My parents were most disappointed when I failed to sit for my Oxford
finals. But through the kindness of Sir Walter Raleigh, the head of the
English School, I was excused finals as I had been excused everything
else, and allowed to proceed to the later degree of Bachelor of
Letters. Instead of estimating, at the examiners’ request, the effect
of the influence of Dryden on pastoral poets of the early eighteenth
century, or tracing the development of the sub-plot in Elizabethan
comedies between the years 1583 and 1594, I was allowed to offer a
written thesis on a subject of my own choice. Sir Walter Raleigh was a
good friend to me. He agreed to be my tutor on condition that he should
not be expected to tutor me. He liked my poetry, and suggested that we
should only meet as friends. He was engaged at the time on the official
history of the war in the air and found it necessary to have practical
flying experience for the task. The R.A.F. took him up as often as he
needed. It was on a flight out East that he got typhoid fever and died.
I was so saddened by his death that it was some time before I thought
again about my thesis, and I did not apply for another tutor. The
subject I had offered was _The Illogical Element in English Poetry_.
I had already written a prose book, _On English Poetry_, a series of
‘workshop notes’ about the writing of poetry. It contained much trivial
but also much practical material, and emphasized the impossibility of
writing poetry of ‘universal appeal.’ I regarded poetry as, first, a
personal cathartic for the poet suffering from some inner conflict,
and then as a cathartic for readers in a similar conflict. I made a
tentative connection between poetry and dream in the light of the
dream-psychology in which I was then interested as a means of
curing myself.
The thesis did not work out like a thesis. I found it difficult to keep
to an academic style and decided to write it as if it were an ordinary
book. Anyhow, I could expect no knowledge of or sympathy with modern
psychology from the literature committee that would read it. I rewrote
it in all nine times, and it was unsatisfactory when finished. I was
trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry. It
was only, I wrote, to be fully understood by close analysis of the
latent associations of the words used; the obvious prose meaning was
often in direct opposition to the latent content. The weakness of the
book lay in its not clearly distinguishing between the supra-logical
thought-processes of poetry and of pathology. Before it appeared I
had published _The Meaning of Dreams_, which was intended to be a
popular shillingsworth for the railway bookstall; but I went to the
wrong publisher and he issued it at five shillings. Being too simply
written for the informed public, and too expensive for the ignorant
public to which it was addressed, it fell flat; as indeed it deserved.
I published a volume of poems every year between 1920 and 1925; after
_The Pier-Glass_, published in 1921, I made no attempt to write for
the ordinary reading public, and no longer regarded my work as being
of public utility. I did not even flatter myself that I was conferring
benefits on posterity; there was no reason to suppose that posterity
would be more appreciative than my contemporaries. I only wrote when
and because there was a poem pressing to be written. Though I assumed
a reader of intelligence and sensibility and considered his possible
reactions to what I wrote, I no longer identified him with contemporary
readers or critics of poetry. He was no more real a person than
the conventional figure put in the foreground of an architectural
design to indicate the size of the building. As a result of this
greater strictness of writing I was soon accused of trying to get
publicity and increase my sales by a wilful clowning modernism. Of
these books, _Whipperginny_, published in 1923, showed the first signs
of my new psychological studies.
_Mock-Beggar Hall_, published in 1924, was almost wholly philosophical.
As Lawrence wrote to me when I sent it to him, it was ‘not the sort of
book that one would put under one’s pillow at night.’ This philosophic
interest was a result of my meeting with Basanta Mallik, when I was
reading a paper to an undergraduate society. One of the results of
my education was a strong prejudice, amounting to contempt, against
anyone of non-European race; the Jews, though with certain exceptions
such as Siegfried, were included in this prejudice. But I had none
of my usual feelings with Basanta. He did not behave as a member of
a subject-race—neither with excessive admiration nor with excessive
hatred of all things English. Though he was a Bengali he was not given
to flattery or insolence. I found on inquiry that he belonged to a
family of high caste. His father had become converted to Christianity
and signalized his freedom from Hindu superstition by changing his
diet; meat and alcohol, untouched by his ancestors for some two
thousand years, soon brought about his death. Basanta had been brought
up in the care of a still unconverted grandmother, but did not have
the strict Hindu education that the boy of caste is given by his male
relatives. He was sent to Calcutta University and, some years before
the war, after taking a law degree, was given the post of assistant
tutor to the children of the Maharajah of Nepal. In Nepal he came to
the notice of the Maharajah as one of the few members of the Court
not concerned in a plot against his life, and was promoted to chief
tutor.
