A Sort of Life (11 page)

There he would always be, sitting behind the desk with his marred musician’s face, stop-watch ready, waiting for my coming. Was there a couch, the stock-subject of so many jokes? I can’t remember. I would begin to read out my dream, and he would check my associations with his watch. Afterwards he would talk in general terms about the theory of analysis, about the mortmain of the past which holds us in thrall. Sometimes, as the analysis progressed,
he would show little hints of excitement – as though he scented something for which he had been waiting for a long while. But so far as my own dreams and associations went, he
told
me nothing; he patiently waited for me to discover the long road back for myself. I too began to feel the excitement of the search. Perhaps, in spite of all the good it did me, the excitement was too heady for a boy and fostered the desire to turn up every stone to discover what lay beneath, to question motives, to doubt – no love would be simple afterwards or free from dusty answers.

The classic moment approached, as in all such analyses, when the emotion of the patient is due to be transferred: a difficult period for the analyst. Perhaps Richmond was trying to provide a subject away from home, for one of the evening callers proved to be a girl who was a ballet-student and one night we went to see her dance. With the added glamour of the stage around her, I nearly fell in love. Exploring London I had found a little bookshop on the Embankment near Albert Bridge and I bought a first edition for a few shillings of Ezra Pound’s early romantic poems,
Personae
– he displaced Walter de la Mare in my admiration. So, under the influence of
Personae
, I wrote three sentimental imagist lines to the girl, whose romantic name was Isola (‘a future Pavlova’ I wrote to my mother), but I never showed them to her, the relation never went further, and I did not see her again. The transference took a more inconvenient route, settling on my analyst’s wife, and the moment I feared at last arrived when, sitting in Kensington Gardens, I found the only dream I had to communicate was an erotic one of Zoe Richmond. For the first time I dreaded the hour of eleven. I could, of course, say that I remembered nothing, and Richmond would tell me to invent, and I could trot out the habitual pig, but I was caught sufficiently by the passion for analysis to be repelled at the thought of cheating. To cheat was to behave like a detective who deliberately destroys a clue to murder. I steeled myself and left the Gardens and went in.

‘And now,’ Richmond said, after a little talk on general theory, ‘we’ll get down to last night’s dream.’

I cleared my dry throat. ‘I can only remember one.’

‘Let’s have it.’

‘I was in bed,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘Here.’

He made a note on his pad. I took a breath and plunged.

‘There was a knock on the door and Zoe came in. She was naked. She leant over me. One of her breasts nearly touched my mouth. I woke up.’

‘What’s your association to breasts?’ Richmond asked, setting his stop-watch.

‘Tube train,’ I said after a long pause.

‘Five seconds,’ Richmond said.

Towards the end of my stay with the Richmonds my rich Greene uncle, Eppy, who perhaps did not wish to be outdone by his intellectual brother, sent his elder daughter Ave to be analysed, and she too stayed in the house. Perhaps if she had come a little sooner my transference would have been directed towards her, for she was a very pretty girl, who, a few years later, was courted by all the Greene brothers, except Hugh who was still too young. Herbert and I particularly entered into rivalry. Tennis on summer evenings, exciting car-rides to the King’s Arms in the neighbouring town of Tring … there were even moments when my German aunt became worried: another first-cousin marriage in the Greene family would have been a disaster. Now in London with all the opportunities open nothing occurred. In those days at sixteen a boy was still very young. With daring I took her to the first London production of Eugene O’Neill’s
Anna Christie
(her family, I learnt afterwards, considered it an unsuitable choice). I was still so heartfree that I could wonder, with cynical amusement, how long it would be before her emotions began to be transferred towards our bizarre and spotty analyst. But I was not there to see. Before that happened (if it ever did) I was returned – repaired – to the world of school.

