Undated note from Edward James to Mary Barnard, ca. June 1945:

"Thank you so very much for everything. I am in a frantic
hurry or else I would write more fully my appreciation of
your kindness and patience with me during the last two weeks.
It has been a great privilege to have known you."

Permission is granted for non-exclusive world rights in the
English language to Mary Barnard and the University of Cali-
fornia Press to reprint the above quotations in *Assault on Mb.
Helicon: A Literary Memoir*, the book to be published in hard
cover in 1983, exact date and price not yet determined.

Signed:

Edward James

By Michael Kernan

# One man's fantasy stands tall in a jungle in Mexico

*The Surrealist poet, self-styled architect and arts patron Edward James liked to put his ideas into concrete form before they got away*

James and pet macaw relax at home. Of his constant bird companions he once said, "I am turning into a parrot."

We jounce for five hours in a pickup truck heading west from Tampico over the dusty Mexican plain to the Sierra Madre, up and up into a green world—peaks as sudden as the mountains of Moorea, tree-covered jagged ranges huge enough to be the molars of God, past coffee plantations, ramping bougainvillea, banana trees, crashing streams—and on to the very top, through the steep hilltop town of Xilitla to reach at last the hidden city that Edward James, the eccentric British Surrealist, built in the deepest jungle, a swirling dream in concrete, a fantasy of shapes that marries Gaudí, Escher, Borromini, Simon Rodia and the Emerald City of Oz.

With my guide I slip through the gate of this amazing place, called Las Posas after its nine pools strung along a winding jungle river, connected by waterfalls. I climb a 20-foot concrete cactus, up freestanding steps to a mushroom platform, up again on spiraling stairs that finally wind themselves around the great shaft and disappear. Enormous fluted columns all around. Eight-foot walls with tear-shaped holes, a moongate, a path bordered by erectile mosaic serpents. Great gates framed in wrought-iron stars. Concrete leaves big enough to walk on, bulbous concrete flowers in yellow, red, green, blue, white, purple. Gourd shapes. Calabash shapes. Dolphin shapes. Stairs that lead straight up into space and stop.

Sixty-foot towers and “stairways without end” rise amid rich vegetation of James’ Mexican estate, Las Posas.

With its raw concrete patinaed by green mildew, rusting corrugated steel and neglected stretches of fence bent by fallen trees, Las Posas feels like a Sleeping Beauty castle arrested in time before it was quite finished.

A gazebo here, and close by, a tiny apartment four stories up with glass windows, two freezers, a fireplace, archways, glass bricks and a collection of perfume bottles. Ferns everywhere, lianas, thickset trees, all so interwined with the constructions that it is impossible to tell where the jungle leaves off and the invention begins. Tucked into the steep hillside, I find a storeroom crammed with the beautiful wooden molds made by local carpenters for all these fantastic shapes. Also James’ four-man sedan chair. And a stone hand nearly as tall as a man. Beside it, a nine-foot dome, almost an Olmec head, beset with columns that blossom out on top, and more bamboo-like columns, so delicate that they quiver when a bird takes off from them. Some of the fantasies have names: the House With a Roof Like a Whale, the House With Three Stories That Might Be Five, the Stegosaurus Column, the Fleur-de-Lys Bridge and Conucopia, the St. Peter and St. Paul Gate, the Temple of the Ducks, the House Destined To Be a Cinema.

The waterfalls, especially the biggest one, more than 80 feet high, are embellished with platforms, curving walls, flying buttresses that may hold up the entire bank or may do nothing at all, battlements, mysterious little prows jutting into the pools. The lower pools have diving boards and small sand beaches for the local people who come here to swim.

The Surreal Edward James

Everywhere, underfoot and up wall corners and wind-
ing around concrete bamboo screens, I see electric con-
duits. In 1979, when the place was as nearly complete as
it ever would be, James had lines brought in from Xilitla
and lit up the mountainside like a fairyland every night.

Talk about magic. Everyone in town came to see. Las
Posas was locally famous, of course. It had been abuild-
ing since 1949, and from 1962 on, employed as many as
150 workers at one time. By the time he died, in 1984,
James had sunk millions into the project.

Here and there, snug among the six-foot-thick col-
umns (designed eventually to support enormous plant-
ers and an aviary) and barrel vaults and groined arches
and framed windows, I noticed all sorts of cages. A little
aviary for parrots and flamingos, a screened cage for the
ocelots, a deer corral, a two-story room for small mon-
keys, a turtle pool, a 20-foot concrete pool shaped like a
human eye, its pupil five feet across. This was where the
crocodiles often played, our guide mentioned casually.

Edward James adored animals. When he visited Mexi-
co City he always stayed at the elegant but modest old
Francis Hotel or the Majestic, because they let him keep
his animals there. Once a guest complained that there
were mice in the hotel. She was sure she had seen one in
the hall. The manager replied, "Oh no. They're not the
hotel's mice. They belong to Mr. James in the room next
to yours. He feeds them to his boa constrictors."

James often wandered through his jungle home with a
parrot perched on his shoulder. Once he showed a
young friend how his own beaky nose and pointed chin
were growing closer together. He said, with a certain
complacency, "I am turning into a parrot, you see."

Las Posas is strange, but not half as strange as its cre-
ator. His American grandfather, already a millionaire
with vast timber holdings, married into the mining
wealth of the Phelps Dodge family before moving to
England. One of his three sons, who made his career as

the master of West Dean Park and its 6,000 acres in Sus-
sex, married an Englishwoman who was reputed to be
an offhand daughter of Edward VII.

Edward James was born to them in 1907, into a world
of nannies and shooting parties, shuttling seasonally be-
tween West Dean, his parents' London town house in
Bryanston Square and a summer place in Scotland. He
went to Eton, hated it. At Oxford he had a Rolls-Royce
and a silk-lined room worthy of a Sebastian Flyte, and he
soon drifted into the gilded London society of Sitwells,
Mitfords and Cunards, of Noël Coward and John Betje-
man, of Augustus John and Randolph Churchill.

A charming person, Edward James, a wonderful
raconteur and a lover of parties. His hermetic child-
hood had left him curiously innocent about the world
of work. And impulsively generous: once when a friend

Michael Kernan wrote about the Battle of Tarawa in
November 1993, the National Postal Museum in
August '93 and the Holocaust Museum in April '93.

Young James sits at desk in his Wimpole Street home,
London. Behind him, Picasso's *Seated Woman with a Hat*.

62

Composer Igor Markevitch lounges at right. All his life James surrounded himself with talented artists.

Dancer Tilly Losch, who was married to James from 1931 to 1934, shows off charms in an early production.

wanted to borrow his car, he gave it to him. But then a reaction—"They want my money, they want my blood"—and he would retreat into a sullen introversion.

He was a packrat who never threw anything away, and so obsessively fastidious that he would boil up a sauce-pan full of old paperclips, drenched in cologne, for reuse. Named to a diplomatic post, he almost caused an incident through his insouciant mistranslations and was fired. He wrote poetry and printed it himself, wrote a novel or two, fell in with avant-garde artists and then, in 1928, met Tilly Losch.

She was dancing in a Noël Coward revue but was celebrated more for her sinuous, wanton beauty than for her dancing. She filmed a performance piece that featured her lovely hands sensuously interlacing to Bach's "Air on a G String." James married her. He was 24.

Soon it turned out that she had fancied a marriage in name only (it happened in those days). She involved herself in a series of increasingly visible affairs, including a primal scene on a sofa with Randolph Churchill

witnessed by a maid, and finally left him. To get her back James financed George Balanchine's first company, Les Ballets 1933, paying for three ballets for her, including the landmark Brecht-Weill collaboration "The Seven Deadly Sins," performed by Tilly Losch and Lotte Lenya, and another ballet with music by Darius Milhaud and sets and costumes by André Derain.

It was no use. Tilly sued for separation, charging homosexuality among other things, whereupon James scandalized everyone by countersuing, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky. Astonished and wounded by the outcry, for this simply was not something a gentleman did, James moved to Europe for a while.

There he met Salvador Dali and was so taken by him that he contracted to buy all his work for a year and to subsidize Dali's "Dream of Venus" exhibit for the 1939 New York World's Fair. He was already buying Picassos, and that same year, 1937-38, he patronized René Magritte and joined the Surrealist movement in earnest.

*La Réproduction Interdite*, the famous Magritte painting

63

Entrance to Las Posas was planned as a giant aviary and monkey cage, with a cinema on the second floor.

Elaborate fountain at estate's Plaza de San Isidro is a James fancy that took him five years to finish.

The wooden forms for diverse structures on estate were made by local artisians. They could be six feet high and incorporate as many as 10,000 parts.

A touch of the Surreal-Plutarco's right hand, front and back, adorns a wall near the entrance. The concrete hands are enlarged seven times.

Decorative capital stands in a corral once used by the estate deer; color has been mixed into the concrete.

A 20-year project: the House With Three Stories That Might Be Five; this view is of the fifth story.

The exterior and bathroom of
his Monkton House were given
the full Surrealistic treatment.

of a man shown from behind as he looks into a mirror and sees the same back of head, is a portrait of the back of Edward James' head. He is also the model for the head-as-explosion-of-light portrait *Pleasure Principle*, though one can hardly tell.

Personally, Surrealism is not my cup of fur. But in James' case the question does come up: How does it differ from sheer eccentricity? I think the difference is that Surrealism has purpose. It seeks to shock the viewer into a new way of seeing. André Breton wrote, "The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, there is only the marvelous that is beautiful."

James had Tilly's bare footprints woven into the stair carpet at West Dean. He had wooden moldings in the shape of towels hung out beneath the windows of Monkton House, his Surrealist country home. There too stood the original Dali sofa made in the shape of Mae West's lips, in addition to Dali's first lobster-telephone, designed for James, as were the Giacometti andirons. And mock-bamboo drainpipes, wooden palm trees, a boa constrictor lamp, pawmarks of Edward's Irish wolfhound on the stairs, a bathroom with walls of translucent alabaster and a medicine cabinet disguised as a bookcase.

