a tea-shop, for in true British fashion we were “dying for autobiographical sketch. So much of it is quotable that I’m going to a cup of tea.” Finally found one & joyfully went in. But it was full of little skip its ‘most important event, for its later results’, along with her ‘first girls in their First Communion veils, so I rushed out and was sick on the traumatic experience’, aged five, which led her ‘to realise with intense pavement, & wouldn’t go back.’ nostalgia that everything was passing & would never come back’. She mentions her close friendships with Ottoline Morrell and Arthur After prep school days amongst ‘deceitful little girls’ who ‘led a life of Waley but more interesting are her recollections of Woolf and Eliot. outlaws or pirates doing all that we could to outwit the mistresses’, and ‘Pernel Strachey had given me an introduction to Virginia shortly the influence of a family friend, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, sending her to after I left Newnham. She was in bed after an attack of the flu which RADA to become an actress, she arrived at Newnham, where her two had pulled her down. I was struck by the starkness & unfeminineness great friends were Karin Costelloe (shortly to marry Virginia Woolf’s of the bed-room – no flounces or flowers or ivory brushes. She was brother, Adrian) & Fredegond Maitland (who would marry Gerald very charming & sweet to me, & I found her touching. She seemed so Shove). In 1913, Mirrlees and Costelloe spent a year together in Paris, wistfully curious about my life. She reminded me of Hans Anderson’s where Mirrlees worked on her first novel at the Bibliotheque Nationale. little match-seller peeping in from the street at a gorgeous children’s Amongst those they came to know there was Edith Wharton, whom they party. Not that there was anything glamorous about my life – but she nicknamed ‘Old Warts’, and whose ‘only remark worth remembering’ always supposed that other people’s lives were glamorous. Two little is recorded by Mirrlees, along with Walter Berry’s disappointing boys (Julian & Quentin Bell) came rushing in & I could see that she description of Proust. That same year, Mirrlees recalls, ‘Duncan Grant was the perfect aunt – indulgent, affectionate, but not possessive. They

50 51 talked about Leonard as “the Yellow Wolf”. … I am certain that in gossip. I love gossip’, writes Mirrlees in her second letter to Henig, in those early days Virginia loved Leonard deeply. I remember once when early August 1972. ‘I am delighted that you like Lud. By the way, it was she had been having tea with Jane & me she talked of him with deep & first published in 1926 – long before Orlando or Tolkien. … I would love unfeigned emotion. “When I think of what is waiting for me when I you to write an article about me. … I perfectly understand that you were get home…” she said, almost in tears. … I also got to know T.S. Eliot not questioning me out of mere curiosity but that to understand me you & his tragic first wife, with her ashy-white, tormented, angry, drug- needed to know my emotional background. At the time it did stir up old addict’s face. She had a streak of poetical sensibility. She was a mixture grief but I soon got back my balance. … You have done so much good to of Ophelia & a spirit in hell. I shall never forget the little party they gave my crushed ego!’ Henig’s draft notes about lunch, tea, and dinner with on the night before Tom sailed for America to give a course of lectures at Mirrlees, on the 16th, mention Eliot, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Alice Harvard, having at last decided on a separation. She cried wildly “Now B. Toklas, of which perhaps the most interesting is that ‘Eliot thought I will give you a toast – TOM!” I can still see Tom sitting there with B[etween] the Act[s] V’s only good novel.’ an enigmatic smile looking like a cross between a tomcat & the Monna A telegram from Mirrlees, sent on the 18th, reads: ‘do come Lisa. For us, the guests, it was all tragic irony, i.e. like a Greek tragedy nights of tuesday and wednesday 22nd and 23rd august when the spectators know what’s going to happen, but the characters stop write life if you like’. Later that month, she writes about in the play do not.’ When the second world war began, Mirrlees moved why she left Cambridge without a degree: ‘really, Sue, Jane knew best! in to her mother’s house in Surrey where, in 1940, Eliot joined them, … I had been doing it only for a year & not intensively, when I first staying from the Thursday to the Monday of each week, as an escape went to Cambridge. … Even a whole laundry of wet-towels round my from the Blitz. ‘My mother & he became very attached to each other. head & an ocean of midnight oil (& I simply did not have the strength I once said to him that she was my ideal of refinement, & he said “Yes or stamina or nerves for such work) could not have got me I.i. … I see she is as refined as it is possible to be without becoming morbid.” … you don’t understand my relationship with Jane. She was an angel of He was a delightful member of the household entering into all the little tenderness & understanding to me.’ In the same letter, she comments: domestic dramas & family jokes. Once I went up to London for the night ‘I possess & have read Dillon [sic] Thomas. I fear I am impervious to & dined with the Bussy’s… Arthur Waley was there… Arthur said what poetical influence. Yeats is the only person I am conscious of having been a beautiful reader-aloud Tom was & asked if he ever read aloud to me. influenced slightly by.’ In another letter, three days later, she adds, ‘I am “Every evening,” I said. They asked what he read. I answered, “Well, at thrilled about the article. … A propos of hearts, I told you my love was the moment he is reading me The Swiss Family Robinson.” There was over. But a letter has brought it back & I realise that it is ineradicable. a shocked puzzled pause, & then a roar of laughter. As a matter of fact But it doesn’t make me miserable any longer. I have learned philosophy. he read me all the Sherlock Holmes books, Pickwick, Tom Sawyer etc. You ask me why I feel I am a failure. My answer is as clear as a pikestaff: etc. While he was staying with us he wrote Dry Salvages & East Coker. I have reached the age of 85 & am quite unknown as a writer.’ He read them aloud to an audience consisting of my mother who loved Mirrlees sent another telegram (evidently not preserved) inviting poetry but not modern poetry, my aunt Constance who hated poetry, me Henig to spend the last night of her English trip in Oxford. Writing on & three barking dogs.’ board the Queen Elizabeth II, on her way back to America, Henig gives There are three separate recordings of Mirrlees on the cassette and cd. an account of the occasion in a letter to ‘Bea and John’, a copy of which In the first, lasting slightly over half an hour, she reads the first 180 or is in the archive: ‘T.S. Eliot’s wife was to be there and Mirrlees had the so lines of Paris, pausing at four points to explain a passage in the text to written permission I needed to publish the letters, so I got there in time Henig, whose voice we also hear. Amidst snippets of trivial conversation, for high tea. … Valerie Eliot, peculiarly enough, wasn’t to arrive until this is followed by six later poems. The two recordings that follow, each the next day and I really didn’t think I had misunderstood. Anyway, roughly twenty minutes long, are both full readings of Paris, the first she was so sweet and gracious and kept pressing gifts upon me which I with a minor variation from the text, the second with several, but in declined to take. It was a little embarrassing because she was so terribly both cases perhaps inadvertent. ‘That’s a little bit better’, she says, as the kind. She took me to dinner at the Hotel Randolph, a terribly posh steak final recording ends. restaurant, where we had a superb meal later and when I decided to Finally, to the correspondence itself. ‘I did so enjoy your visit and our leave later in the evening instead of staying over (it turned out later this