The relations between Nepal and India were strained at this time.
Basanta was the only man in Nepal with an up-to-date knowledge of
international law. His advice ultimately enabled the Maharajah to
induce the British to sign the 1923 treaty recognizing the complete
independence of the country, which had for many years been threatened
with British protection. Under the terms of this treaty, no foreigners
might enter Nepal except at the personal invitation of the Maharajah.
The Maharajah had sent Basanta over to England to study British
political psychology; this knowledge might be useful in the event of
future misunderstandings between Nepal and India. He had now been some
eleven years in Oxford but, becoming a philosopher and making many
friends, had overcome his long-standing grudge against the British.
Basanta used to come out to Islip frequently to talk philosophy
with us. With him came Sam Harries, a young Balliol scholar, who
soon became our closest friend. Metaphysics soon made psychology of
secondary interest for me: it threatened almost to displace poetry.
Basanta’s philosophy was a development of formal metaphysics, but
with characteristically Indian insistence on ethics. He believed in
no hierarchy of ultimate values or the possibility of any unifying
religion or ideology. But at the same time he insisted on the necessity
of strict self-discipline in the individual in meeting every possible
demand made upon him from whatever quarter, and he recommended constant
self-watchfulness against either dominating or being dominated by any
other individual. This view of strict personal morality consistent
with scepticism of social morality agreed very well with my
practice. He returned to India in 1923 and considered taking an
appointment in Nepal, but decided that to do so would put him in a
position incompatible with his philosophy. He would have returned
to Oxford but a friend had died, leaving him to support a typical
large Hindu family of aunts and cousins remotely related. We missed
Basanta’s visits, but Sam Harries used to come out regularly. Sam was
a communist, an atheist, enthusiastic about professional football
(Aston Villa was his favourite team) and experimental films, and most
puritanical in matters of sex.
Other friends were not numerous. Edith Sitwell was one of them.
It was a surprise, after reading her poems, to find her gentle,
domesticated, and even devout. When she came to stay with us she spent
her time sitting on the sofa and hemming handkerchiefs. She used to
write to Nancy and me frequently, but 1926 ended the friendship. 1926
was yesterday, when the autobiographical part of my life was fast
approaching its end. I saw no more of any of my army friends, with the
exception of Siegfried, and meetings with him were now only about once
a year. Edmund Blunden had gone as professor of English Literature
to Tokyo. Lawrence was now in the Royal Tank Corps. He had enlisted
in the Royal Air Force when he came to the end of things after the
Middle-Eastern settlement of 1921, but had been forced to leave it
when a notice was given of a question in the House about his presence
there under an assumed name. When Sir Walter Raleigh died I felt my
connection with Oxford University was broken, and when Rivers died,
and George Mallory on Everest, it seemed as though the death of my
friends was following me in peace-time as relentlessly as in war.
Basanta had spoken of getting an invitation from the Maharajah for us
to visit Nepal with him but, when he found it impossible to resume his
work there, the idea lapsed. Sam went to visit him in India in 1924;
his reputation as a communist followed him there. He wrote that he
was tagged by policemen wherever he went in Calcutta; but they need
not have worried. A week or two after his arrival he died of cerebral
malaria. After Sam’s death our friendship with Basanta gradually
failed. India re-absorbed him and we changed.
There came one more death among our friends; a girl who had been a
friend of Sam’s at Oxford and had married another friend at Balliol.
They used to come out together to Islip with Basanta and talk
philosophy. She died in childbirth. There had been insufficient care
in the pre-natal period and a midwife attended the case without having
sterilized her hands after attending an infectious case. Deaths in
childbirth had as particular horror for me now as they had for Nancy.
