Now that I had reached the VIth form, work too was transformed. The School Certificate had been safely gained, and I was able to drop mathematics, Latin and Greek and choose the so-called modern side, with French, History and English as the main subjects. There were not many of us and we enjoyed frequent blank periods when we worked alone in the library – beneficiaries from the white cards of my father’s Scheme. French, which I never learnt properly to speak, became a fascinating literary language taught by a handsome tawny-faced man called Rawes who had his roots, so it was said, in Portugal and the wine trade and wore in his buttonhole the small green ribbon of a Portuguese decoration, for he had served with the unfortunate Portuguese troops who had been whipped, like porkers to an abattoir, to the mass slaughter of the Western Front. Most boys were frightened by his worldly good looks, his air of military authority, and he was unpopular, but I always enjoyed his teaching, and during his French lessons, when we would spend a whole hour juggling with words in an attempt to translate two or three lines of Molière or a sestet of Heredia, he opened my eyes to the importance of precision in my own language as well.
It was he who introduced me to Lytton Strachey’s Landmarks in French Literature, and through Strachey I at least imagined for a while that I had become a lover of Racine. How cunningly Strachey went about his persuasion: ‘The ordinary English reader today probably thinks of him – if he thinks of him at all – as a dull, frigid, conventional writer.’ No boy worth his salt could fail to respond to that challenge, and on long solitary walks – which were for pleasure now and not an escape from cricket, for Kenneth Richmond had made sure that I would be excused all games – I carried Bérénice in my pocket in place of The Epic of Hades.
It was now I began to develop a love for the landscape around Berkhamsted which never left me, so that Chesterton’s rather inferior political ballade ‘Of the First Rain’ moves me still like poetry with its key-line: ‘A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills.’ Chenies, Ivinghoe, Aldbury have always meant more to me than Dartmoor or the fells of Yorkshire, and the hidden spots of the Chilterns were all the dearer because they were on the very borders of Metroland. They had the excitement of a frontier. There was one dried stream-bed, half hidden in bushes, called the Woe Water because the stream only ran before a war. It ran before the Boer War and in July 1914. I visited it during the crisis of Munich and it was dry, but I failed to return in September 1939. The depth of this country was vertical rather than horizontal, so that a Green Man might be seen dressed in leaves only a few feet away from the school playing-fields, and once talking to a railway porter in a public house near the station I learned that he had not been as far as the High Street five hundred yards away since his wife died fifteen years before. Berkhamsted always reminds me of Rilke’s poem, where beyond ‘the narrow-chested’ suburban houses ‘a shepherd leans against the last lamp-post in the gloom’.
It was strange that, while I carried Racine with me on my walks and Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, I was beginning to write the most sentimental fantasies in bad poetic prose. One abominable one, called The Tick of the Clock, about an old woman’s solitary death, was published in the school magazine. I cut out the pages and posted them to the Star, an evening paper of the period, and for God knows what reason they published the story and sent me a cheque for three guineas. I took the editor’s kindly letter and the complimentary copy up to the Common, and for hours I sat on the abandoned rifle-butts reading the piece aloud to myself and to the dark green ocean of gorse and bracken. Now, I told myself, I was really a professional writer, and never again did the idea hold such excitement, pride and confidence; always later, even with the publication of my first novel, the excitement was overshadowed by the knowledge of failure, by awareness of the flawed intention. But that sunny afternoon I could detect no flaw in The Tick of the Clock. The sense of glory touched me for the first and last time.
Then I attempted the theatre: first, modestly enough, with one-act plays, very tragic and very brutal, set in the Middle Ages, which seemed to give scope to my poor brand of poetic prose. I was much under the influence of Maurice Hewlett and The Forest Lovers, and many an Isoult La Desirous found her way into the plays. ‘A slim girl, somewhat under the common size of the country, and overburdened with a curtain of black hair; and a sullen, brooding girl who says little, and that nakedly and askance; and in a pale face two grey eyes a-burning.’ So the Abbot of Holy Thorn described her, and it was much the same character which attracted me when I read over and over again Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande.
Then another influence succeeded Hewlett. I went to see Lord Dunsany’s If in which Henry Ainley played the leading part (I had myself played the Poet in Dunsany’s Lost Silk Hat at a school fête and felt myself his colleague). Immediately afterwards I began to write a fantastic play of which I cannot even remember the title. It celebrated what I liked to believe was the sense of poetry inherent in the ceremony of afternoon tea. In 1920 tea was still one of the important meals of the day, and the most aesthetic. The silver pot, the tall tiered cake-stand, like a Chinese temple, two kinds of bread and butter, white and brown, cucumber and tomato sandwiches cut razor-thin, scones, rock-buns, and then all the cakes – plum, madeira, caraway seed – the meal had about it the lavishness of a Victorian dinner. My play, I don’t know why, except that Dunsany’s had taken much the same road, moved from London to Samarkand.
