28.02.35
Dear P.D., On Tuesday I took my discharge from the RAF and started southward by road, meaning to call at Bourne and see Manning; but to-day I turned eastward, instead, hearing that he was dead.
It seems queer news, for the books are so much more intense than he ever was, and his dying doesn't, cannot affect them. Therefore what has died really? Our hopes of having more from him - but that is greed. The writing them was duch pain-and pains- to him. Of late I had devoutly wished him to cease trying to write. He had done enough; two wonderful works, full-sized: four lesser things. A man who can produce one decent book is a fortunate man, surely? Some friends of mine, in dying, have robbed me; Hogarth and Aubrey Herbert are two empty places which no one and nothing can ever fill. Wheras Doughty and Hardy and Manning had earned their release. yet his hoong takes away a person of great kindness, exquisite and pathetic. It means one rare thing less in our setting. You will be very sad.
My losing the Raf numbs me, so that I haven't much feeling to spare for the while. In fact I find myself wishing all the time that my own curtain would fall. It seems as if I had finished, now. Strange to think how Manning, sick, poor, fastidious, worked like a slave for year after year, not on the concrete and palpable boats or engines of my ambition, but on stringing words together to shape his ideas and reasonings. That's what being a born writer means, I suppose. And today it is all over and nobody ever heard of him. If he had been famous in his day he would have liked it, I think; liked it deprecatingly. As for fame-after-death, it's a thing to spit at; the only minds worth winning are the warm ones about us. If we miss those we are failures. I suppose his not being really English, and so generally ill, barred him from his fellows, Only not in Her privates we which is hot blooded and familiar. it is puzzling. How I wish, for my own sake, that he hadn't slipped away in this fashion; but how like him. He was too shy to let anyone tell him how good he was