26 March 1921
26 March 1921
26 March 1921
Villa Isola Bella, Menton, France
The curse is still heavy on me — but I ignore it all I can, and, merciful Powers! What strange compensations there are! Yesterday for instance, as I waited for the surgeon in a huge, grim ante-chamber, I thought as I watched my companions — especially the poor ones - as I realised the immense gulf between those who have a perfect right to be ill if they choose & can pay whatever is necessary to be well again, and the others for whom illness is the mysterious ill fortune for which they are somehow to blame . . . “kindly excuse us, but even an insect will live” . . . I felt, more sincerely than I can say: “I would not be anywhere else for worlds. I would not have missed this.” But Im writing quickly, and I haven’t expressed what really was there - Beauty . . . Do you know what I mean that word to convey? No, I must turn it into a story before its really intelligible.
Thank you for telling me about O’Malley.
Ive been feeling these last weeks that its only now that I know what I want the short story to be . . .
Yes, Brett is a brick. I get impatient with her sometimes because she will think it necessary to write to me about what Koteliansky used to call “extremely serious questions”. And somehow these questions ring a little false from Brett. They are not what one wants from her. But I do appreciate my wickedness.
[To Sydney Waterlow in Collected Letters, late March 1921.]