A World of My Own (2 page)

I was living then not far from Bethlehem, and I
decided to walk down to that small town to visit a brothel I knew there, carrying a gold coin with which to pay the girl whom I would choose. At the approach to the town I saw a strange sight: a group of men in Eastern clothes who were bowing and offering gifts. To what? To a blank wall. There was no one there to receive their gifts or return their salutation. I stood quite a while watching this curious scene and then something—I don’t know what—impelled me to throw my gold coin at the wall and turn away.

Time in the World of One’s Own can move slowly or it can move very rapidly. In this case the centuries passed by me like a flash and I found myself lying on my bed reading in the New Testament a story of how some Eastern kings came to a stable in Bethlehem, and I realized that this was what I had seen. My first thought was: ‘Well, I went to Bethlehem to give that gold coin to a woman and it seems that I did in fact give it to a woman, even though all I saw was a blank wall.’

There is an imaginative side to the World of One’s Own quite distinct from that of the Common World. Robert Louis Stevenson told an interviewer about the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘On one occasion I was very hard up for money and I felt I had to do something. I thought and thought, and tried hard to find a subject to write about. At night
I dreamt the story, it practically came to me as a gift, and what makes it appear more odd is that I was quite in the habit of dreaming stories. Thus, not long ago, I dreamt the story of “Olalla”, and I have at the present moment two unwritten stories I likewise dreamt.’

‘Olalla’ is an unfairly neglected story of Stevenson’s and in it there is a kind of underground resemblance to Dr Jekyll. It is a story which belongs quite definitely to the World of His Own rather than to Spain, where the scene is supposed to be set, just as in Dr Jekyll’s London we seem to be moving in the streets of Edinburgh or the streets of a city in Stevenson’s own private world.

The strange thing is that the author, when he is in the Common World, feels a stranger in the World of His Own, and Stevenson was lost and puzzled by his own story. He wrote a letter: ‘The trouble with “Olalla” is that it somehow sounds false … the odd problem is: what makes a story true? “Markheim” is true; “Olalla” false, and I don’t know why.’ He even went so far, in the case of Dr Jekyll, as to throw the first draft into the fire.

A few of my short stories have been drawn from memories of the World of My Own. In ‘Dream of a Strange Land’ I recorded my experience in that World when I was a leper seeking treatment in Sweden.
Only the sound of a shot with which the printed tale ends has been added. In another story, ‘The Root of All Evil’, laid in Germany far back in the nineteenth century, I changed nothing after I woke, with a smile of amusement, from My Own World to the Common World.

There is another side to what we call dreams, very interestingly exposed in J.W. Dunne’s
Experiment with Time
. They contain scraps of the future as well as of the past. I have already written of how at the age of seven I dreamed of a shipwreck on the night the
Titanic
went down, and again nine years later I witnessed another disastrous shipwreck in the Irish Sea. As I look through the long record of my dreams I note time and again incidents of the Common World that have occurred a few days after the dream. They are too trivial to include here, but I am convinced that Dunne was right.

The strangeness of my completely unexpected meeting with Henry James in My Own World at least seems worthy to take precedence in the second chapter, to which I have given the title ‘Some Famous Writers I Have Known’. Unlike the biographer, I do not find it necessary to plod along in the footsteps of the years, and my earlier meeting with Pope John Paul II in a hotel bedroom seems unimportant compared with my more recent meeting
with Henry James. (I am sure no good would have come to either the Pope or myself if I had woken him up. We were not made to like each other.)

The erotic side of life may seem oddly absent from this record but I do not wish to involve those whom I have loved in this World of My Own, even though I am powerless to censor biographers and journalists who write of them in the Common World. Another thing lacking is nightmare. Wars and danger are here, but nothing as bad as the witch who used to haunt a passage on the way to the nursery at home when I was a child until at last I turned and faced her and she disappeared for ever. I have known fear often enough in Haiti and Vietnam in My Own World, but never terror, never nightmare. Perhaps there has always been an element of adventure and a kind of pleasure in my fear, both in the Common World and in the World of My Own.

