[Mainly Typescripts] The Autobiographical Writings of Sylvia Lynd, poet, novelist, and Irish nationalist.

Note: Sylvia Lynd, née Dryhurst, poet, novelist, reviewer, significant member of the Book Society, Irish nationalist, daughter of anarchist and suffragette, Nannie Dryhurst (1888-1952). Her papers include, typescripts, manuscripts, unpublished illustrated children's 'books', correspondence, a remarkable diary reflecting her personal, social and literary life (and the cross she had to bear in the alcoholic, Robert Lynd), and substantial autobiographical fragments."Their home in Hampstead was the resort of those in literary circles", including James Joyce (whose wedding reception was held there), W.B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, etc, etc. More political (nationalist) friends included Roger Casement.This portion of the Lynd papers is divided into two sections:A. Original autobiographical writings by Sylvia LyndB. Papers relating to Maire Gaister's editing of Sylvia Lynd's autobiographyNone of Sylvia Lynd's attempts to write an autobiography reached completion, but the mass of material which survives, almost entirely unpublished, is of the greatest interest, both for subject matter and style. At its best (as the extracts quoted below indicate) it gives us, with deceptive simplicity, the sensitive reminiscences of a true poet, a woman whose whole life was spent at the centre of the highest Irish and English literary circles.The attempt which has been made in the following description to rescue the papers from the jumble in which they were found, and to order them properly, is by no means definitive. The editorial history of these papers is a nightmare: Sylvia Lynd herself appears to have engaged in continuous recasting of her material, and her daughter Maire Gaister went even further, guilty of nearly every editorial sin it is possible to commit: she mixed up the sections some more, switched her own editorial procedure halfway through, and made changes to both the style and substance of the text. As her 'Not for the Publisher' note in section B2 below shows, she also committed the cardinal sin of underestimating her material, working on the principle that her mother's autobiography was mainly of interest for the information it provides about famous authors. This is certainly not the case: Sylvia Lynd's autobiography, fragmented as it is, is a genuine work of art by a fine writer, and it richly deserves publication in unmediated form.A. Original autobiographical writings by Sylvia LyndA1. Typescript of autobiography including diary entries from 1935.A top copy typescript, with numerous autograph emendations and additions by SL, with three carbon copies, each with light (and different) autograph emendations. Between them the four versions provide all but pp.85-187 and 250 of the 315pp. of text. Undated, but with the greater part (pp.188-290) of the final section written in the form of diary, with entries dating from between 21 October and 28 November 1935. In 4to, on one side only of each leaf. The top copy is paginated in type 1, 2, 3, 5-14, 16-28, 30-69, 71-84, 200-221, 223, 226-249, 251-264, 266-315 (pages 3 and 268 are incomplete). The three carbon copies all include pages not present in the top copy: the first consists of pp.1-84, 200-249, 251-315; the second of pp.1-61, 64-84, 200-249, 251-315; the third, paginated 1-12, consists of pp.[188]-[199], and gives an account of a dinner party, at which Max Beerbohm and his wife were present, on 21 October 1935. A duplicate final page to this third carbon (p.199 or [12]) carries a long autograph addendum by SL, beginning: 'Robert very merry this evening'. Also present is a photocopy of another copy of pp.188-198 [paginated 1-11], reproducing different autograph emendations by SL, and headed by her '1935 or 36 DIARY begins | A dinner party at 5 Keats Grove, in fact several'.The first page of the whole memoir, headed 'AUTOBIOGRAPHY', begins: When I was eleven two important events occurred; my Uncle Ger had a bathroom built at 11, Downshire Hill; till then every night we bathed, or a few years earlier were bathed, before the gas fire in my mother's bedroom. After that we used the bathroom, with the exception of my father for whom a two gallon can of hot water was carried up every morning into his bedroom and who continued to use a sponge bath drawn out from under his bed until the end of his life. The rest of us managed with a big kettle boiled on a gas-ring in the bathroom, with which a very small bath could be obtained. [MG adds here: 'A splendid though alarming coppery geyser came later.']In the early pages she gives her childhood memories of the Purcell Operatic Society, Martin Shaw, and Gordon Craig, on whom she had her first crush:There, as the summit of earthly happiness it seemed to be, would I be sent for by Gordon Craig, whom I so much loved, as did all the feminine creatures he met with in those days, as in later and earlier ones. - I would be sent to paint his woodcuts to go out as advertisements of the "Book of Penny Toys". [...] In September 1901 I must have been nearly thirteen. He gave a very nice drawing of me to my mother who know how properly to prize it [...] and a letter, faithfully kept among the Lynd archives, describing me as "a strange and beautiful little girl".Soon afterwards William Butler Yeats makes an appearance:The next person that I met, and of course fell in love with in my usual way, was Yeats. He came with Florence Farr to supper at 11, Downshire Hill. My father said to him with his rather too usual abrupt bad manners, "Why do you wear that tie" - it was a very long black tie, tied in several