Surrealism is about Things. The Surrealism of Edward James, born into a world absolutely cluttered with expensive things and yearning to be free of their magnetism (when periodically overwhelmed by stuff that he accumulated, down to old matchboxes, he would simply have it all wrapped in bushels of tissue, packed in trunks and stored in a warehouse), has a blithe humor tinged with disdain that I sensed often in Las Posas.

It is impossible to write about the man without dropping names, for one of his great talents was meeting people. It helped to be a rich patron of the arts. While still at Oxford, he founded the James Press for the debut

of John Betjeman's poems and his own. Later Betjeman, as British poet laureate, wrote a poem about his friend, "Surrounded by Bells," which appeared in the *New Yorker*: "The sun that shines on Edward James / Shines also down on me...."

Names. Edith Sitwell introduced him to Dylan Thomas, whom he sponsored for a while; through Dali he met Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig; as a regular at Surrealist gatherings he knew Leonora Carrington, Paul Delvaux, Pavel Tchelitchew and others; he sublet a house in Rome to Garbo and Stokowski; he commissioned works by Stravinsky and Poulenc. During World War II he came to America, a visit which took him to Taos, New Mexico, where he met D. H. Lawrence and entourage, including Aldous Huxley. In 1940 Huxley became his ticket to the pantheistic crypto-Hindu Vedanta movement in Hollywood and super-chic Ojai, where he met all sorts of people, from Krishnamurti, the great spiritual leader who would not lead, to the major movie stars and directors of the day (including, I note, that other builder of unlived-in cities, Cecil B. DeMille) and friends of the great Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and on beyond movies to Hollywood's expatriate writers, such as Thomas Mann, Somerset Maugham, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, and on beyond writers to psychiatrist Erich Fromm.

Then Fromm invited him to spend some time at the American colony in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The country delighted Edward James. It was everything that England wasn't: no censorious social critics, none of that upper-class British inhibition, a concept of time that made this habitual maunderer seem punctual, and best of all, a climate that allowed one to grow plants and animals in lush profusion. For his wealth had become a burden and a source of something close to paranoia: more and

Inspired by James' treatment of footprints in England, his friend Plutarco used motif at entry to his own home.

more, people were besieging him for money, wheedling and conniving and suggesting worthy projects. One French composer's wife noted in her diary, "Edward James has arrived with his Rolls-Royce, his Duesenberg and, let us hope, his checkbook."

All through his life he doled out money freely to painters and writers, Surrealist or not, even as he built clinics for poor nuns, bought houses in Hollywood and Malibu and land in Mexico, came to the financial rescue of Rodia's Watts Towers and supported platoons of hangers-on. No wonder he preferred animals and plants.

Specifically, it was orchids that first brought him to Xilitla. It was by far the best place to grow them, he was told. He met his friend Plutarco Gastelum, part Yaqui Indian, part Spanish aristocrat and a swashbuckling former rancher, boxer, telegrapher and amateur architect, in a telegraph office in Cuernavaca, where Gastelum, taking James for a poorly dressed tourist complete with cheap silver watch chain, had directed him to the second-class bus stand.

"Oh no, thank you," James replied politely, "I have my car." Whereupon his chauffeur drove up in a Lincoln Continental. In any case, James hired Gastelum as his manager, and later sent him and his wife, Marina, on a tour of Europe.

In 1962 a once-in-a-lifetime frost killed James' orchids

by the thousands. Crushed, he decided to recoup in concrete. He would build a city of flowers four stories high that no frost could ever kill. Meanwhile, Gastelum, inspired by Venice and Florence, had started to vastly expand his own house in the village of Xilitla. James came to live there with Plutarco and Marina, their daughters and their lively son Plutarcito, now known to one and all as "Kako." The two great structural follies rose at the same time, influenced by each other.

"I think Uncle Edward was a little jealous of my father," Kako says. "Sometimes he copied ideas he saw here in our house." And no doubt Plutarco imitated his rival too: just inside the gate is a series of stepping stones in the shape of bare feet. The feet are splayed and misshapen like James' own feet, for according to his story he was nearly crippled in childhood by his mother's refusal to buy him big enough shoes.

While James was alive, the Edward James Foundation, which he had set up in 1964 and which ran the West Dean College of art and antiques restoration, supported Las Posas. But after his death, major support stopped. James had willed the property to Kako and his sisters. At one time, state officials expressed interest in buying Las Posas and making it a state park. The locals already use the pools freely, as James had urged them to, and patronize a little café on the site. But decisions seem far off at the moment. For one thing, all those protruding steel rods will have to be expensively cut off and capped soon or the structures will disintegrate, an unthinkable tragedy in the mind of the young man who calls James "Uncle Edward."

### Money to indulge every fancy

Early pictures of James show a slight, trim, neatly handsome man with deepset eyes and a firm chin, but Kako knew him as a bent old Robinson Crusoe, distinctly overweight, with a white beard and a stick, with gnarled feet and the money to do any wild, delightful thing that occurred to him, who lived in this house and talked of the grand, thrilling world outside. James died at 77 of a stroke on a return visit to Europe in 1984.

Las Posas, Kako, his father and a large cast of characters from James' life figure in the full-length documentary being produced by filmmaker Avery Danziger and his wife, Lenore, who have been working on it so long that they have had time to fall in love with Xilitla and have bought property there. Danziger expects to complete work next month. The film is called *Edward James: Builder of Dreams* and is destined for public television or a cable channel.

It is remarkable for its priceless record of Las Posas—with James himself guiding the camera about the premises, talking a steady stream—and for the portrait it draws of this engaging, driven man. Friends from all

over the world, from actress Ruth Ford to Leonora Carrington to James Bridges, describe James and his life, only to be topped by the master storyteller, James himself, with his deadly ear for accents.

He recalls his stately, remote mother who, on her way to church, would ask a servant to send down one of the children from the nursery, "whichever one will go best with my blue dress."

He tells one interviewer, "I used to have to stay in bed long after the sun had risen, until my nanny got up and dressed me. The sun would rise early, especially in Scotland in August, and I would long to get up and play on the beach. So to amuse myself in bed, aged 6, I would turn the sheets into a great hall and the pillows into towers."

His accent slips easily from hard-edged American to fluty upper-class British. He talks of his animals: the giant butterflies that he named after couturiers Dior, Schiaparelli and Chanel ("the rather dull one in good taste"), the three boas, the parrots, the kinkajous, the ocelots, the ducks and deer and peacocks, the generations of dogs and cats and the four baby crocodiles a friend gave him, one of which "used to sleep in my bed and crawl across and rest his muzzle on my shoulder."

All of James' life, I came to understand, was a search for something to create. His novels never amounted to much, his poems were spangled with good lines but also derivative ones and downright bad ones. It was never enough to support other artists or even to appear in their work. The animals had to be returned to the wild. The exotic flowers with which he hoped to brighten the world would die all too quickly. It was in Las Posas that he found at last his true artistic medium.

It was of heroic scale, it covered acres of jungle, it was a world. Its bare reinforcing rods yearned upward as if they would grow still more columns and platforms in the sky, expanding forever.

Yet the strangest thing of all was the apartment that this unworldly accumulator of worldly things, this owner of land in England and America and Mexico, of houses from California to Scotland, built for himself in the leafy heart of his vast fantasy. The apartment has a bedroom, living room and porch on two stories. On one wall is scrawled in pencil his poem "This Shell": "My house grows like the chambered nautilus. ..."

And it is tiny, a doll's tree house, the smallest possible shell where a man could hide.

Evocative masks prepared for a Dada and Surrealist exhibition in London in 1978 featured René Magritte's

rendering of Napoleon's death mask alongside the young Edward James simulating sleep—or perhaps death.

God Bless
America!

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Additional
reading

Around the Mall (p. 16)

*Birds Over Troubled Forests* by Russell Greenberg and Susan Lumpkin, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (Washington, D.C.), 1991

"Center seeks to uncover 'mysterious lives' of neotropical birds" by Jo Ann Webb, *Research Reports*, Smithsonian Institution, Winter 1992

Object at hand (p. 22)

*Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877* by Eric Foner, Harper & Row, 1988

*Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963* by Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, 1988

"Senate Bows to Braun on Symbol of Confederacy" by Helen Dewar, Washington Post, July 23, 1993

Clouds (p. 36)

*Skywatcher's Cloud Chart*, distributed by For Spacious Skies (54 Webb Street, Lexington, Massachusetts 02173)

*For Spacious Skies Activity Guide* by C. Whitney Ward and Jack Borden, For Spacious Skies, 1990

*Clouds and Weather* by J. A. Day and V. J. Schaefer, Houghton Mifflin, 1991

*Meteorology Today* by C. Donald Ahrens, West Publishing Company (St. Paul, Minnesota), 1991

Fallout shelters (p. 46)

"When Bunkers Last in the Backyard Bloom'd" by Walter Karp, *American Heritage*, March-April 1980

*By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age* by Paul Boyer, Pantheon, 1985

*The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Krushchev 1960-1963* by Michael R. Beschloss, HarperCollins, 1991

*The Wizards of Armageddon* by Fred Kaplan, Stanford University Press, 1991

Edward James (p. 60)

*Poeted: The Final Quest of Edward James* by Philip Purser, Quartet Books Limited, 1991

*Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years* by Edward James, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London), 1982

"Enrolling at West Dean: Fine Arts in a Surreal English Setting" by Elizabeth Lambert, *Architectural Digest*, May 1990

Jewish businesses (p. 80)

*The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914* by Moses Rischin, Harvard University Press, 1962

