2110-5-6-6

[F.S. OLIVER]

I hope very much your own health is thoroughly reestablished. I gather that you had a very much worse time than I ever thought. My advice to you is - don't put so great a strain on the seams.

KENRY HOUSE, KINGSTON HILL, SURREY.

16/2 30

Dear John Guido,

I have recently received three or four letters wh. cheered my heart very much; but none of them more so than yours.

I shd. have written sooner to thank you; but I've been unwell, & forbidden all exercises of the mind & body. However I had a dear little marmozet called Sir Thomas Horder down here the other day, & after going over me (so to speak) with a tooth

comb, & after innumerable punchings rappings, squeezings & soundings, he gave me a fairly reassuring report. If, as he & the surgeon both think, the surgical part of my troubles is now at an end (after 4 bloody operations!) my bad lung will gradually be reduced to peaceful & orderly behaviour. Since Sept 1 it has been in revolt & was greatly encouraged by the two knifings I had in Nov. & Dec.

My chief trouble lately has been that I have hardly seen any of my friends - not because

they wd.n't come, but because "I wasn't let". Consequently I have got into a condition of mind nearer mutiny than I have yet been in - all the more dangerous because I hadn't been able to do any work.

I've been surprised at the kind reception my book has had (mainly of course from people who have not read it, but only amiably skimmed). For I wrote it to please myself & a few friends, & I didn't suppose that that odd creature the reviewer was likely to find it to his taste. So far he seems on the whole to have done so - except for two or three who seem to have got "Ordeal by Battle" on the brain, & a crosspatch pedant who can't forgive

me for not reading German books & who says, mot just, that I shouldn't get a 'First' in any up to date history tripos. I'm sincerely grieved to have made him so cross, & I expect he will not be the solitary daw to peck at me.

What an excellent bit of molten lava the "Fair Maid of Perth" is! I have been rereading it for the first time in 50 years. When one thinks how it was written, after the smash, & while that damnably mind-&-body-destroying "Napoleon" was in the stocks it is a miracle of constructive exuberant imagination & also of the dramatic fulfilment of his intention as to the character he meant to draw. Of course the joins are often very clumsily bolted, & there are repetitions that suggest lapses of memory; but the main thing is achieved triumphantly.

[in margin:] Love to Susie, your dramatist daughter & yourself. I'll get Katie to try & make a plan so soon as I am better. Yours F.S.O.