21st February 1933 - Terrick to Mary

Hotel Brice
Rue du Maréchal Joffre
Nice (A-M)

21st February 1933

Dear Mary Pleasant,

“Edwy the Fair” is finished!  You can’t imagine how bucked I feel.  “Edwy” is the most important thing of all.  I would rather see it acted than have anything else in the world.  I pretend to people that I write it when I have nothing else to do, even to Paul.  But in reality I think more of it than anything else I am interested in.  Whenever I travel, whatever I forget to pack, the MS of “Edwy” is never forgotten.  Sometimes I have been months without writing a word because I have felt that I could not put my best into it.
While I am here I shall improve parts of it and write out neatly what i have not yet typed and then – I’ll see what I can do with it.
On Monday I bought a “Sunday...

much of next pages missing – fractions which remain:  

...only a nice sunny day yesterday and good bookings for today’s excursion soothed me.  It rained for the whole of to-day’s trip except just at tea and lunch but the people didn’t mind much fortunately.

...none of them use their own complexions.  Their eye-lashes are beaded and thin lids tinted.  Très elegante, très chic, but comparing them with you I couldn’t help chuckling and quoting to myself :
“I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden, 
In a cleaner, greener land.”

...posing pitifully and hating myself as I did it; just because I thought you would think me easily put off if I said: “Oh, all right; don’t if you’d rather not.”

And on that hill on Sunday too, I was saying to myself as I was talking to you: “You are behaving like a cracked idiot.  Why can’t you say it naturally, as you think it?”

I am glad you dislike – or like less – the Terrick FitzHugh whom you meet.  He is an ass.  I loathe and despise him.   But when I am with you I am so afraid that you will dislike the real T.F. that I hide him behind this fellow.

Now I have done it!  When I started this letter I meant to tell you that I was unnatural and posed whenever I meet you, but I did not intend to tell you it all.  There is a limit to what you should show to other people.

... enough, a perfectly ghastly business, but now I have invented a way, hopelessly unorthodox, that I think will do away with that difficulty, so I haven’t a care in the world.
All the same I am not so contented with being in Nice as I ought to be.  I feel a bit of an exile with you in London and Paul there doing my work in the scheme.  The rolling stone is gathering a spot of moss, and about time too.

Not being even in the same country as you makes a distinct gap.  I don’t mean because you are a girl that I am keen on, but because you are a friend of mine whom I can enjoy comparing notes with and can take advice from on such matters as bath taps.

That is how it should be; and I never realised it – not properly – till just lately.
I have put the three snapshots of you in frames.  I keep them in a drawer when I am out in case they get damaged but when I am in my office-bed-room I prop them up where I can see them.

I think I shall send them, one at a time, home, for my people to look at and return.  They will be quite interested in my “latest” even though they won’t realise that it is my last. And first as I see now.

Well I’ll stop now before you get bored with this type of conversation.

Take care of yourself.

And write and let me know who – well, everything.  I don’t think we shall misunderstand each other as we did before.

How are the knives getting on?  I think perhaps it is best to say you know who is running it because some people are very suspicious of it.  It is not illegal and not a snowball which I believe is.  Did Paul send you the brochures?

Cheerio, old thing

If you have the impulse to write by return of post, don’t resist it.

Fitz