For both of us, the great event of that term was the series of lectures on modern poetry given by Mr I. A. Richards. Here, at last, was the prophet we had been waiting for—this pale, mild, muscular, curly-headed young man who announced in his plaintive baa-lamb voice: ‘According to me, it’s quite possible that, in fifty years’ time, people will have stopped writing poetry altogether …’ The substance of those lectures has since become famous through Mr Richards’ books. But, to us, he was infinitely more than a brilliant new literary critic: he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World. Up to this moment, we had been a pair of romantic conservatives, devil-worshippers, votaries of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Vice,’ Manicheans, would-be Kropotkin anarchists, who refused to read T. S. Eliot (because of his vogue amongst the Poshocracy), or the newspapers, or Freud. Now, in a moment, all was changed. Poets, ordered Mr Richards, were to reflect aspects of the World-Picture. Poetry wasn’t a holy flame, a fire-bird from the moon; it was a group of interrelated stimuli acting upon the ocular nerves, the semi-circular canals, the brain, the solar plexus, the digestive and sexual organs. It did you medically demonstrable good, like a dose of strychnine or salts. We became behaviourists, materialists, atheists. In our conversation, we substituted the word ‘emotive’ for the word beautiful; we learnt to condemn inferior work as a ‘failure in communication,’ or more crushing still, as ‘a private poem.’ We talked excitedly about ‘the phantom aesthetic state.’
But if Mr Richards enormously stimulated us, he plunged us, also, into the profoundest gloom. It seemed to us that everything we had valued would have to be scrapped. We had reactions, of course, in favour of genre, of strangeness, of the Rats’ Hostel—now regretfully stowed away in the lumber room of ‘private poetry.’ But it was no good: we were banished from that world forever: we could only pay it short occasional visits, as mourners visit a cemetery, and then return.
About the middle of February, I had sufficiently pulled myself together to be able to start a new novel: it was to be called Christopher Garland. Here is the synopsis, exactly as I wrote it, on the first page of a clean exercise book (my handwriting, at this period, had shrunk into strings of tiny hooks and dots—because, as an expert explained to me several years later, I hated myself so much that I was trying to disappear altogether):
A young man’s first year after leaving school. The action takes place in London, Sussex and Cambridge. Roughly speaking, it is to show how the young man is, through a series of experiences and incidents, gradually committed to art—to the art which he had, at first, not taken very seriously.
The story opens with the arrival of the young man after his last term at school; goes on to his first great period of inspiration, while staying in Sussex. Then comes Cambridge, with its terrible stupefying effect on the brain and spirit. In the vacation, the young man, cut off from his friends by his perceptions but not yet fully initiate, drifts into a dismal struggle with the personality of the aunt with whom he lives. A love affair with a friend’s fiancée brings him to himself, and, with its renuniciation, he enters upon a period, if not of peace, at least of courage and assurance for the future.
It will be noticed at once that ‘Isherwood the Artist’ was now in full temporary ascendancy over ‘War.’ The mood of Christopher Garland was to be monastic renunciation of all life’s pleasures—and of all life’s difficulties as well. But Garland, like most of his kind, was only a pseudo-monk; and so this was only a pseudo-subject for a novel—doomed as unworkable from the start. The key-phrase—‘cut off from his friends by his perceptions’—touching in its adolescent arrogance, comes strangely from an admirer of Katherine Mansfield (‘To be rooted in Life—that is what I want, that is what I must try for.’) It hadn’t yet occurred to me that the artist, just because he has these ‘perceptions,’ is thereby under an obligation to communicate them to ‘his friends.’ Christopher Garland might, in fact, be described as a ‘Life-snob.’ Note the snobbish-religious flavour of ‘gradually committed to art’ and ‘not yet fully initiate.’ But I mustn’t be too hard on poor Christopher. With all his faults, he was an advance on Leonard Merrows (who would undoubtedly have developed into a full-blown Poshocrat): he did care, in deadly earnest, for the cultural values—had he lived in these less complex days, he might even have found himself defending an art gallery with a machine-gun. I suppose that what I, in my muddled way, was trying to do was to define the artist’s position in society—a legitimate and interesting theme. But as ‘society,’ for me, still meant the peerage; and as I still imagined that ‘being an artist’ was a kind of neurotic alternative to being an ordinary human man, it is hardly surprising that my ideas got a little mixed.
