Item 30 - Letter from Marius Bewley to James Smith

2 single sheets

17 Barton Road, Cambridge.—Has recently returned from Paris and Chartres, and hopes to go to Italy in the spring. Father Gilbey has been ‘elevated to the purple’ [created a domestic prelate] and has taken to wearing a top hat. Doyle’s thesis has been rejected, though with permission to rewrite it. Leavis sees this as evidence that the Faculty Board is seeking to kill graduate study, at least in English, by subversive means, and Bewley thinks he is probably right. Peter Lienhardt has a good position in the ‘decoding department of the army’, Cuttle has retired as senior tutor, and construction of the Downing chapel has actually begun. He will probably have to return to America in the summer, but Marjorie Nicolson thinks that, despite the Korean crisis, he has a good chance of getting a junior fellowship at Harvard. Leavis has written to propose his candidacy and Crane Brinton has sent an encouraging reply. Requests a reference from Smith. Asks whether Smith will be going to Italy or to England at Easter. Is going to Salisbury Cathedral this weekend. As the time to leave England approaches, his affection for it increases. ‘I imagine the first six months in America will be a grim business, especially as most of the people I rather liked have more or less permanently moved to Europe in the interval.’ Mason will not be returning to Cambridge the year after next, as his Rockefeller grant has not been renewed. ‘I believ[e] Leavis is overjoyed. He blames Mason for having been indiscreet with Queenie!’ Has seen a lot of Ralph [Leavis], who comes to the Downing Music Society, and is disturbed by his behaviour. ‘The poor boy moves, to an extent no one had suspected as long as he was only momentarily in view on trips up from Dartington, in a paralysis of terror.’ Leavis’s new book, «The Common Pursuit», now in proof, will, he thinks, be good, though marred by ‘Queenie’s insistence that Leavis include all the reviews in which he has anciently insulted Tillyard’. Asks whether Smith is going to print his Graham Greene lecture. ‘Leavis doesn’t really know anything about that kind of novel, and is constitutionally in-capable of learning.’