Dolly, to Emily (excerpts)

Isle of Wight, July 18th, 1927

Where are you, darling? In what bed do you lie, and under what sky? Time stretches between us like a quarrel...

You left Paris so hurriedly without a letter to comfort me – just an American business man’s telegram. Such coldness has stopped the warm current of my thoughts, and diverted them into horrid channels and treacherous eddies and whirlpools. I imagine you cross and irritable and – far worse – indifferent...

Don’t, don’t slip away from me – don’t short-circuit your magic. The flooding light of attraction is rare enough to be cared for while it lasts: don’t extinguish it with determination! Am I blaming you with my faults?

Here I am embosomed in Beauty – wrapped up in the scented sachet of summer. The garden rivals any gardener’s catalogue: and we walk between the borders as wide as the Champs-Élysées and superbly highly coloured over green velvet into the sea (“I have no love for the sea, but I respect it” I, or somebody else once said). We play tennis and disprove melancholy with rapid circulation of the blood. It’s a lazy, exquisite life and we allow no one to intrude – hiding under the table at the first scrunch of a car in the drive with callers. I lie a great deal in the hammock which swings in the orchard by a bed of white stocks and roses, with a litter of books I never read. Today I lay there and the bell of your name sounded in my ears all the time. And somehow the blue immensity of sky was so terribly eternal – such a guarantee of vast projects being realized that I found comfort in it and thought you can’t be cross with me – you can’t stand in the way of our dual pleasure – the perfect mechanism of love – wheels within wheels – !

The rain is pouring down the windows, and like bored fish we swim round our glassy cage gazing on the watery world outside. A very pretty girl is strumming “Mozart” at the piano (Raynaldo Hahn’s piece) and in a divinely youthful voice full of half-promises is singing... her voice falls like drops of glass – brittle and clear .. She is unconscious of her own delicacy and hasn’t docketed any of her emotions yet. She just knows that praise is inevitable. I topple her over into unaccustomed channels of thought about herself and so intrigue her that she leaves the young men and sits bewildered on the arm of my chair waiting like a little dog for a bone! She should be saved...

Are you dead, again, darling? Or bored or lazy? Was there ever a day when people complained of me not writing? I can’t believe it! Oh! What a lovely time I am having – staying with the young Carnarvons – falling in love with my host – and adoring every moment. This is the place I always think of you and Elmer because the bedrooms are so enchanting and look over a fairyland of garden and country. The name of my room this visit is “Star Chamber” – isn’t it delightful! They all have names written in gold above the door. It is a large, shimmering, deep-breasted room in primrose brocade with a garlanded ceiling and misty glasses reflecting the mysterious vistas – and warm corners. I cannot sleep at night for amusing myself glancing round with wide, happy eyes, and in the morning I cannot get up so delighted am I by my fairy cage! And outside are dark cedar trees – and grey, curling oaks and elms and lawns like emeralds and far away hills. On New Year’s eve Porchy (Lord Carnarvon) had the most wonderful fireworks outside at about 6 p.m. on the lawns. How can I tell you how those lovely pale stars trembled in the air and floated down the sky? How great golden feathers swept the night – and airy plumes of light wavered in the air. How long ribbands were tossed sky high and flowered into lovely blossom and came gently, but oh so gently to earth. How shimmering golden rain sprayed in eternal fountains – gold and silver rain – and golden rain storms whirling coloured petals. How exquisite balloons misty in a flare of spear-like gold rose higher and higher and floated away for ever and ever into the blue night. I died of delight and let my soul rest in those sprays of starry leaves hung in the sky.

Well, well – are you breathless my sweetness with my fireworks? but I must always bring my plunder of beauty to you – the arch-robber – the brigand-chief. Such jokes going on all day – such laughter – such leisurely comfort – such innocence once more. I must marry my country squire – my darling little English lord – my gentle, fox-hunting gentleman – it’s the only life! And all the time I let slip my coloured ribbons of thoughts in extravagant confusion all round me. I believe life could be one delightful sensation after another – I really do!

And oh – dearest Emily – I have stumbled on a wonderful classic. Staying with the Herons I was rummaging in the shelves and Madame Bovary in her tattered yellow-back cover kept glancing at me. I took her up and put her down and passed her by and slighted her – and pouted and sulked at her. I took her to bed and was so entertained, so amused, so delighted with the beauty of it – the exquisite delicate thought – the brilliant analyses that I cannot understand why we aren’t always reading it. That wedding in the country! that ball! Oh – What lovely bits there are even tho’ I am only quarter through it. Do you remember how as a girl she was so entranced with the satin valentines and their pictures of love that she drew in her breath with delight and made the thin silk paper gently lift from the pictures and fall gently back again! Dear, worldly dreaming Emma Bovary, how wonderful to have found you at last.

Did you have a happy New Year. I had a heavenly letter from Lucretia. I sent Peter a telegram. Did he get it? Do – do write to me. I get thin without your letters. A gipsy woman told our fortunes yesterday. I am to be married within a year to a divorced man with lots of money – so tell Elmer to marry and get divorced and make a fortune quickly! Fond love to all and Don and Tudor.