I sent the play to one of the many dramatic societies which existed in 1920, though I didn’t fly so high as the Stage Society, and I was excited to receive a letter signed with a woman’s name accepting it for production. So up I went to London one morning to meet my first management. The address was somewhere in St John’s Wood, a district which in those days still retained the glamour of illicit love-nests. There was a long delay, after I sounded the bell, and when at last the door was opened, it was by an over-blown rosy woman holding a dressing-gown together, who was watched from the end of the passage by a naked man in a double bed. She looked with astonishment at my blue cap with a school crest while I explained that I had come about my play. Then she gave me a cup of rather weak Mazawattee tea (very different from the tea which I had been celebrating) and she became carefully vague, as she scrutinized me, about casting and the date of production. I don’t remember that I ever heard from her again, and the society, I am sure, soon ceased to exist. Perhaps my play was the last piece of wreckage at which she clutched, and down with it sank all her dreams of some rich sucker who would put up the expenses, incidental and accidental, of his play (including the quarter’s rent and the milk bill and all that went with the double bed at the end of the passage).
Still my play had been accepted. Disillusion came gently, slowly, with no letters in the day’s post bearing a London postmark, and I suppose it was then I began to have the dream which continued intermittently for twenty years. In the dream, though still at school, I was an established writer who was making enough money to support himself. Why should I fear examinations when I could simply, by an act of will, abandon all study? What did a university matter to me? Why should I bother about the future and that ugly Anglo-Saxon word of double meaning a ‘job’? But in waking life the classes continued without interruption, and the menace of scholarship examinations loomed ahead.
2
For English my father took charge of some of the classes, ‘Dicker’ Dale of others. Dicker’s were the more unexpected. He would read aloud to us, a class of half a dozen only, works which were not on the syllabus, introducing us in his lazy drawl – ‘it’s all experience’ – to Beddoes and Death’s Jest-Book. But perhaps my father’s lessons drove deeper roots. He was an unconventional teacher. His three subjects were English, History and the Latin classics, and they often overlapped, so that a lesson on Robert Browning might well turn into a discussion of Trevelyan’s history of Garibaldi’s campaigns. The amusement and respect which he inspired in the VIth form (far, far distant now were the jeers of Carter and his immature gang who d
idn’t know a thing about the Freudian interpretation of dreams) have been described by Claud Cockburn. ‘Nobody but a fool could fail to enjoy a history lesson with Charles Greene. “Speaking”, he would say, “of Rome, let me draw your attention to yesterday’s events in Paris. Let me draw your attention for a moment, if I may, to the probable – nay, assured – consequences of the machinations of Mr Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau. Let us gaze for a moment into the abyss which now opens before the feet of liberal Europe. Let us not for a moment hesitate to recognize the consequences of the evil acts of these misguided men. And with this in mind, let us return to a thoughtful consideration of the situation which faced Cicero (a shady character) and his associates at the moment of the Catiline conspiracy.”’
A letter written to me by Peter Quennell after I had reached Oxford describes my father’s manner as he lay, almost on his back, in his deep chair at the end of the table in the library, his mortar-board at a perilous angle (he was never during school hours without gown and mortar-board and it was a shock sometimes to encounter him in his uniform on the home side of the green baize door: it was like a breach of neutrality). I had gone to Oxford a term or two in advance of Quennell carrying with me his introduction to a girl much older than either of us who lived at Boar’s Hill. Greatly daring, Claud Cockburn and I invited her to lunch and I sent Quennell what must have been a rather boastful telegram (not that there was anything at all to boast about, for in a letter to my mother I wrote, ‘She was very charming, but on the wrong side of twenty’). This was his reply, arranged somewhat in the vers libre manner of his Masque of The Three Beasts which was about to be published by the Golden Cockerel Press. (The poem had already appeared in Public School Verse, and it was said that in the school baths he had been sometimes pursued by his own particular Carters who mockingly recited what seemed to them his loony lines.)
My dear Graham,
Even ironic laughter wants a fine sprinkling of discretion. Next time you take my dear Violet out to lunch you must arrange not to wire to me during your father’s period …
Your father was in the middle of what I think was an English period. It had become rather historical. The dear old gentleman was lying comfortably on his back – like an inverted turtle.
– Have you noticed how like a very dear old
turtle he is becoming? –
– and we had become gloomy but sonorous –
over the future of Democracy
And then of course entered Mrs Edmunds1 (Mr Edmunds has a new bluff sea captain macintosh which makes him look like a statue waiting to be unveiled
– and once wore a souwester with it)
– in a tottering hurry
And your father stopped in the middle of a more than Ciceronian period
– and heavy gloom and foreboding fell
upon everybody –
– and especially Peter when he heard
it was for him –
– and I pictured my father run over in
Theobald’s Road
or my Cockerel at his last gasp
And your father made ineffectual efforts to sit up and said in a severe and entirely cold and disapproving way that I might read it at 12
– and – suddenly relenting – if I was good – that I might read it
now – and immediately and at once
lest there was an answer
And I read it in icy stillness and while I was still glaring at it
– in astonishment of mind
– almost alarm –
your father
asked in a yet more disapproving way if there was an answer
but there wasn’t
And he slid back to the turtle position
and the Ciceronian period went on – and the Democracy of Europe and its fate rolled up again like storm clouds.