enormous bows - to which W. B. Yeats replied, quick and witty as usual, "To match my hair and boots." I remember on the same occasion - it was the night after "The Shadowy Waters" at which Robert Farquharson played the chief part and had been sadly concerned because he hadn't given himself a larger piece of false nose for fear lest it should come off when he kissed Florence Farr - Yeats' comment on his was "A Worm" to which he carefully added "newly washed in warm water". Henry Nevinson who was constantly in and out in those days, and still madly in love with my charming mother, began, à propos of Yeats' saying, to recite an early Victorian nursery rhyme,"The rose had been washed,Newly washed by the rain"and changing it to:"The worm had been washed,Newly washed by the rain,Which Emma to William conveyed,But William he turned up his nose in disdain"- and I added,"And cut it in half with a spade."She continues with memories of Yeats's commendation of her performance in a school production of 'The Land of Heart's Desire', and the poet's dealings with Hugh Lane. Later reminiscences of Yeats include a Sunday supper with Rebecca West and Philip Guedalla in autumn of 1922, during which 'he did not appear to listen to them, but closed his eyes in the silliest way, and pretended to be asleep', andanother day at Plunket House where he was discoursing about the charms of Fascism. I have often thought what a genius he was, for he only had to write to make one forget his silly new political opinions. [...] how nice in every way he must have been before Lady Gregory taught him the whole cunning of snobbery; but perhaps it wasn't she who taught him: that may be Dublin's own lore, the city of genteel dastards.Before long comes the first reference to RL:It was on one of those occasions when Gerald Gould was rehearsing at 11, Downshire Hill, that Robert Lynd happened to be present. He and I had met at an Annual Meeting of the London Gaelic League the year before, my mother being already a Gaelic Leaguer as the result of the Abbey Theatre's performances in London which had brought George Morrow and Robert Lynd into the Gaelic League. I asked Robert Lynd to my 16th birthday party, and before my 17th one he asked me to marry him, holding me by the chin and kissing me at every lamp-post. When I told my mother that I was engaged to marry Robert Lynd, she replied firmly that I was "nothing of the sort", and I broke the news to Robert with the tears rolling down his cheeks, and gave him two kisses to show that we need not take the refusal too seriously. It was a half-year or perhaps a whole year later that Gerald Gould saw him, and asked me, "Who is that beautiful young man?" and when I told him, he said, "I think he is the most beautiful young man I have ever seen in my life." [...] Remembering that first kiss, I think of the last just before we both got ill half-way through September 1949. I was turning down the counterpane from his bed, and suddenly for no particular reason, for we had just come from dinner having walked up the hill from the little restaurant by the bus stop - suddenly we kissed, two kisses beside his mouth, and one more, thinking how pleasant it was to find ourselves friends again after so many less than loving years. The day after, my temperature suddenly rose to 103, and he became ill four days later.Another friend is Roger Casement:My mother and I had met Roger Casement in Dublin, and now he was often at our flat. He it was who insisted on Robert's not wearing a made-up tie, which Robert found much simpler than the tying of a bow. [...] I remember that our indifference to such a possibility as war made Roger Casement impatient. We often met him at Mrs. Green's house in Grosvenor Road, as well as at our own house after his return from South America. I don't remember the context, à propos of the English and the Germans in Africa - that the English expected their soldiers to behave as if they were Englishmen, but the Germans allowed them to follow their native ways as blacks, and mutilate the dead to their hearts' content. Dear Roger, a tall, dark-haired man with pale grey-blue eyes. I remember seeing him and Robert come striding down Downshire Hill together, and our grief when 1916 had brought all the old fierceness and danger back into the Irish and English scene. Until 1914-16 it hadn't existed since the time of the Fenians.She recalls RL's 'frightful and frightening shout with which he used to deter dogs from chasing cats, and on those rarer and possibly not equally dangerous occasions when he happened to see a man striking a woman, or two men hitting one another.'The early pages place the youthful SL squarely in the centre of London's literary milieu:I remember a paper-chase with the Oliviers in which I and Edward Garnett were some of the swiftly out-distanced hounds, [...] I remember bursting into tears when Henry Nevinson at a still earlier stage of my childhood teased me for wearing what he called "England's cruel red", quoting from the wearing of the green, and my replying in tears about my overall, "It isn't red, it's p-pink. At Limpsfield the Olivier girls - surely Bryn was the most beautiful girl that ever was - used to find pleasure in making Bunny Garnett cry. I remember Bunny as a comparatively gentle boy, gentler than his father, who was known to put little bare-legged girls into gorse bushes, much gentler than the Oliviers, of whom Margery and Bryn used to fight like daemons until they were exhausted. [...] I remember David or Bunny Garnett, who can't have been more than ten years old in those days, saying, "My grandmother's cat is a polygamous cat", as indeed it most probably was [...]She now turns to 'Irish politics and the Liberals being in power, and the stage when the world became serious and frightening before the first war was won and over. We had begun, I remember, with Robert's refusing to dine with our new and very nice friends the Bentleys, because Jack Bentley [i.e. E. C. Bentley] had taken the side of the Orangemen in some local riot in Ulster'. Reminiscences of Tom Kettle and J. C. Squire follow, after which she declares poignantly:And Tom Kettle's bust is in Stephen's Green, Dublin; Robert's essays are going in Everyman; and Clifford Sharp is dead, and Sir John Squire not discoverable at this moment in the telephone book; Desmond MacCarthy, the best of critics, and myself still choosing winners for the Book Society, and my poems being transcribed in Braille by the Greater London Fund for the Blind. Well, how much less pleasant it is to be old instead of young.She now gives an account of the 'penniless' early days of her marriage. 'All the same', she recalls, 'in those days we went to Ireland without fuss for our three weeks' holiday several times - to Donegal when Sheila was a baby, where we stayed at a farmhouse, and where Baby Junior was soon on the way (after which butter became more than 1/5 a lb.)'Next comes an account of the First World War:First we had gone for a day to Brighton when the posters began suddenly to fill with the news of the shooting of the Austrian Archduke. James Good, who knew the pattern of the world better than we did, I remember saying, "I don't like the look of that." Till then we had no conception that a war between England and Germany would soon be upon us, and a war between England and Ireland too. War between us seemed unthinkable. [...] just as before the last war when I said to Paddy Campbell that it wasn't wise to take rooms in a turning off Portland Place beside the BBC in 1938. Paddy replied that no-one except Robert and Sylvia were thinking of war. In 1914 we were similarly young and hopeful.Her account of the downfall of Roger Casement is of great interest:Roger Casement was at our house for the last time in 1913, when news came of the sinking of the "Titanic" - '"Titanic" goes down off Cape Race" I remember the poster, and the name of a brave Belfast engineer, Andrews, who went down with the ship. Already he was talking about the German war as certain, and telling about some Englishman who had exclaimed "I wish Ireland were under the sea" and Roger's pointing out what a misfortune for Ireland it had been that she happened to be so near England, for it was simply England's jealousy that had brought about the Union between the two countries, a complete misfortune for Ireland. [...] The next time I saw him was at the Bow Street Police Court. Robert had been writing in his defence to the Westminster Gazette, and I feared the police would presently be round to carry off a lot of his old letters about the Davies Press Agency, an early taste of the new Force "Sinn Fein" of a rebelly kind. I put them all into a suitcase, and when the Easter week rebellion had been suppressed, with blood, and half O'Connell Street burned down, and Roger Casement captured and brought to London, I brought the suitcase to Euston, and handed it to a good brave Liberal friend - S. K. Ratcliffe [...] At Bow Street I and Una Bannister - who became Una Parry - and her sister had some difficulty in getting in, because we hadn't realised how happy it would make the door-keeper to receive a small sum of money, namely 5/-. Once we had grasped that fact there were no further difficulties. We sat on the bench reserved for witnesses of whom there were scarcely any to be called, but a great many reporters from the Press. I noticed standing with the police a miserable youth who stayed there until Roger Casement had obviously turned his head and seen him; then he disappeared, and I wondered who he was. And I noticed how wretched the soldier looked who hadn't shaved for three or four days, and how handsome and unchanged Roger Casement looked.It is a surprise to see that SL is convinced of the genuineness of the celebrated 'Casement Diaries':I simply have forgotten whence came the information about the sodomitic diary - I think someone in Fleet Street told Robert about it. I remember suggesting that it might have belonged to some of the rubber traders on the Putumayo whose tortures Roger had denounced in his report. So Robert put that possibility to A. G. Gardiner and to Morel of the Aborigines Protection Society, for Roger had helped denounce the treatment of black slaves on the Congo. But alas, the diary appeared to be a diary of Roger Casement's own. We supposed of course that he had hoped to stop the Rising, especially as he must have heard that John MacNeill had sent orders countermanding it. But Roger would not plead that, or let his counsel plead it, although it meant that he would be certainly hanged. We went to see him in Brixton prison. We also made visits to all the men arrested in 1916. Arthur Griffiths greeted us with the words, "How do you like my beard?" which he pronounced "bird" but we guessed his meaning all right.After describing Tom Kettle's death she recalls an unlikely conjunction:Katherine Mansfield, when I first met her, was small and plump with dark eyes and hair. I remember her telling us that night how she had attended "The Rites of Isis" at which Aleister Crowley was expected to produce Magic, but which afterwards were suppressed by the police because someone in the audience had been kissed in the dark by a man with a moustache. Katherine found Aleister Crowley living on the platform in the Caxton Hall in a sort of cave built out of unsold