Footnotes

'I FEEL WE ARE SORT OF BROTHERS. HOPE YOU DONT MIND' – HENRY WILLIAMSON ON LITERATURE, LOVE, THE GREAT WAR, AND HIS SPIRITUAL JOURNEY, as well as friends ranging from Lawrence of Arabia to Ted Hughes, writing with unguarded frankness, extraordinary vividness of phrase and at very great length to possibly his closest male friend; together with drafts for two novels in his Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence.

Williamson had a high regard for the letters that he received from Heygate, which may help explain – or reflect back – the special character possessed by his own letters. Writing to Heygate on 14 October 1954, he tells him: "Your letters are so interesting & direct: sense of living truth in most people's letters is rare – I know of no-one else who can, & does (same thing) write like that. This effect comes, of course, from their truth. Yesterday, after your latest, I thought, 'Why can't we make a book of them?' The trouble would be, of course, other living personalities. Your letters are not malicious in any way: the effect of what you write of the girls, etc, is one of kindly truth without any personalism of yourself. I wish I could say the same of my letters, & other writings. Too often the letters come from pain or unhappiness – from those contacts in which I am involved, & turning round & round, upside down and all ways – and a claustrophobic sense of suffocation" (adding a few months later: "I love your place, feel AT HOME there. I feel we are sort of brothers. Hope you dont mind").

The same letter, of 14 October, contains one of his many attempts to explain the how and why of his hero Phillip Maddison: "if I make Phillip behave as I did it will be out of HIS character; and, opposed to this, is the nagging thought (of which Farson, drunk, is merely an audible voice of my own conscience) that if I am not truthful the books will have no validity – trouble is between life and art. How wise is Waugh who writes, in some paper, that he never takes characters from life; always imagines them. In the imagination alone is freedom, as TEL wrote years ago... My theme originally was this:- Like George Meredith, for example, Phillip through causes plain to reader grows away or flings away from old mortifications and rebuilds anew. Or thinks he has. Based on a withered paternalism, roots eaten away in acid of despair, he rejects all the past, and will build as it were for 1000 years. Phoenix... I want to show all sides in one man, with a central integrity which never allows him to deceive himself about the defects of the 'qualities'. So, at last, after years of dream-roots, he returns in humility, to try and be simple as he was before the Great War, before Ideas bit him like gad fly".

After discussing some torrid goings-on among mutual acquaintances, the letter continues: "I knew a man of genius who was the political counterpart of DHLawrence in the humanistic wilderness; and what seemed rot in the 'thirties is now apparent in the 'fifties. There was, I think, no other way to preach the ideas, except in the street; just as there was no other way for DHLawrence than to write as he did, with all the over-emphasis and irritability and hostility... I think it is the fate of all pioneers, including the suffragettes who did not pull their punches. (As Theodora Maddison [in How Dear is Life, published eleven days later] pulls hers after the Gas Attack in 1915 at Ypres, and Lusitania: she splits with Sylvia who of course is S. Pankhurst. It is a question of power to endure: courage is expendable)./ Ideas, ideas: while perhaps only character and courage last in the end; and Art. So you see, my friend, the struggle between Art and Life is a great one, in a would-be psychic-historian of these times. Will it last? Shall the author last out? Every day it is doubted; every awakening a dullness of self-searching, with often violent self-condemnation".