My sixth term began—the term of the Tripos examination. Now, at last, I had to look my bogy in the face. What on earth was I going to do? I wasn’t dead. I saw no prospect of becoming seriously ill. Certain legendary heroes had jumped out of windows or thrown themselves downstairs, deliberately breaking an arm: I hadn’t the nerve. Of course, there was work. Even now, with desperate cramming, I might scrape a Second, make sure of a Third. I did try, after a fashion, to cover some of the lost ground: it was like starting to walk across Siberia. After a couple of days I gave it up. The absurd truth was that my vanity sided with my laziness: I was still secretly rather proud of being a scholar. I knew I could never get a First; a Second I scorned. I didn’t want to be ignominiously degraded. Rather than that, I would fail altogether.
Next autumn, no doubt, I should at length be allowed to read English. But I had lost my enthusiasm for the English school. And, next autumn, Chalmers would be gone. That was the blackest part of the whole prospect. I simply couldn’t imagine how I should be able to bear Cambridge without him.
Suppose I stayed on and did, somehow, get a degree: what would become of me? I should have to be a schoolmaster. But I didn’t want to be a schoolmaster—I wanted, at least, to escape from that world. I wanted to learn to direct films. Roger East was going to try for a job in the Stoll studios; and he’d said, already, that it was a pity I couldn’t join him. How I longed to be independent, to earn money of my own! And I had got to wait another whole year!
Chalmers and I were walking round the college court together, one evening late in April. I said: ‘You know, there’s a perfectly simple way out of this. I shall have to get myself sent down.’
I hadn’t really meant it; and yet, as I spoke the words, I felt suddenly that this was an unalterable decision. Chalmers was delighted. We at once began discussing ways and means. A public scandal with a woman—too difficult to arrange. Damage to a University monument—too expensive. Assault on a don—risk of prison or a lunatic asylum. (Besides which, all these offences might, conceivably, be forgiven.) No, my crime must be strictly academic; and, as such, unpardonable. What about a lampoon pinned to the college notice-board? An attractive idea; but probably a tactful servant would whisk it out of the way before the harm was done: it would never get to the eyes or ears of the authorities. And a single lampoon, however insulting, would be far too little: I should have to open a regular campaign—banners, leaflets, notes thrown in at the tutor’s window, manifestos on lavatory paper: the technical problems would be enormous. None of these schemes would do. My gesture must be in connection with the Tripos itself. That was it! I must actually go into the examination-room and write my insults as answers to the questions. The examining body itself would see them: they couldn’t possibly be ignored. And, when the sealed packets were opened—imagine the examiners’ faces! Imagine what they would say to each other! Chalmers laughed riotously. He hadn’t, as yet, the least suspicion that this wasn’t just one more of a thousand fantastic anti-Cambridge plots. And I was glad that he didn’t suspect. As long as I could keep my intentions to myself, they remained a little unreal. I had more than a month to get through, before the examinations. I mustn’t, on any account, allow myself to get rattled. Meanwhile, I took t
he precaution of stopping any possible funk-holes or emergency exits—I burnt all my history note-books (most of them three-quarters empty) and sold my history text-books—all except Bishop Stubbs. Him I dropped ceremonially into the River Cam. On the title page I had written a quotation from Julius Ccesar, Act III, Scene 2: ‘Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read …’
Beethoven and Schubert helped to fill the interval. We took them up the Backs in a punt, on Chalmers’ portable gramophone, and lay listening for hours under the willows to the Eroika, the ‘C Sharp Minor Quartette’ and the ‘Trio in B Flat.’ The slow movement of the ‘Trio’ reminded me, for some reason, of The Boy in the Bush: indeed, my whole pleasure in music was literary-romantic. When I told Chalmers about this, he immediately discovered that the violin was singing: ‘Oh, Mister Law-rence! Oh, Mister Law-rence …’ The opening of the Eroika symphony he described as: ‘Already the crowds prepare …’ The first movement of the ‘C Sharp Minor’ we called ‘The Angels.’
