All My Road Before Me
Page 48
Tuesday 1 June: . . . Forgot to mention yesterday a letter from Pasley in India, fairly cheerful, but complaining of Anglo-Indian society and with a Pasleyish undercurrent of schemes for the future, implying that he has not yet quite found himself. He has two children now.46
Went home and lunched (after spending the rest of the morning on Elyot: Titus & Gisippus is a good novella).
D was better today. Walked up Shotover in the afternoon thro’ Headington Quarry, where I have not been for a long time. Back to tea at which arrived a letter from Harwood announcing the birth of a son.47 We were both glad, tho’ it is rather dreadful to think of a child born into a house full of educational theories!
D is more and more discontented with Dotty who gives her an hour’s work every morning making up meals for her and her friends to take on the river. I am afraid she is one of our many mistakes.
Back to College where I wrote to Harwood (enclosing a note from D) and read Elyot again till hall. Went into Common Room afterwards and sat next to J.A. who was in great form, tho’ one of his stories was a familiar chestnut.
I then walked to the Union to return Gavin Douglas—a beautiful clear evening with a cold look about the stone. In Market Street I met Hardie and foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded to go to the Cinema. I was rewarded by a very bad Harold Lloyd. Back to his room to discuss whether one knew of one’s own selfhood by knowing other selves (my theory) or vice-versa, till 12.30. He had the best of the argument. A mis-spent evening.
Wednesday 2 June: Waddington & Sykes at 9 o’clock. I felt very tired and dull at the beginning but a lively discussion developed . . . Hetherington and Hamilton came at twelve. Hetherington is an extraordinary man and seems to see the whole of modern idealism by nature. He began on the subjective level but accepted the distinction of the I and the me and thence mounted on his own wings to the back of beyond. What is one to do with him for the rest of his career? . . .
To hall, during which Segar told me of his experiences when torpedoed in the Mediterranean. It was a story of panic and bad conduct worse than any I have heard in the war. The Captain shot himself. Segar, in the water, approached a boat with three men in it: one a man with his jaw shot away, the other a padré temporarily mad, the third unhurt. This one said ‘Go away, you’re making me sea sick’ and taking off his boots hammered Segar’s hands till he let go of the ropes. He was afterwards picked up by a tug . . .
Thursday 3 June: . . . Yorke on O.E. this morning followed by Betjeman and Valentin who did better. I tried to do something on my new poem but made nothing of it. I am afraid nothing more can be made of it.
Home for lunch. D was rather affairé making up sandwiches for all three girls (drat ’em) to take on the river for Eights. Went for a short walk down by the cemetery and home for tea.
. . . After tea I came back to College and worked on Spenser, after finishing Elyot’s Governour. Stayed for some time in the smoking room after dinner doing an impossibly difficult crossword puzzle with J.A. and Wrong. Back to my rooms and spent the whole evening on Spenser with great satisfaction. To bed about 11.30 and heard many sounds of revelry.
Friday 4 June: . . . A beautiful misty warm morning, the mist all transparent and luminous with concealed sunshine, wood pigeons making a noise in the grove, and a heavy dew. It suggested autumn and gave me a shudden whiff of what I used to call ‘the real joy’.
Tried to write after breakfast and copied out four new stanzas, including the swallow one. This poem must wind itself up or else take an unexpected development. Betjeman came this morning, followed by Percival and Waterfield, both very silly.
Home for lunch, walk and back to College after tea, where I began to read Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (in the library copy) with great enjoyment, having conceived the idea of giving a lecture next term on Elyot, Ascham, Hooker and Bacon.48
After dinner, at which very few were present, I got into an interesting conversation with J.A. on the Norse mythology in which he is well informed.
Saturday 5 June: Another beautiful day. Went out after breakfast and bought the Everyman Hooker in two volumes. Clark & de Peyer, Yorke and Glasgow all came this morning.
Home for lunch. D suffering badly from stiffness after clipping and brushing Pat. I stayed in all afternoon reading Hooker, who is certainly a great man. After tea went for a pleasant walk with Pat, up the crab-apple road as far as the stile and home by the fields: soft afternoon sunshine, improved by a mild wind . . . D and I had a quiet evening to ourselves and I finished the first book of Hooker, coming back to College about 10.30.