Literature can have a far more lasting influence than religious teaching, and my father’s enthusiasm for Robert Browning was the bacillus of a recurring fever. The edition I still possess of the poems was given me by him as a Confirmation present, but it was certainly not a belief in God that Browning confirmed. I had emerged from my psycho-analysis without any religious belief at all, certainly no belief in the Jesus of the school chapel, and what I took from Browning my father might well have thought unhealthily selective. To recall today any phrase from the Sermon on the Mount I must open the New Testament to find the words, but some lines of Browning have stayed in my memory for fifty years and have influenced my life more than any of the Beatitudes:
‘Better sin the whole sin, sure that God observes;
Then go live his life out! Life will try his nerves,
When the sky, which noticed all, makes no disclosure,
And the earth keeps up her terrible composure.’
‘I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.’
‘And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is – the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.’
And if I were to choose an epigraph for all the novels I have written, it would be from Bishop Blougram’s Apology:
‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demi-rep
That loves and saves her soul in new French books –
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway.’
With Robert Browning I lived in a region of adulteries, of assignations at dark street corners, of lascivious priests and hasty dagger thrusts, and of sexual passion far more heady than romantic love. Did my father, under that potent spell, not even notice the meaning of the lines he read us? Even in Swinburne I never felt so strongly the drive of desire – the sudden exact detail which could stir a boy physically.
‘What is the use of the lips’ red charm,
The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,
And the blood that blues the inside arm?’
‘Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts …’
‘Your soft hand is a woman of itself,
And mine the man’s bared breast she curls inside.’
‘Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower
on its bed,
O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might
base his head?’
‘.… there you stand,
Warm too, and white too: would this wine
Had washed all over that body of yours,
Ere I drank it, and you down with it, thus!’
After an afternoon of Browning it was not to Tennyson’s poems that one turned for a comparison: one walked up the High Street in the fading light, hoping to see a tress of gold hair dangling waist-deep.
‘—Ah, but the fresher faces! “Is it true”
Thou’lt ask, “some eyes are beautiful and new?
Some hair, – how can one choose but grasp such
wealth …?”’
In Browning there was the sense of danger, adventure, change: we could leave dull fidelity to the Lord of Burleigh and Sir Galahad.
As we grow old we are apt to forget the state of extreme sexual excitement in which we spent the years between sixteen and twenty. There was a musical comedy in the early twenties called The Cabaret Girl, in which Miss Dorothy Dickson starred. Today it would seem, I suppose, as comic as The Boy Friend, but, during my first year after leaving school, I saw it six times, and every time but one in a state of continuous physical excitement. (That one time an understudy had taken Miss Dickson’s part.) There is a short story of Sean O’Casey’s called ‘I Wanna Woman’ which is more in the mood of adolescence than romances of calf-love.
We lived in those years continuously with the sexual experience we had never known; we talked, we dreamt, we read, but it was always there,
and yet, when I came to write, it was sentimental verse or sentimental prose fantasies which leaked from the pen. And in between the periods of sexual excitement came agonizing crises of boredom. Boredom seemed to swell like a balloon inside the head; it became a pressure inside the skull: sometimes I feared the balloon would burst and I would lose my reason. Then, if it were not term-time, I would beg my brother Raymond to take the train with me to London, an hour away (a workman’s return ticket, if one caught an early enough train, cost only about three shillings). We would have lunch in a restaurant in Soho (a five-course half-crown lunch at Pinoli’s) and walk down Charing Cross Road looking at the second-hand books. I was soothed by the movements of the crowd and the hard resistance of the pavement under my feet. A country walk in those moods was no solution. Turf yields like a body and the feel of it brought the fever back. Every haystack was the possible scene of bucolic love.
Alcohol began to appeal to me in the innocent form of bitter beer. I was offered beer first by Lubbock, my riding master, whom I visited one evening in summer. I hated the taste and drank it down with an effort to prove my manliness, and yet some days later, on a long country walk with Raymond, the memory of the taste came back to taunt my thirst. We stopped at an inn for bread and cheese, and I drank bitter for the second time and enjoyed the taste with a pleasure that has never failed me since. I had found another alleviation of the boredom-sickness and later at Oxford it served me dangerously well, when for a whole term I was drunk from breakfast till bed.
What a mess those inexperienced years can be! Lust and boredom and sentimentality, a frightened longing for the prostitute in Jermyn Street, where there were real brothels in those days, an unreal romantic love for a girl with a tress of gold and a cousin who played tennis when it was almost too dark to see the ball – in that twilight world of calf-love any number of girls can rehearse simultaneously a sentimental part which never reaches performance. My younger brother and sister had a nurse who ill-treated them and fancied me. I felt a traitor to them every evening when I came and kissed her good night. Like a promise of something further she gave me my first razor, but the promise was not fulfilled. One night when I came up to the nursery before bed I found my mother there, and, to show that I was not ashamed of what I did on other occasions, I went and kissed the nurse quite openly on the lips. I was neither in love nor in lust, and I was glad enough when soon after that she went away, and the children were relieved of her tyranny.