The middle of May was glorious and very hot. Now that I was irrevocably doomed to leave Cambridge, I began to enjoy University life as never before. I spent whole afternoons on the river, in punts and canoes. I made several new friends—neither Poshocrats nor hearties but nice ordinary intelligent people whom I’d said good morning to every day for six terms, without ever getting to know. One of them even asked me to share digs with him next autumn, when, according to custom, I should be living outside college. I felt inclined to reply that I should be living a very long way outside College; but I only thanked him, and said my plans were vague.
Philip paid us a visit, at our joint invitation. He and Chalmers got on well together. It was amusing to stand Philip against our academic background. He was so entirely the Londoner: his smart slick suit looked comic amidst the fashionable dilettante untidiness of the Poshocrats. He read us passages from his latest opus, The Deverels. It was wonderfully sordid—eighty thousand words of sheer middle-class gloom: for Philip, on my advice, had temporarily abandoned Mayfair and was writing about North Kensington. How he gloated over it! By the time he had finished with the district, there wasn’t a window left unbroken; every pair of lace curtains was faded, every aspidistra was dusty, every Venetian blind was falling to pieces; not a single door-bell or lavatory chain was in working order; all coal fires smoked, all gas leaked; the electric light glared, ruining your eyesight, the rooms were draughty, stuffy, freezing, far too hot; the baths dripped, the clocks chimed incorrectly, the telephone was shrill; the smells were quite indescribable—though Philip certainly did his best; no back garden was without its rubbish heap, composed of rusty sardine-tins, smashed beer-bottles, hair-combings, odd shoes and at least one dead cat. And the people who inhabited this wilderness! All were hideous, diseased, underdeveloped, sly, lecherous, hypocritical, stingy, pot-bellied, cancerous, deaf—with the exception of a few girls, grudgingly admitted to be ‘cheaply pretty,’ who, of course, left home at the age of seventeen for a life of vice, ending in the clinic or the river. Philip had still three more chapters to write: he hadn’t yet killed off all his principal characters.
The Tripos began on June the first. There were no portents; no signs in the heavens. Nothing happened to disturb the illusion of absolute matter-of-factness with which I filled my fountain-pen, put on my gown, and set out, in plenty of time, for the examination hall. You would have noticed nothing strange about me as I followed the other candidates obediently through the doorway, and took my place. The paper was before me on the desk, the ink was in its bottle, and there lay the printed question-sheet. And now, at length, I had to ask myself: what exactly was I going to do?
Deliberately, I had avoided making any plans. I would leave everything to the inspiration of the moment. I had vaguely expected that my excitement and desperation would, when the time came, provide me with some daring, amazing idea. But now, confronted with a paper on mediaeval history, I felt neither excited nor desperate nor, in the very least, daring. The task before me no longer appeared as a sensational act of defiance, but rather as a kind of literary puzzle; I had got to write something which would ensure my being sent down from Cambridge. That was all. But—what?
I hear the reader exclaim: ‘How can you ask?’ Wasn’t this the opportunity of a lifetime—for a communist manifesto, a scalding satire, a magnificent passage of obscene libel, a frank reasonable open letter to the authorities on education and the inalienable rights of youth? Of course it was. And I missed it. Alas, I was no Shelly. I felt, that morning, no warmth of generous indignation against the examiners: indeed, my attitude towards them had become timid, almost respectful. I wanted to achieve my object without unnecessarily hurting anybody’s feelings. After all, this act of mine was a strictly private affair: it had nothing to do with them, personally. I merely asked them to record a certain decision. Insults were out of the question. So also was the terse retort, the brief ironical lampoon: whatever happened, I had got to sit here three hours—and three more this afternoon, and all day tomorrow, and the next, as well. If I left early or cut altogether, I should only make myself conspicuous. And I didn’t want to be conspicuous; I wanted things to take their course, automatically, without my further intervention. I wished, if possible, to avoid any kind of a scene. In the meanwhile, somehow, I must make use of my time.