52 53 was very wise for several reasons), she cried. It was then I decided I had adamant re the lines about First Communion.’ She sends a résumé of better ask her once and for all if she was in love with me. She was rather Madeleine, remarking that the story ‘might have a certain poignancy taken aback, shocked not so much by the question I think as by my were it not for these ridiculous imitations of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. audacity in asking it. Her reply was strange, “I love you, of course I love …as a novel it is a complete failure.’ She also writes about her second you but I’m not IN LOVE with you,” she began to assure me, going into novel, The Counterplot. ‘The meaning of the title is that there are two a long explanation how she thought of me rather as a granddaughter. It’s plots – one taking place on earth, the other on the plane of art. And the so terribly sad a situation; I felt so sorry for her. She wanted to know if second plot (the counterplot) swallows up the first plot – art destroys life. I was having an affair with Sidney or John, which was laughable in the It is because the young Scot sees the play that he realises his vocation. extreme. I assured her I wasn’t and I left later. She is so terribly kind and And I think it is possible that Teresa subconsciously wrote the play sweet that I think I had to sort of put her on notice by letting her know with this purpose. She didn’t really want to marry him. With regard to I knew. Anyhow, she assured me that it wasn’t that way at all and I left. obsolete details, surely they are indispensable! My young friend (28) Of course, I think I sort of shocked her by guessing so that she will have who looks up things for me described the book as “a marvellous period to be careful and I think it rather unnerved her. Anyway, I think we can piece.” And it is because it is a period piece, a picture of life as it was in be friends now that she understands perfectly my ideas on the subject.’ the haute bourgeoisie between the two wars, that it seems to have some Accompanying this is a heavily corrected draft of a letter to Mirrlees, value to-day. …I won’t have it republished – tho’ no publisher would be also written from the ship. ‘Am trying to figure out which friend sent foolish enough to contemplate doing so. It is cluttered up with learning, me some exquisite yellow roses to the ship. Was it you by any chance … weighed down, utterly ruined. There are two people in me – one a I am glad too that you know all just as I know all, because I know I am sort of poet the other a sort of scholar, & in the case of Madeleine the right in thinking we genuinely care what happens to each other… I do scholar has killed both the poet and the book.’ Mirrlees mentions seeing so cherish your friendship and feel with all the weirs razed [sic], now Simon Gray’s play, Butley, whose eponymous protagonist is a T. S. Eliot we can be even closer.’ Henig also offers advice on Mirrlees’ unhappy scholar. ‘Both Valerie & I (she had seen it before) roared at Butley. It was emotional involvement with another woman (identified in Henig’s desperately funny.’ The following letter brings up Cocteau’s poem, ‘La notes), on whose account she had returned to live in England. Cap de Bonne Esperance’, which ‘certainly fired the fuse that exploded ‘I miss you very much’, Mirrlees replies. ‘I feel as if I had known you into Paris. As far as I remember it had fantastic wit but no poetry. The for years.’ She sends three pages of published descriptions of herself by contents had no influence on me, it was the form, i.e. a series of short Jane Harrison and Elsie Butler, and mentions Valerie Eliot working prose lines.’ In another letter, she refers to two poems which ‘seem to me on an edition of her husband’s letters. ‘She brought down a number of the best things I have done’, and provides an additional line for one of letters from me to Tom. But they simply don’t lend themselves to be them. Later that month, Mirrlees announces that: ‘I have been very busy printed. They consist almost entirely of private jokes – the utterly silly inserting small corrections in the 60 copies of Moods & Tensions which jokes which flourish when a group of people become intimate. And shall be sent off tomorrow. In the course of the tedious job I thought of laboriously to annotate them would be to crush a butterfly on a wheel.’ better alterations & so the copies vary! And as this might be confusing to She sends a revised ending of her poem, ‘Cape of Good Hope’, thanks the students I will now tell you which are the latest (& I hope permanent) Henig ‘for pointing out that the poem should end with that full stop’, alterations.’ She is almost relieved when Lud is turned down by Disney and adds: ‘I have never got to know anyone before as quickly as I have (‘I think the best people to turn it into a film would be the Germans or you. I do wish we did not live so far apart. … to use an expression of the Swedes’) and revels in Peter Levi’s ‘absolutely fascinating book about Berenson you are the most “life-enhancing” person I know.’ Afghanistan’, The Light Garden of the Angel King, ‘a book qualified In early October, in response to Henig’s essay, ‘Hope Mirrlees: Queen deliciously to feed any love of beauty & strangeness.’ Rereading Paris of Lud’ (shortly to be published in the first issue of the Virginia Woolf again, and finding that a sequence of lines in the revised passage was not Quarterly), she writes, ‘I can’t thank you adequately for your wonderful entirely clear, she encloses a corrected version. essay. It is lovely to be appreciated & understood at last.’ Paris was to be After reading Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, Mirrlees republished in the second issue but Mirrlees’ fear of blasphemy led her is ‘struck by the resemblance to infections of V.W.’s attacks – high to insist on revising the offending parts. ‘I am sorry, darling, but I am temperatures, galloping pulse, bad colour, & her feeling of being ill

54 55 when the attacks where on their way. And I wondered if it might not like’, she writes, in a paragraph on the third page. ‘Virginia Woolf had have been what they now call “chemical madness”, & which can be described her as a bohemian sharing a Sapphic flat with Jane Harrison in completely cured by drugs. Some years ago Professor Helen Gardner Paris.’ Mirrlees replied with a letter marked ‘private’. ‘I must protest went right off her head – as mad as a hatter, ran into the street naked furiously against p.3 of your Introduction’, she rails. ‘Dear Sue, I am not etc. It was “chemical madness” & she is completely cured.’ In the same yet dead! I have never been a sapphist in the strict sense of the word, letter, Mirrlees refers to the portrayal of her sister in her second novel. i.e. as Catholic confessors ask one, I have never had carnal desires for ‘Don’t forget that in The Counterpoint she is not Teresa, she is Concha, & a woman. I have confessed twice about my feelings & have been given Concha gets horribly on Teresa’s nerves, & all her little failings cruelly the “all clear” & told that in my case “the most affectionate embraces” exaggerated.’ She also mentions having sent Henig a copy of Mary are entirely permissible. If the quotation from V.W. were published in Renault’s The Persian Boy. ‘I have been wondering why we never talked my biography I should never dare to show my face in Newnham (my about Mary Renault she lives at the Cape of Good Hope & is a friend of College) again – they would be furious over the aspersion cast on their mine, & seems to me one of the greatest of living writers.’ most famous member. And it would be a pretty low down trick for an old ‘You promised that all I told you was in the strictest confidence’, woman to beguile a young pupil into a Sapphic friendship! My mother, Mirrlees complains in mid-November. ‘Please don’t talk about Jane & who disliked the relationship (she wanted me to marry) said Jane loved I being “in love”. … I had a “crush” for her when I was her pupil at me so much because I was “the child of her old age.” It was nothing Newnham. But it was when she came to Paris, where I was living at the but a very loving friendship. Margot thinks she was in love with me but time, to see a doctor, that we made friends. I had always been frightened I don’t think so. … I won’t say that I have never been in love with a of her before. I certainly had a “fixation” on her, but it was not physical. woman, but always “without carnal desire.” Please say nothing about So, for heaven’s sake, darling Sue, don’t talk about us “being in love”. this in the biography. You may say that I have never married because My mother disliked our friendship because she felt I was too much I was not in love with the men who were in love with me, & the men absorbed in Jane to marry. … My only great friends in Bloomsbury I was in love with (there were three – one a homosexual) were not in were Ottoline Morrell, Desmond & Mary MacCarthy, Arthur Waley & love with me. This is absolutely true. It all took place in my extreme Francis Birrell & Dorothy & Janey Bussy. I knew Leonard & Virginia youth. … I have always been an incurable introvert. I hope you realise over a number of years, but we were never intimate. … Lytton that the biography will, however well-written, arouse no interest – I am [Strachey] & I made friends, but then he annoyed me (I thought he was neither famous or dead.’ She goes on to say that she has been ‘completely discourteous to Jane) & I became very cold to him. To go back to Jane, absorbed (& nearly driven mad!) by a brute of a chapter of the new Fly – you must remember that she was heterosexual.’ In a postscript about chronology has been the problem – the difficulty of correctly matching The Counterplot, she suggests that its influence was limited to the next facts & dates in the cross-word. I have a sense of the past, but I find generation of writers. ‘R[osamond]. Lehmann told Valerie [Eliot] how historical scholarship very difficult to achieve.’ much it had meant to her. And Elizabeth Bowen told me.’ Explaining Henig was hurt by what she took to be Mirrlees’ lack of faith in her. her inability to visit Henig in San Diego, Mirrlees describes herself as ‘a She wrote back, explaining that she had taken the offending line from very old & very nervous woman who is never happy away from her own one of Woolf’s letters to Sydney Saxon-Turner, and discussing the issue home. All my life I have suffered from attacks of depression, which Sir at length. ‘Virginia has, quite deliberately, painted you and Jane as Thomas Browne defines as “melancholy without rational cause”. And practicing lesbians and your biographer must deal with the matter in nowadays anything out of my routine or any extra fatigue brings on this some way… As for Jane’s three grande passions, I fear that mentioning depression.’ Another letter discusses publishing rights and notes that, them as proof that she was not a lesbian would hold no water with not being a Catholic, Henig may have missed the point of the last line of modern psychologists… Of course, I won’t say anything of this or 90% Paris. ‘It is a parody of the last line of Hail Mary in French, viz Je vous of what you told me in the book. Don’t you know that already?’ Mirrlees salue, Maria, plein de grâce.’ She ends by praising Henig’s ‘beautiful was aghast (‘I could not bear to think I had so upset you’) but Henig’s face, as beautiful as Virginia Woolf.’ reassurance that while she believed Mirrlees’ ‘protestations of not being In January 1973, Henig sent Mirrlees the preface to her biography in a Sapphist’, it made no difference to her one way or the other, had missed progress. ‘I had no preconceived notion of what Miss Mirrlees would be the point. ‘Your letter has made me realise the gulf of years between us’,