"Welcome to America" by Marvin Gelfand, *American Heritage*, April 1992

*World of Our Fathers* by Irving Howe, Random House, 1989

*The Joys of Yiddish* by Leo Rosten, Simon & Schuster, 1991

Willem de Kooning (p. 108)

*Willem de Kooning: From the Hirshhorn Museum Collection* (exhibition catalog) by Judith Zilczer, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Rizzoli International, 1993

*Willem de Kooning: Paintings* (exhibition catalog) by David Sylvester, Richard Schiff and Marla Prather, National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 1994

*Willem de Kooning* by Diane Waldman, Harry N. Abrams/National Museum of American Art, 1988

*Willem de Kooning* by Harry F. Gaugh, Abbeville Press, 1983

Garbage House (p. 121)

"The House That Junk Built" by Suzanne Kantra, *Popular Science*, January 1993

"New Materials Explored in Construction" by H. Jane Lehman, Washington Post, April 11, 1992

Carthage (p. 124)

*Carthage* by David Soren, Aicha Ben Abed Ben Khader and Hedi Slim, Simon & Schuster, 1991

*Carthage: A Mosaic of Ancient Tunisia*, edited by Aicha Ben Abed Ben Khader and David Soren, American Museum of Natural History in association with W.W. Norton, 1987

*New Light on Ancient Carthage*, edited by John Griffiths Pedley, University of Michigan Press, 1980

*Carthage* by B. H. Warmington, Frederick A. Praeger (New York), 1960

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By Rudolph Chelminski

# Let me confess my servile secret: whenever it comes to Kitties, I kowtow

OK, listen up. We're playing hardball here. Straight talk. The subject is cats. Sorry, I mean Kitties. The naked truth.

You know what people usually say about cats. It's always the same: I like them for their independence, they're not slavish like dogs, they're mysterious, they're clean, they know what they want.

Bull. That's just smoke screen stuff.

The plain truth is that cat people are born with an uncontrollable compulsion to be servile to fur balls with teeth. The condition is irreversible, probably genetic. There is no other possible explanation for their behavior.

Now that we've got that straight, we can get to the tough part: I am going to confess-in print, right here-just *how* servile I am. Other cat people will recognize this immediately, of course, even if they don't have the guts to admit it about themselves. We're all the same.

OK, first of all, they're not cats. We never say "cats." They're *kitties*.

"Some kitty you got there, dude."

"Damn straight. Killer."

"Wake you up much?"

"Sure, all the time. Gotta go out, gotta come in. You know."

"Yeah. How's he on food?"

"Terrible. Won't go near Mew-Mew. Usta like it. Changed his mind."

"Yeah."

We stand at attention for our Kitties, of course, that's part of the deal. My present one-an exceptional animal, by the way-is, I would say, only slightly more tyrannical than the average. She yells at me if I'm late with her meals-that's only natural-but the hard part is keeping up with her whims. What I give her for breakfast is usually out of favor by lunchtime, and absolutely passé for super, so I've got all these cans with two or three tablespoons skimmed off the top, the rest of which she refuses to eat. (Luckily, the dog's there. He eats any-

thing.) She also has to have the dry stuff mixed in with the canned stuff, and the water right next to it. If I ever forget, you can imagine the looks she gives me.

I've been pretty lucky with the kitty sand. It doesn't seem to bother her too much if I'm late in cleaning it up. She just finds some other place. That's why I'm not late very often.

Bedtime is becoming a bit of a problem, though. She started out sleeping exclusively on me, but of late she's taken to alternating between me and my wife, so we don't really know which one of us she likes better (I'm pretty sure it's me, though). Her regular spot used to be where the covers formed a kind of tramline between my knees, but that left her back exposed to the air, so she's gotten into the habit of trotting up over me at about 4 A.M. and moving in under the covers with my wife. Hard to blame her, even if it makes me feel deprived. It does allow me to turn over, though. She never permits me to turn over when she's sleeping on my side. That's harder than you'd think. Sometimes I get cramps.

Her name is RitRit, by the way (that's onomatopoeic, as you may have guessed), but we tend to call her WitWit because Kitties need the reassurance of a certain amount of baby talk; that's a scientific fact. You shouldn't overdo it, though. When I discuss her menu ("Well, WitWit, what in hell *will* you eat if you won't eat that?") I have to be explicit. Any maître d' can tell you that.

Being in the service of Kitties is a continuing lesson in tact. Take the matter of lap-sitting, for example. You are required to pretend it doesn't bother you when they demonstrate contentment by gouging furrows in your thigh, otherwise you're sure to hurt their feelings. (A discreet, inward "Ow!Ow!Ow!Ow!" is the limit.) Newspaper and magazine reading is a recurring problem because, of course, they want to be where the

paper is-that is to say, on it. You can always lift the paper up and read with your head tilted back, but inevitably that leads to a crick in the neck. I've discovered that RitRit will sometimes accept an alternative position up on my shoulders rather than on my lap, but it never lasts long, and then when she decides to take off I really get the impact of those claws. So either way you're in trouble. But, hey, who ever said life was simple?

Now, as for the crucial question of interspecies communication, I have found that on many occasions it is useful to talk in kitty talk, that is, with your voice at a squeaky pitch in imitation of a cat's. (It's a good idea to check for the presence of strangers first, especially shrinks.) One can also break away from Standard English and actually say the classic "meow" sometimes. It goes over fine. I occasionally vary it with a deliberately cute Beatrix Potter "mew." RitRit enjoys irony and literary reference. (I am careful not to mention *The Roly-Poly Pudding*, however. That's just simple good taste.)

I could go into a lot more humiliating detail about the extent of my abjection, but I don't want to embarrass anyone. I hate to see people cringe-I think you get the idea. And in case you're wondering, the answer is yes, theFACTS are the same. Of course-they're cat people.

You might be interested to know that Bill and Hillary never really call their kitty "Socks." That's just the version they use for the press. Much too formal. His real name-and this is an exclusive scoop-is "Woxy," as in "Soxy-Woxy."

"Hillary, did you feed Woxy yet? He's hungwy, aren't you Woxy?"

"Widdle Woxy's hungwy? Are you, baby?"

"Just a minute, dear, I've got Moscow on the line. [Voice dropping back down to normal pitch] Hello, Bowis?"

148

31

PROFILES

SUMMONED BY BELLS

I

HERE on the southern slope of Highgate Hill
Red squirrels leap the hornbeams. Still I see
Twigs and serrated leaves against the sky.

The sunny silence was of Middlesex.

Once a Delaunay Belleville crawling up

West Hill in bottom gear made such a noise

As drew me from my dream world, out to watch
That early motorcar attempt the steep.

But mostly it was footsteps, rustling leaves,

And blackbirds fluting over miles of Heath.

Then Millfield Lane looked like a Constable
And all the grassy hillocks spoke of Keats.

Mysterious gravel drives to hidden wealth

Wound between laurels—mighty Caen Wood Towers,
And Grand Duke Michael's house, and Holly Lodge.

But what of us in our small villa row

Who gazed into the Burdett-Coutts estate?

I knew we were a lower, lesser world

Than that, the remote one of the carriage folk,
Who left their cedars and brown garden walls

To servants' families. And I also knew

That we were slightly richer than my friends

The family next door: we owned a brougham,
And they would envy us our holidays.

In fact, it was the mother there who first

Made me aware of insecurity,

When war was near: "Your name is German, John."

But I had always thought that it was Dutch.

That tee-jay-ee, that fatal tee-jay-ee,

Which I have watched the hesitating pens

Of government clerks and cloakroom porters funk.

I asked my mother. "No," she said, "it's Dutch.

Thank God you're English on your mother's side."

Oh, happy, happy Browns and Robinsons!

Safe were those evenings of the prewar world,
When firelight shone on green linoleum.

I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky,
Deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars,

And turned to Archibald, my safe old bear,
Whose woollen eyes looked sad or glad at me,

Whose ample forehead I could wet with tears,
Whose half-moon ears received my confidence,
Who made me laugh, who never let me down.

I used to wait for hours to see him move,

Convinced that he could breathe. One dreadful day

They hid him from me as a punishment,
And still the desolation of that loss

Comes back to me and I must go upstairs

To see him in the sawdust, so to speak,

Safe and returned to his idolater.

Safe, in a world of trains and buttered toast,
Where things inanimate could feel and think,
Deeply I loved thee, 31 West Hill!

At the hill's foot did London then begin:

The yellow horse trams clopping past the planes

To gray brick, Nonconformist Chetwynd Road

And on to Kentish Town and barking dogs

And costers' carts and crowded grocers' shops

And Daniels' store (the local Selfridges),

The Bon Marché, the Electric Palace, slums

That thrilled me with their smells of poverty

Till, safe once more, we gained the leafy slope

And buttered toast and 31 West Hill.

"A DIAMOND," "A heart," "No trumps," "Two spades"...

Happy and tense, they played at auction bridge,

Two tables in the drawing room: Mother's friends

From terra-cotta flats on Muswell Hill

And nearer Brookfield Mansions; cigarettes

And "Votes-for-Women" ashtrays, mauve and green.

I watched the players, happy to be quiet

Till someone nice was dummy who would talk—

A talk soon drowned. "If you'd finessed my heart

And played your diamond ..." "If I'd had the lead,

I might have done ..." "Well, length is strength, you know."

Did they, I wonder, leave us in a huff

After those hot post-mortems? All I knew

Were taffetas and bits of scented fur

On ladies vaguely designated "aunts"

Who came on second Thursdays to "at homes."

The sunlit weeks between were full of maids:

Sarah, with orange wig and horsy teeth,

Was so bad-tempered that she scarcely spoke.

Maud was my hateful nurse, who smelled of poor

And forced me to eat chewy bits of fish,

Thrusting me back to babyhood with threats

Of nappies, porridge, and the feeding bottle;

She was the first to tell me about Hell,

Admitting she was going there herself.