copies of his magazine "The Equinox". The last news I had of him he was a retired warlock living at Tunbridge Wells.At p.50 she turns again to her childhood, describing 'the sensationally cold winter in 1893 when a water-jug in those days of jugs and basins, broke in two when it was lifted, and left a solid block of ice standing in the basin', her 'first big thunderstorm', and her 'first mushroom, a huge horse mushroom, it must have been, at Selsey, where came Mr. Bernard Shaw on a summer holiday'. Five pages later she is '23 or 24', and has moved with RLto a Regency house, 14, Downshire Hill, where we had a good landlord who put in a bathroom - a lovely bathroom to which we added a large gas fire. In that charming Regency house we had countless parties and made friends with Jack Squire, Clifford Sharp, and Desmond MacCarthy of the "New Statesman". And there B. J. was born, who has always been known by her initials, B. J. (Baby Junior), and while there we had made friends with Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry and Ivy Low [...]There are memories of 'Frances Hodgkins' studio on Porthmeor beach' in 1915:Alas, that I did not insist on getting hold of the picture which she had offered to give to me. I let it go, and in 1941, when I again had a little money to spare, she had lost it [...] She had taken to painting in oils in order to be able to correct the paintings, so she told me when we were at St. Ives again in 1917. It was a hideous portrait, alas, as far as I was concerned, for I had been baking in the summer sun when she had "a further go" at it in 1915, and my complexion had changed from pallor to the bright scarlet of a new brick villa. [...] I loved Frances Hodgkins' company, and her big swinging ear-rings [...]She describes her delight on the acceptance by the publishers Constable & Co of her first novel The ChorusThe book appeared in 1916, and the Times Literary Supplement commented in its short notes which I used to call their "pauper's burying ground" "disgusting in subject and unredeemed in treatment". A very good novel all the same, which G. M. Young thought brilliant, and Margaret Kennedy, the other day, found and read and said the same of, to my great astonishment and delight. It was at Steyning that I first fell in love, and began to write most of my poetry. Well, that is all long ago, but by me never forgotten.She discusses instances of 'second sight' in her life, before turning to her mother's death. A passage added in autograph reads:I had gone over to 5 Keats Grove to write a review for "Time & Tide" & had asked Dr. Johnson couldn't she give her something to make her sleep. She said "Don't fuss Sylvia. You always fuss." And when I came back she was sleeping. I held her head on my hand & heard her breathe her last.In a lengthy interlude she describes vividly a temporary attack of deafness in 1931, before returning to manifestations of the supernatural in her life. Recollections of her Aunt Bessie are intertwined with early memories: 'I remember the Diamond Jubilee and red-coated soldiers falling in faints in the sun').On p.83 she turns to her marriage, with digs at her daughters' politics (deleted by MG):Robert Lynd and I married for love, and industered [sic] for riches, as the Irish proverb has it. We married with far too little money according to the standards of the time, which thought £600 a year was the smallest sum that people could live on. In those cheap and kind old days we couldn't always take a cab. [...] I was buying clothes from Phyllis Frood, who cut sleeves beautifully, and moved from Hampstead High Street to rooms in Brook Street, and afterwards followed her husband, Nicholas Klishko, to Russia, where Stalin - note, dear Communist daughters - shot him as a supposed spy, as he has shot so many men better than himself. Moses and Christian ethics are better than the silly assumptions of KARL MARX.She now deals with the beginning of her marital difficulties: Robert and I lived together very happily for eight years, when to my great surprise one day, on my suggesting that three whiskies instead of four would be better after dinner, I found that we did not agree. With the founding of the "New Statesman" Robert began to drink so much that a Belfast woman, my doctor, could say to me in 1926 or 27, that she had heard a fellow townsman say, "I hear that man is drinking hard." Robert was a Socialist but also a Presbyterian. I fear that I taught him not to be ashamed of drinking, and learnt from him that whiskey drinking is a very insidious vice. The first time I remember his being drunk was when Clifford Sharp had come back from Sweden in 1916 or so, and had bought there a large flask that could hold a whole bottle of whiskey. It was a snowy night, and we travelled from our dinner at Golder's Green by Tube, and Robert was so stupefied when we were walking home in the snow that he proposed to sing "Good King Wenceslaus" to Archibald Herd whose respectable Tory gate we passed. We got to our own gate, and up to bed, I not knowing whether to laugh or cry.This first section of the diary ends on p.84 with reminiscences of 'our lovely cottage that my father had bought in my name in 1937 [...] I paid my father £965 that he paid for it, and sold it for 3,000 guineas, after living in it with much anxiety & many draughts for ten years. I wish I had it still, and a new car, so that I could get down to it, and legs on which I could walk as freely as I used to. However what can't be helped but be endured'.The first entry begins:OCTOBER 23rd. First I must put in the things I forgot yesterday. A letter from Priestley saying he is tired and depressed and that if I