A Letter From Scotland

IN place of a Prize Essay, we open the Club this month with a letter from a literary household in Scotland. Edwin and Willa Muir are well known on both sides of the Atlantic for their translations and their works of criticism and fiction. There is no prize award for September. Next month, interest will be focused on the Essay on Citizenship, the subject of an announcement on p. 348 of this issue.

20 Queen’s Gardens
St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland
June 24, 1940
MY DEAREST MART : — Your letter was a comfort and a joy when it arrived two days ago. We are both going through very strange spiritual experiences here: there are days when I feel down and out, thinking that my physical resources are exhausted, that I am literally too tired to move, then the ‘something’ happens which ‘brings me back to myself’ again, and I see that the exhaustion was largely psychological, and that I am not so effete and incompetent as I may seem. Your letter was one of those ‘somethings’ and it heartened both Edwin and me, so that today I can sit down and write a letter, whereas two days ago I simply could not have done so.
Edwin was out till 6 A.M. this morning humping a rifle on sentry go. (That sentence should be enough to tell you volumes.) I have had a refugee as cook, but she has been sent away from the coast, like all refugees, and so I am cooking and sweeping in the home. I have a broadcast to prepare for July 1, but otherwise no relevant work at all. (I am thinking of applying for a teacher’s job anywhere in Scotland.) Edwin still has a little reviewing, but he is thinking of getting any job he can — yea, even to a job of clerking in a shipyard, so you can see where we are. Our profession has slid down from under our feet, and, invasion or no invasion, bills still have to be paid, and rent and taxes, and I doubt if we shall be able to keep our home going here.
In the circumstances, nothing would please us better than to send Gavin to the States. He is worth preserving, for his musical gifts are really astounding. The obverse side of that is his extraordinary susceptibility to sound: I think he must have extra-large resonance chambers in his ears; it is impossible to forecast what effect a really big aerial bombardment might have on his nervous system. This house here has a basement, and I should muffle his ears with cotton wool, of course, but even so I shrink from having him subjected to such an ordeal if it can be circumvented by getting him out of the country. We are making inquiries of the Overseas Reception Board, and if we can get him on a ship, would you really take him in? Edwin wrote some time ago to a friend (who has a son about Gavin’s age, a musical prodigy) asking him what arrangements he was making for his son, but no answer has come back, so we fear that perhaps they are in the States, since he is, I believe, an American citizen. We had thought that if the two could be ‘evacuated’ together they would stimulate each other’s music; but if the boy is already out of the country, that’s no good, and Gavin might as well cross overseas too.
I should send him off with a full and trusting heart if I knew he had you to depend on. He plays a piano well, not merely well for a boy of twelve, but well, by all standards. His compositions are amazingly well built up and impressive. And he is unsophisticated in everything but music; he wrote out a whole sonata of his, twenty-one pages of manuscript in two days, at top speed, his face flushed and his hair on end, simply because Edwin promised him three and six to buy a toy battle fleet if he finished the job. Music, ice cream, playing with a toy battle fleet and aeroplanes — these are his dominant interests! (Most of the children in the country are playing with toy aeroplanes and imitating airraid sirens: it is as good a way as any other of coming to terms with the present situation.)
As for ourselves: we shall carry on with easier minds if Gavin is secure. It is very good of you to suggest Toronto, but I fancy it is impossible. . . . Well, now, this is what I’m getting to: if Edwin’s autobiography and my novel are placed in America, I want you to get most of the advance money for Gavin’s keep. Nor do you need to have him in your house if you haven’t room or time: all I want to know is that he has someone to whom he can turn, someone to take a personal interest in him, someone who will give him the emotional centre he needs if he is to be happy in a strange land.
An old friend of mine here knows very well a musical panjandrum who in turn knows all the musical people in New York. If Gavin gets to the States she says this man can arrange the best musical tuition for him in New York for nothing, or next to nothing. I hope and pray that this is true, for musical education he ought to have. Oh Mary, I don’t know half the time what I am writing down: please forgive the confusion of this letter. Gavin is our weak spot; if he were provided for, we could gird our loins and plunge as we are able into the fray.
I do hope this letter gets safely across. Since I began it I have just heard that I have a good chance of getting a job teaching Latin and Greek in Galashiels Academy in September near the borders of Scotland. It would be enough to keep Edwin and myself, and so we should survive; we have only to keep going till then. Perhaps before then it may have dawned on our country that people can live, without money, on minimum rations, and so writers and artists might be kept from actual starvation. There’s lots of work we could do, if we could get the chance of it, but one needs to be on the spot in London to horn in on official jobs, and our being up here in Scotland is a disadvantage, not to mention our natural dislike of ‘horning in.’
I don’t think the Nazis will conquer us by force of arms: I do think we shall beat them in the end; but I am sure that before we do so there will be hell to pay. I am always hoping that we shall be able to use this war to construct a better and more equitable society in which our children’s children will be able to live at peace and in peace; we may achieve it, but the price will be terrible. So will you please look after Gavin if we can get him across? Of course I know that the voyage itself will be a risk, but it is weighing one risk against another, and I prefer taking the shipping risk. Much love to you.
WILLA

MY DEAREST MARY AND ARTHUR : — I’m adding this just to feel that I’m talking again to two old friends whom I loved so dearly in another kind of world. We can never thank you enough for thinking so kindly of us now. We aren’t defeatists: this country is capable of providing surpluses when it finds itself in the last ditch, and it may beat Hitler as it beat Napoleon. Gavin is our chief worry, as Willa has written already. It would be a terrible wrench to part with him, but an infinite comfort to know that he was with you.
When we had those long talks in Menton we did not imagine that anything like this lay before us. It’s an astounding time, probably unique in history. I’m going to keep a diary of it, — I think everyone here should do that, — for no other generation will pass through what we’re passing through, and it should be recorded. Our writing royalties, if any, might help to solve Gavin’s problem in the States — or rather, help you to solve it.
We should both be relieved if we could do that. I feel we’ll live through all this to a better time, and if we do, then the four of us must make up our minds to meet again — it doesn’t matter where — and pick up our old gay times. We often talk about you both.
Much love to you,
EDWIN