As an example of one of the later letters, one could take one written on 2 November 1970, in which he tells Heygate about Ted Hughes, dubbed "a poet friend of mine", describing the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill and her child, and continuing: "CROW seemed to me to be a savage and exact exposé of man's treatment of women. CROW is the carrion bird, almost the devil of the species. To my utter surprise I was told by a friend of Ted's that CROW represented the female spirit – woman. How could this be, I wondered./ Then, having shown the book to Rhiannon, while we slept together in the Ilfracombe cottage, I was again shocked – when the 'my darling' letters ceased & she wrote that Ted was right: that CROW was the female spirit & that a large part of her was CROW". Later in the letter he reminisces about T.E. Lawrence: "I remember one of the sentences in a letter from 'T.E.L.' to me... In reply to a questionnaire in a child's 'Birthday' book, & one query – what is your dearest wish? he replied 'To be forgotten by my friends'. And his last letter to me said in p.s. 'In March 1935, exit T.E.S. from the R.A.F. Rather sad, I think.' Etc – I forget"; concluding his letter by yet again invoking the Christmas Truce of 1914: "I envy you your spirit, floating in a gentle aura of the love of Dora-John-Dora... This is NOT CROW... Rhiannon is no crow. The truth surely is simple. She has not yet met the man to awaken her & like Brunhilde, in Wagner's opera, to a full & glowing life in conjoined souls & bodies. I am not so blessed: my pathway led into an unseen love – Christmas Day 1914 was the inception of Greater Love, Dear John, I am so close to you, too. Henry" (a rare signing thus).

Memories of the Great War are never far from the surface. On 29 August 1956, in a discussion of Edmonds's A Subaltern's War he notes of the genre: "Yes, Barbusse pollinated many of the anti-war books; he had hell... the 1915 battles-on-the-wire were hell, & the discipline hell... One did not gain strength from battle experience: one lost resistance. Until it was gone. I saw men of 1914 & 1915, in 1917, with stony eyes. They knew. Their luck couldn't last"; and on the heading of a letter written on 25 September the year before: "40 years after Loos battle opening in rain & despair".

The drafts that are present in the archive are for the novels The Phoenix Generation (published in 1965) and Lucifer before Sunrise (1967), volumes twelve and fourteen of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, described by his daughter Anne as 'his fifteen-volume masterpiece encompassing a portrait of life in the first half of the twentieth century' (ODNB). It is clear from the letters that Williamson was in the habit of sending Heygate drafts of the work in progress; for example writing on 15 January 1955: "Many thanks for your Critique, which is just what I wanted... It is a botched book. The original was true; and that was the one three young soldiers of the Rifle Brigade – and all of your old school – read here in the autumn of 1945, and begged me to publish"; and on 30 January 1956: "I got your parcel of TSS Lucifer this morning & read your letter & Report as I walked up Brake Lane, first pushing the wrapping paper into mossy rabbit holes – period pieces now. Again, my thanks for your services: the frankness & candour of your comments of the greatest use".

The sections that we have here relate to the time Williamson had spent farming in Norfolk, which he described in his memoir The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941). This he fictionalised and wanted to incorporate in the Chronicle, the problem being that the first volume of this, which begins before the First World War, was not to appear until 1951; which meant that, on the advice of his publishers Faber, with whom he eventually fell out over the matter, he had to stay his hand. A large part of his farming experience went into volume fourteen, Lucifer before Sunrise (1967).

Our drafts for Phoenix Generation comprise a section of six mixed autograph and typed pages which opens: "When I look at the manuscript of my chronicle of the Norfolk farm in war-time...", and on the second page opens the narrative: "Now let us get on with our story./ One morning in the second week of August I left my cottage..."; going on to describe the children's party given that August by 'Roddy' Runnymeade (who becomes 'Boy' Runnymeade in one place, as he does in the published version), the narrative here corresponding to what was become Chapter 13. There are a further three pages, entirely autograph, for the section where Williamson draws parallels between the summer landscapes of August 1914 and August 1939, running on from Hitler's assurances that there would be no war: "It was an old-fashioned English summer. The butterflies were dancing over the fields of sugar beet and the seeded flowers and brambles of the hedges, as in that August Bank Holiday of 1914 – blue and white day of rushing air and sunshine, with clouds forming in the height of the sky but to be torn by the winds...".

The drafts for Lucifer before Sunrise comprise seven pages of mixed autograph and typed drafts, again heavily-worked in places, corresponding to the section describing the October pheasant shoot; and four pages of reworked typescript describing work on the farm in the pouring rain with Dick, "massive labourer with leg-wound from Ypres", ending: "I opened the oak door of my hut, my wet footprints crossed the floor, I seized the towel on the beam, and found myself singing. Outside the open door the silver-birch leaves glowing green under a blue sky" (the singing coming from the gramophone in the published version).