November 14th, 1931

Your letter arrived with my breakfast tray and a beam of sunlight cut the pages like a golden paper knife. I lit a voluptuous cigarette and in the fresh morning solitude – before the incidents of the day have broken me into segments – I read your lovely words. Alas! I said there is no Virginia-Dolly – only Virgnia-Emily. I am cousin-germaine – but no nearer. Jealousy, however, could not stab and I wondered why – after such delight – a finger of ice lay on my heart. I concluded that your musical raptures had given you something of the inhumanity of musiciens (have you noticed how strangely “different” they are?). I felt a lack of tenderness – as if my faint plucking of the Sapphic harp had merely disturbed your precise ear. Was I wrong? But the ‘weather’ is so musical today that I can’t resist writing to you. It’s spring, not autumn and I am surprised not to see lettuce-green buds on all the trees. I thought of you walking through the park this morning – thought, surely Emily will take the veil with me in this enchantment, as if we two could retire for a day into conventional peace swearing eternal vows to beauty and understanding – and music if you insist! Honey and I alternate between Bach played on the guitar with a very soft needle (Bach executed by a mosquito) and Yvonne Printemps’ brittle-glass notes. I fear we could hardly pass an examination from you, dear professorial Emily.

I am to dine with Virginia one day next week – but I dread the ordeal and she will never know what marginal notes of understanding mark every page of her books in my library.

Tell me which books of Schopenhauer to get – I look for solid consolation. I wave a Valentine hand to you, darling, affectionately.

Dolly

Sometime 1927.

I picked a garland of fruit – grapes, figs, tiny golden apricots and a little green apple on its twig – and dreamily slipped down the hill back to the villa. S. loved the garland which astonished me as such things appear generally to amuse rather than delight her – and we sat on the wide balcony with the sun weaving golden webs round us and splintering its last rays in our eyes. And then the little maid brought your letter to me, and the words blossomed in the quiet air and dripped gently into my mood...

The fifteen days motoring was wonderful in many ways, altho’ the arrival of R. on the scene was the herald of unimaginable suffering to me. I must tell you all the story when I see you. It contains all but the obvious ingredients. Dear Madame de C. T. was with us, exquisite, wonderful and so sensitive to someone she likes, that after an outwardly amusing evening she got up in the middle of the night and came to my room because she felt I was feeling sad – and indeed I was in tears! Such sweet rough comforting!

I feel immeasurably 67 older in the knowledge, and when I think how lightly I arrived at the Villa that summer morning I look back on that figure as a frivolous, light-hearted mondaine – woefully unprepared to meet life in her idle, impetuous, undisciplined view of things in general! I was so sure of love, so dominant at that moment, that I failed to see anything beyond the pleasureable delights of love, and conversations in which I arrogantly voiced opinions and dictated my ways. Gradually I perceive S. to be of transcedental (spell it) intelligence – without sensibilities in the weaker meaning of the word – altho’ alive through her intelligence to this quality in others. Thus, she is not tender – but will assume tenderness like a cloak – is not romantic but if needs be will pander to romanticism, etc. A week of charming companionship with her has left me like a refreshed martyr gathered up in new strength! forgetful of the pangs of torture. Strange how life – to me the flippety-gibbety fly-away Dolly – has become a never ceasing discipline – and ever-watchful survey of my thoughts and emotions – an inventory of ideals and maxims – an exhausting survey of my motives and reactions – a pitiless examination of conscience! Mentally ascetic – joy becomes disproportionate and I – who ever craved new exciting pleasures of happy days – now am relieved and made momentarily forgetful by a morning bathe! S. is charming to me – always amusing and delightful but the experience has been too deep even for my superficiality – and like a medium I play a part strange to me. Dear S. is unaware of all this – does not deal in introspective whirl-winds – knows not melancholy and is stranger to poetic despair.

We have discovered Henry James! I ADORE him. What phrases if only I wasn’t too lazy to copy them out. A gifted pig I find out all the succulent truffles and pop them in S.’s mouth! Darling write to me at once.

November 1931

“Peerless Emily”

This description was applied by a critic to the plum-coloured and passionate chimpanzee but the epithet is yours by right, too dear nacreous, chaste Emily: I’m lying in a big bed with autumn pressing her nose against the window panes. The spiced brown leaves fall from the trees, leaving them with “the clear anatomy of winter”, and sun and mist make the boundaries of this intimate world.

Autumn must be sniffed – and sniffed again!

What shall I tell you? That I am living with Honey’s Mama and Papa in a charming house in London – and once more find delight in ‘family life’ and her perfect companionship? Last night, counting on one hand the people she liked, she crooked her fourth finger, saying ‘And of course I adore Emily – but I don’t expect she would like me.’ Of course you would like my gentle, elegant Honey, offspring as I say of a Prince and a spinster!

We have just been doing a motor tour in England – staying in lovely houses with their enchantment of shabby elegance – and oh the pleasure of going to bed in those Victorian bedrooms with the chintzes and the white rug on the worn carpet in front of the fire with the shining brass fender. When happiness is definitely out of sight I shall retire like Emily Dickinson into just such a bedroom – the last refuge.

I look very pretty but I feel 85 which means that my character possesses nearly every good quality, and with that deep comprehension that makes one’s tread more gentle, one’s voice more delicate. I often think of you and regret my youthful brusqueness in the days I was allowed to see you, and my flights of imagination turn with magnetic precision to memories of your exquisite imaginings.

Just now I’m in love with Mlle de Maupin which I’ve just read in an excellent translation. Do read it – the beauty of it sets one’s head buzzing with heavy honeybees. Also dear Virginia-Dolly-Emily’s “The Waves” – the flawless melting of style and feeling (What bad writing – this last sentence!)

Dearest please write to me. My mood is all dreams and I fear to touch reality in dread of awakening.

My love to Lucretia and my unsaid thoughts to Elmer.

Always
D

Source: Oscaria: In Memory of Dorothy Ierne Wilde. Ed. Natalie Clifford Barney. Privately printed, 1951.

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