'[Charlie] Lahr lent [Bonar] Thompson Andre Gide and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". "It was wonderful for me to feel that I belonged to the elect who had read these giants of the future", wrote Thompson, who credited Lahr with introducing him to "writers of whom I should not otherwised have heard until years later". The difficulty was that "As soon as authors did become well known, Charlie had done with them. He felt, I suppose, that they had been bought over, or had taken to writing for the mob, else why were they popular with the wrong kind of readers?".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bonar Thompson Print: Book
'I am particularly glad to have, from you, your new book, with its inscription. I thank you very much. For years I have known a number of your friends, and of course I have been reading your books for a long time; so that I feel that somehow we ought to have been acquainted before this. What pleases me particularly in a book like "The New Pretexts" (I had already read a great deal of it in reviews etc.) is the proof it offers that an artist is interesting himself in the daily guerrilla of literature.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'Many thanks for your letter and the book. I read the book at once, d?un trait. This is praise, I think! It reminds me of "Dominique".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 1 February 1940:
'Reading Burke. Reading Gide.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'I am reading Gide's memoirs, very disappointing I think, so far; I have found hardly anything that pleased me except the marble that had been dropped into the hole in the door. I read Jesting Pilate and liked it. I have tried Arabia Deserta for the fiftieth time, but can't manage it. Yet no doubt it is a more monumental work than Jesting Pilate.'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
Thursday 30 August 1934: 'No letters at all this summer. But there will be many next year, I predict. And I dont mind; the day, yesterday to be exact, being so triumphant: writing: the walk; reading, Leeson, a detective, Saint Simon, Henry James' preface to P. of a Lady -- very clever, [word illegible] but one or two things I recognise: then Gide's Journal, again full of stratling recollection -- things I cd have said myself.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Tuesday 2 October 1934:
'Books read or in reading [over summer 1934]:
Sh[akespea]re. Troilus.
Pericles.
Taming of Shrew.
Cymbeline.
Maupassant.
de Vigny. only scraps [the four French authors grouped by bracket in MS]
St Simon.
Gide.
Library books: Powys
Wells
Lady Brooke.
Prose. Dobree.
Alice James.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Friday 28 July 1939: 'Reading Gide's diaries, recommended by poor death mask Eddie [Sackville-West]. An interesting knotted book. Its queer that diaries now pullulate. No one can settle to a work of art. Comment only.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Monday 20 January 1941: 'Reading Gide. La Porte Etroite [1909] feeble, slaty, sentimental.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'La Silence de la Mer by "Vercors" (Schlumberger?) was given me by Raymond Mortimer yesterday and read without much admiration though with plenty of sympathy: published secretly under the Nazis in France. Read also too slow a story by Giono of the coming of Pan: it quickens at the end where human beings and animals dance together, with regrettable results [...] Read too in Illusions Perdues [...] and in Gide's Journal [...] Gide aroused my envy by reading, reading, but if I kept a journal I too should appear to have read, read a lot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Unknown
'Have you read 'The Pretty Lady'? It was while reading 'Isabelle' that the form of this novel suddenly presented itself to me, and I began to write it at once. Yet nothing could be less like calm 'Isabelle' than this feverish novel.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
Your book on Dostoevsky (for which many thanks) has made a very considerable impression upon me. And yet you say almost nothing about his technique, which interests me considerably . . . (If he had any technique!)
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
I have read a lot of 'The Vatican Swindle' and also 'The School of Women'.
I see in the course of a year a large number of American translations, and I have not yet seen one which was not extremely inferior to Madame Bussy’s translation of you.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
I have read a lot of 'The Vatican Swindle' and also 'The School of Women'.
I see in the course of a year a large number of American translations, and I have not yet seen one which was not extremely inferior to Madame Bussy’s translation of you.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
I wish I could write short novels like your completely admirable 'L’Ecole des Femmes'. But I can’t.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'I admit, then, that I read and admired "The Immoralist" all of two years ago. Davray gave it to me. I have not said anything but someone has filched my copy; and I wanted to get the book from you. As to the volume of criticism, all I can tell you is that I am so much in accord with the sentiment of this book that the sympathy--permit me to say affection-- that I felt for you from the first moment is infinitely increased.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'I admit, then, that I read and admired "The Immoralist" all of two years ago. Davray gave it to me. I have not said anything but someone has filched my copy; and I wanted to get the book from you. As to the volume of criticism, all I can tell you is that I am so much in accord with the sentiment of this book that the sympathy--permit me to say affection-- that I felt for you from the first moment is infinitely increased.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'I am proud to learn that there is one [a phrase in "Lord Jim"] worthy to serve as an epigraph to one of the books of "Les Caves du Vatican". What a beautiful start! What things you have put in the so characteristic and interesting pages of this fine beginning!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: see additional information
'Many thanks indeed for your good letter and for the little book ["La Symphonie Pastorale"] whose precious pages I will cut tonight "in the silence of my study" in a peaceful house where everyone has gone to bed.[...] For me that is the moment for friends' books.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'A few days ago in fact I re-read "Les Caves du Vatican", with the same interest but with an admiration that grows on each new reading. The infinity of things you put into that book, where the hand is so light and the thought so deep, is truly marvellous.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'Forgive me for not thanking you sooner for the book ["Incidences"]. It's my gouty wrist I can barely hold a pen. But I don't need to tell you that I find your pages always congenial beyond measure. In the volume you so kindly sent to me there are some pages that I know. I did not know the Prefaces. I read them with delight — and also the reflections on mythology.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
