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2, HARCOURT BUILDINGS, TEMPLE, E.C.
10/12/13
Dear Buchan
I am going to yield in a belated way to an impulse I have successfully resisted on many former occasions. The fact that I have so resisted it makes this letter absurdly out of date.
The fact is I want to praise in an unrestrained way your story "Kings of Orion" in "The Moon Endureth". I have read the whole book many times, and given many copies of it to friends, and like it all, but as to that
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particular story I have never read it without wanting to write to you in an extravagant way that would probably make you question my sanity. I happened to glance at the book - which I keep in my chambers - during an idle hour to-day, and this time it's too much for me, and I must write.
I keep telling myself that it's absurd and uncritical to feel that it's the best short story ever written, but it's no use, to me it is, far and away; it "gets" me in a way no other story ever did, and it never loses its power with me.
I think if I'd liked it less excessively I should have written to you long ago,
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when the book first came out, but you know how anyone with English blood in him hates the idea of "gushing", and about that story I've got to gush if I say anything. So I've managed to restrain myself hitherto.
Anyhow, from what I have said, you will realise that anything I say about "Kings of Orion" is if anything an understatement of what I really feel about it, I don't want to say nice things to you about it, I would rather avoid them if I could.
But I am reluctantly compelled to write to you to thank you and congratulate you for having written a story, which - while I can give myself no special reason for thinking as I do - moves and excites and holds me in a way which no other piece of writing has ever gone near doing.
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Alfred would tell you that I am as a rule a particularly cold and critical reader, whose enjoyment of what he reads - or sees in the case of a play - is purely in the literary skill of the author, and in no way complicated by emotion. That's true as a rule, but it's emphatically untrue of this one story.
There: don't think I'm mad, I'm just as I always was, and if anything calmer than usual for having got this "off my chest".
By the way, I hope you'll some day publish some of your poems separately. They are many of them the real thing, e.g. I have shown "The Last Song of Oisin" to various discriminating persons, and they have not been content with agreeing to praise it, but have borrowed my book to copy it out.
Yours sincerely
Geoffrey Gathorne-Hardy