56 57 Mirrlees replied. ‘… And I can see that you don’t in the least understand Henig visited Mirrlees that June. Amongst her correspondence is a how profoundly shocked & horrified I was to see that odious sentence of long draft letter to ‘Mary’ [MacCarthy (grand-daughter of Desmond Virginia’s… I mind very much for myself, but I mind much more for and Mary)], written while ‘still reeling from shock’ following a fraught Jane. … And it is horrible to think that she should go down to posterity overnight stay with Mirrlees. ‘She mentioned how VW had written to as a lesbian who seduced her students.’ Ottoline that she had genius & she hoped Q[uentin] would publish that A flurry of anxious letters follow. Valerie Eliot ‘has taken exception letter. … I felt immeasurably saddened when I left. Some spark has (as I have myself) to your saying that I have a blue rinse! So please take it gone out of her. She has given up the will to live, I think. She was very out. Also on reflection we are not happy about the insertion in any part of nice at dinner. She spoke of Rilke, how she had sat in front of him at a the book of Virginia’s remark. So please omit it. Furthermore Mrs Eliot concert once & attended a party for him. He looked like a character in thinks that no English publisher would print the sentence, because it is, Alice who has a crust of bread for a face. She said Ernst Curtius had been to say the least, offensive.’ ‘I do wish you would give up this absurd plan in love with her & if she had found a man rich enough, she would have of writing the biography of an aged nonentity. For one thing there is not married. She said VW once said to her, “Don’t you think my Voyage enough material for a life, & even if there were no one would read it. … Out shows great promise?” “No, I don’t,” Hope replied, “Jacob’s Room My last letter was dictated by Valerie Eliot. She says it [Woolf’s letter] does.” … She asked me if I liked Joyce. “Oh yes.” “So do I” she said. … is libellous…’ ‘I have now quite made up my mind that I don’t want a she spoke of not wishing to live long & of not having much time left, how biography. At the time you suggested it, your strong will & personality she did not produce enough to be a great poet, how Paris is a bad poem, drowned my innate Scotch common-sense & I was quite pleased. But I how she was “lost in the race” for fame, how she is very stupid really & have realised more & more the absurdity of the plan. Biographies are has a terrible inferiority complex because everyone outstripped her’… I not written till the person is dead. It would only be making a fool of me.’ didn’t have the guts to bring up the biog.’ ‘I am obsessed with terror of your fighting me over the biography. … I ‘We made a mistake, I think by rushing into friendship’, Mirrlees must beg you to let the matter drop. Nothing will induce me to change concludes, in a letter that October. ‘I am sure that we both now realize my mind. But I simply can’t stand arguing. Please forgive me for being that our background, upbringing, point of view, & sense of decorum so old!’ ‘Dear Sue, please don’t tease me any more about it. My nerves are too different for any intimate friendship.’ The correspondence which are strung on rather taut wires, would crack. I hate the notion of ends in December with two last letters from Mirrlees, the first sending having my life written & I won’t have it.’ Christmas greetings to Henig and her collection of cats and dogs. ‘As On receiving a proof printing of Paris, Mirrlees makes the startling you know, I am not a long letter writer’, she adds. ‘My letters are like comment that ‘I wish now I had had it printed in paragraphs, instead of newly born fox-terriers in Victorian days, whose tails were bitten off.’ in scattered straws of sentences. Don’t you think paragraphs would have In the final letter, in which ‘all good wishes’ replaces ‘love’, she writes been better? They would have kept the ideas & similes together.’ In May, appreciatively of some poems that Henig has sent her, though ‘I am she confides that she has been very unwell. ‘My “chemical” pill (which I afraid I am so prosaic that I like poems to call a spade a spade, e.g. to call take to put right the chemistry of old age one of the symptoms of which a Grecian urn “a still unravished bride of quietness”.’ is great depression) I thought had failed & I stopped taking it – with disastrous results. …I don’t think you realize the difficulty you have in 95 MIRRLEES, Hope. Poems. [Cape Town: Privately printed taking no for an answer. In one of your last letters you said we would for the author, ?1962.] First edition. Printed wrappers. Signed by discuss the matter of the biography when you came – & this terrified the author on half-title. Light spotting to corner of upper wrapper me. … Of course I want you to come. But I am too old for emotional and very head of flyleaf, else a very nice copy. £1000 demanding friendships. … I have always been a very detached person. …What profoundly shocked me was your putting that odious quotation Rare. Library Hub Discover and WorldCat locate copies at BL, Oxford, from Virginia’s letters on the first page of the biography – almost as the Cambridge, UCL, Duke University, and Washington State; to which motto of the book! It smirched my lovely innocent friendship with Jane, should be added one at Stanford. which is my most sacred memory. I have never been either Bloomsbury or “permissive”.’

58 59 96 MORRIS, W.F. Bretherton: khaki or field-grey? Geoffrey 100 MULLER, Wilhelm. Schubert’s Winter Journey: the poems Bles, [1929]. First edition. Spine very slightly faded, some faint of Wilhelm Müller. Translated by Ian Bostridge. [Binham]: Front offsetting to endpapers; edges, and very hinge of front free Street Editions, 2015. First edition. 4to. Quarter grey Harmatan endpaper slightly spotted, else a nice copy in slightly spine- leather, blue cloth sides, inset printed paper label to upper board. browned and dust-soiled pictorial jacket. £650 Tipped-in three-colour wood engraved frontispiece portrait Highly regarded as a first world war novel, and praised by Eric Ambler of Schubert by Chris Daunt after a portrait by Wilhelm August as one of his favourite spy stories, alongside The Riddle of the Sands, The Reidler. Fine copy in cloth slipcase. £175 Secret Agent, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Ashenden. Very scarce in jacket. One of 20 numbered copies, specially bound.

