LITMIR.BIZ

      To Edith Gaddis

      San José, Costa Rica

      4 May 1948

      dear Mother.

      Many thanks for your letter(s), which I had this morning. And pleasant reading on my bed of pain. Yes, I must tell you. Finally, after a rousing night—nothing equals a toothache—I went to call on Dr Saturnino Medal (University Loyola, Honduras, &c) and told him I realised that the foolishness had to stop. (Now remember the NewTestament: (or maybe it is the Old One) —plucking out offending members in order to be whole) Or AE Housman: ‘If it chance your eye offend you, Pluck it out lad, and be whole. But play the man, stand up and end you, When the sickness is your soul.’ At any rate, we plucked out the offending member. Dear heaven, how we worked. And sure enough, the damn’ thing was absessed, and no wonder that my pain had not been simply toothache but usurping other realms as well. To tell the truth, for this past two months I haven’t been feeling great, and (awful truth) have done such painfully little writing that there is that guilt too. Though I have been fairly consistent in taking notes on thought and happening, and now have a horrid accumulation of that. And to assure myself that I not waste all this time given me, have been steadily toiling through AJ Toynbee’s Study of History; losing much of course, it being an abridgement of the original 6 volumes and so many of the references have little meaning to me, with my vacuous background in history. But many revelations too, it is a magnificent book; and of course I want to settle down now and go through the whole 6. Because that brilliant man has somehow the meaning of meaning, and never in a smart way, you know, like so many of the books now: how to be free from nervous strain, how to write, how to read, how to be a Chinaman like Lin Yutang, &c &c. No this man is very humble before knowledge, never pedagogic.

      Well. I think it was rather dim of Chandler and (I suppose it was Constance Smith) to not call you, but go busting into the house. Not angry about it of course, it was Chandler’s work and I had told him he could leave it there until anytime he wanted to take it. But that manner of conduct seems to me presumptuous, and above all I cannot abide that. And thoughtless, which makes it all a little sad.

      Certainly Hartley Cross had a better life than most men; but I do now wish that I had managed to see him again, or reply to his and his wife’s kindnesses. (But even here I must add that a memorial fund sounds a bit thick to me; and even so far as the subject of the preceeding paragraph.) I have been thinking

      To Edith Gaddis recently about Robert L Stevenson. You know, I used to think he was a healthy cultivated and rather satisfied Englishman; and only recently have learned or rather realised, what a wanderer. And in bad health; but still a tramp, vagamundo. Romantic, incorrigably so. And his lines which I think ended up on his stone: These be the lines you wrote (grave?) for me: Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. I like him. (No memorial fund.)

      Now I gather you are enjoying the perennial wonder of spring. And I immediately feel that I should be there, helping you to ‘set the house in order’ and doing all of the things that a man should do and I seem to have avoided since I was six. (Good age.) All of it is thoroughly strange. First, let me say, I have found in this country one of the best societies I hope ever to encounter. And the climate, the countryside itself. The people is of course Catholic, thoroughly. And the way to see it now is not as Granga does with shudders of ignorant horror but you see it here as the foundation of a traditional society. The family is very important, and so unlike our country eminently successful. This is the sort of thing that has happened to most young Americans. That they are profoundly impressed by a self-sufficient society. It is the reason that the people have been so wonderfully hospitable to me: because they could afford it. Then comes the problem that foolish Chandler thought to solve in going to Italy, whose culture he admired from a distance for just these reasons. But he went in a time of troubles, and in addition immediately after the American (soldiery) had got done (or more miserably has not yet finished) setting a thoroughly bad example of Americans. And so (I gather from letters to others) Chandler who had intended to become integrated in that society instead met in Rome some Bulgarians and some French and some somethingelses and saw Lucky Luciano in a bar and—with the inestimable help of the language barrier—was defeated. It is always so.

      And

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