CANADA:
EDINBOROUGH, ARNOLD
(b. England 1922;
art critic, journalist & broadcaster, Editor of the Journal “Saturday Night”,
formed the influential Council for Business and the Arts in Canada).
A very good series of 12
early autograph letters to his close friend, Douglas Eves; 29-pages 8vo and
60-pages 4to, 1947 – 1954.
In 1947 Edinborough left Cambridge to take up an appointment at Queen’s
University in Kingston, Ontario. The first letter is written shortly before
sailing: “… I now languish in the deep heart of the
Lincolnshire harvest country-side
with tonsillitis ravaging my throat … my wife (God bless her) struggling with
all the final arrangements…”
The following extracts from a 6-page letter
written from Kingston, Ontario, on 20th Feb. 1949 will give an idea
of content although the bulk of the correspondence remains unread:
“…this winter has been
exceptionally mild……warm blustery rainy weather of the sort which made rowing at
Cambridge a superficially uninviting but actually exhilarating pastime………this
last year would have provided nostalgia – this year it makes me more amenable to
my surroundings. And perhaps it is for this reason basically that we are both
much more settled, for I find physical conditions affect me considerably, and I
have still not outgrown the incurably romantic idea that Chaucer should be read
in December, Keats in the spring, Yeats in the windy season, and the ‘moderns’
on a train amongst that pullulating ant-hill of humanity which they purport to
show. First, I have been unbelievably (to myself) successful at bursting into
print. The Ontario Library Review have agreed to publish the text of a fairly
long speech I delivered in November at a banquet of Librarians soundly swingeing
the apathy to literature and unthinking adherence to materialism that is so
common in America both in the States and here. Which has had further
repercussions in that I have also been invited to stir up a little more cultural
sediment………… the Queen’s Quarterly, which is Queen’s ‘learned journal’ has
accepted for publication …an article on ‘Sartre and the Existentialist Novel’.
Existentialism, you may remember, interested me a great deal in my last year at
Cambridge……… All of which, my dear Douglas … encourages me a good deal and makes
me want to make me scratch a furrow, the furrow a fertile field. But there are
more things too which are gradually breaking down my nostalgia for a Cambridge
which quite obviously does not exist any more anyhow. The first one is a man
called Robertson Davies…… editor of a small town newspaper in a town some two
hundred miles away, a writer of plays and a humorous diarist who makes me laugh
weekly in his syndicated column…… He produced yesterday…in the Dominion Drama
Festival a completely uncut version of the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ using an apron
stage, ordinary lighting and an unparalleled invention he produced an absolute
work of genius………the effect on a staid Canadian audience was such that it gave
applause for a good five minutes…I would like to see this play sent throughout
the length and breadth of the Dominion to show Canadians that there is a man
called Shakespeare, and that he is a man who could write good plays………There are
so many things I want to talk about, not the least of which is tea chez
Masefield. I feel that he is a good poetic mentor for you, too, because your
verse is more in his tradition than that of, say, C. Day Lewis. But to meet him
must be like speaking to Hardy or Shaw……”
89-pages; 1947-1954.
Quote Item No.
4824
Price: £295.00