97 MOTION, Andrew. Destination Norfolk. Illustrated with 101 NASH, Paul. Letters to Oliver Simon of the Curwen Press, six full page wood engravings and two vignettes by Andy English. 1924–45. [Binham]: Front Street Editions, 2016. First edition. [Binham]: Front Street Editions, 2015. First edition. Obl. 8vo. Red Quarter blue cloth, with patterned paper boards to a design by cloth, inset printed paper label to upper board. Fine copy in cloth Nash, in cloth slipcase. Tipped-in frontispiece of Nash’s wood- slipcase, with matching inset label. £85 engraving ‘Coronilla 2’ and a folding facsimile of the artist’s The former Poet Laureate’s prose recollections of childhood journeys working directions for Urne Buriall. Fine copy. £75 to north Norfolk are complemented by the illustrator’s delightful Seventeen previously unpublished letters, the majority concerned with engravings. From an edition of 135 copies printed by Hand & Eye the Curwen Press production of Nash’s illustrated edition of Sir Thomas Letterpress, on Zerkall mould-made paper, this is one of 120 numbered Browne’s Urne Buriall. From an edition of 125 copies, this is one of 100 copies. numbered copies.

98 MOTION, Andrew. Destination Norfolk. Illustrated with 102 NASH, Paul. Letters to Oliver Simon of the Curwen Press, six full page wood engravings and two vignettes by Andy English. 1924–45. [Binham]: Front Street Editions, 2016. First edition. [Binham]: Front Street Editions, 2015. First edition. Obl. 8vo. Red Original quarter morocco, with patterned paper boards to a design cloth, inset printed paper label to upper board. Fine copy, with by Nash, in cloth slipcase. Tipped-in frontispiece of Nash’s wood- a separate portfolio of the wood engravings, together in a cloth engraving ‘Coronilla 2’ and a folding facsimile of the artist’s solander box, with matching inset label. £225 working directions for Urne Buriall. Fine copy. £125 One of 15 numbered copies with an additional portfolio of the wood One of 25 numbered, specially bound copies. engravings. A very handsome production. 103 NEVINSON, C. R. W. Paint and Prejudice. Methuen, 99 MULLER, Wilhelm. Schubert’s Winter Journey: the poems [1937]. First edition. With 32 plates. Inscribed by the author, ‘To of Wilhelm Müller. Translated by Ian Bostridge. [Binham]: Front Peggy from C.R.W. Nevinson’. Spine slightly cocked and faded, Street Editions, 2015. First edition. 4to. Blue cloth, inset printed cloth a trifle soiled, front endpaper slightly foxed, else a good paper label to upper board. Tipped-in three-colour wood engraved copy. £250 frontispiece portrait of Schubert by Chris Daunt after a portrait by The recipient was probably Peggy Wyatt, a fellow artist mentioned in Wilhelm August Reidler. Fine copy in cloth slipcase. £125 the text. Here, printed with parallel German text, is Bostridge’s translation of the poems that Schubert set to music in Wintereisse. From an edition of 120 104 OBENG, R. E. Eighteenpence. Ilfracombe: Arthur H. copies printed by Hand & Eye Letterpress, on Somerset mould-made Stockwell, [1943]. First edition. Spine slightly cocked, cloth paper, this is one of 100 numbered copies. slightly soiled, else a very good copy. £750

60 61 Though not the first Ghanaian novel to be published in English, as was long believed, Eighteenpence remains of considerable historical importance in Gold Coast literary culture. Printed for the author at his own expense in an edition of a thousand copies, the first edition is rare. Apart from copies at four legal deposit libraries (BL, NLS, NLW, Oxford), the only other one recorded is at the University of Cape Town.

105 OVID PRESS. GAUDIER-BRZESKA, Henri. Twenty drawings from the note-books of H. Gaudier Brzeska. Ovid Press, 1919. Folio. Introductory text and colophon leaf, and nineteen monochrome plates, printed on Japan vellum, in thick paper portfolio. Portfolio lacking its two red ribbon ties and one of the six flaps; two edges of rear panel slightly browned, but a very nice copy indeed of a vulnerable production. £2000 The first title produced by John Rodker’s Ovid Press. ‘All the drawings are reproduced by the courtesy of Mr. Ezra Pound with the exception of the dancing figure, which is due to the kindness of Miss Nina Hamnett.’ Though the colophon claims a print run of 250 copies, and there are known copies numbered as high as 247, the bibliographer posits an edition of 70, following Rodker’s statement elsewhere that all the Ovid Press books were printed in an edition of 250 apart from Roald Kristian’s A Bestiary, 110 copies, and the Gaudier-Brzeska, 70 copies. What is undeniable is that, as with Wyndham Lewis’s more sturdily produced Fifteen Drawings, it is considerably rarer than a limitation of 250 copies might suggest. Cloud, John Rodker’s Ovid Press: a bibliographical history, A2.

106 PARTRIDGE, Frances. Six autograph letters signed to Janetta Parladé, Nov 28th 1974 to Dec 22, 1983, 20pp., variously 4to or large 4to, Flat 5, 14 West Halkin Street, SW1. £350 Frances declared herself ‘fonder of and more closely linked to’ Parladé than anyone other than her husband and son. Despite mention of her own work, and references to Cyril Connolly, David Garnett, and Gerald Brenan, amongst others, the substance of these letters is largely that of old friends, bearing news of everyday life, and remarking on the lives and loves of their social circle.

Item 105 107 PERLES, Alfred. My Friend Henry Miller: an intimate biography. With a preface by Henry Miller. Neville Spearman, [1955]. First edition. Plates. Inscribed by the author on half-title,