I
T
was a life transformed. I was no longer a boarder at that hated brick barracks called St John’s, which had become so mysteriously changed from the home of a happy childhood, and I had no fear of the old routine of classes. Classes, when once I had outwitted and outgrown the gym, I had never hated, and I returned to them with the proud sense of having been a voyager in very distant seas. Among the natives whom I had encountered there, I had been the witness of strange rites and gained a knowledge of human nature that it would take many years for my companions to equal, or that was what I believed. Had my grandfather returned to England from the long morning rides among the sugarcanes and the black labourers of St Kitts with the same exhilarating and unbalanced sense of superiority? I had left for London a timid boy, anti-social,
farouche
: when I came back I must have seemed vain and knowing. Who among my fellows in 1921 knew anything of Freud or Jung? That summer I invited Walter de la Mare to a strawberry-tea in the garden with my parents. He had come to lecture in Berkhamsted and I posed proudly as the poet’s friend, though I wished my father had been more impressed by his poetry. ‘It lacks passion,’ he argued with me, and to refute him I showed him a poem in
The Veil
.

‘Poor hands, poor feeble wings,

Folded, a-droop, O sad!

See, ‘tis my heart that sings

To make thee glad.

‘My mouth breathes love, thou dear.

All that I am and know

Is thine. My breast – draw near:

Be grieved not so!’

He shook his head sadly, remembering Browning. ‘Tenderness,’ he said, ‘not passion.’

I found it easy now to make friends. The domination of Carter was over for good. He belonged to another geological age, a buried stratum of school society. A school has many backwaters, but I was at last in the main stream. Instead of those petty gangsters of St John’s there were Eric Guest (later a distinguished Metropolitan magistrate), Claud Cockburn, Peter Quennell. I escaped in company with Quennell the loathsome
O.T.C
. on condition that we both took riding lessons from the gym master, an agreeable red-faced ex-cavalryman called Sergeant Lubbock. I was always a frightened rider and later, when I had left school, I would take a horse out only in order to scare myself with jumps on the Common and escape the deep boredom which I had begun to suffer, a belated effect of the psycho-analysis, or so I believed then, not knowing it would pursue me all my life. Quennell always rode a far more spirited horse than mine, galloped faster, jumped higher. Sometimes returning at a walk down the long road from the Common – the road of my escape – we would pass on a hot summer’s day the sweating trudging ranks of the
O.T.C.
singing a gloomy military song, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,’ like a line of Gertrude Stein, and I felt the same compassionate contempt a cavalryman must have felt in the old days for the poor bloody infantry. I no longer ride, but the smell of a horse’s coat brings back at once the sense of pride and tension.

Now that I had reached the
VI
th form, work too was transformed. The School Certificate had been safely gained, and I was able to drop mathematics, Latin and Greek and choose the so-called modern side, with French, History and English as the main subjects. There were not many of us and we enjoyed frequent blank periods when we worked alone in the library – beneficiaries from the white cards of my father’s Scheme. French, which I never learnt properly to speak, became a fascinating literary language taught by a handsome tawny-faced man called Rawes who had his roots, so it was said, in Portugal and the wine trade and wore in his buttonhole the small green ribbon of a Portuguese decoration, for he had served with the unfortunate Portuguese troops who had been whipped, like porkers to an abattoir, to the mass slaughter of the Western Front. Most boys
were frightened by his worldly good looks, his air of military authority, and he was unpopular, but I always enjoyed his teaching, and during his French lessons, when we would spend a whole hour juggling with words in an attempt to translate two or three lines of Molière or a sestet of Heredia, he opened my eyes to the importance of precision in my own language as well.

It was he who introduced me to Lytton Strachey’s
Landmarks in French Literature
, and through Strachey I at least imagined for a while that I had become a lover of Racine. How cunningly Strachey went about his persuasion: ‘The ordinary English reader today probably thinks of him – if he thinks of him at all – as a dull, frigid, conventional writer.’ No boy worth his salt could fail to respond to that challenge, and on long solitary walks – which were for pleasure now and not an escape from cricket, for Kenneth Richmond had made sure that I would be excused all games – I carried
Bérénice
in my pocket in place of
The Epic of Hades
.