It was 1965. I had decided to do a little Liberal canvassing in a forthcoming by-election and I had chosen a country town called Horden. Apparently one couldn’t leave from the main station at Victoria, but by a branch line, the Horden line, which had its own entrance. I gathered that it was a very old and very interesting line and so it proved.

The first train to leave consisted of pretty carriages which must have dated back more than a hundred years, but this train didn’t go to Horden. The second train was bound there, but it was very crowded. I was much struck by the kindness and jollity of the passengers, who welcomed me and made room for me in a very packed carriage. They all wore strange clothes—Edwardian or Victorian—and I was fascinated by the stations we passed. On one wide platform children were playing with scarlet balloons; another station was built like a ruined Greek temple;
at one point the track narrowed and the train went through a kind of tunnel made with mattresses.

I had never in my life felt such a sensation of happiness. Lights were beginning to come out in the quaint houses which we passed, and I longed to return with the woman I loved at just this hour of the evening.

The train drew up by a little antique shop and I heard a passenger say, ‘You see, all the men are drinking or playing cards.’

A young couple (the girl pretty but quite unerotic and her husband a simple good-looking man with curly hair and an open face) became almost instantaneously like old friends. I said, ‘I’ve lived in London fifty years and yet I’ve never heard before of the Horden line. I could make this journey every day and not be tired of it.’

The girl replied, ‘The only thing is—don’t let them put you up in a hostel if you stay the night.’

‘Aren’t there hotels?’

‘They are just as bad.’

I had decided to do nothing about my canvassing. All I longed for was to see Horden. I had planned to be back in London for dinner, but all the same I enquired about a late train when I got out. I was a little apprehensive that it might have already left and I would find myself staying in a disagreeable
hostel. However all was well, there was a late train at 10.25.

The girl took my hand and told me she would show me the town. I said, ‘First the two of you will have a drink with me.’ I could see the bars were full of laughing people. ‘You are not teetotallers?’ I asked.

‘No,’ the girl said.

‘Then you choose the nicest pub.’

All the time there stayed with me that sense of inexplicable happiness. If only I could go back one day to the little town of Horden which exists in My Own World, but not in the world I share.

An odd thing about this World of My Own is that it contains no living writers. It seems that a writer whom I have the pleasure of knowing must die before he enters my secret world.

On April 28, 1988, I found myself on a most disagreeable river trip to Bogotá in the company of Henry James. The boat left after midnight and we had to find our way along the quay in complete darkness, carrying our hand baggage. I would have turned back if it had not been for the determination of the great author, and my admiration for his work.

What made things worse was the loud voice of an official—invisible in the darkness—who was continually shouting threats. ‘Anyone who tries to come
on board without a ticket will be fined one thousand dollars.’ In the crowd pushing to get onto the boat it was impossible even to show our tickets.

There was no place to sit—we just managed to squeeze ourselves into a corridor tightly packed, mainly by women—but I heard no complaint from Henry James. At some place on the river the boat stopped for a few minutes and a few passengers got off. Surely, I urged James, we could take the opportunity and escape too, but no, James wouldn’t hear of it. We must go on to the bitter end. ‘For scientific reasons,’ he told me.

One night I had a happy encounter by the roadside with Robert Graves, who looked as young as when I had known him in the Common World when he lived near Oxford in 1923. He was pleased to see me again and recalled a chance meeting we had once had on the Italian frontier, which I had forgotten. I told him how much I had always admired his poems, even in the twenties, and how I still treasured a copy of his first poems,
Over the Brazier
.

‘Do you remember,’ I asked him, ‘my own awful book of verse,
Babbling April
, about which you were kind in the case of one poem?’ I teasingly added,
‘Now the book is fetching even a higher price at auction than your own first book.’

