The little I do in the course of my day’s work has proved enough to what my old Waterman. This new life here is a big block of material (virgin except for a million and one others like me, who are writing their letters as if for publication) and I yearn to sit down and carve out of it a wonderful admixture of fabrication and fact, which shall be utterly unfit for anything. As it is, it has been hard to get my hand back in, after being out of the game six months.
To be sure, you may say I could sit in my room every night from 7 to 11 and write the Great American Epic or something. But I’m afraid that would be expending electricity without anything epochal ensuing. “The American in France” will not be written indoors, I think. It will be carved indelibly on amusing little character, ideas and aspect of the country.
While we are on the subject of writing I’ll answer your question about Arnold Bennett. Yes, he makes lots of money – and writes lots of rot. He is of the Thomas Hardy school, only he never got above the primary grades. His “Old Wives’ Tale” is a masterpiece among novels in English, but that ends it. Like old Robert W. Chambers, Bennett is not an author, he is the proprietor of a book factory. He comes in in the morning, looks over the previous day’s report, and tells his foreman, “We’ll have to speed up production. Add on 10 hands in the plot department, set those Five Towns piece-workers to doing France local color stuff – we must reach 12,000 words daily.” But, one thing old A.B. does is write English, while Chambers produces novels couched in the most hearstian Cosmopolitanese that a shop-girl ever read.
Nothing at all new in your Mr. Wilcomb’s (?) idea about the partition of Russia. Only I don’t agree that Germany will get much of it. Japan has her eye on Manchuria and her hand in northeastern Siberia. As for the rest, I can see a number of small republics, ultimately, constituted along racial lines, possibly. I believe the nations are going to readjust the balance of power after this war, then enforce peace. A lasting peace would be impossible while one or more countries were too large or too strong. Hence the fall of the old order of imperialism, German, Russian or anything else.
As to the front, I am further from it than ever, for, as you may know, it has begun to move back towards Germany. Also, though there are many things about the army, which I have yet to learn, no body can convince me that there is any such institution as a large yellow card, saying, “I am at the front”. That wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare.
I hope you realize now, young woman, that it is nothing unhealthy in my make-up that makes me love a pipe. You’ve read, no doubt, that greatest of pipe books – “My Lady Nicotine”. My two pipes are beginning to have an offensive smell, or rather two smells, one a piece. But they’re the best friends I have here; though they only gurgle a bit, I can understand their language.
Arnold Bennett Wikipedia Entry
My Lady Nicotine – complete book online. Grandpa smoked a pipe all his life.
Next post September 3.
Letters from Sidney Friend During The Great War 