want to write to him about anything, to write care of Harper's. This, I think, is his way of saying that he wants a letter.The diary covers all aspects of SL's life, including her health, her Book Society duties, politics, and family news and finances ('This morning a letter from Pinker saying that Robert's contract with Dent's for a book of essays has at long last been arranged. This was my doing. I hope all will go well. The Terms are slightly better than Methuen's.'). References to a host of writers, including Rose Macaulay, John Drinkwater, Eleanor Farjeon, Dorothy Richardson, Edward Marsh, Lennox Robinson, J. C. Squire, Richard Church and T. S. Eliot. She seeks to 'put on record Sarah Purser's dislike on Yeats':I told her how cantakerous Willy Yeats is with me - always wanting me to say something for him to contradict. In which case he would doubtless murmur "the distaff or the broomstick" as I have heard him do when Rebecca West, I think, suggested that the "Wasteland" [sic] did not mean anything in the ordinary sense of meaning. That must have been in the winter of 1922-23. I always hope that I may have an opportunity of adding "The toasting fork" if he says that to me. Sarah likes Max's [i.e. Max Beerbohm's] story about "A tear shall lead the blind man -" Yeats the last time I met him made a point of expressing great contempt for Journalists - adding that Moore was a Journalist - Forgetting that Moore never wrote for the papers but that Yeats himself did. Then W. B. turned to me and asked me what papers I wrote for. I told this story to AE and he was very indignant. "You are a journalist in exactly the same way that Yeats as a journalist himself," he said.An account of a party with Oliver Gogarty ('very amusing, rather spiteful and mentioned titled people fairly often), has Gogarty quoting 'a limerick of Joyce's' on Lady Gregory:There was an old lady called Gregory,Said, "Come all ye poets in beggary",But found her imprudenceWhen thousands of studentsCried "We are all in that category.On 29 October [1934 or 1935?] she states that B. J. is 'off to dine with Virginia Woolf', and the following day she reports that her daughter returned after midnight: 'Only Adrian Stephen and Stephen Spender & William Plomer later at the Woolfs besides herself.' On 31 October 'B. J. is dining at the Ivy with Bryan Guinness - afterwards a concert - then to the party together. If he does not want to marry her, he should not make her so conspicuous.' On 6 November she describes a party at 'the Gollanczes', with 'the Gerard Hopkinses, the Lorants, Norman Collins, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes and later Rose [Macaulay]', and on 24 November 'a very good party' with 'Maxes, Gollanczes, Brookes, Bruces [...] Rose, Mona Wilkinson, Eileen Squire, Collinses, Thomases and D. Guthrie'. At the latter Beerbohm is reported to bedelighted with Alan Thomas's imitation of Howard Marshall's broadcast of the riot in Hyde park, and with the Eleanor Farjeon songs. The Broadcast Max called a "complete little work of art" and "the sort of thing he loved." At dinner he told me that his name for the new flats was "disreputable workhouses". He is going to broadcast at the end of the year and says he is sorry to have to depress everybody - the subject is London Revisited. He talked of the horror of the long corridors of the flats with the little doors - what sort of people will they grow up - the babies who are born in them! [...] Max accused me of tactlessness in saying that reading was more difficult than speaking as he is going to read - with Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. Max hoped that Aldous would read before him as Aldous has a very poor reading voice - weak and with a narrow intonation he said - and he hoped to shine coming after him.On 2 November:Mark Gertler was just going out of our gate as we got home. Shouted to him and brought him back for tea. He had been returning the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He finds T. E. Lawrence as repellent a personality as I do. Told us various stories - that Ottoline Morrell's elder brother the Duke comes to her tea-parties now and tells long and unexciting reminiscences which have to be listened to brightly and attentively. He was hostile to Lady Ott. during the war but has now made it up and bribed her, according to Mark, with the present of an old car, to listen to his account of his love affairs. Apparently his presence at the last tea-party ruined things from O. M.'s point of view because she wanted to listen to Stephen Spender's ideas on poetry and not to him. [...] Some French woman was there who talked to him about Katherine Mansfield. To Mark's surprise she was spoken of as a Saint. Mark explained that she was not a saint because she was spiteful, mischief-making, made fun of her friends behind their backs & bilked her creditors. [...] Mark described a night with his old circle, Katherine, Murry, D. H. Lawrence, Koteliansky, the Campbells and the Cannans. When they had discussed sex - Murry walking up and down the room and saying a certain condition of soul was necessary and Mark maintaining that there was no soul about it and that for his part "he jumped on the girl like a cock on a hen". Then there was a fierce argument, Koteliansky telling him that this was "untrue and bad" and Mark getting into a great rage defending himself. He was to have stayed the night on that occasion and had his pyjamas with him in a little parcel; but he got into such a rage that he wouldn't stay the night and walked away with his little parcel of pyjamas feeling intensely bitter and miserable because he thought he would see none of these