In November 1983 I met Jean Cocteau at a party and was pleasantly surprised. As I told him frankly, I expected to find his eyes cold, but they were understanding, even affectionate. His boyfriend turned up a little later dead drunk.

Talking to Ford Madox Ford I wanted to express my admiration for one of his books, which concerned the Spanish Civil War. He said he had never written such a book. Searching in vain for the title, I went to my bookshelves to find a book of his which might list the other. I found only two volumes in the Bodley Head edition—one a book of essays which I didn’t know at all. His other titles were not given. Suddenly (several times I had begun to say
For Whom the Bell …
but checked myself) the title came to me—
Some Do Not
.

We went for a very pretty country walk together.
He told me of a legend that the Holy Virgin, standing on a hill, had bent down and picked out of the river we were passing a man who was drowning seven miles away from her.

‘But the land is quite flat,’ I said.

‘Not if you look closer. It slopes down past that old millhouse to the lock.’ People had spoken to me of the woman who kept the lock—a wonderful cook with a great interest in local history, which she tried to pass on to her sons.

We began to cross a field—nervously on my part, because it contained one large bull and a young one that showed itself too interested in our movements. I edged back on the road and, looking round, I saw the young bull had mounted on Ford’s shoulders. He didn’t seem disturbed.

I walked on to the lock to wait for him. There was a delicious smell of cooking and the woman was talking to a neighbour. The lock was just at the entrance to a small town. Ford joined me. The woman said she recommended soup and fish. We said we would go into the town and buy a bottle of wine. She offered to send her son, who was dressed in a sort of smock like an old-time agricultural labourer, but we insisted on going. As we went Ford said to me, ‘Have you noticed that men don’t like wearing anything that comes below the knee?’

I was working one day for a poetry competition and had written one line—‘Beauty makes crime noble’—when I was interrupted by a criticism flung at me from behind by T.S. Eliot. ‘What does that mean? How can crime be noble?’ He had, I noticed, grown a moustache.

Rather strange circumstances brought the two writers together. I had been part of a group who had managed to beat a gang of guerrillas, but the chief of the gang, Wystan Auden, had escaped. He was hidden somewhere in the brushwood which we were carefully searching. I had armed myself with a kitchen knife, for he was the most dangerous of our enemies. Suddenly he broke cover and dashed into a nearby house. He had been shot by Evelyn Waugh and was bleeding from his wounds.

I followed him and stuck my kitchen knife into his side, but he seemed unhurt by my blow and began a literary discussion of which, strangely enough, I can remember nothing.

Next night I found myself at a party, again with Auden, and I do remember our conversation then. I expressed my preference for living in England rather than in the United States because English literature was far richer than American. Shakespeare made all other writers into dwarfs and there could be no jealousy among dwarfs. American literature, having no such giant, gave room for jealousy.

Auden replied that all the same he was content in America. Although he was no scientist, he held a position in the science faculty of the university. He gave an impression of lazy well-being, tilted back in his chair.

I said, ‘It would be fun if you could discover one small scientific principle so that we could speak of “The Auden Digit”.’

Our hostess now left us alone, saying, ‘Help yourselves to drinks.’ We both agreed that the larger the bottle of whisky, the easier it was to welcome her invitation.

It was the Duke of Marlborough who introduced me to D.H. Lawrence. I found him younger and better groomed than I had expected. He was quite friendly towards my work.

I remember having a discussion with Sartre. I had made notes of various questions to ask him, and I tried to be very precise. I apologized for the badness of my French, which prevented me from being as precise as I wanted to be, and Sartre said kindly, ‘You speak French very well, but,’ he added, ‘I don’t understand a word you say.’

Then he became amiable and referred to a book of mine which Robert Laffont had published in France, the English title being
The Origin of Brighton Rock
. It was a reproduction of a childish manuscript in brown ink—a story with animal characters—and it was illustrated by Beatrix Potter. Sartre very much admired her drawings, but he said nothing of my writing.