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Carmel, 3 July 37
Dear Father Freud,
There can be no question that anything of yours has ever met with lack of success with me. Firstly, you have completely destroyed my naïve pedagogic certainty in matters relating to W. Sh. Secondly, through your intervention you have made Oxford an important figure for me, an heir-apparent to the highest poetic rank. Does that count for nothing? And thirdly, since our last conversations in October you have tempted me to create a Shakespeare character of such a kind that in the last weeks of his life he struggles with the shade of Oxford and all the time wishes to confess: My plays are not by me at all, they're by him. But I cannot decide-as yet-whether this should be a genuine confession or whether it is just a delusion. I am simply not convinced that the works are not by W. Sh. of Str. Why should they not be? Because we have no proof that he ever went to school? Or because he made money and bought land? Dear Father Freud, what do we know about Shakespeare's contemporaries-Kyd, Peele, Greene, Webster and Massinger? Two generations of Civil War swept away all records. And the fact that Shakespeare tells us he carried the baldachin well? Dante tells us that he has been in hell. The poet's idea of truth is peculiar; it refers to the reality of his ideas, not to the content of experienced reality behind these ideas. But we will soon be talking of these and other things-how happy I am at the thought!
I was delighted to read a short essay in the last number of the Neue Tagebuch on your Moses article. But my memory of the whole work is so vivid and so precious a possession that I do not want to have my total impression clouded by being reminded once again of how much we are losing by your suppression of the book. We have discussed your reasons, they are good reasons; out of regard for your decision I have said nothing publicly about Moses and the reasons for its suppression, though I would like to have paid you a tribute of gratitude and r