There I found a long letter from P[apy]. which I answered at once, and went to bed.
Sunday 6 June: A glorious summer morning. Walked home after breakfast and found all well: D much better today. Took my walk in the morning despite the heat, in order to have the afternoon free, when D would be able to sit out and the chairs wd. be unoccupied by girls. I went to the field with the fir trees and sat in the grass and buttercups for a while, then back to drink beer in Headington, and so home for lunch.
After lunch the girls all went off to the river. We had an enlightened conversation in which Valerie and Dotty explained how one can cry on purpose. One begins at the psychological end by a representation of one’s wrongs and desolation, and it is soon quite easy. Valerie is specially instructive because she is more naïf than Dotty and says the most appalling things without knowing it. She admits that she feels ‘respect’ or ‘feels small’ in the presence of girls with really good hats: and as for clothes, she feels ready to ‘tear them off’ their possessors. She said it was very complicated: I said I thought it was the simplest feeling I had ever heard anyone put into words.
D and I spent the afternoon in the garden under the plum tree, which looks as if it will bear some fruit this year. I read Abercrombie’s Idea of Great Poetry which I borrowed from J.A. He is not a great mind but he knows more about poetry than most of those now writing—understands what a long poem is—and combats the hectic theory of poetry as existing only in momentary lyrical impressions. Let us hope the tide is turning.
Left home about 5.30 and came in to go to chapel but missed it . . . A big crowd dining in. Onions introduced me to his guest, Fiedler, and plunging himself into conversation with Brightman, left me to entertain the Bosche.49 The best thing I got out of him was his statement that before the war he used to delight Farquharson by telling him he looked rather like Moltke.50 Dawnay was in and Weldon tells me he is going to get a Guards battalion and that he is ‘far too nice for a soldier’.51 (A good early blank verse line, as we observed.)
As Hardie and I were coming across to New Building we were overtaken by J.A. who proposed a stroll in the walks. We went and sat in the garden till it was quite dark. He was very great, telling us about his travels in the Balkans. The best things were (a) the masterful ladies (English of course) on a small Greek steamer who made such a nuisance of themselves that the Captain said ‘Have you no brothers? Why have they not got someone to marry you?’, and went on muttering at intervals for the rest of the evening ‘It ought to have been possible to get someone.’ (b) The Austrian minister at some unearthly town who took J.A. and his party out for a walk on the railway line, which was the only place level enough to walk on, and beginning to balance himself on the rails, remarked sadly ‘C’est mon seul sport.’ (c) The Greek clergyman who asked J.A. and his sister to tea and, when they departed, accompanied them back to their hotel, repeating ‘You will remember me?’ ‘Yes, certainly,’ said J.A. The clergyman repeated his touching request about fifteen times and each time J.A. (tho’ somewhat surprised) assured him with increasing warmth that he would never forget him. It was only afterwards they realised that the reverend gentleman was asking for a tip.
We began to be troubled with midges and as J.A. had used all my matches it was impossible to smoke, so we returned. I read a few of Emily Brontë’s poems and went to bed.
Monday 7 June: Valentin and Boddington this morning.
Lawson and Keir came for lunch. We considered the Everyman list with a view to suggesting additions, as Pocock had invited me to do: after lunch we sat in the grove—very beautiful with light and shadow this hot afternoon—and continued the job till about three.
I then bussed home: all well there, except that D seems to be more and more worried by Dotty. I did not go out till after tea and then took only a short walk past Mrs Seymour’s to sit among the trees by Bayswater brook. There is almost a spinney of pollards among the flat grass and buttercups beside the stream . . .
Tuesday 8 June: Finished setting a Literature and Criticism paper for the Fellowship examination this morning. Rang up the theatre and got three tickets for the Coriolanus tonight. Wrote to Spencer in answer to his apologies, to Margoliouth giving him Yorke’s name for the English fund,52 to Driver telling him I had set my paper, to Fell saying I wd. join the Mermaid Club, and to Joan Colborne changing tomorrow’s class to 5.30 as she had requested . . .