"You're late for dinner, John." I feel again

32

AUGUST 27, 1960

That awful feeling, fear confused with thrill,
As I would be unbuttoned, bent across
Her starchy apron, screaming "Don't, Maud, don't!"
Then dissolution, bed, and kindly fur
Of agèd, uncomplaining Archibald.

## II

MY poor old father—how I loved him then,
Before the years of our estrangement came!

The long, calm walks on twilit evenings
Through Highgate New Town to the cinema;
The expeditions by North London trains
To dim, forgotten stations—wooden shacks
On oil-lit flimsy platforms among fields
As yet unbuilt on, deep in Middlesex.

We'd stand in dark antique shops while he talked,
Holding his hearing trumpet to his ear,
Proffering the ugly mouthpiece with a smile
Toward the flattered shopman. Most of all
I think my father loved me when we went
In early-morning pipe smoke on the tram
Down to the Angel, visiting the Works.
"Fourth generation. Yes, this is the boy."

The smell of shavings still brings back to me
The rambling workshops high on Pentonville,
Clicking with patents of the family firm,
Founded in 1820. When you rang
The front-door bell, a watchful packer pulled
A polished lever twenty yards away,
And this released the catch into a world
Of shining showrooms full of secret drawers
And maharajahs' leather dressing cases
From the past days of our prosperity,
And stockrooms heavy with the tantalus
On which the family fortunes had been made,
The Alexandra Palace patent locks,
The Betjeman device for hansom cabs
(Patents exhibited in '51,
Improvements on them shown in '62),
The Betjeman trolley used in coffeerooms,
The inlaid brass, the figured rosewood box,
The yellow satinwood, the silverware....

What wealth the money from them once had brought
To fill the hothouse on the drawing-room floor
With red begonias, what servants' halls,
What terrace houses, and what carriage drives!

Bang through the packing room, then up a step.
"Be careful, Master John!" old William called.
Over the silversmiths' uneven floor
I thought myself a fast electric train,
First stop the silver-plating shop (no time
To watch the locksmiths and engravers work),
For there, in silence, Buckland used to drop
Dull bits of metal into frothing tanks
And bring them out all gold- or silver-bright;
He'd turn a penny into half a crown.
Though he but seldom spoke, yet he and I
Worked there as one. (He let me seem to work.)
The cabinetmakers' shop, all belts and wheels
And whining saws, would thrill me with the scream
Of tortured wood, starting a blackened plank
Under the cruel plane and coming out
Sweet-scented pink and smooth and richly grained,
While in a far-off shed, caressingly,
French polishers, all whistling different tunes,
With reeking swabs would rub the colored woods,
Bringing the figured surfaces to light:

Dark, whirling walnut, deep and deeper brown,
And red mahogany's pressed butterflies.
Beside the timberyard, a favorite hut
Encased the thumping heartbeat of the Works—
An old gas engine smelling strong of oil.
Its mighty wheel revolved a leather belt
Which, turning lesser wheels and lesser belts,
Spread like a drawing by Heath Robinson
Through all the rambling length of factory.

When lunchtime brought me hopes of ginger beer,
I'd meet my father's smile as he would stand
Among his clerks, with pens behind their ears,
In the stern silence of the countinghouse.
And he, perhaps not ready to go out,
Would send me to explore some upper rooms—
One full of ticking clocks, one full of books,
And once I found a dusty drawing room,
Completely furnished, where long years ago
My great-grandfather lived above his work
Before he moved to sylvan Highbury.
But in the downstairs showrooms I could find
No link between the finished articles
And all the clatter of the factory.
The works in Birmingham, I knew, made glass,
The stoneworks in Torquay made other things,
But what did we do? Then I did not know.
Nor ever wished to—to my father's grief.

O Mappin, Webb, Asprey, and Finnigan,
You polished persons on the retail side,
Why did I never take to you? Why now
When, staying in a quiet country house,
I see an onyx ashtray of the firm,
Or in my bedroom find the figured wood
Of my smooth-sliding dressing-table drawers
To have a look about them of the Works,
Does my mind flinch so?

Partly it is guilt.

"Following in Father's footsteps" was the theme
Of all my early childhood. With what pride
He introduced me to old gentlemen—
Pin-striped commercial travellers of the firm
And tall proprietors of Bond Street shops.
With joy he showed me old George Betjeman's book:
"December 1807. Twelve and six—
For helping Brother William with his desk."
Uninteresting then it seemed to me,
Uninteresting now.

Slow walks we made
On sunny afternoons to great-great-aunts
In tall Italianate houses: Aberdeen Park,
Hillmarton Road, and Upper Holloway—
Short gravel drives to steepish flights of steps
And stained-glass windows in a purple hall,
A drawing room full of stands and potted plants,
Lace curtains screening other plants beyond.
"Fourth generation. Yes, this is the boy."

Partly my guilt is letting down the men:
Bradshaw and Pettit, of the lathe and plane;
Fieldhouse and Lovely; and the old and bent
With wire-framed spectacles and aproned knees;
The young apprentices, whom custom called,
Indentures done, to passing-out parade
Down a long alley formed among the men
Beating on bits of metal. How they all
Trusted that I would fill my father's place!
"The Guv'nor's looking for you, Master John."
"Well, now, my boy, I want your solemn word

THE NEW YORKER

To carry on the firm when I am gone.
Fourth generation, John. They look to you.
They're artist craftsmen to their fingertips....
Go on creating beauty!" What is that?
Here, where I write, the green Atlantic bursts
In cannonades of white along Pentire—
There's beauty here. There's beauty in the slate
And granite smoothed by centuries of sea
And washed to life as rain and spray bring out
Contrasting strata higher up the cliff,
But none to me in polished wood and stone
Tortured by Father's craftsmen into shapes
To shine in Asprey's showrooms under glass,
A maharajah's eyeful.

For myself,
I knew as soon as I could read and write
That I must be a poet. Even today,
With a cold Cambridge wind about the house
Blowing the lamps out every time they're lit,
I know that I must light mine up again.
My first attraction was to tripping lines,
And fancy words, like "o'er" and "ere" and "e'en,"
Were ones I liked to use. My father smiled:
"And how's our budding bard? Let what you write
Be funny, John, and be original."
Secretly proud, I merrily showed off.
I went with pencil and a writing pad
And stood tiptoe upon a little hill,
Awaiting inspiration from the sky.
The gap between my feelings and my skill
Was so immense I wonder I went on.
Atlantic rollers bursting in my ears,
And pealing church bells and the puff of trains,
The sight of sailing clouds, the smell of grass
Were always calling out to me for words.
I caught at them and missed and missed again.
"Catch hold!" my father said. "Catch hold like this!"—
And tried to teach me how to carpenter;
"Not that way, boy! When will you ever learn?"—
I dug the chisel deep into my hand.
"Shoot!" said my father, helping me with my gun
And aiming at the rabbit. "Quick, boy, fire!"—
But I had not released the safety lock.
I was a poet. That was why I failed.

### III

O PEGGY PUREY-CUST, how pure you were,
My first and purest love, Miss Purey-Cust!
Satchel on back, I hurried up West Hill
To meet you on your morning walk to school,
Your nanny with you, and your yellow hair
Streaming like sunlight. Strict deportment made
You hold yourself erect, and every step
Bounced up and down as though you walked on springs.
Your ice-blue eyes, your lashes long and light,
Your sweetly freckled face and turned-up nose
So haunted me that all my loves since then
Have had a look of Peggy Purey-Cust.
Along the Grove, what happy, happy steps
Under the limes I took to Byron House
With you beside me. How contentedly
Did blob-work, weaving, carpentry, and art.
Only one harbinger of future woe
Comes to me from those far, sun-gilded days,
Gold with the hair of Peggy Purey-Cust.
Two other boys—my rivals, I suppose—
Came suddenly round a corner, caught my arms,

And one, a treacherous, stocky little Scot,
Winded me with a punch, and "Want some more?"
He grunted when I could not speak for pain.
Why did he do it? Why that other boy,
Who theretofore had been a friend of mine,
Was his accomplice I could not divine,
Nor ever have done. But those fatal two
Continued with me to another school—
A hellhole in the side of Highgate Hill.

Let those who have such memories recollect
Their sinking dread of going back to school.
I well remember mine. I see again
The great headmaster's study, lined with books,
Where somewhere, in a corner, there were canes.
He wrapped his gown, the great headmaster did,
About himself, chucked off his mortarboard,
And, leaning back, said, "Let's see what you know.
How many half crowns are there in a pound?"
I didn't know. I couldn't even guess.
My dear, deaf father, who was with me, smiled;
The gold clock ticked; the waiting furniture
Shone like a color plate by H. M. Brock. . .
No answer, and the great headmaster frowned—
But let me into Highgate Junior School.

In late September, in the conker time,
When Poperinghe and Zillebeke and Mons
Boomed with five-nines, large sepia gravures
Of French, Smith-Dorrien, and Haig were given
Free with each half pound of Brooke Bond's tea.
A neighbor's son had just been killed at Ypres,
Another had been wounded. Up West Hill
I walked, red-capped and jacketed, to school—
A new boy, much too early. School at nine,
And here I was outside at half past eight.
I see the asphalt slope and smell again
The sluggish, sour, inadequate latrines.
I watch the shrubbery shake as leaping out
Come my two enemies of Byron House,
But now red-capped and jacketed like me.
"Betjeman's a German spy,
Shoot him down and let him die.
Betjeman's a German spy,
A German spy, a German spy!"

They danced around me, and their merry shouts
Brought other merry newcomers to see.