63 ‘To Rab Shiell, with kindest regards, Alfred Perlés, Hampstead, The previous year, Harwood had sent Prince the proofs of The White June, 1960’, with Shiell’s earlier ownership signature, dated ‘Cape Room, with its disarming ‘The Late Poem’, the last four lines of which Town 1959’. Spine lightly faded, free endpapers slightly browned, read: ‘I don’t know anyone who’s met F.T. Prince. / I wish I could meet else a very good copy. £200 F.T. Prince; / maybe I will some day, but it will have to be soon / as he must be getting old.’ The two poets subsequently met and engaged in a Loosely inserted are six t.l.s. from Perlés (only one letter bears a date, lengthy correspondence. Harwood would later help arrange publication May 21st 1960, but they are clearly all from the same year) and a photo of Prince’s Memoirs of Oxford, for which he wrote a blurb introducing of him in a tweed jacket and a bow tie. ‘I am busy at odd hours in a Fleet Prince to a new audience. Street news agency, as I still have to work for a living!’ he writes in his second letter. Though there are passing references to J. G. Farrell and Ian Hamilton, the main focus of these jovial letters is a party to which 110 [RAFFALOVICH, Marc-André.] Man to Man ... homo­ Shiell has invited Perlés. ‘I hope Clive Jordan isn’t under the impression sexuals in literature ... and a few others (including books from he has to do a spot of pimping for me!’, Perlés exclaims. ‘Reassure him, the Library of Marc-André Raffalovich). Hay-on-Wye: Richard will you? There’s still a thing or two I can do for myself.’ As a postscript, Booth, [Ca. 1975]. 4to. Twelve duplicated pages, stapled at one he adds, ‘I hope I’m not expected to dress up! I’ve got a dark suit but I corner into lilac wrappers, and folded. Very good. £75 look like an idiot in it. Will ordinary attire do —I mean a pullover, say In his introductory note, the cataloguer explains that: ‘The cryptic a bottle-green one?’ The final letter thanks Shiell for ‘an exceptionally wording “and a few others” is intended as a sort of safety device which unforgettable evening’, asks for a repeat at his own house, ‘we want the may enable those figures rightly or wrongly included here to dissociate lot of you’, and asks him to tenderly embrace ‘the lovely strong-frail themselves from the catalogue’. Amongst other items, the catalogue lists nurse who reminds me a little of Brigitte Bardot but in a much more a copy of Tissot’s L’Onanisme: dissertation sur les maladies produites par refined version.’ la Masturbation, inscribed ‘A Monsieur Lytton Strachey de la part de son frere affectueux..’ 108 PETERS, William Theodore. Tutti-Frutti: a book of child songs. By Laura Ledyard & W. T. Peters. Designs by D. Clinton 111 [RAVERAT, Jacques.] KEATS, John. The Poetical Works Peters. Cover and this [title-] page [by] A. Brennan. New York: of John Keats. Reprinted from the original editions with notes by George W. Harlan, [1881]. First edition. Colour pictorial boards. Francis T. Palgrave. Macmillan, 1903. Reprint. Sm. 8vo. Jacques 34 leaves, printed rectos only, all but the contents leaf illustrated. Raverat’s copy, with his pencilled ownership signature. Spine Bookplate of the Marchese Majnoni d’Intignano; boards lightly slightly faded, cloth slightly marked, endpapers slightly browned, dust-soiled, with bumping and chafing to corners, some spotting else a very good copy. £50 to edges, else a good copy. £250 In common with Keats, for whom he had a particular fondness, Raverat The author’s first book, albeit a collaboration, to which he contributed became aware that an early death lay before him. In Raverat’s case it thirteen of the twenty-four poems. Peters (1862–1904) was an was by discovering that he had multiple sclerosis. Eventually dying of American-born poet and actor. A ‘permanent guest’ at the Rhymers’ slow asphyxiation, his suffering was brought to an end by the steady Club, he is most notable for having commissioned Ernest Dowson to application of a pillow in the hands of his wife, Gwen. write his short play, The Pierrot of the Minute. Excessively penurious, he starved to death in Paris. 112 [REYNOLDS, Alan.] MELVILLE, Robert. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881). With an introduction and notes by Robert Melville. 109 PRINCE, F. T. The Doors of Stone: poems, 1938–1962. Faber, The Faber Gallery, [1956]. First edition. 4to. Decorated Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963. First edition. Inscribed by the author, boards. With ten tipped-in coloured plates. Inscribed by the author ‘For Lee Harwood, F.T. Prince. 18.v.67.’ Nice copy in dust to the painter, Alan Reynolds, ‘For Alan, with love from Robert, jacket. £125 3/4/56’. Nice copy in slightly soiled dust jacket, a little rubbed at

64 65 upper edge of spine, and with short tear at head of that edge, else Cohen, later described them in The Poetry of This Age as ‘the best’. No a very good copy. Together with a nice copy of the wrappers issue equivalent edition could be published in England, however, because of John Rothenstein’s 1949 book on Turner, in the same series, the agreement between Rilke’s German publishers and the Hogarth inscribed by him, ‘For Alan Reynolds from Alan Reynolds with Press meant that no rivals to the translations of J. B. Leishman could be John Rothenstein’s admiration, 4. ix. 58.’ £250 authorised until the copyrights ended. 250 copies were printed. In their introduction to an enlarged edition, During his period as a neo-romantic painter, probably no artist exerted a entitled The Rilke of Ruth Spiers, published in 2015, the editors write: greater influence on Alan Reynolds than Samuel Palmer. The art critic ‘Though no publication could hope to match the obscure charisma Robert Melville was an early advocate of Reynolds’ work, writing of his attaching to that Selected Poems, this book is intended to broaden an landscapes that: ‘If we are regaining confidence in the future of the most experience that, until now, has been restricted to only the lucky few able rewarding tradition in English art, it is thanks to the immense promise to access one of the surviving copies.’ of his work and the evidence of his already remarkable development.’ John Rothenstein was the Director of the Tate Gallery, on whose behalf he had bought a painting by Reynolds two years earlier. Inscribed by Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol 116 ROHMER, Eric & CHABROL, Claude. Hitchcock. 113 RICHARDS, Grant. Author Hunting by an old literary Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1957. First edition. Sm. 8vo. sportsman: memories of years spent mainly in publishing, 1897– Photographically illustrated wrappers. Plates. Inscribed by the 1925. Hamish Hamilton, 1934. First edition. Plates. Some light authors to a film critic, on the title page, ‘à Jean Kress, sous l’ombre pencilled underlining and marginal scorings, else an extremely intimidante du [HITCHCOCK] en chair et en os. Cordialment, nice copy in very lightly spine-browned and dust-marked Eric Rohmer’ and ‘A Jean Kress, un homme qui aime ce que vous jacket. £150 amions, Claude Chabrol’. Very nice copy. £875 Amusing reminiscences, particularly of Ronald Firbank. Uncommon to find signed by both authors.

Bridget Riley to Prunella Clough 117 ROLFE, Frederick, ‘Baron Corvo’. A Letter to Father 114 RILEY, Bridget. White Noise. 21 May to 28 June 1998. Beauclerk. Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1960. First edition. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1998. Obl. 8vo. Printed wrappers. Wrappers, in marbled paper dust jacket, with printed label. Illustrated. Inscribed by Riley to Prunella Clough, ‘For Pru with Fine copy. £475 love from Bridget’. Near fine. £150 Edition limited to 20 numbered copies. Anderson later wrote that: ‘The whole production was a disaster from beginning to end. In the first place The catalogue of an exhibition in which Riley was the only painter, the paper was unsatisfactory and did not suit my machine very well. contributing a huge wall drawing, her largest work up to that point. After the sheets were all printed some of them were accidentally spoiled and I had to use several rejected ones. Even then I was unable to issue 115 RILKE, Rainer Maria. Selected Poems. Translated by Ruth more than 15 copies of the full 20. Besides these, at least one set of sheets Spiers. Cairo: The Anglo Egyptian Bookshop, [1942]. First edition without wrappers is in circulation. About four perfect copies, possibly of this translation. Printed wrappers. Bookplate to verso of upper five, had the recipient’s name printed below the limitation notice.’ The wrapper; wrappers soiled, lower corner bent, tiny mark to corner- need to use rejected sheets might explain why this copy is numbered tip of three leaves, else a good copy. £125 ‘14’, as is the one inscribed to Cecil Woolf, now at the NLS. Woolf A18; In an early review, Lawrence Durrell praised Spiers’ translations of Halliwell A7. Rilke as ‘lucid and pure as water’ and hoped that they might ‘become the definitive translations’, while the distinguished translator, J.M.

