A Sort of Life (12 page)

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.

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
VI
th form (far, far distant now were the jeers of Carter and his immature gang who didn’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 Edmunds
¹
(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

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.

I went up to Oxford for the autumn term of 1922 to Balliol
²
with nothing resolved – a muddled adolescent who wanted to write but hadn’t found his subject, who wanted to express his lust
but was too scared to try, and who wanted to love but hadn’t found a real object. I tried to make my aunt Maud into an intermediary between me and the girl with the gold hair, for I was afraid to write to her at home where the letter might be seen by her formidable stepfather, but my aunt after passing her one letter refused to pass another and I don’t think I ever received a reply. At the same time I preserved carefully a postcard from my cousin who was somewhere in Germany, and after a little while I tried to persuade myself that I was in love with a young waitress at the George in the Cornmarket who corresponded with me during my first vac and sent me a snapshot. This correspondence too I preserved, making thus a harem out of scraps of paper.

‘For love of Love or from heart’s loneliness …’ No one has better expressed than Rupert Brooke in his adolescent verse this state of confused, half-expressed sexuality.

‘Pleasure’s not theirs, nor pain. They doubt, and sigh …’ But the genuine pain was not far off: it is possible to grow up between one blink of the eyelids and another.

¹
My father’s widowed secretary who had married, for the second time; her new husband was a big humourless master in the Junior School. By her first husband, with a more glamorous Irish name, she had a beautiful daughter with long golden hair falling below her waist. How often I walked up the long High Street almost as far as Northchurch and the Crooked Billet in the hope of catching sight of her. I think not one of us liked the idea of poor Edmunds as her stepfather. He seemed like an intruder on the realms of romance.

²
I had failed to win a scholarship, so why to Balliol? I think my father wisely plumped for a college which at that period was anti-athletic. Also the number of students there, as in a great city, offered the shelter of anonymity.

I
T
must have been the summer of 1923 that I reluctantly joined my family at Sheringham on the Norfolk coast. I was allowed two hundred and fifty pounds a year by my over-burdened father – a generous enough allowance in those days – and I was able, soon after I went up to Oxford, to reduce the cost to him by winning a history exhibition of fifty pounds. I had twice failed for a scholarship while at school, and I doubt whether my history had much improved in the intervening months, but we still lived in a world of influential friends. My tutor, Kenneth Bell, was an old pupil and disciple of my father’s and a governor of my school. I learned from him later that the history exhibition had been awarded mainly on my English essay. ‘That poem you quoted,’ he said, ‘I told them you had written it yourself.’ He must have known that I was trying to write poetry, but the poem in fact was one by Ezra Pound which I knew by heart. ‘It’s the white stag, Fame, we’re hunting …’ Few dons in 1923 had read Pound, and, when I told Kenneth Bell of his mistake, he was not unduly disturbed. The exhibition had to go to someone: better me than another.