See the rich elms careening down the hill,
Full billows rolling into Holloway.
In the tall classroom hear again the drone
Of multiplication tables chanted out.
Recall how Kelly stood us in a ring:
"Three sevens, then add eight, and take away
Twelve—what's the answer?" Hesitation then
Meant a shaking by the shoulders till we cried.
Deal out again the dog-eared poetry books
Where Hemans, Campbell, Longfellow, and Scott
Mixed their dim lights with Edgar Allan Poe,
Who "died of dissipation," said the notes.
"And what is dissipation, please, Miss Long?"
Its dreadfulness so pleased me that I learned
"The Bells" by heart, but all the time preferred
"Casabianca" and "The Hesperus"
As poetry, and Campbell's "Soldier's Dream."
I couldn't see why Shakespeare was admired.
I thought myself as good as Campbell now
And very nearly up to Longfellow,
And so I bound my verse into a book,
"The Best of Betjeman," and handed it

33

34

AUGUST 27, 1960

To one who, I was told, liked poetry—
The American master, Mr. Eliot.
That dear, good man, with Prufrock in his head
And Sweeney waiting to be agonized—
I wonder what he thought. He never says
When now we meet, across the port and cheese.
He looks the same as then—long, lean, and pale,
Still with the slow, deliberating speech
And enigmatic answers. At the time,
A boy called Jelly said, “He thinks it’s bad”—
But he himself is still too kind to say.

IV

IN summer, the long express from Waterloo
Takes us all down to Cornwall. Teatime shows
The small fields waiting, every blackthorn hedge
Straining inland before the southwest gale.
The emptying train, wind in the ventilators,
Puffs out of Egloskerry to Tresmeer,
Through minny meadows, under bearded woods
And hills upon whose sides the clinging farms
Hold Bible Christians. Can it really be
That this same carriage came from Waterloo?
At Wadebridge station what a breath of sea
Scented the Camel Valley! Cornish air,
Soft Cornish rains, and silence after steam
As out from Derry's stable came the brake
To drag us up those long, familiar hills,
Past haunted woods and oil-lit farms and on
To far Trebetherick by the sounding sea.
Oh, what a host of questions in me rose:
Were spring tides here, or neap? And who was down?
Was there another wreck upon Doom Bar?
The carriage lamps lit up the ferrypwort
And fennel in the hedges of the lane....
In bed at last, I listened to the roar
Of full Atlantic rollers on the beach.
Then, before breakfast, down toward the sea
I ran alone, monarch of miles of sand,
Its shining stretches satin-smooth and veined,
And felt beneath bare feet the lugworm casts
And walked where only gulls and oyster catchers
Had stepped before me to the water's edge.

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells
And sights, before the dark of reason grows.
Ears! Hear again the wild south'westers whine!
Three days on end would the September gale
Slam at our bungalow—three days on end
Rattling cheap doors and making tempers short.
It mattered not, for then enormous waves,
House-high, rolled thunderous on Greenaway,
Flinging up spume and shingle to the cliffs.
Unmoved amid the foam, the cormorant
Watched from its peak. In all the roar and swirl,
The still and small things gained significance.
Somehow the freckled cowrie would survive
And prawns hang waiting in their watery woods;
Deep in the noise there was a core of peace,
Deep in my heart a warm security.

Nose! Smell again the early-morning smells:
Congealing bacon and my father's pipe;
The after-breakfast freshness out-of-doors,
Where sun had dried the heavy dew and freed
Acres of thyme to scent the links and lawns;
The rotten apples on our shady path;
Mint round the spring and fennel in the lane
And honeysuckle wafted from the hedge;
The Lynams' cesspool, like a body blow;

Then, clean, medicinal, and cold, the sea.
"Breathe in the ozone, John. It's iodine."
(Say which is iodine and which is drains.)
Salt and hot sun on rubber water wings...
Home to the luncheon smell of Irish stew
And washing-up stench from the kitchen sink,
Because the sump is blocked. On afternoons,
Coconut smell of gorse; at Mably's farm,
Sweet scent of drying cow dung, then the moist
Exhaling of the earth in Shilla Woods—
First earth encountered after days of sand.
Evening brought back the gummy smell of toys
And fishy stink of glue and Stickphast paste,
And sleep inside the laundriness of sheets.

 Eyes! See again the rock face in the lane,
Years before tarmac and the motorcar.
Across the estuary, Stepper Point
Stands, still unquarried, black against the sun;
On its Atlantic shore the cliffs fall sheer.
Look down into the weed world of the lawn—
The devil's-coach-horse beetle hurries through,
Lifting its tail up as I bar the way
To further flowery jungles.

See once more
The Padstow ferry, worked by oar and sail,
Her outboard engines always going wrong;
Ascend the slippery quay's upended slate,
The seaweed hanging from the harbor wall.
Hot is the pavement under as I gaze
At lanterns, brass, rope, and ships' compasses
In the marine-store window on the quay.
Climb the steep hill to where that belt of elm
Circles the town and church tower, reached by lanes
Whose ferry ramparts shelter toadflax flowers
And periwinkles. See hydrangeas bloom
In warm back gardens full of fuchsia bells.
And as the homeward ferry soon draws near
Our own low bank of sand dunes comes the walk
Over a mile of quicksand, evening-cold.

It is all there, excitement for the eyes:
Imagined ghosts on unfrequented roads,
Gated and winding up through broom and gorse,
Out of the parish, on to who knows where.
What pleasure as the oil lights sparkle gold
On cut-glass tumblers and the flip of cards
To feel secure from the night outside:
Safe Cornish holidays before the storm!

V

THE Great War rumbled on; the skies were black
In that September, nineteen-seventeen,
When first I went to boarding school. And there
Were friends from Cornwall, unfamiliar
In the blue jackets of the O.P.S.,
North Oxford's famed preparatory school.
Before the hymn the Skipper would announce
The names of those who'd fallen in the fight
For King and Country, Oxford and the School.
Sometimes his gruff old voice was full of tears
When a particular favorite had been killed.
Then we would hear the nickname of the boy,
"Pongo" or "Podge," and how he played 3 Q
For Oxford and, if only he had lived,
He might have played for England—which he did,
But in a grimmer game, against the Hun.
And then we'd all look solemn, knowing well
There'd be no extra holiday today.
And we were told we each must do our bit,

THE NEW YORKER

35

And so we knitted shapeless gloves from string

For men in minesweepers, and on the map
We stuck the Allied flags along the Somme;

Visited wounded soldiers; learned by heart
Those patriotic lines by Oxenham:

"What can a little chap do
For his country and for you?"

*He can boil his head in the stev,
We added, for the trenches and the guns
Meant less to us than bicycles and gangs
And marzipan and what there was for prep.*

Take me, my Centaur bike, down Linton Road,
Gliding by newly planted almond trees,
Where the young dons, with wives in tussah gowns,
Are building in the morning of their lives
Houses for future Dragons. The choking dust,
The narrowness of the footpath made our speed
Seem swift as light. Maybush and elm flashed by.

Bicycling past a trotting butcher's cart,
I glimpsed behind lace curtains silvered hair
Of sundry old professors. Here were friends
Of Ruskin, Newman, Pattison, and Froude
Among their books and plants and photographs
In comfortable twilight. But for me
Less academic red brick Chalfont Road
Meant an old great-aunt, tea, and buttered toast.

Ronald Hughes Wright, come with me once again
Bicycling off to churches in the town:
St. Andrew's first, with Neo-Norman apse;

St. Old's, distinctly evangelical;
And, Lower still, St. Ebbes, which smelled of gas.

St. Giles had then a proper fairground air,
For Oxford was a Cotswold country town
Standing in water meadows of the Thames,
And cattle moaned in pens on Gloucester Green,
Cornmarket inns had cobbled yards and straw,
High Street St. Thomas was an ancient slum.

One lucky afternoon in Chaundy's shop
I bought a book of tipped-in color plates,
"City of Dreaming Spires," or some such name—

Soft late-Victorian water colors framed
Against brown paper pages. Thus it was
"Sunset in Worcester Gardens" meant for me

Such beauty in that black and shallow pool
That even today when from the ilex tree
I see its shining length, I fail to hear
The all too near and omnipresent train.

The Founder's Tower in Magdalen still seems drowned
In red Virginia creeper, and the High
Has but one horse tram down its famous length,
While a gowned Doctor of Divinity
Enters the porch of Univ. (Christ Church stairs,
A single column supporting the intricate roof).

Wallflowers upon the ruined city wall,
Wisteria-mantled buildings in St. John's—
All that was crumbling, picturesque, and quaint
Informed my taste and sent me biking off,
Escaped from games, for Architecture bound.

Can words express the unexampled thrill
I first enjoyed in Norm., E.E., and Dec.?
Norm. crude and round and strong and primitive,
E.E. so lofty, pointed, fine, and pure,
And Dec. the high perfection of it all,
Flowing curvilinear from which
The Perp. showed such "lamentable decline."
Who knew what undiscovered glories hung
Waiting in locked-up churches—vaulting shafts,

Pillar piscinas, floreated cap.s,
Squints, squinches, low side windows, quoin and groins—

Till I had roused the vicar, found the key,
And made a quick inspection of the church,
Then, full of my discovery, biked back

To tell of what I'd seen to Gerald Haynes.

Much do I owe you, Mr. Gerald Haynes,
Who taught us architecture and its terms!
(Harrow and Keble.) From your shambling height,
Over your spectacles you nodded down.

We called you Tortoise. From your lower lip
Inevitably hung a cigarette.

A gym shoe in your hand, you stood about
Waiting for misdemeanors; then you'd pounce:
"Who's talking here?" The dormitory quailed.

"Who's talking?" Once, though innocent myself,
A schoolboy hero to the dorm at last,

Bravely I answered, "Please, sir, it was me."

"All right. Bend over!" A resounding three

From the strong gym shoe brought a gulp of pain.

"I liked the way you took that beating, John.

Reckon yourself henceforth a gentleman."