I skimmed Coriolanus until dinner time and glanced at Stead’s Shadow of Mt Carmel, just published, which he has sent me. He had already shown it me in proof and I had criticised pretty plainly, but it rolled off like water from a duck’s back . . .
The performance was bad beyond description. They had only two ways of speaking, to whisper or to shout, and both inaudible. Coriolanus had every trick of the traditional barn stormer, and one wonders how this kind of acting has survived a hundred years of parody. I met Carter in one of the intervals. He thought it good: but to such a beaming Friar Tuck as Carter all things are good. It was a real relief to get out at the end and to be bellowed and grimaced at no longer . . .
Wednesday 9 June: A busy day. Waddington and Sykes came at 9 and we had a good, tho’ exhausting, hour.
I then wrote to Stead thanking him for the book and enclosing for his criticism a parody of T. S. Eliot wh. I had just scribbled off: very nonsensical, but with a flavour of dirt all through. My idea is to send it up to his paper in the hope that he will be taken in and publish it: if he falls into the trap I will then consider how best to use the joke for the advancement of literature and the punishment of quackery.53 If he doesn’t I shall have proved that there is something more than I suspected in this kind of stuff . . .
Then came Hamilton and Hetherington, and we had a most vigorous and gruelling hour . . .
I went . . . at 3.45 to the board room in old Clarendon for a meeting of the sub faculty. Met Miss Spens who seems to think my class a great success and agrees with most of my report, tho’ she is surprised at my thinking Miss Colborne so good.54 The meeting was rather ridiculous. The air was electric with ‘sex antagonisms’, Miss Rooke being the eloquent and ironic exponent of women’s wrongs (‘In that term most of our students are doing the XIXth century, and hardly any men take it, and there are no lectures on it that term, so I suppose that’s all right.’).55
Didn’t get away till 4.30. Had tea in the smoking room and went to L.M.H. for my class, where Miss Colbourne read a paper on Scepticism and a lively discussion followed.
Home by bus in torrents of rain. Letters from Pocock (1) Acknowledging my list of proposed Everymans (2) Asking me if I wanted any alterations made in the design of the title page of ‘Dymer’, by one Knowles, which came in a separate cover. It is not a bad thing, but there is too much of Beardsley in the faces. After supper I wrote complimenting it as much as I cd., but begging for something more classical and less ninetyish in the faces . . .
Thursday 10 June: Betjeman came this morning and shifted his tutorial to Monday. Then came Yorke and after doing O.E. I broached to him the idea of my literary dragonnade: a series of mock Eliotic poems to be sent up to the Dial and the Criterion until, sooner or later, one of these filthy editors falls into the trap. We both looked into T. S. Eliot’s poems (which Betjeman had lent me) and Yorke was pleased with the idea. He struck out a good opening line ‘My soul is a windowless façade’: then we hunted for a rime and of course ‘de Sade’ turned up, with the double merit of being irrelevant and offensive. We decided to bring Coghill into the scheme . . .
Home at one in a storm of rain and found the whole house buzzing with deliberations about the badminton tournament on Saturday . . .
Back to College where I found a letter from Stead. It was encouraging to find that tho’ I told him my ‘Cross-Channel Boat’ was a parody, it has quite impressed him. Poor fellow, he finds in it ‘a robust and rollicking flavour’! Yorke turned up with a finished poem, all about de Sade and furniture covered with pink rep and drinking mint-julep. I think it will do . . .
Friday 11 June: . . . I . . . enlisted Hardie in the anti-Eliot group. Betjeman came, having done practically no work, and I had a row with him: he is v. conceited which makes him vulnerable.
Bussed home. Proofs of ‘Dymer’ (I, 1–30) arrived from the Temple Press at Letchworth. Back to College after tea. Corrected my proofs and posted them. Wrote another rag poem—very sad and desperate and disillusioned, cheap as dirt. Hardie came in after hall and read me his ‘A Portrait’: good fun, but too funny for a beginning.