It was now I began to develop a love for the landscape around Berkhamsted which never left me, so that Chesterton’s rather inferior political ballade ‘
Of the First Rain
’ moves me still like poetry with its key-line: ‘A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills.’ Chenies, Ivinghoe, Aldbury have always meant more to me than Dartmoor or the fells of Yorkshire, and the hidden spots of the Chilterns were all the dearer because they were on the very borders of Metroland. They had the excitement of a frontier. There was one dried stream-bed, half hidden in bushes, called the Woe Water because the stream only ran before a war. It ran before the Boer War and in July 1914. I visited it during the crisis of Munich and it was dry, but I failed to return in September 1939. The depth of this country was vertical rather than horizontal, so that a Green Man might be seen dressed in leaves only a few feet away from the school playing-fields, and once talking to a railway porter in a public house near the station I learned that he had not been as far as the High Street five hundred yards away since his wife died fifteen years before. Berkhamsted always reminds me of Rilke’s poem, where beyond ‘the narrow-chested’ suburban houses ‘a shepherd leans against the last lamp-post in the gloom’.

It was strange that, while I carried Racine with me on my walks and Ruskin’s
Sesame and Lilies
, I was beginning to write the most sentimental fantasies in bad poetic prose. One abominable one, called
The Tick of the Clock
, about an old woman’s solitary death, was published in the school magazine. I cut out the pages and posted them to the
Star
, an evening paper of the period, and for God knows what reason they published the story and sent me a cheque for three guineas. I took the editor’s kindly letter and the complimentary copy up to the Common, and for hours I sat on the abandoned rifle-butts reading the piece aloud to myself and to the dark green ocean of gorse and bracken. Now, I told myself, I was really a professional writer, and never again did the idea hold such excitement, pride and confidence; always later, even with the publication of my first novel, the excitement was overshadowed by the knowledge of failure, by awareness of the flawed intention. But that sunny afternoon I could detect no flaw in
The Tick of the Clock
. The sense of glory touched me for the first and last time.

Then I attempted the theatre: first, modestly enough, with one-act plays, very tragic and very brutal, set in the Middle Ages, which seemed to give scope to my poor brand of poetic prose. I was much under the influence of Maurice Hewlett and
The Forest Lovers
, and many an Isoult La Desirous found her way into the plays. ‘A slim girl, somewhat under the common size of the country, and overburdened with a curtain of black hair; and a sullen, brooding girl who says little, and that nakedly and askance; and in a pale face two grey eyes a-burning.’ So the Abbot of Holy Thorn described her, and it was much the same character which attracted me when I read over and over again Maeterlinck’s
Pelléas and Mélisande
.

Then another influence succeeded Hewlett. I went to see Lord Dunsany’s
If
in which Henry Ainley played the leading part (I had myself played the Poet in Dunsany’s
Lost Silk Hat
at a school fête and felt myself his colleague). Immediately afterwards I began to write a fantastic play of which I cannot even remember the title. It celebrated what I liked to believe was the sense of poetry inherent in the ceremony of afternoon tea. In 1920 tea was still one of the important meals of the day, and the most aesthetic.
The silver pot, the tall tiered cake-stand, like a Chinese temple, two kinds of bread and butter, white and brown, cucumber and tomato sandwiches cut razor-thin, scones, rock-buns, and then all the cakes – plum, madeira, caraway seed – the meal had about it the lavishness of a Victorian dinner. My play, I don’t know why, except that Dunsany’s had taken much the same road, moved from London to Samarkand.

I sent the play to one of the many dramatic societies which existed in 1920, though I didn’t fly so high as the Stage Society, and I was excited to receive a letter signed with a woman’s name accepting it for production. So up I went to London one morning to meet my first management. The address was somewhere in St John’s Wood, a district which in those days still retained the glamour of illicit love-nests. There was a long delay, after I sounded the bell, and when at last the door was opened, it was by an over-blown rosy woman holding a dressing-gown together, who was watched from the end of the passage by a naked man in a double bed. She looked with astonishment at my blue cap with a school crest while I explained that I had come about my play. Then she gave me a cup of rather weak Mazawattee tea (very different from the tea which I had been celebrating) and she became carefully vague, as she scrutinized me, about casting and the date of production. I don’t remember that I ever heard from her again, and the society, I am sure, soon ceased to exist. Perhaps my play was the last piece of wreckage at which she clutched, and down with it sank all her dreams of some rich sucker who would put up the expenses, incidental and accidental, of his play (including the quarter’s rent and the milk bill and all that went with the double bed at the end of the passage).