66 67 118 ROSENAU, Dr. Helen. Woman in Art: from type to 121 SPENCER, Gilbert. Eleven autograph letters, three with personality. Isomorph Ltd., 1944. First edition. Obl. 8vo., spiral comic drawings, 30pp., and one autograph postcard signed, to bound. Printed pictorial stiff wrappers. Illustrated. Wrappers Julian Morrell, various addresses, 1925–1928, the letters various soiled, else a very good copy. £500 sizes from sm. 8vo to large 4to, one in the shape of the artists’s foot, A scarce and interesting early feminist work of art history by a Jewish with toes and shading drawn on the verso. £750 emigré working at the London School of Economics. Designed by the Affectionately humorous letters to Ottoline Morrell’s daughter. The typographer, Anthony Froshaug, it was intended to be the first in a series foot-shaped letter reads: ‘How pleased I should have been to send you of titles published under his imprint, Isomorph, but it was also the last. my heart but that I fear is not mine to dispose of so I send you my foot with fondest love. It has been a faithful friend to me these 33 odd years 119 ROTHENSTEIN, William. Catalogue of an exhibition & I sincerely trust that you will appreciate the supreme sacrifice I am of Cotswold art and craftsmanship. Chipping Campden: Alcuin making in sending it to you. Of course if it comes back with a leg I shall Press, July 31st – September 1st [1934]. One page preface by be more than grateful as since the advent of my plus 4s I find I want all William Rothenstein and three page introduction by A.B.R. the legs I can get. Walter Turner has not sent me his legs yet & until he does I shant send him my head’, while a large quarto leaf bears a Finberg. Printed wrappers, with engraving to upper wrapper. charming manuscript composition for piano, signed and dated ‘1910’, Wrappers lightly foxed, staples rusty, with consequent rust mark and subsequently inscribed, ‘To Julians baby daughter on her first to immediate surrounds, else a nice copy. £125 birthday (with much expression but no crying)’ and with a humorous Scarce; a catalogue of work, mostly for sale and priced, by Maxwell letter beneath. Beyond the whimsy, there are references to Duncan Armfield, Michael Cardew, Charles & Margaret Gere, Ernest Gimson, Grant and Mark Gertler, as well as a weekend spent with Henry Lamb: F.L. Griggs, Keith Henderson, Ethel Mairet, May and William Morris, ‘he gave me a wonderful lesson on the [Mozart] Fantasia, he turned it William Rothenstein, Gordon Russell, Albert Rutherston, Bernard inside out & made me do it in front of him on his new Bechstein Grand.’ Sleigh, Joseph Southall, William Simmonds, Paul Woodroffe, and He writes about a successful painting trip to Durweston, a Devon village others. notable to Gilbert for its ‘uncanny atmosphere’ and frequent suicides, and mentions two significant paintings,The Shepherds Amazed, which 120 SHARP, William. Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Walter Julian’s uncle has just bought, and Portrait of Joyce Peters, which he has Scott, 1887. First edition. Inscribed by the author, ‘To Mathilde begun working on. His brother, Stanley, makes a number of appearances, Blind, with the admiration & affection of her friend, William most notably in an undated letter in which Gilbert, having been invited Sharp, Oct 27: ’87’. Spine slightly soiled, a little foxing to to have his photograph taken by a Bond Street photographer, remarks end­papers, bookplate to front pastedown, else a very good that ‘I thought that as Stans show was imminent, that I had better make this last grab at being distinguished before being finally extinguished by copy. £250 the cloud burst of fame which is so soon to break over the head of “Little ‘I never told you how much I liked your Shelley, which I think gives Stanley”.’ a very succinct and fair statement of the poet’s life and works’, Blind wrote to Sharp, later in the year. She had only one fault to find with Sharp, ‘to wit that when speaking of The Revolt of Islam you did not ‘I can’t think why Gil & I can’t paint angels’ mention in a line or so that I was the first writer who pointed out, first in 122 SPENCER, Stanley. Two autograph letters signed to Julian the Westminster Review and afterward in my Memoir of the poet, that Morrell, 10pp., Cornerways, Bourne End, Oct 6th and Nov 14th, in Cythna Shelley had introduced a new type of Woman into poetry. I 1920. £500 am rather proud of it, and as it was mentioned by several of Shelley’s In his first letter to Julian, then aged fourteen, Spencer writes, ‘Gil & subsequent biographers I would have been pleased to have seen it in a I loved getting your letter; I am afraid that if you write such lovely volume likely to be so popular as yours.’ letters you will have to write to us often’. In response to her mention of visiting a Fair, he comments, ‘I have never been on a Roundabout or in a

68 69 swinging boat! I don’t like it: it makes me feel bad. But for Gil, well one belong to a series of compositions I did of domestic life which some day might say the Roundabout is his natural element.’ After a paragraph of I hope to paint in some ladies room. My daily programme down here is jovial nonsense involving various characters from her toy cupboard, he get up feed the baby (11 months old) prepare her bottle[.] Then wash & adds, ‘Gil & I were delighted with the photos: it was gratifying to notice shave (not the baby), then take her bed & put it in the pram: then put that in one of them I look bigger than Gil’. His second letter is more her in it after Hilda has bathed her then have breakfast; then put her to interesting, despite the two pages devoted to an account of watching a sleep then go out & paint, then dinner, then put ‘her’ to sleep then paint crane lift steel girders. He mentions having taken a painting to Mary then have tea then help bath her then feed her & then “the land had rest Behrend, and a visit to the Spanish Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 40 years”. … Yesterday I received the thrilling news of the sale of the but of greater note is his comment after seeing Gilbert’s painting, The second landscape I sent to the Marchant show. It is funny how I seem Shepherds Amazed. ‘I also went up to Hampstead & saw Gilbert’s lovely to sell my landscapes; I dont think they are nearly as good, nor anything picture of the Shepherds being surprised by the Angels but there are no like as good as those little ideas I do of Joachims & John Donn[e]s. angels in it. I can’t think why Gil & I can’t paint angels; I don’t know that The ‘second landscape’ mentioned by Spencer was evidently a work Gil can’t: but I certainly can’t & the puzzling thing is that I badly want sold in advance of his first one-man exhibition, at William Marchant’s to, & I believe that one can do anything that one really wants to do.’ Goupil Gallery, the following February. The ‘Joachims & John Donn[e]s’ presumably refer to his earlier paintings, Joachim among the To Ottoline Morrell Shepherds and John Donne arriving in Heaven. Included with the above are two letters to Ottoline from Spencer’s 123 SPENCER, Stanley. Autograph letter signed to Ottoline parents, a single page from his father, dated July 17th 1914, and another Morrell, 4pp., The Hill, Wangford, Nov 17th 1926, 4to. Somewhat from his mother, dated Nov. 4th 1920. The former is in response to browned at centrefold, and at very head and tail. £1500 an invitation to a performance of Don Giovanni, and begins: ‘We are Spencer writes to thank Morrell for her appreciation of his illustrations greatly indebted to you for your most kind invitation, but I fear there to A Chatto & Windus Almanack, his only foray into such work. ‘It is an insurmountable difficulty. Neither I nor the boys have an evening especially pleased me as I had just heard from Chatto & Windus that it suit. I had, but I lent it & never got it back. The boys must get one some had the appreciation of a few (the minority) & the intence [sic] dislike time. We are as your Ladyship saw very homely people. The ‘gentry’ of many (the majority). Isn’t that extraordinary? I wonder why! … here are money lenders, stock-jobbers, pawn-brokers etc & think us I have done some really rather nice landscapes. One is really rather a immeasurably beneath their notice; so we are allowed to go our own gait beauty though I say it as shouldnt. Its a big one of a heap of stinging which we much prefer. Will you kindly telegraph to us & I pray you to nettles. The whole canvas is occupied by this great mound. You know be frank for I would rather anything than cause you any embarrassment those marvellous great clumps one sees of stinging nettles. Over the whatever through our unconventional doings.’ top of this dome shape of nettles is a view of the back of Wangford Village.’ Returning to the Almanack, he uses the next page and a half To Patricia Preece to explain either the subject or inspiration for each of the twenty-four illustrations, adding notes such as ‘The actual idea of this I like very 124 [SPENCER, Stanley.] ROTHENSTEIN, Elizabeth. Stanley much but it has not come off yet. It is of children picking flowers in a Spencer. Phaidon Press, 1945. First edition. Frontispiece and 82 field. One has discovered a scarlet Pimpernel’, ‘A scene I remembered plates. Inscribed by the artist to his second wife, ‘To Patricia from at Ramsgate one summer’, ‘Cutting Privet hedge. An idea I have not Stanley. Dec 12th 1945.’ Number written at upper corner of half- yet properly digested’, ‘Harvest festival. Really a scene I did in Bedales title, else a very nice copy in lightly worn and dust-soiled jacket, School’, or ‘Spring Cleaning. At home the chairs & every thing was put with very small label to spine and a jagged tear to corner of upper on the table’, or, in a couple of cases simply their locations, ‘Scene on panel. £1250 Hampstead heath’ and ‘Goring on the river’. ‘In the upright ones’, he Patricia Preece was seventeen when she inadvertently caused the death writes, ‘I tried to keep to incidents relating in some way to Girls and of the playwright and librettist, W.S. Gilbert. Swimming in the lake in flowers. The Feb: March, Aug: Oct: Nov: & December upright drawings the grounds of his house, she had got out of her depth and cried out for