Saturday 12 June: A crowded day. Pupils from 9 till 1. Home, to lunch off sandwiches in a topsy-turvy kitchen. Party from 2.30 till 6 . . . For the last half hour the conversation of Dotty and Valerie was maddeningly silly. D stood the day pretty well. I hope it has not done her much harm.
More proofs of ‘Dymer’ and a letter from Pocock agreeing with me about the title page design. Back to College at 10.30 fagged out with the unwholesome weariness of long hours’ grimacing and pretence. Got rid of that atmosphere over some whiskey and a detective story and went to bed. I am told the party was a success: at any rate it is over.
Sunday 13 June: Woke up feeling very tired and stiff. Got drawn into an argument with J.A. on aesthetics after breakfast and was late getting home.
A beautiful morning which I spent partly in the garden correcting proofs, partly in the kitchen helping D. The girls took Pat out. I washed up after lunch.
Spent a quiet and sleepy afternoon, and re-read some of Hewlett’s Lore of Proserpine. The simile of the three men on the three floors of the house affected me strangely. I began to think that I had let my ‘forensic’ dominate my ‘recondite’ too long and too severely. Of course that was a necessary reaction against the rule of the ‘recondite’ out of his own sphere, which means Christina dreams. Perhaps now that I have learned my lesson I can begin to encourage the recondite a bit more. One needn’t be asking questions and giving judgements all the time. This very crude psychology put me into a mood I have not enjoyed for years: it was like melting, as if I were a man of snow, or having doors open in one’s back.
Came back to College about 6.30 and gazed out of my windows on to an extraordinary evening light in the Grove. The old white horse was transfigured in it. In Common Room sat next an aged parson who talked to me of the Great Eastern, the first bicycle, and English feeling during the American civil war . . .
(D tired but I hope none the worse. The chief excitement today was over Henry, Dotty’s tortoise, who was discovered about two hundred yards from the gate working his passage towards the London road. He was brought back and tethered by a cord round his body, and supplied with lettuce leaves and snails in which he took no interest. He escaped repeatedly during the day. When I buy a tortoise I shall say I want a quiet one for ladies.)
Began G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils.
Monday 14 June: Betjeman and Valentin for O.E.: both had worked (according to their lights) pretty well. I corrected and sent off the second bunch of ‘Dymer’ proofs . . .
Bussed home. D rather tired and the girls working her hard: they kept her up late last night and there were four river lunches to be got for Dotty today. They
certainly intend to get ‘real value’ out of anyone who will let them. A letter from Pocock saying he sent me my copy of the contract on the 7th of April. It certainly never reached me. Took Pat for a short walk in Cuckoo Lane.
Back to College at 5 to attend a fellowship meeting in Benecke’s rooms, with Weldon and Hardie. It was interesting to see again, as I used to see when I was his pupil, Benecke’s mantelpiece full of pigs—stone pigs, china pigs, stuff pigs, and brazen pigs. The meeting lasted till 6.30 when Hardie and I rushed off to dress . . .
We bussed out to the Prichards and found that dinner jackets would have done. It was a most rational dinner. The guests were all men—Mabbott, Harrod (?) of the House, Hardie and myself. The daughters were not there and Mrs Pritchard retired almost at once. We then talked philosophy till 11.30, a very good discussion . . .
Tuesday 15 June: Woke up in the early morning from an abominable dream. It began innocently and absurdly enough with W and me walking on a pier and inquiring whether certain minute points of light which we held in our hands were ‘merely time signals’ or something more. But then we were seated by an old man, whom we dared not offend, listening to his triumphant account of someone he had buried alive or was going to bury alive. At least that is as near as the waking mind can get to it: it was really I think a corpse wh. was buried, and decaying, but somehow also alive—the life in death of the poem in MacDonald’s Lilith. I was just saying with fiendish approval (real or feigned?) ‘Yes. Just think what it would feel like by about the third day,’ when I woke up. I was ‘half dead with nothing’ and took some time to get to sleep again.
Valentin on Spenser this morning, pretty poor. Wrote another Eliot-parody . . .