Were those the words that made me follow him,
Waiting for hours in churches while he fixed
His huge plate camera up and, a black cloth
Over his head, photographed the font?

Was this the reason that the pale-gray slides
Of tympana, scratch dials, and Norfolk screens

So pleased me at his lectures? I think not.

Rather, his kindness and his power to share
Joys of his own—churches and botany—

With those of us whose tastes he could inform.

He motor-bicycled his life away

Looking for orchids in the Wytham Woods

And Early English in Northamptonshire.

He was the giver. Ours it was to take.

THE bindweed hung in leafy hoops
On half a hundred hawthorn caves;
For Godstow bound, the white road wound
In swirls of dust and narrow shaves,
And we were biking Red Sea troops,
Between the high cow-parsley waves.

Port Meadow's level green grew near
With Wytham Woods and Cumnor Hurst;

I clicked my Sturmey-Archer gear
And pedalled till I nearly burst,

And, king of speed, attained the lead

And got to gushing Godstow first.

The skiffs were moored above the lock
And bumped each other, side to side.

I boarded one and made her rock—

"Watch out, you fool!" a master cried.

By reed and rush and alder bush
See soon our long procession glide.

There is a world of waterweed
Seen only from a shallow boat:

Deep forests of the bladed reed,
Whose wolves are rats of slimy coat,
Whose yellow lily blossoms need
Broad leaves to keep themselves afloat.

A heaving world, half land, half flood,
It rose and sank as ripples rolled;

The hideous larva from the mud

36

AUGUST 27, 1960

Clung to a reed with patient hold,
Waiting to break its sheath and make
An aeroplane of green and gold.

The picnic and the orchid hunt,
On Oxey mead the rounders played,
The bellyfloppers from a punt,
The echoes that our shouting made,
The rowing back, relaxed and slack,
And shipping oars in Godstow shade....

Once more we biked beside the hedge,
And darker seemed the hawthorn caves
And lonelier looked the water's edge
And we were sad returning slaves
To bell and rule and smell of school
Beyond the high cow-parsley waves.

VI

WHEN I returned from school, I found we'd moved:
"53 Church Street. Yes, the slummy end..."
A little laugh accompanied the joke,
For we were Chelsea now and we had friends
Whose friends had friends who knew Augustus John;
We liked bold color schemes—orange and black—
And clever, daring plays about divorce
At the St. Martin's. Oh, our lives were changed!
Ladies with pearls and hyphenated names
Supplanted simpler aunts from Muswell Hill;
A brand-new car and brand-new chauffeur came
To carry off my father to the Works.

Old Hannah Wallis left.
For years she'd listened to me reading verse;
Tons (if you added them) of buttered toast
Had she and I consumed through all the days
In happy Highgate. Now her dear old face,
Black bonnet, sniffs, and comfortable self
Were gone to Tottenham, where her daughter lived.
What is it first breeds insecurity?
Perhaps a change of house? I missed the climb
By garden walls and fences where a stick
Dragged on the palings clattered to my steps;
I missed the smell of trodden leaves and grass,
Millfield and Merton Lanes, and sheep-worn tracks
Under the hawthorns west of Highgate Ponds;
I missed the trams, the few North London trains,
The frequent Underground to Kentish Town.
Here in a district only served by bus,
Here on an urban level by the Thames,
I never really liked the Chelsea house.
"It's simply sweet, Bess!" visitors exclaimed,
 depositing their wraps and settling down
To a nice rubber. "So artistic, too."
To me the house was poky, dark, and cramped,
Haunted by quarrels and the ground-floor ghost.

Well do I recollect the bounding thrill
Slamming behind me our green garden door
And haring off—free! free!—to see the town.
Great was my joy with London at my feet—
All London mine, five shillings in my hand,
And not expected back till after tea!
All silvery on frosty Sunday nights
Were City steeples bright against the stars.
And narrowly the chasms wound between
Italianate counting houses, Roman banks,
To this church and to that. Huge office doors,
Their granite thresholds worn by weekday feet

(Now far away in slippered ease in Penge),
Stood locked. St. Botolph this, St. Mary that
Alone shone out resplendent in the dark.
I used to stand by intersecting lanes
Among the silent offices and wait,
Choosing which bell to follow. Not a peal,
For that meant somewhere active. Not St. Paul's,
For that was too well known. I liked things dim—
Some lazy rector living in Bexhill
Who most unwillingly on Sunday came
To take the statutory services.
A single bell would tinkle down a lane;
My echoing steps would track the source of sound.
A cassocked verger, bell rope in his hands,
Called me to high box pews, to cedarwood
Like incense where no incense ever burned;
A hidden organist sent reedy notes
To flute around the plasterwork. I stood,
And from the sea of pews a single head,
With cherries nodding on a black straw hat,
Rose in a neighboring pew. The caretaker?
Or the sole resident parishioner?
And so once more, as for three hundred years,
This carven wood, these gray memorial'd walls
Heard once again the Book of Common Prayer
While somewhere in the back the verger, now
Turned parish clerk, would rumble out "Amen."
'Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God
That brought me to these dim, forgotten fanes.
Largely it was a longing for the past.
And yet another feeling drew me there,
A sense of guilt increasing with the years—
"When I am dead you will be sorry, John."
Here I could pray my mother would not die.
Thus were my London Sundays incomplete
If unaccompanied by Evening Prayer.

VII

AS I review the five long Marlborough years
I feel the seasons. Winter starts us off,
Lasting two years, for we were new boys twice—
Once in a junior, then a senior house.
Spring has its love and summer has its art;
It is the winter that remains with me—
Black as our college suits, as cold and thin.
Doom! Shivering doom! Clutching a leather grip
Containing things for the first night of term—
House slippers, sponge, pajamas, Common Prayer,
Health certificate, photographs of home
(Where were my bike, my playbox, and my trunk?)—
I walked with strangers down the hill to school.
The town's first gaslights twinkled in the cold.
Deserted by the coaches, poorly served
By railway, Marlborough was a lonely place;
The Old Bath Road, in chalky whiteness, raised
Occasional clouds of smoke as motors passed.

Those few who read Dean Farrar's "Eric" now
Read merely for a laugh, yet still for me
That mawkish and oh-so-melodious book
Holds one great truth: through every page there runs
The schoolboy sense of an impending doom
Which goes with rows of desks and clanging bells;
It filters down from God to Master's Lodge,
Through housemasters and prefects, to the fags.
Doom! Shivering doom! Inexorable bells
To early school, to chapel, school again;
Compulsory constipation, hurried meals

THE NEW YORKER

37

Bulked out with whipped-cream walnuts from the town.
At first there was the dread of breaking rules:
Keeping the buttons of one's coat done up;
"Betjeman, you know that new boys mustn't show
Their hair below the peak of college caps.
Stand still and have your face slapped." "Sorry, Jones."
The dread of beatings, dread of being late,
And, greatest dread of all, the dread of games!

"The center and the mainspring of your lives,
The inspiration for your work and sport,
The corporate life of this great public school
Stems from its glorious chapel. Day by day
You come to worship in its noble walls
Hallowed by half a century of prayer...."

The Old Marlburian bishop thundered on
When all my worship was the athletes, ranged
In the pews opposite. "Be pure!" he cried,
And, for a moment, stilled a sea of coughs.
"Do nothing that would make your mother blush
If she could see you. When the Tempter comes,
Spurn him, and God will lift you from the mire."
Oh, who is God? Oh, tell me who is God?

Perhaps He hides behind the reredos? ...
Give me a God whom I can touch and see.
The bishop was more right than he could know,
For, safe in the surge of undogmatic hymns,
The chapel was the center of my life—

The only place where I could be alone.

THE afterlight that hung along the hedges
On sunward sides of them when sun was down,
The sprinkled lights along the borough's edges,
The pale-green gas lamps winking in the town,
The waiting elm boughs black against the blue,
Which still to westward held a silver hue ...

Alone beside the fives courts pacing, pacing,
Waiting for God knows what. Oh, stars above!

My clothes clung tight to me, my heart was racing—
Perhaps what I was waiting for was love?

And what is love? And wherefore is it its shape
To do with legs and arms and waist and nape?

First tremulous desires in autumn stillness—
Gray eyes, lips laughing at another's joke,
A nose, a cowlick—a delightful illness
That put me off my food and off my stroke,
Electric currents racing through my frame:

Was this the love that dare not speak its name?

Intense and inexplicable emotion!
Here by the fives courts, by myself at last,
I longed to meet the warm, enclosing ocean
Of joy to come and persecution past;

Here, 'twixt the church tower and the chapel spire,
Rang sad and deep the bells of my desire.

The smell of trodden leaves beside the Kennet
On Sunday walks with Swinburne in my brain,
November showers upon the chalk dust when it
Would turn to streaming milk in Manton Lane,
And coming back to feel one's footsteps drag,
And smells of burning toast and cries of "Fag!" ...

How could I have withstood those five years, flowing
From boredom on to boredom, how endure
Without romantic love to keep them going—

Romantic love so rarefied and pure
That the sole reason that it never died
Was just because it was unsatisfied?

VIII

SUMMER, and we are spinning down to Slough,
Cornwall the object of the early start
And Newbury a foretaste of the goal.
The golf bags shifted as we took the hill.
"It's getting dark, Bates. Switch the headlights on!"
Swathed in his deafness and his loneliness,
My father, his gray eyes sad, in gathering dusk
Saw Roughton and Brown Willy hide the view
Of that bold coastline where he was not born—
Not born, but would he had been, would he had
More right than just the price of them to wear
Those tweeds and leather leggings. "Hurry, Bates!"