people again.Marital tension is apparent throughout. On 5 November:R. very loving on Saturday night - i.e. Sunday morning - very cross on Sunday night - i.e. Monday morning (we had one of our standard quarrels that we had twice a year, perhaps, about his putting out the light) all well today. That and drink and not changing down soon enough - his fault and mine - are the only things we quarrel about. Once every two months each, about.She later comments that 'Robert's hypocritical strain is the worst thing about him'.On 20 November comes a reference to the object of her love:A letter this morning from Gordon Campbell after I had ceased even to half-expect one. He now proposes to come and see me. I want to see him. Whether I answer it or not, or however I answer it if I do, he is quite likely not to come, I think. This considering shows that I do really want to see him and don't only think that I do.After the end of the diary section the memoir resumes in more conventional form, with an anecdote concerning Rebecca West ('young American from Chicago': 'Miss West, I don't admire your novels'; West, 'quietly': 'Well, I was not proposing to read them aloud to you.'). Further on she recalls George Bernard Shawcoming to stay with us at Dewdney's Farm at Abinger to play in a cricket match, when I was about four years old and his telling me that I should be taking salt instead of sugar with my porridge. [...] It was I who introduced Robert Lynd to Bernard Shaw when we stayed with all the "New Statesman" people at the Beacon Hotel at Hindhead, and I heard the Great Man saying damn a dozen times because the cook had put a sprinkle of ham on his omelette. He asked Robert, "Do you feel disposed for a walk?", so Robert was very joyful.She transcribes a message sent by Shaw from Ayot Saint Lawrence in January 1949, on the back of a postcard, in which he describes himself as '92½, a widower', adding:I keep on your track through your writings, which are never unreadable, and regard you as a special friend, still a child. | Time flies so fast that the old days at Downshire (Hill) seem as yesterday. I cannot gad about nor orate nor drive my car safely; but I write as much as ever and am always in arrear with the work it puts on me.The account ends in profound sadness:It still seems very strange for me to be sitting here alone. [...] It was 1924 in March that we came here to 5 Keats Grove to live. And it was in 1945, after the end of the second war that I sold the cottage at Forest Green, to my great regret, and settled again in this beloved house. From here we saw one of the last of the air raids on London when a bomb was dropped close to Gospel Oak Station - how fantastically pretty the aeroplanes looked in the searchlights. [...] Robert's father, like Robert Lynd himself, was a very handsome man. He was also a presbyterian minister and as a young man had nearly lost his Church for drinking too much. [...] Robert gave it up for many years before we were married, but took to it again when the New Statesman was started and drank too much with many short breaks until the time of his death. Even a week before we both became ill and he was expecting to get better, he was expressing a good resolution not to go to the Freemason's Arms every night in the week. Of course I knew that he would break his word. Fleet Street is not an easy place to keep it in. But it was a sad surprise to me when in 1931, he having told me that he would accompany me to the Dentist in Brighton where it might be found necessary for Mr. Tybalt to take the nerve out of one of my beautiful teeth, he didn't get up in time to catch the train. [...] But 1919 was a year of evil destiny for me. It began with Robert's ordering me out of the bedroom when I wouldn't rub him with Elliman's embrocation before putting on Thermogene wool, because as I told him, the two together would take his skin off, and then my breaking the little mirror of a lamp - all on St. Valentine's Day, and then my putting in the early potatoes and then my having a miscarriage and not saying anything about it until Robert had caught the train to town. And I was curetted and after I had myself discovered that a dark green placenta had been left behind and after I had walked out to see how the spring was getting on and after I had admired the great elms which in those good days used to enclose the white road to the downs and thought how truly beautiful they were. Then I came to Dublin and tossed up for whether I should have an operation or not and in spite of the advice of the toss had it, and have been ill on and off ever since and seldom perfectly well.The memoir draws to a close, after a reminiscence of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, with a few more pages on RL's drinking. The last lines read:Well now they are all dead so I may tell the story. Alas and alas. | I remember at 32 Queen's Gate, when Katherine Mansfield was dead and Middleton Murry was publishing her letters, Rebecca's comment was "making soup of the bones." Well that is just what I am doing now.A2. Typescript of the first three chapters of an undated autobiographyThree copies of the first three chapters of an undated typed autobiography (different to Autobiography A) by SL. The first copy (10pp., foolscap 8vo) is heavily revised by SL, with numerous autograph emendations and additions, and with the first chapter titled in autograph 'Jog on Jog on or A Blue Sponge cake'. The other two copies (both 12pp., foolscap 8vo, one with light emendations by SL) both have two pages at the end of the second chapter (paginated 7 and 8) not present in the first copy. With three copies of a (1970s?) transcript of