70 71 help. Gilbert swam to her aid but the exertion earned him a fatal heart in the artist’s possession. If it was intended as a blandishment towards attack. The name of his estate, Grim’s Dyke, rather adds to the Edward her acceptance of a divorce, it was unsuccessful. Gorey-like vignette. In 1917, Preece enrolled at the Slade, where she met Dorothy Hep­ 125 SPENDER, Stephen. European Witness. Hamish worth, with whom she would be romantically involved for the rest of Hamilton, [1946]. First edition. Inscribed by the author to his her life, setting up home and studio together, with the financial help of wife, ‘To darling Natasha, who toured Germany with me, with Hepworth’s father. Preece’s work eventually attracted attention, most love from Stephen, Oct 16 1946’. Very good copy in dust jacket, notably from Virginia Woolf and Augustus John, and Clive Bell wrote the foreword for her 1938 exhibition at the Leger Galleries. Decades slightly chipped at head and tail of lightly faded spine, and with later, the discovery of their joint diaries would reveal that Hepworth some soiling to rear panel. £250 was the real artist and that Preece’s role was simply to deal with their exhibition and sale. One can see why Preece became flustered when 126 STRACHEY, Lytton. Pope: the Leslie Stephen lecture for Woolf, who owned a couple of drawings, asked her to paint a portrait of 1925. Cambridge: University Press, 1925. First edition. Printed her friend, Ethel Smyth. wrappers; paper label. Inscribed by Strachey to Harry Norton, ‘To But I have run ahead of the chronology. After Hepworth’s father H.T.J.N. with love from the author’. Spine split at head of upper died in 1930, having lost all his money in the stock market crash, the edge, and with slight mark to tail, else a very good copy. £375 two women struggled to pay their mortgage. Preece began to work as Fellow Cambridge apostle and close friend of Strachey’s, Norton was the a waitress in a tea-shop in Cookham, where she met Stanley Spencer dedicatee of Eminent Victorians. and his wife, Hilda Carline, a fellow artist. The Spencers befriended the couple, who soon moved into the house next door. Preece began to sit for Spencer, who gradually became obsessed with her. Dismayed by Preece’s 127 SUMMERS, Montague. The Marquis de Sade: a study in habit of turning up half-clothed, and the ease with which she accepted algolagnia. The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, expensive gifts from Spencer, Hilda moved out. Intent on a ménage à [1920]. First edition. Printed wrappers. Staples rusty, else a very trois, Spencer wrote to her: ‘My development (as an artist) depends on good copy. £175 my having both you and Patricia.’ Hilda’s view of artistic development ‘It is interesting to note that Summers’s pamphlet is the first separate did not involve sharing her husband, and she eventually agreed to a work to be published in England on the Marquis de Sade.’ – d’Arch divorce. Four days after that, Spencer married Preece. The honeymoon Smith, A10. was in St. Ives but Preece set off with her long-term partner rather than her new husband. On her return, she continued to live with Hepworth 128 [THOMAS, Dylan.] LINDSAY, Philip. Sir Rusty Sword. and her marriage to Spencer was almost certainly unconsummated. Hutchinson, [1946]. First edition. Inscribed by the author, ‘for Foolishly, he had signed his house over to her and within little more than a year, Preece had evicted Spencer so that she could rent it out. That Dylan & Caitlin Thomas with all love from Philip Lindsay’. intervening period nevertheless produced two of Spencer’s most famous Boards slightly marked, with stain to lower corner of upper board; paintings: Self-portrait with Patricia Preece, now at the Fitzwilliam, and edges and prelims slightly spotted else a very good copy. £200 Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and his Second Wife (also known as the An historical novel set in the Elizabethan period. The author was Nor­ ‘Leg of Mutton’ nude on account of a foregrounded joint of raw meat), man Lindsay’s son, and Jack’s younger brother. As Thomas’s co-script­ which is at the Tate. writer at the Strand Film Company, he became a close friend and serious Spencer had recently returned to Cookham, to live in a house drinking partner. Gerald Kersh later remarked that an account of one of belonging to his brother Percy, when this book about his work was their benders ‘would make The Lost Weekend sound like Southey’s Life published, in December 1945. It seems surprising to find him giving Of Nelson. Dylan got his penis stuck in a two ounce honey pot. Why he Preece a copy as a gift at this point, though she appears in a full-page put it there I don’t know. On the same occasion he pushed a shirt button reproduction of Portrait in a Garden, painted in 1936 and noted as being up his nose and couldn’t get it out either.’

72 73 129 [THOMAS, Edward.] GUTHRIE, James. Original oil painting of a moonlit landscape, set around the estuary of a river. 9 ½ x 12 inches. Inscribed by the artist on the back, ‘To E.T. from J.G. Jan 1915’. Framed. £2000 Thomas’s friendship with Guthrie was one of the most important of his life. They first met when Thomas moved to Hampshire, a comfortable seven mile walk from where Guthrie lived. Writing to their mutual friend, Gordon Bottomley, the day after his first visit to Guthrie, in February 1907, Thomas reported that: ‘We seemed to hit it off in a lazy way quite comfortably and he walked back with me in the evening as far as Petersfield which was midway. I saw lots of his work and I like his landscapes more and more…’ Guthrie’s Samuel Palmerish romanticism struck a chord with Thomas. ‘Frankly, there is a deep fund of what must narrowly, and for the moment only, be called an inhumanity in the artist, or he could not thus have reinforced or intensified the inhumanity of Nature’, he wrote in his introductory essay to Guthrie’s A Second Book of Drawings, published in 1908. ‘Consider, for example, his ‘Song of the Nightingale’. Those woods are untrodden woods as lonely as the sky. They are made for the nightingale’s song to rule in solitude under the crescent moon. No lovers walk there. Mortal who enters there must either a poet or a madman be.’ The date of Guthrie’s inscription is noteworthy. Returning home on January 2nd, after a Christmas spent with his parents, Thomas suffered an injury to his ankle that more or less immobilised him for the next three weeks. Unable to leave the house and with little distraction in the way of paid work, he took the opportunity to devote himself to what he once described as the ‘unlikely employment’ of writing poetry. By the time he was able to begin walking again, on the 23rd, he had written sixteen poems, including ‘Adlestrop’. Later that year, in his periodical, Root and Branch, Guthrie published the first two poems by Thomas to appear in print. In 1917, he hand- printed the pseudonymous Six Poems by Edward Eastaway, the only collection of his verse that Thomas would see published before his death, that April. Pasted to the back of the canvas is a cutting identifiable as being from G.F. Sims’ catalogue 78, in which this painting was item 184. In A Life in Catalogues, Sims mentions having bought a number of books and manuscripts by Edward Thomas from his widow, Helen. This painting Item 129 must surely have accompanied them.