(His Gibson girl, his bride, his good Queen Bess,
Straw-hatted, bicycling down Surrey lanes ...
Her welcome for him coming home from work ...
That early flat, electrically lit,

Red silk and leather in the dining room,
Beads round the drawing-room electrolier ...
Singing in bed, to make the youngster laugh—

Tosti's "Goodbye," Lord Henry's "Echo Song"—
And windy walks on Sunday to the Heath ...
Then it was us. Now it is she and I,

For I am deaf and she is someone else;
Our son, a long-haired stripling, stands between.)

These were the years when love gave way to fear.
I feared my father, loved my mother more,

And just because of this would criticize
In my own mind the artless things she said:

"Dr. Macmillan, who's so good and cheap,
Says I will tire my kidneys if I stoop,

And, oh, I do love gardening, for now
The garden is the last thing I have left.

You'll help me with the weeding, won't you, John? ...

He says my teeth are what is wrong. The roots
Are sick and ossified into my gums—

No dentist could extract them.... Listen, John!
We've sent you to a most expensive school,

And John—oh, John!—you've disappointed us."

Her wit, her gaiety, the jokes we shared,
The love for her that waited underneath

I kept in check. And as the motor sped

At thirty-five through Shepton on to Wells,

Bearing its chauffeur-driven bogeyman,

I knew this summer I would run away

And leave her. Thus we let the tension mount

Through all the summer Cornish afternoon.
A motor broke the spell and that was that.

And here was home, and here the gate, and here
The Arrol Johnston crawling down the lane.

And on the morning after burst the storm:
"How often have I said the bacon's cold?

Confound it, Bess! Confound! When will they learn?"

Bang! Boom! His big fists set the cups a-dance,

The willow pattern shivered on the shelves,

His coat sleeve caught an ashtray to the floor.

"Just down for breakfast, sir? You're good enough
To honor us by coming down at ten!

Don't fidget, boy. Attention when I speak!

As I was saying—now I look at you—

Bone-lazy, like my eldest brother Jack,
A rotten, low, deceitful little snob.

Yes, I'm in trade and proud of it, I am."

38

AUGUST 27, 1960

Black waves of hate went racing round the room;
My gorge was stuck with undigested toast.
And did this woman once adore this man?
And did he love her for her form and face?
I drew my arm across my eyes to hide
The horror in them at the wicked thoughts.
"My boy, it's no good sulking. Listen here.
You'll go to Bates and order me the car,
You'll caddie for me on the morning round,
This afternoon you'll help me dig for bait,
You'll weed the lawn, and when you've finished that,
I'll find another job for you to do.
I'll keep you at it, as I've kept myself.
I'll have obedience. Yes, by God, I will!"
"You damn well won't! I'm going out today."
I darted for the door. My father rose.
My saintly mother, on her serious face
A quenly look of dignified reproach
("They both are in the wrong"), now seized her chance.
She waved an arm and dropped her cigarette.
"Come back!" she cried, and heard her cry ring out
As rung the martyred wife-and-mother's cry
In many a Temple Thurston she had read
And Philip Gibbs. "He is your father, John."
I scraped my wrist along the unstained oak
And slammed the door against my father's weight
And ran like mad and ran like mad and ran....
"I'm free! I'm free!" The open air was warm
And heavy with the scent of flowering mint,
And beetles waved on bending leagues of grass,
And all the baking countryside was kind.

DEAR lanes of Cornwall! With a one-inch map,
A bicycle, and well-worn "Little Guide,"
Those were the years of exploration made
To far-off churches. One of them that year
So worked on me that if my life was changed
I owe it to St. Ervan and his priest
In that small hollow, deep in sycamores.
The time was teatime, calm freewheeling-time,
When from slashed treetops in the coomb below
I heard a bell note floating to the sun;
It gave significance to lichened stone
And large red admirals with outspread wings
Basking on buddleia. So, coasting down
Into cool shade of interlacing boughs,
I found St. Ervan's partly ruined church.
Its bearded rector, holding in one hand
A gong stick, in the other hand a book,
Struck, while he read, a heavy-sounding bell
Hung from an elm bough by the churchyard gate.
"Better come in. It's time for Evensong."
There wasn't much to see, there wasn't much
The "Little Guide" could say about the church.
Holy and small and heavily restored,
It held me for the length of Evensong
Said rapidly among discolored walls
Impatient of my diffident response.
"Better come in and have a cup of tea."
The rectory was large, uncarpeted,
Books and oil lamps and papers lay about,
The study's pale-green walls were mapped with damp,
The pitch-pine doors and window frames were cracked,
Loose, noisy tiles along the passages
Led to a waste of barely furnished rooms;
Clearly the rector lived here all alone.
He talked of poetry and Cornish saints;
He kept an apiary and a cow;

He asked me which church service I liked best.
I told him Evensong. "And I suppose
You think religion's mostly singing hymns
And feeling warm and comfortable inside."
And he was right. Most certainly I did.
"Borrow this book and come to tea again."
With Arthur Machen's "Secret Glory" stuffed
Into my blazer pocket, up the hill,
On to St. Merryn, down to Padstow Quay
In time for the last ferry back to Rock
I bicycled, and found Trebetherick
A worldly contrast to my afternoon.
I would not care to read that book again;
It so exactly mingled with the mood
Of those impressionable years that now
I might be disillusioned. There were laughs
At public schools, at chapel services,
At masters who were still "big boys at heart,"
While all the time the author's hero knew
A Secret Glory in the hills of Wales:
Caverns of light revealed the Holy Grail
Exhaling gold upon the mountaintops
At Holy, Holy, Holy of the Mass,
King Brychan's sainted children crowded round,
The past and present were enwrapped in one.
In quest of mystical experience
I knelt in darkness in St. Enodoc;
I visited our local Holy Well,
To which the native Cornish still resort
For cures for whooping cough, and drop bent pins
Into its peaty water. Not a sign;
No mystical experience was vouchsafed.
The maidenhair just trembled in the wind
And everything looked as it always looked—
But somewhere, somewhere underneath the dunes,
Somewhere among the cairns or in the caves,
The Celtic saints would come to me, the ledge
Of time we walk on, like a thin cliff path
High in the mists, would show the precipice.
An only child, deliciously apart,
Misunderstood, and not like other boys,
Deep, dark, and pitiful I saw myself
In my mind's mirror, every step I took
An object of absorbing interest.
Boxwallahs, doctors, schoolmasters, and dons,
Who were the other "parents" of the place,
Seemed easier to deal with than my own.
In bungalows with relics of the East
Spared from their London houses, they reclined
On sofas and with happy faces watched
Their bouncing young ones in the drawing room
Roll up the carpet, ready for a dance.
There the jingle tinkled in the entrance hall,
Japanese lanterns lit the sandy path,
Over the tamarisks the summer night
Heard Melville Gideon on the gramophone.
And one there was of all the adults there
Who took me at my reckoning of myself—
Aunt Elsie, aunt of normal Scottish boys,
Adopted aunt of lone, abnormal me.
She understood us all. She treated me
With reason, waiting while I choked with rage.
"Aunt Elsie, surely I could have the car?"
The eucalyptus shivered in the drive,
The stars were out above the garage roof,
Night-scented stock and white tobacco plant
Gave way to petrol scent and came again.
A rival, changing gear along the lane,

THE NEW YORKER

Alone disturbed the wide September night.
"Come in, John, and I'll tell you why you can't."
And there, among the water colors, screens,
Thick carpets, Whistler books, and porcelain,
There, in that more-than-summer residence,
She would explain that I was still a boy.

*Was still a boy?* Then what, by God, was this—
This tender, humble, unrequited love
For Biddy Walsham? What the worshipping
That put me off my supper, fixed my hair
Thick with Anzora for the dance tonight?
The Talbot-Darracq—oh, to drive it out,
With Biddy in beside me! I could show
Double declutching to perfection now.
What though the Stokes were but a field away?
Biddy would scream with laughter as I'd charge
Up the steep corner of Coolgrena Drive
And slip from top to second, down to first,
And almost seem to ram the bungalow,
And swirl around the terraced plateau, brake,
Then switch the headlights off, and we would wait
While the recovering engine ticked to quiet
In comfortable darkness. If my hand
By accident should touch her hand, perhaps
The love in me would race along to her
On the electron principle, perhaps . . . ?
"So surely, John, it's sensible to walk?"

## IX

BALKAN Sobranies in a wooden box,
The college arms upon the lid; Tokay
And sherry in the cupboard; on the shelves
"The University Statutes," bound in olive,
"Crome Yellow," "Prancing Nigger," Blunden, Keats.
My walls were painted bursar's apple-green;
My wide-sashed windows looked across the grass
To tower and hall and lines of pinnacles;
The wind among the elms, the echoing stairs,
The quarters chimed across the quite quad
From Magdalen Tower and neighboring turret clocks
Gave eighteenth-century splendor to my state.
Privacy after years of public school,
Dignity after years of none at all!
First college rooms, a kingdom of my own—
What words can tell my gratitude?
No wonder, looking back, I never worked.
Too pleased with life, swept in the social round,
I soon left Old Marlburians behind.
I cut tutorials with wild excuses,
For life was luncheons, luncheons, all the way,
And evenings dining with the "Georgeoisie."
Open, swing doors, upon the lighted George
And smell of *vol-au-vent!* Behold the band,
Sawing away at gems from "Chu Chin Chow."
But as the laughs grew long and loud I heard
The more insistent inner voice of guilt:
"Stop!" said my mother from her bed of pain;
I heard my father in his factory say,
"Fourth generation, John. They look to you."
And then the chatter of the George returned:
"Harry Strathspey is coming if he can
After he's dined at Blenheim." "Hamish says
That Ben has got twelve dozen Bollinger."
Moon after parties, moon on Magdalen Tower,
And shadow on the place for climbing in.
Noise; then the great, deep silences again.
Silk-dressing-gowned, to Sunday-morning bells,
Long after breakfast had been cleared in hall,

I wandered to my lavender-scented bath,
Then, with a loosely knotted shantung tie
And hair well soaked in Delhez's Genêt d'Or,
Strolled to the Eastgate. Oxford marmalade
And a thin volume of Lowes Dickinson
But half engaged my thoughts till Sunday calm
Led me by crumbling walls and echoing lanes,
Past college chapels, with their organ groan,
And churches stacked with bicycles outside,
To worship at High Mass in Pusey House.