the three chapters, with the first titled 'JOG ON JOG ON and A BLUE SPONGE CAKE'.The first chapter deals with SL's parents' backgrounds, and contains a dig at her daughters' communism:My mother was an Irish Protestant follower of Peter KROPOTKIN & she used to edit an Anarchist paper "Freedom" and would arrange the lay-out with a comrade who was the printer, on the dining-room table. She also while I was very young used to teach Anarchy at an Anarchist Sunday school, where she would sometimes tell of the presence of a small boy called Ibie who used to keep used matches in his ears. [...] In fact my mother was no less an Anarchist about Anarchists than about other things. Later on, Louise Michel used to come sometimes to lunch and wrote me a poem for my birthday when I was thirteen and at King Alfred's School in Hampstead [...] I still have it in a box of family papers for I think Peter Kropotkin a better guide to civilisation with his book Mutual Aid than the Marxist bureaucracy.'Chapter One also contains an account of the death of SL's father's brother Charles James Dryhurst, while 'a midshipman on a troop ship [HMS Worcester] bound for India'. The two pages missing from the revised version describe the circumstances of his death, and the efforts of SL's grandmother to prove that 'Charlie has been murdered', resulting in the conviction for manslaughter of the captain and his son.The second chapter discusses her paternal uncles George and Frederick Dryhurst, 'Uncle Ger and Uncle Fer', and the third chapter deals with her 'wild Irish Great Grand Uncle, John Egan, Member for Tallacht in Grattan's Parliament'. The following passage, from Chapter 2, shows SL's sensitive treatment of the theme of childhood:'Uncle Ger used to take us to the pantomime where we sat in the front row of the Dress Circle and where I met, with agonised disappointment, my first ice. I was five years old and the occasion, I remember well, was the debut of Miss Ellaline Terriss at the Lyceum as Cinderella. Fortunately I had earned the reputation of having the prettiest manners that any little girl ever had, so I did not howl, and my mother finished the ice for me - a pink, white and green Neapolitan ice - thus saving the situation. I remember I was wearing a smock made of terra-cotta coloured wool crepe. Usually my smocks were white smocked in yellow. My hair was very fair and I was always beautifully turned out and when someone asked my mother how she managed it - for we notoriously hadn't a nurse and only one servant - she replied "Oh, I wash them out when I wash my hands." | For we were in the William Morris era in those days and also in the Jaeger era with the woollen terra cotta smock they overlapped. With the passing of another year it was to the Drury Lane pantomime we went seeing Dan Leno as the Widow Tawnky in Alladin, with Cinquavalli the juggler as the slave of the lamp. Later came the Forty Thieves, with Dan Leno as their Captain, and Hansel and Gretel with Humperdinck's music instead of the pantomime and a year later The Tinder Box, showing Uncle Fer instead of Uncle Ger guiding our infant fancies in less soundly philistine ways.'A3. Six autobiographical typescripts1: 'An Unimportant Fragment of Autobiography', beginning 'During the first war, in the winter of 1917-18, we were staying with our two children and their nurse in lodgings in a village in Surrey where we had stayed before (Abinger Hammer).' 4pp., 4to, paginated 1-4, with covering title leaf. With numerous autograph emendations. Repaginated in autograph 315-319. With two carbon copies, the first with emendations and repaginated by MG 75-78.1a: Untitled carbon copy of revised draft of 1 above. 4pp., 4to. Paginated by MG i-iv2: Untitled autobiographical account (4pp, 4to, with manuscript pagination 4-7) beginning 'I saw an extraordinary sight the other day - a little figure, not more than ten inches high, which glided across the lawn, glided across a flower bed, and disappeared completely among the leaves of the hedge - a little figure that wore a fawn-coloured coat and a white cap, and carried some sort of bag upon its shoulders.' With two carbon copies, the first with autograph emendations, and the second with the deleted autograph title 'At Tillies Cottage Forest Green'. Repaginated by MG 320-323.3: 'A Chapter of Autobiography, 1940.' 6pp., 4to, paginated 1-6. Repaginated by MG 324-329. Begins: 'This, I fear, will seem to most readers, a dull chapter. The only thing to be said in its favour is that it is true.' With emendations and note by MG.4: 'A Chapter of Autobiography' (subtitled in autograph 'My first ghost.'). 3pp., 4to, with covering title leaf. Paginated by MG 330-332. Begins: 'I am one of the comparatively rare people who have themselves seen a ghost, and no mere hearsay about it.' With two carbon copies, the first subtitled in autograph 'My first ghost' and the second 'My only ghost'. Both with autograph emendations.4a: Untitled revised draft of last item. 3pp., 4to, paginated 1-3, with minor autograph emendations. With two carbon copies.5: 'A Chapter of Autobiography' (subtitled in autograph 'My mother's strange vision.'). 4pp., 4to, paginated 1-4 (repaginated by MG 17a, 17b, 17c and 17d). With covering title leaf, and autograph emendations. Begins: 'I was brought up on what must have been a typical example of second sight.' With carbon copy, with autograph emendations. Paginated in pencil (including title) 48-52.6: 'Chap. 3.' Subtitled by MG: 'Her mother. Shaw. Sydney Oliver & other Fabians.' 