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JUNIOR COMMON ROOM
BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD. Mar: 3: '96
Dear Mr Murray
I have never written to you all this term and my conscience is reproaching me. I hear sometimes of you & class from Dick. I hope you are finding your work pleasant and are not too fagged at the close of this session. I suppose the session will be near its end. Our term ends in about three weeks and I believe we are only a little before Glasgow.
This session has been very pleasant. The weather has been better and I have had far less work and have had more time for my necessary classics. I am getting quite to like Mods. work. This term we have done Cicero's Verrines, two books of the Annals of Tacitus, and nearly all Virgil. I found Virgil very interesting; it is really worth one's while wasting time in trying to translate him. I have
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sent in my Newdigate and Stanhope things. I think it's very likely I won't get either, but I shouldn't much mind. I wrote a paper on Modern Criticism for a club here, which took me some time: but nearly all the extra work I have been doing has been in literature. There was a very nice review of Sir Quixote and my Yellow Book story in last week's Saturday Review, which brought me several requests for contributions. I have now got all the stories in my book of short stories placed in diff.t magazines, and have corrected all the proofs of my essays. These and the fishing-book, wh. has been long delayed, will be out in April. I am just putting the last touches to my big novel, before I begin to type-write it. It is an enormous story and I cannot feel sure of it. Sometimes it seems good, and very often cumbrous and ill put-together.
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Perhaps you know of the sad defeat of our boat on the river. From being head we have gone down to third, New and Balliol bumping us. We did not much mind New, but we did mind Balliol. A chastened gloom hung over the college for a few days, which is now being dispelled by the preparation for the Eights.
I don't know if you ever bicycled much here. I have been doing a good deal lately with my tutor and found the country round Oxford lovely. Twice I have gone down right into the Berkshire moors, and to Bablockhithe and Didcot and Wantage. This afternoon I went up the river in a sailing-boat. We tried a race with another, which in the course of it turned right upside down and the unhappy crew had to flounder to shore with little more than their faces visible. I have temporarily given up golfing in sheer desperation.
Our Ibsen society has, I am afraid, degenerated
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sadly. First they gave up Ibsen and went through in succession Cymbeline, the Dolly Dialogues, Kenneth Grahame's Golden Age, till they came to Rudyard Kipling and stayed there. Secondly, they have changed their name to "The Crocodiles" and adopted a tie of green, gray and white, under a fatuous idea that this is the colour of a crocodile's back. Finally they seem in danger of turning into a dining club.
Were you troubled much here with socialists and volunteers? There seem to be a great many of both in the place, whose invitations to join their numbers I have been dodging for weeks.
I hope your Greek Literature is getting on well, and that Carlyon has found a sensible manager.
Remember me kindly to Lady Mary.
Yours very sincerely
John Buchan
Please do not trouble to answer this rambling letter, unless you have ever so much time.
