Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

Villeneuve

2 January 1957

My dear Hodinus,

If you only knew how much I love the beautyful one you would understand how mad with joy I was when she took the book away with her to read - with the help of a dictionary! That is the heroism of one of those great Roman heroines who gave her life (in my case an [illegible] lifetime, since we no longer live in ancient Rome!) for her faith in her husband. I don't recall their names just now. Besides, I love Pam more than any marble statue.

Until you yourself, dear master, have read every page of this book - of which I am as proud as a cock who crows at the morning sun as though he himself had begotten it - you must write me many long letters, for I can't hear enough about it in a time when literature is so thoroughly camphorised in Kafka. It's hard living in a proletarian society; it's no use reading a German book these days, and the French will soon be going the same way. This is one reason why I wrote a book for my own amusement, and I've already finished it! How many writers today would do that sort of thing? Put yourself in the place of one or another famous author of history working today. From which of them would you expect this?

I'd rather have written my book in the English language, where people still know how to write and above all how to read! But my English isn't yet good enough. I dictated the stories from a few fragments and in one stretch, from October 1955 until shortly before Salzburg 1956, to a sweet young lady in Switzerland who always seemed to get hot and bothered at certain passages, which only fed my imagination. Will you write about that somewhere?

Put my heart in the arms of the beautyful one. Perhaps we'll see each other again in London this year? All my love to you all.

Yours,

OK

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