Just before Christmas the book was selling at the rate of ten thousand
copies a week. I heard later that Shaw had mistaken me for my _Daily
Mail_ brother.
Shortly afterwards I had a reply, delayed for nine months, to an
application that I had made, when things were bad, for an appointment
as English lecturer in an Adult Education scheme. I was told that my
qualifications were not considered sufficient. By this time I had lost
all my academic manners and wrote wishing the entire committee in
Baluchistan, to be tickled to death by wild butterflies.
In 1927, in a process of tidying-up, I published a collected book of my
poems. One of the later ones began:
This, I admit, Death is terrible to me,
To no man more so, naturally.
And I have disenthralled my natural terror
Of every comfortable philosopher
Or tall dark doctor of divinity.
Death stands at last in his true rank and order.
The book was selective rather than collective, intended as a
disavowal of over half the poetry that I had so far printed. As Skelton
told Fame, speaking of his regretted poem _Apollo Whirled up his
Chair_, I had done what I could to scrape out the scrolls, To erase it
for ever out of her ragman’s rolls. But I still permitted anthologists
to print some of the rejected pieces if they paid highly enough—if they
wanted them, that was their business and I was glad of the money. On
the other hand I stopped contributing new poems to English and American
periodicals. My critical writings I did not tidy up; but let them go
out of print. In 1927 I began learning to print on a hand-press. In
1928 I continued learning to print.
On May 6th, 1929 Nancy and I suddenly parted company. I had already
finished with nearly all my other leading and subsidiary characters,
and dozens more whom I have not troubled to put in. I began to write
my autobiography on May 23rd and write these words on July 24th, my
thirty-fourth birthday; another month of final review and I shall have
parted with myself for good. I have been able to draw on contemporary
records for most of the facts, but in many passages memory has been
the only source. My memory is good but not perfect. For instance, I
can after two hearings remember the tune and words of any song that
I like, and never afterwards forget them; but there are always odd
discrepancies between my version and the original. So here, there
must be many slight errors of one sort or another. No incidents,
however, are invented or embellished. Some are, no doubt, in their
wrong order; I am uncertain, for example, of the exact date and place
of the megaphoned trench-conversation between the Royal Welch and the
Germans, though I have a contemporary record of it. I am not sure
of some of the less-important names (even of Lance-corporal Baxter’s,
but it was at least a name like Baxter). To avoid the suggestion of
libel I have disguised two names. Also, I make a general disclaimer
of such opinions as I have recorded myself as holding from chapter to
chapter, on education, nature, war, religion, literature, philosophy,
psychology, politics, and so on. This is a story of what I was, not
what I am. Wherever I have used autobiographical material in previous
books and it does not tally with what I have written here, this is the
story and that was literature.
I find myself wondering whether it is justified as a story. Yet I seem
to have done most of the usual storybook things. I had, by the age of
twenty-three, been born, initiated into a formal religion, travelled,
learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken
life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame, and been
killed. At the age of thirty-four many things still remain undone.
For instance, I have never been on a journey of exploration, or in a
submarine, aeroplane or civil court of law (except a magistrate’s court
on the charge of ‘riding a vehicle, to wit a bicycle, without proper
illumination, to wit a rear lamp’). I have never mastered any musical
instrument, starved, committed civil murder, found buried treasure,
engaged in unnatural vice, slept with a prostitute, or seen a corpse
that has died a natural death. On the other hand, I have ridden on a
locomotive, won a prize at the Olympic Games, become a member of the
senior common-room at one Oxford college before becoming a member of
the junior common-room at another, been examined by the police on
suspicion of attempted murder, passed at dusk in a hail-storm
within half a mile of Stromboli when it was in eruption, had a statue
of myself erected in my lifetime in a London park, and learned to tell
the truth—nearly.