6pp., 4to. Repaginated by MG 12-17. Begins: My mother's grandfather was a notably humane and intelligent Dr. Moorhead, in those great days of Dublin's Medical history.' With emendations. With carbon copy of pp.1-4.A4. Six autobiographical fragments Six incomplete pieces of autobiographical writing by SL - four in autograph, two typewritten - comprising:1. Autograph (9pp., 4to) beginning: 'In 1919 we went to Ireland, the first time since 1916.' Numerous emendations. Containing references to H. G. Wells and Rebecca West.2. Autograph (1p., 4to) beginning: 'Robert's Father, like Robert Lynd himself, was a very handsome man.' With emendations. In a deleted passage at the end SL explaining that she does not think 'Mr. Aneurin Bevan M.P. should be tolerated in the Government. Or Mrs. Bradock whom I heard declare at a public meeting in the Friend's Meeting House in Euston Road, that if there was another war the women of England would lie down on the railway tracks and stop the trains. Neither Mrs. Braddock or Mr. Aneurin Bevan have shown that they are fit to take on the responsibility of government because they haven't learnt to keep their word.'3. Autograph (2pp., 4to) beginning: 'I miss my cottage & I miss my cars I miss Robert Lynd for whom I had to do everything; but not until the 2nd war occasionally write his articles in the literary pages of the News Chronicle for him. Some of the Obituaries were mine, the one on Lawrence Binyon, the one on James Joyce, the one on a book by Victoria Sackville West "The Eagle & the Dove" & one about a German historical writer, Zweig, who killed himself, in Mexico, because he was partly Jewish.' Dated by MG to 1949 and titled by her 'The cottage below Leith Hill', with note 'Add 311 lower half'.4. Autograph (1p., 4to) beginning: 'For what reason I wrote my first book? For the pleasure of recording, or should I say boasting of? my experience of life.' With emendations.5. Typewritten account (2pp., 4to, paginated 2 and 3) of her childhood among 'socialists and anarchists of every nationality': 'You must not imagine when I talk of anarchists that my cradle was surroundeed with bearded foreigners armed with bombs. Foreigners in plenty there were and beards there were, for most men wore beards in those days; but bombs emphatically there were not. The Anarchists that I grew up among were particularly gentle people.' With emendations.6. Half a leaf of a typed transcription of SL's diary entry for 10 May [1939], beginning 'Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg this morning. War now begins in earnest. At least one hopes so. If only Mr. Chamberlain will call in his betters to help him, or resign.'7. Photocopy of later typescript (for MG) of the three chapters of the first copy of A1 (with SL's autograph emendations and without pp.7 and 8 of Chapter One). With two extra copies of Chapter Two, and an extra copy of Chapter Three. One copy with 'AUTOBIOGRAPHY of SYLVIA LYND' by MG at head of first page, and another with minor autograph additions by her to Chapters One and Three.B. Papers relating to Maire Gaister's editing of Sylvia Lynd's autobiographyB1. First version of Maire Gaister's edition of her mother's autobiographyRecast and retyped (in the 1980s?), with autograph notes and emendations by MG. Paginated in blue pencil. Pp.1-12, 20-24, 24a, 24b, 24c, 25, 26, 38-51, 56-60, 71-76, 78-82, 90-92, 94-119, 110, 109a, 110-134, 190-208, covering autograph note by MG before 98: 'Perhaps transfer these brushes with the supernatural to an Appendix, though they are interesting - & true, or seemed to her true (though perhaps the one about the fairies suggests a doubt.)'B2. Second version of Maire Gaister's edition of her mother's autobiographyWith emendations by MG. Pp.4-98, and second pp.1-24, 24b, 24c, 25-38, 38a, 39-41 [one page numbered '41, 42 & 43'], 44-89, 89a, 90-120; with unnumbered photocopy of letter before second p.96; and no second pp.81 and 82, and 106-111; and duplicate second pp.9-10, 21-22, 38a, 39, 40, 53-60, 77, 78-80, 83-85Autograph note by MG after first p.98: 'NOTE FOR THE PUBLISHER | The pagination starts again here because I originally thought that Sylvia Lynd should tell her story in chronological order, but have since decided that with the renewed interest in all the writers in the 1930s (not quite all), it would be better to begin with the 1936 [sic] diary, which is full of them, & then go back to begin at the beginning of her life. This is the order in which she actually wrote the book - first the 1936 diary & later, mainly after Robert Lynd's death, the rest. | Ed. | P.S. I have given Victoria Glendinning copies of the letters from Rebecca West & a photograph, along with small extracts of this book will appear shortly in Ian Norrie's book of "Writers & Hampstead" which grew out of the exhibition during the Hampstead millennium.'B3. Transcripts of various portions of Sylvia Lynd's autobiography, edited by Maire Gaister for publication, with associated miscellaneous materialA large number of typed transcripts of sections of SL's autobiography, apparently made in the 1970s and 1980s, by or for MG, for an edition to be published under the title 'Slices of Autobiography'. In two blue card folders. With original text by MG herself, including several versions, in typescript and manuscript, of a planned introduction. Also a yellow folder (marked 'Gooseberry by S. L.'), containing a large number of photocopies of transcripts of letters and other documents from the Lynd archive; an envelope containing '4 sample illustrations for Sylvia Lynd's Slices of Autobiography'; several leaves of miscellaneous autograph notes by MG for her edition (including autograph 'Queries on MS' from the transcriber).SEE Sylvia Lynd's Diaries, 1935-1940, sku#16322. And ralated material sku #s 16324, 16325, 16226 16327.