Tentatively, gingerly, I began to experiment. Concealed verses seemed a possibility, for a start (we had been asked to discuss the political problems of the Doges in connection with the Crusades):
But these considerations were outweighed by others. The Venetians thought of trade. Their friendly converse with the Moslem king must cease if Christian Powers were threatening to declare war on him and to attack Jerusalem. And always, at their back, the Papal sanction menaced the unwilling; they, too, would have to lend a hand at killing. Therefore, they leased their ships at heavy prices and told the warriors to bring back spices.
But this was really too easy. Next I tried some mild silliness, in the style of Punch:
One cannot be a missionary nowadays—as a class, they have been too much exposed; and, indeed, the demoralizing effect of having to wear boots in the tropics must be very serious. But the missionary monks did not wear boots; they wore sandals and fuzzy smocks that itched, and leather wallets …
A rather unfortunately worded question (‘Innocent the Third’s policy with regard to South Italy sowed a fatal crop for his successors.’ Examine this statement) gave me the chance to be impudent:
1. It is difficult to say whether a ‘policy’ can sow a crop. Perhaps ‘sow’ is a dead metaphor, but ‘a fatal crop’—referring, of course, to that favourite myth of hack journalists, the Dragon’s Teeth—assuredly is not.
2. The warriors who sprang from the Dragon’s Teeth killed each other, not the onlookers. Therefore the metaphor fails utterly to apply to any conceivable combination of facts.
3. The statement is not true.
When I had finished, I copied out my answers for the benefit of Chalmers, touching them up as much as possible in the process. He, of course, was delighted. As I read them to him, he danced gleefully about the room, exclaiming that Mortmere was avenged. I didn’t feel so sure; but his enthusiasm silenced my doubts. I resolved, at any rate, to try to be a little funnier that afternoon.
Most of what I wrote during those three days was dreadfully stupid, however. When I read through all that nonsense now, I feel really ashamed. Perhaps my sonnet on the causes of the Restoration is just worth quoting:
When Charles the Second had, at length, returned, most Englishmen received him with relief rather than real affection. Bonfires burned to welcome back the Stuarts; and no grief was then expressed for Puritanical customs and fasts and sabbaths. Men were tired of martial law and major-general. A monarchy was all that they desired.
And, besides this, now Oliver was dead and Richard had been tried with ill-success as Lord Protector; now that all the slow tide of opinion, gathering to a head, demanded Charles; now they were leaderless—t
he Roundheads were resigned to lying low.
And here is my last answer to the last question (on Usury and the Jews) in the last Tripos paper, Economic History:
The Jews are all very well in their way and usury is all very well in its way; but how can I think of either when, for the last two days, I have been wondering, almost to the point of agony, whatever can be the use of those long strips of dirty cloth which are hung, like washing, from the ceiling of this room? If the authorities have any human sympathy, they should have them taken down before the next Tripos, or else put up a notice describing the function they perform. And, while we are on the subject of this place, may I add that, in my opinion, the portrait of Albert the Good which hangs over the magic-lantern emplacement is an act of lèse-majesté—no less?
My first impulse, when it was all over, was to go straight to the college tutor and tell him what I had done. Chalmers dissuaded me. Such a move, he insisted, would be tactically fatal. I should be putting myself in the position of a penitent. I should have to make some kind of apology; I might even risk being forgiven. He was quite right, of course. My real motive had been cowardice: I wanted to get the whole business over and done with as soon as possible.
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