Introduction (1936) to Margot Ruddock, The Lemon Tree (1937)

Abstract

I was in Majorca, breakfasting in bed at 7.30 when my wife announced that Margot Collis had arrived¹ — a† woman in whom I had some two years before divined a frustrated tragic genius. She had asked my help to found a poets’ theatre.² Of distinguished beauty of face and limb, a successful provincial actress, managing her own company, she had come to London hoping to get work on the London stage.³ Her father’s name was Ruddock, and she wishes, when we speak of her as a poet, to be called Margot Ruddock. I brought her to Dulac the painter, and Ashton the creator and producer of ballets,⁴ subtle technical minds with an instinctive knowledge of the next step in whatever art they discussed. I asked her to recite some poems. She had all the tricks of the professional elocutionist, but rehearsed by Ashton and Dulac substituted a musical clarity pleasant to a poet’s ear. In a few days she had lost it and returned unconsciously to the tricks, but what can be done once can be done again.⁵ I had never seen her act, but after thirty years’ experience I know from the mind of man and woman what they can do† upon the stage when they have found their legs, judging that mind perhaps from the way they sink into a chair or lift a cup.