Percival "Percy" Arland Ussher (1899 -1980) was an Anglo-Irish academic, essayist and translator. He published The Face and Mind of Ireland (1949) and Three Great Irishmen (1952), a comparative study of Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce. This letter gives a good, and reasonably sympathetic, view of Beckett's masterwork as it was seen at the time that it was first performed.
Charles Henry Gordon Campbell, 2nd Baron Glenavy (1885–1963) was a barrister who married Beatrice the artist Elvery. He was a contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, to whom he was introduced by Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. Known as Gordon Campbell, he served as Secretary of the new Department of Industry and Commerce. He was appointed a director of the Bank of Ireland. He and his wife were on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set.
I8 Green RdThanks for your interesting letter. It's always good to hear these fellows attacked. They get away with it too easily. But still..
Blackrock
Dear Glenavy,
When we came out from GODOT I said to my companion, & heard other people saying:
Let's go have a drink.
- No good, it's much too late. Everything shuts.
- Let's go to XX
- No. Too far. I haven't enough petrol.
- We'll find somehwere we can have coffee.
- Oh it's too much of a crush at this hour.
I want to go to bed.
- It's so late, I know I shan't sleep.
- Why did we come? - Oh we had to see Godot.
