27 September

27 September 1920

Your Link

Travelling to Menton, France

To business.
Your Wilde, Bogey, was extremely good. You put him in his place without for a moment pronouncing a judgment which was not strictly critical. What I mean is its so very difficult with a man like Wilde to get him & keep him inside that strange sort of ring through which one gazes at ones ‘specimens' at the moment of writing. Know what I mean? Its a kind of expanding & contracting ring - you can pull your specimen up very near, so near that you can count the hairs of his spiritual eyebrows - or you can send him far far - a speck on the horizon. Wilde - the immense temptation is to take your eye away and see him there without its aid. You haven't. I note, tho', darling, the last sentence and it makes me smile a little . . . Instead of ‘a great biography' you can't resist poor old Frankie's dreadfully battered hat & his: ‘I knew you as a boy, Sir.' I understand .. . [. . .]
410-411 look very dull, don't they But it can't be helped, I realise. I think our Library Table is - no, its not dull. At the same time its not interesting - is it? I feel the paper lacks something, lacks a column - on the lines we suggested for Delamare. Do you feel it a bit scrappy? I don't bite in to it.
About the leaders - there again I think they ought to be more pro¬nouncedly the work of one hand. They ought to be just a touch caustic or (appalling word) bright. They can't compel in such a little space they ought to attract. If that can't be done I think real good pars. would be better. Talk it over with me - will you? [Letter to J. M. Murry in Collected Letters 1920]