Autograph Letter signed, from Palestine to 'The Hon. David Roberts & Mrs Roberts'.

Bookseller Notes

A superb, lengthy wartime letter to David Roberts, his old history master at Christ's Hospital school, and his wife Margaret ('Peggy'), discussing his existence in the Middle East, its effect on his creativity, his interactions with locals and various attempts with limited success to extract entertainments from his 'isolated billet kneedeep in sand'. The letter is undated but can confidently be dated to December 1941; written from Palestine, its subject matter and various references corresponding to published examples sent to his mother and his Oxford friend Jean Turner in that month. At its heart is the depressing effect of his circumstances on his creative life: 'I've seldom felt more fruitless and aimless and bored and miserable in my life', he explains, and I'm amazed to find what an utterly dull, ugly person I am [...] I've given up trying to escape from this stagnation [...]There is excellent material for sketching and painting everywhere but I feel much too apathetic & useless to get materials together & do it'.Douglas had 'come out to find adventure', but now wishes 'I were almost anywhere else' his quarters are uncomfortable, 'and the rains are on'. Douglas reflects, however, that 'I'm still glad I came, because of the places I've been to' and proceeds to tell them of recent trips to Syria and Lebanon, where there are 'few signs of recent battles' and 'what must (in appearance) be the most beautiful people in the world'; this he contrasts with Palestine, 'this land of milk and honey', where he had expected to find 'intellectual Jewish exiles' but is instead 'full of motheaten arabs and bandy-legged hirsute permanently pregnant Jewesses'. His dissatisfaction extends from the locals to his surrounding officers complaining that 'I know twice as much about my job as most of the majors & captains', but they will gladly accept the credit for his knowledge.In his leisure time, he will 'ride, eat too much for dinner and then go to the camp cinema, where I eat sweets and nourish my third chin [...] I play rugger now and then but the regimental team and the referees have so little idea of the rules that it is more like soccer [...] than rugger, and not much like either'; he closes with an account of a raucous evening in a Jewish caf, perhaps calculated to shock his former schoolmaster ('I bet you don't believe it, but its true'), where he has seized the microphone from a 'so-called Russian singer' and then finished 'by doing an inspired tapdance' projecting an alternative future, where he might, instead of a literary career, 'in postwar years be found entertaining tourists with smutty Yiddish stories, the darling of all the shonks in Tel Aviv'.In the event, Douglas did return from his desert campaigns, but not from a subsequent posting in Normandy, where he died and was buried in 1944.The letter is unpublished; indeed, whilst there are numerous references to Roberts in the Letters collected by Desmond Graham, and Graham's biography, no other letters to him are recorded but it is clear that, as other sources corroborate, Roberts was one of the formative influences on the young poet, who signs his letter affectionately, 'Love, Keith'.[With:] Douglas (Keith) Alamein to Zem Zem. PL Editions Poetry, 1946, FIRST EDITION, frontispiece and 2 further colour-printed plates by the author along with several text illustrations by the same, paper browned throughout pp. 141, xvi, 8vo original quarter red cloth with grey boards, backstrip lettered in gilt and faded, a little worn and the lower joint with splitting to cloth, fair condition overall, the flyleaf inscribed by the author's mother: 'A.M.R. [and] D.S.R. from J.D. [i.e., Josephine Douglas], in memory of K.C.D., 1935-1945'[And:] A first edition copy of Desmond Graham's biography of Douglas (1974), sent to Peggy Roberts with the publisher's compliments and a pair of letters from the biographer laid in (one to the same, the other to Edward Malins) along with a couple of clipped reviews