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  • Letters to a Friend
  • J. H. Stape
Norman Douglas: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 6: Dear Sir (or Madam)—Letters of Norman Douglas to Bryher. Michael Allan, ed. General editors: Arthur S. Wensinger and Michael Allan. Graz/Feldkirch: W. Neugebauer Verlag, 2013. ix + 526 pp. €48.00

A SOCIAL MEDIA COMMENT on South Wind (1917), Douglas’s best-known book, strikes a surprisingly apt, even intelligent, note in a medium known neither for depth nor insight: “Gilbert & Sullivan on Capri where the little-known author lived.” Both remarks seem just: the novel is a whimsical jeux d’esprit, at points impossibly silly, and to the reader not aware of the persons being sent up perhaps rather beside the point, beside any point. At other moments it is sharply observant, witty in a wry way and all so very period. But the point in citing this snippet from the blogosphere is really for its characterization of Douglas as a “little-known author.” It was not always thus, of course, although it is certainly the case today, some half century after the writer’s death, when he seems on his way to fading from memory, a well-connected footnote, as it were, in the biographies of larger literary figures. Well, not quite fading, as it turns out. The heroic salvage work undertaken by several scholars, stimulated, in large part, by the formidable energies of Wilhelm Meusburger at the Voralberger Landsbibliothek in Bregenz, keeps the fire alive; and Michael Allan, as his learned and ample notes to this volume of letters—the sixth to appear in the series—amply demonstrate, is surely primus inter pares, knowing as much, if not more, about Douglas than anyone else now living. Scholars are obsessive, and it is thanks to Allan’s evident devotion and passionate interest in things “Douglasian” that this volume succeeds so well.

The selected letters in this volume—the whole series of Douglas letters is divided not chronologically but by recipient—are to Bryher (the pen name of Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894–1983) better known, if known at all, for having been the lover of the American poet H.D. Here again, the rescue work in archives (principally the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale where all the original letters reside) has been both exemplary and impressive. The result is that Bryher, herself a published writer eclipsed by her partner, emerges as someone [End Page 572] of at least period interest who also helps cast light on early twentieth-century “Sapphic” circles, with Alice B. Toklas, a consummate second fiddle herself, quipping on H.D.’s death that “It is impossible to believe in Bryher without H.D.” In assembling and meticulously annotating this one-sided correspondence, Allan proves Toklas wrong; and one ultimately “believes” in Bryher, even if her voice is carried almost exclusively through Douglas’s. (His some 220 letters and notes to her, written over thirty years, survive; an inveterate destroyer of incoming correspondence, he preserved only two missives from her, published here.)

Indeed, much of this volume’s interest lies in, and is sustained by, the commentary rather than by the letters themselves. As a letter writer, Douglas only rarely does a star turn, resembling Hardy or Conrad in being in their correspondence more often than not in work-a-day mode and mood, in contrast to Woolf, whose epistolary impulse is sometimes imbued with artistic ambitions, or E. M. Forster, who can by dint of a prose style of fascinating twists and turns make very much of very little. There is, of course, the occasional bright glow here, but it tends to be short-lived, and bread-and-butter mainly rules the day, as a casual thought or impression is conveyed to the ear of a friend, upcoming publications and works in progress are reported on, or the doings of mutual friends detailed.

What emerges from the whole is not only Douglas but also a kaleidoscopic glimpse of several personalities, some shadowy, others vivid. People of period note flit in and out—Compton Mackenzie, Richard Aldington, H.D.—as does the rare lion (Freud and Gide); and, of course, in addition to the Douglas circle (the Florentine bookseller...

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