{"id":968,"date":"2019-10-17T12:02:42","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T16:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/blog\/?p=968"},"modified":"2019-10-24T12:14:23","modified_gmt":"2019-10-24T16:14:23","slug":"an-anglo-american-friendship-john-masefields-letters-to-miss-dorothy-bull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/?p=968","title":{"rendered":"An Anglo-American Friendship: John Masefield\u2019s Letters to Miss Dorothy Bull"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Masefield\u2019s Letters to Litchfield<\/h2>\n

By Barbara Potter, Litchfield Historical Society<\/p>\n

The first of his mid-April letters to Dorothy Bull (1888-1934), on April 20, 1917, was a sad and simple plea for more letters. \u00a0Brief, mournful, to the point.<\/p>\n

The second, penned some 24 hours later, is John Masefield\u2019s (1878-1967) enthusiastic reply to Bull\u2019s latest letter. \u00a0The reply conveys his elation but is stuffed with starched enthusiasm and jaunty catchphrases prompting questions to fly from the folder in which both letters sit, washed up into their jarring juxtaposition.<\/p>\n

\"\"

English: John Masefield (1878-1967) Portrait by Mary Dale Clarke<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The juxtaposition seems <\/em>important. \u00a0We just aren\u2019t sure why. \u00a0We, at the Litchfield Historical Society, don\u2019t even know questions to ask. \u00a0So will share what little we know follow it with a future post.<\/p>\n

John Masefield wrote Dorothy Bull at least 94 times. \u00a0Masefield wrote a 95th letter to her brother after his return from Australia, in 1935. \u00a0In that letter Masefield echoed sentiments shared by locals at Bull\u2019s death a year earlier. \u00a0She was a good person, they said without exception.\u00a0 Of all Masefield letters to Dorothy Bull, his \u2018line\u2019 of the 20th of April is singularly, palpably sad. \u00a0Like an exclamation point that leaps off of a page.<\/p>\n

Masefield expressed the same sadness to other, more important correspondents while conducting his unpaid research on the Somme\u2019s battlefields in the spring of 1917.<\/p>\n

Foremost among them was Masefield\u2019s wife Constance (Letters from the Front: 1915-1917, Peter Vansittart, 1984). Masefield wrote her almost daily.\u00a0 He wrote detailed, reports about the war\u2019s progress, war crimes, field actions, conditions and fortifications, and the remains strewn across battlefields all along the Somme\u2019s war zone. \u00a0These letters appear to have been written without a shred of self-censorship and little or no B.E.F. Field Censor filtering.\u00a0 But then these were the letters of an Englishman to his English wife.\u00a0 Relative to Masefield\u2019s Anglo-American letters of the same period there seems to be no comparison in terms of candor and content.<\/p>\n

Masefield also wrote to Florence Corliss from the Somme. \u00a0He wrote the American heiress, and wife of prominent American banker Thomas William Lamont, nearly 2,200 times between 1916 and 1952. \u00a0At the beginning of April 1917, Masefield noted, to his wife Constance, that Florence Lamont \u201csurpasses herself\u201d by sharing her knowledge about the United States\u2019 declaration of war. \u00a0For this or, perhaps, for other reasons, Masefield\u2019s letters to Lamont may have undergone lighter international censorship than letters to other Americans such as Bull.<\/p>\n

But we just can\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

What we do know is that Masefield\u2019s April 20th letter to Bull conveys a sadness nowhere else so clearly expressed in this Collection. \u00a0And it is a letter written one day apart from the letter bearing Masefield\u2019s great (most brittle?) good cheer.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re left wondering what happened in Masefield\u2019s mind during this period. \u00a0Was he trying to paper over impressions expressed to Bull the preceding day?\u00a0 Was he self-censoring his thoughts so assiduously they would sail past the toughest B.E.F. Field Censors with the pace of a military march?<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

\"\"

American: Dorothy Bull (1888-1934)<\/p><\/div>\n

Bull wouldn\u2019t see Masefield until the following winter, when he came to lecture across the U.S. and visit U.S. military camps with recruits preparing for war. \u00a0\u00a0But it seems quite possible that, in 1918, the failed debutante and aspiring writer reframed her probing questions for England\u2019s successful poet and battlefield chronicler.<\/p>\n

We wish we knew the whereabouts of Bull\u2019s letters to Masefield.<\/p>\n

But we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

They might have answered some of our questions. \u00a0But they might not.<\/p>\n

Perhaps all of them went the way of the wind in the stretch of time when many Masefield papers came to special collections at Harvard and Columbia. \u00a0Perhaps not.<\/p>\n

In any event, we all feel privileged for the tiny peek Dorothy Bull and her family gave us…into the mind of an Englishman with courage enough to explore a real waste land four or five years before T.S. Eliot penned the immortal opening lines of his 1922 poem: \u00a0\u201cApril is the cruellest month.\u201d<\/p>\n

The finding aid for this collection is a work in progress. You may view it here. We are also working to digitize the collection and will let you know when the images are available in the Connecticut Digital Archives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Masefield\u2019s Letters to Litchfield By Barbara Potter, Litchfield Historical Society The first of his mid-April letters to Dorothy Bull (1888-1934), on April 20, 1917, was a sad and simple plea for more letters. \u00a0Brief, mournful, to the point. The second, penned some 24 hours later, is John Masefield\u2019s (1878-1967) enthusiastic reply to Bull\u2019s latest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":189,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/189"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=968"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":983,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions\/983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}