I had assisted the midwife at the birth of Sam, our fourth child, and
could not have believed that a natural process like birth could be so
abominable in its pain and extravagant messiness. Many deaths and a
feeling of bad luck clouded these years. Islip was no longer a country
refuge. I found myself resorting to my war-time technique of getting
through things somehow, anyhow, in the hope that they would mend. Nancy
was in poor health and able to do less and less work. Our finances had
been improved by an allowance from Nancy’s father that covered the
extra expense of the new children—we now had about two hundred pounds
a year—but I decided that cottage life with four of them under six
years old, and Nancy ill, was not good enough. I would have, after all,
to take a job. Nancy and I had always sworn that we would manage
somehow so that this would not be necessary.
The only possible job that I could undertake was teaching. But I
needed a degree, so I completed my thesis, which I published under
the title of _Poetic Unreason_ and handed in, when in print, to the
examining board. I was most surprized when they accepted it and I had
my bachelor’s degree. But the problem of an appointment remained, I
did not want a preparatory or secondary-school job which would keep me
away from home all day. Nancy did not want anyone else but myself and
her looking after the children, so there seemed no solution. And then
the doctor told Nancy that if she wished to regain her health she must
spend the winter in Egypt. In fact, the only appointment that would
be at all suitable would be a teaching job in Egypt, at a very high
salary, where there was little work to do. And a week or two later
(for this is the way things have always happened to me in emergencies)
I was asked to offer myself as a candidate for the post of professor
of English Literature at the newly-founded Egyptian University at
Cairo. I had been recommended, I found out later, by two or three
influential friends, among them Arnold Bennett, who has always been a
good friend to me, and Lawrence, who had served in the war with Lord
Lloyd, the then High Commissioner of Egypt. The salary amounted, with
the passage money, to fourteen hundred pounds a year. I fortified these
recommendations with others, from my neighbour, Colonel John Buchan,
and from the Earl of Oxford, who had taken a fatherly interest in me
and often visited Islip. And so was given the appointment.
Among other books written in the Islip period were two essays on
contemporary poetry. I then held the view that there was not such
a thing as poetry of constant value; I regarded it as a product of
its period only having relevance in a limited context. I regarded all
poetry, in a philosophic sense, as of equal merit, though admitting
that at any given time pragmatic distinctions could be drawn between
such poems as embodied the conflicts and syntheses of the time and were
therefore charged with contemporary sagacity, and such as were literary
hang-overs from a preceding period and were therefore inept. I was, in
fact, finding only extrinsic values for poetry. I found psychological
reasons why poems of a particular sort appealed to a particular class
of reader, surviving even political, economic, and religious change. I
published two other books. One was waste—a ballad-opera called _John
Kemp’s Wager_. It marked the end of what I may call the folk-song
period of my life. It was an artificial simple play for performance
by village societies and has been once performed, in California. The
newspaper cuttings that I was sent described it as delightfully English
and quaint. A better book was _My Head, My Head_, a romance on the
story of Elijah and the Shunamite woman. It was an ingenious attempt
to repair the important omissions in the biblical story; but like all
the other prose-books that I had written up to this time it failed in
its chief object, which was to sell. During this period I was willing
to undertake almost any writing job to bring in money. I wrote a series
of rhymes for a big map-advertisement for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits
(I was paid, but the rhymes never appeared); and silly lyrics for a
light opera, _Lord Clancarty_, for which I was not paid, because the
opera was never staged; and translations from Dutch and German carols;
and rhymes for children’s Christmas annuals; and edited three sixpenny
pamphlets of verse for Benn’s popular series—selections from
Skelton’s poems, and from my own, and a collection of the less
familiar nursery rhymes. I did some verse-reviewing for the _Nation_
and _Athenæum_, but by 1925 I found it more and more difficult to be
patient with dud books of poetry. And they all seemed to be dud now. I
had agreed to collaborate with T. S. Eliot in a book about modernist
poetry to which we were each to contribute essays, but the plan fell
through; and later I was glad that it had.
I also made several attempts during these years to rid myself of the
poison of war-memories by finishing my novel, but I had to abandon
them. It was not only that they brought back neurasthenia, but that
I was ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot, and yet
not sure enough of myself to retranslate it into undisguised history.
If my scruples had been literary and not moral I could easily have
compromised, as many writers have since done, with a pretended diary
stylistically disguising characters, times, and dates. I had found the
same difficulty in my last year at Charterhouse with a projected novel
of public-school life.