75 130 [TURGENEV, Ivan.] Pöemes Dramatiques d’Alexandre Pouchkine. Traduits du Russe par Ivan Tourgéneff et Louis ‘I am becoming slightly less neurotic than I was, Viardot. Paris: Hachette, 1862. First edition of Turgenev’s though I am still insane’ translation of Pushkin into French. Contemporary half calf, 132 WARNER, Rex. Two a.l.s., one with original envelope, to marbled boards, spine gilt-ruled, leather label. Pp. (iv) + 279 + Molly Rickards, 8pp., 22 St. Giles, Oxford, the first dated ‘Friday’, contents leaf + 4pp ads. Spine slightly faded, else a nice copy.£500 the other Dec. 6. 1926. £750 Translations of ‘Boris Godunov’, ‘Russalka’, and the ‘Little Tragedies’: In 1926, during the summer term of his third year at Oxford, Warner ‘Mozart and Salieri’, ‘The Courteous Knight’, and ‘The Stone Guest’. suffered a nervous breakdown. With money from a family friend, he spent two or three months in Morocco but by late November, Warner was Alfred Wallis’s copy back in England, at the house he shared with C. Day Lewis and Charles Fenby. ‘Dear Molly,’ he begins the first letter, ‘(do you mind me calling 131 [WALLIS, Alfred.] BONSELS, Waldemar. Indienfahrt. you ‘Molly’? I can’t call you ‘Miss Richards’ without thinking of ‘Mrs Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1919. Reprint. Pictorial Richards’, & that interrupts the tenor of my way.) Thanks a hundred boards, depicting the Hindu God, Ganesh. Pencilled ownership times for your letter. … And your condolences on my not getting my signature to corner of front pastedown, ‘Alfred Wallis / Born ‘country cap’ were refreshingly half-hearted. People usually write to august 18 1855 / Devonport’, and with an earlier gift inscription me as though I valued my health solely in order to play brutal games (‘Max and Marjorie, with love from Alice – March 1 – 1920’) to with savages. Actually I am, as they say, so awfully misunderstood. … free endpaper. Spine slightly browned, boards dust-soiled, rear Have you ever been sincerely unconvinced of the reality of anything? board pitted with a handful of pinhead-sized dents, one of which That is the state I have been in for the last six weeks. Very interesting, has extended through the board and into the last gathering, and no doubt, but disquieting. I feel I am undergoing a sea-change, yet I do with variable browning and a little foxing to the contents but, in & say all the same things. Perhaps these are the pains of adolescence spite of this description, by no means an unattractive copy.£750 of which psychologists talk, but I am taking some time in living them down. This state of mind exposes one’s weak spots, &, as you probably Alfred Wallis was particularly proud of his date of birth, under the saw from my poetry, I have one very weak spot. – This is awful. I am mistaken belief that it was also the day on which Sebastopol fell to sorry for making a letter a catalogue of ailments. Apologies too for not the English and French during the Crimean War. Though his name having sent ‘Sword & Sheath’ before. Even now I send it reluctantly, has become synonymous with St Ives, he was born into poverty in because I am not quite satisfied with it, though it is a little altered. Here Devonport, near Plymouth. He almost certainly never went to school is something else I wrote the other day. It can describe the expression and remained semi-literate throughout his life. It was not until he of any important feeling & might be called ‘The Word made Flesh’, or reached the age of seventy that he began to paint, an occupation that more accurately ‘The Flesh made Word’.’ An eight line poem follows, he pursued until his death in a Penzance workhouse in 1942. The story beginning: ‘Metallic veins of silver running & gold / Swollen swell to of how his work came to be taken up by Ben Nicholson, amongst others, bursting’. The letter ends, ‘I am going for a walking tour this week-end, is too well-known to require repetition but it ends with Nicholson & hope to be cured of my unfortunate passion for the real.’ driving over to visit Wallis and taking with him an issue of Cahiers ‘I am becoming slightly less neurotic than I was, though I am still d’Art, containing an appreciation of Wallis’s work, in order to impress insane’, he writes in the second letter. ‘If I get better I shall think the on the workhouse Master that, despite his derelict state, this particular experience interesting. At present, like Sokrates, (N.B. high-brow inmate was an artist of some repute. A deeply religious man, the Bible ‘k’) I go about aghast at my own ignorance of anything of the least was Wallis’s chief literary companion. How he came to own the present importance. Today at a lunch party A said he liked women to wear book, written in a language he couldn’t read and to which he can surely tweeds. B said No, he liked chic. A said he did not like being seduced. only have been drawn by the image on the cover, is a mystery. I asked him whether he ever had been. He said, No, he was the sort of man that smoked ‘Three Nuns’… That is Oxford. Quite nice at lunch, but can you blame me for wanting to go to Siam.’ After a paragraph

76 77 about the Chinese war and its coverage by the Times, he continues, ‘I have just started Keyserling’s book, & may have time to read the first vol. this term. It is certainly interesting. One knows his feelings, in all their contradictions, so well. I am going to read Bergson in the vac., if I can’. He asks if they can meet in London on the following Saturday, and concludes with a bit of flirtatious teasing. Despite his reference to the ‘vac’, Warner didn’t return to Oxford until the autumn term of 1927.

‘Valentine, with love that even Christmas cannot dim’ 133 [WARNER, Sylvia Townsend.] JONES, Henry Festing. Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon (1835–1902): a memoir. Macmillan, 1919. First edition. Two volumes. Frontispieces and plates printed by Emery Walker. Publisher’s blind-stamp, ‘Presentation Copy’, to both title-pages. Inscribed by Townsend- Warner to Valentine Ackland on the free endpaper of the first volume, ‘Valentine, with love that even Christmas cannot dim. Tib. 25 : xii : 1939 :’, and simply ‘Valentine’ in the second volume. With 37 lines of indexed notes by Ackland to rear paste-downs, and further notes by her to free endpapers. Spines slightly faded, cloth slightly soiled, foxing to frontispieces and plates, with offset browning from the tissue guards, one plate loose and lacking tissue guard, else a good, sound set. £250

134 WILKINSON, Louis U[mfreville]. Syllabus of a Course of Seven Lectures on Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Horace Hart, 1912. First edition. Printed wrappers, stitched. Wrappers slightly soiled, else a nice copy. £125 The synopsis of a series of Oxford University Extension Lectures by a writer chiefly remembered for his schoolboy correspondence with Oscar Wilde, his close friendships with the Powys brothers and Aleister Crowley, and a literary career largely conducted under the pseudonym of ‘Louis Marlow’. Not in WorldCat or Library Hub Discover.

135 WORSLEY, T. C. Flannelled Fool: a slice of life in the Thirties. Alan Ross, 1967. First edition. Inscribed by the author on half-title, ‘To its first kindly and helpful critic, with gratitude, Cuthbert’. Very good copy in price-clipped dust jacket. £75 Cyril Connolly read Worlsey’s autobiography in manuscript and was responsible for recommending it to Alan Ross, after it had been rejected by a number of publishers.

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