Those were the days when that divine baroque
Transformed our English altars and our ways.
Fiddleback chasuble in mid-Lent pink
Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike.
"Why do you try to ape the Holy See?"
"Why do you sojourn in a halfway house?"
And if these doubts had ever troubled me
(Praise God they didn't) I would have made a move.
What seemed to me a greater question then
Tugged, and still tugs: Is Christ the son of God?
Despite delicious lapses into lust,
Despite hypocrisy, revenge, and hate,
I learned at Pusey House that Catholic faith.
Friends of those days, now patient parish priests,
By worldly standards you have not "got on"
Who knelt with me as Oxford sunlight streamed
On some colonial bishop's broidered cope.
Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,
Some start upon that painful love affair
By means of doubt and argument, and some
(My closest friends) seem not to want His love—
And this is why I wish to God I knew.
My steps to truth were always made by stone,
Stained glass and vestments, holy-water stoups,
Incense, and crossings of myself—the things
That hearty middle-stumpers most despise
As "all the inessentials of the Faith."

SOMETIMES from Oxford on a morn in May
We'd drive to Sunday lunch at Sezincote—
First steps in learning how to be a guest,
First wood-smoke-scented luxury of life
In the large ambience of a country house.
Heavy with hawthorn scent the Cotswold lanes,
Golden the church towers standing in the sun,
And Gordon Russell and his arts and crafts
Somewhere beyond in Broadway. Down the drive,
Under the early yellow leaves of oaks,
One lodge is Gothic, one in Indian style.
The bridge, the waterfall, the Temple Pool—
And then there burst on us the onion domes,
Chajahs and chattris made of amber stone.
"Home of the Oaks," exotic Sezincote!
Stately and strange it stood, the Nabob's house,
Indian without and coolest Greek within,
Looking from Gloucestershire to Oxfordshire,
And with the landscape gardener's subtle art
The lake below the eastward slope of grass
Was made to seem a mighty river-reach,
Curving along to Chipping Norton's hills.
Crackle of gravel. In the entrance hall,
Billhooks and mattocks, hunting mackintosh,
And whips and sticks and barometric clock
Were Colonel Dugdale's. But a sheaf of bast
And gardening basket told us of his wife.
Dear Mrs. Dugdale, mother of us all,
In trailing and Edwardian-looking dress,
A Sargent portrait in your elegance,

39

40

Sweet confidante in every tale of woe!
She and her son and we were on the Left,
But Colonel Dugdale was Conservative.
From one end of the butler-tended board
The Colonel's eyes looked out toward the hills,
While at the other end our hostess heard
Political and undergraduate chat.
"Oh, Ethell!" Loudly Colonel Dugdale's voice
Boomed sudden down the table. "That manure—
I've had it shifted to the strawberry beds."

So Sezincote became a second home.
The love between those seeming opposites,
Colonel and Mrs. Dugdale, warmed their guests.
The paddock where the Colonel's favorite mare,
His tried companion of the '14 war,
Grazed in retirement—what is in it now?
New owners wander to the Temple Pool,
Where Mrs. Dugdale snipped exotic shrubs
With secateurs as on and on I talked.
The onion dome which listened all the time
To water filling after-tennis baths,
To water splashing from the limestone rock
By primulas and under thin bamboo,
The cottages, the lanes and woods and paths
Are all so filled with voices of the past
I do not dare return.

At six o'clock from Bourton-on-the-Hill
The bells rang out above the clumps of oaks;
A lighter peal from Longborough lingered on;
Moreton-in-Marsh came echoing from the vale.
So gently broke the triple waves of sound
On a still evening of enormous light
That when they ceased I almost seemed to hear
From open church doors village voluntaries
A mile and more away.

It's time to go.
Dinner with Maurice Bowra sharp at eight,
High up in Wadham's hospitable quad,
Of which West Country college he was Dean:
The Gilbert Spencers and the Campbell Grays
Bright in the inner room; the brown and green
Of rows and rows of Greek and Latin texts;
The learning lightly worn; the grand contempt
For pedants, traitors, and pretentiousness.
A dozen oysters and a dryish hock;
Claret and tournedos; a bombe surprise;
The fusillade of phrases ("I'm a man
More dined against than dining") rattled out
In that incisive voice and chucked away
To be reused in envious common rooms
By imitation. Maurices. I learned,
If learn I could, how not to be a bore,
And merciless was his remark that touched
The tender spot if one was showing off.
Within those rooms I met my friends for life;
True values there were handed on a plate
As easily as sprouts and aubergines.
Administrators, professorial chairs
In subjects such as civics, and the cad
Out for himself pretending to be kind—
He summed them up with vigorous remark,
Occasionally shouting out the truth
In vigorous nineteen-fourteen Army slang.
And as the evening mellowed into port
He read us poems. There I learned to love
That lord of language Alfred Tennyson,
There first heard Thomas Hardy's poetry.

Yeats he would chant in deep, sonorous voice;
Bring Rudyard Kipling—then so out of date—
To his full stature; show that learning was
Not memory tests (as I had long supposed),
Not "first-class brains" and swotting for exams,
But humble love for what we learned and knew.
King of a kingdom underneath the stars,
I wandered back to Magdalen certain then,
As now, that Maurice Bowra's company
Taught me far more than all my tutors did.

X

FAILED in Divinity! Oh, count the hours
Spent on my knees in Cowley, Pusey House,
St. Barnabas', St. Mary Mag's, St. Paul's,
Revering chasubles and copes and albs!
Consider what I knew of High and Low—
Failed in Divinity! O towers and spires!
Could no one help? Was nothing to be done?
No. No one. Nothing. Mercilessly calm,
The Cherwell carried under Magdalen Bridge
Its leisured puntfuls of the fortunate
Who next term and the next would still come back.
Could no one help? I'd seen myself a don,
Reading old poets in the library,
Attending chapel in an M.A. gown,
And sipping vintage port by candlelight.
I sought my tutor in his arid room;
He said, "You only would have got a Third."
I wandered into Blackwell's, where my bill
Was so enormous that it wasn't paid
Till long years later, from the small estate
My father left. Not even dusty shelves
Of folios of architectural plates
Could comfort me. Outside, the sunny Broad,
The moldering busts round the Sheldonian,
The hard Victorian front of Exeter,
The small, dim colleges that front the Turl,
The lean acacia tree in Trinity
Stood strong and confident, outlasting me.
Already I could hear my father's voice:
"My boy, henceforward your allowance stops.
You'll copy me, who with my strong right arm
Alone have got myself the victory."
"Your father's right, John, you must earn your keep...."
I was a poet. That was why I failed.
And following this chimera brought an end
To all my father's hopes. In later years,
When, old and ill, he asked me once again
To carry on the firm, I still refused.
And still when I behold, fresh-published, new,
A further volume of my verse, I see
His kind gray eyes look woundedly at mine.
I see his workmen seeking other jobs,
And that red granite obelisk above
The family vault in Highgate Cemet'ry
Points an accusing finger to the sky.

THE sun that shines on Edward James
Shines also down on me;
It's strange that two such simple names
Should spell such mystery.
The air he breathes, I breathe it, too,
But where's he now? What does he do?

On tapestries from Brussels looms
The low, late-twenties sunlight falls

42

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In those black-ceilinged Oxford rooms
And on their silver-panelled walls.

"ARS LONGA VITA BREVIS EST"
Was painted round them—not in jest.

And who in those days thought it odd
To liven breakfast with champagne
And watch, in Canterbury Quad,
Pale undergraduates in the rain?

For while we ate Virginia hams
Contemporaries passed exams.

Tutorials and dons there were,
And tests and teams and toughs and games—
But these were neither here nor there
To such as me and Edward James.
We swung the incense smoke about
To drive the smells of breakfast out,

And talked of Eliot and Wilde
And Sachie's "Southern Baroque Art,"
While all the time our darling child,
The poem we had learned by heart
(And wrote last night), must be recited,
Whether or not it was invited.

At William Morris how we laughed,
At hairy tweeds and knitted ties—
Pub poets who in tankards quaffed
Glared up at us with angry eyes—
For, Regency before our time,
We first found Cheltenham sublime.

Ah, how the trivial would enchant!
On our Botanic Garden walk
We touched the tender "sensitive plant"
And saw the fronds enfold the stalk
At each light blow our fingers dealt—
So very like ourselves, we felt.

But in the end they sent me down
From that sweet hothouse world of bells
And crumbling walls of golden brown
And dotty peers and incense smells
And dinners at the George and hock
And Wytham Woods and Godstow Lock.

The sun that shone on Edward James
Shone also down on me,
A prep-school master teaching games,
Maths, French, Divinity.

Harsh hand bells harried me from sleep
For thirty pounds a term and keep.

And you continued friendly still,
And wrote your verses out with care
On vellum with a colored quill,
And published them in volumes rare
Of handmade paper bound up fine—
And then, by Jove, you published mine!

They tell me you're in Mexico,
They will not give me your address,
But if you see these lines you'll know
I do not value you the less,
For Art is long but Life must end—
My early publisher and friend.

—JOHN BETJEMAN

COMMENTARY

BOURGEOIS VISIONARIES

Surrealists' houses embody a conventional sense of place

By George Melly

"Human psychism in its most universal aspect has found in the gothic castle and its accessories a point of fixation so precise that it becomes essential to discover what would be the equivalent for our own period. (Everything leads us to believe that there is no question of it being a factory.)" André Breton

Breton's observation, couched as usual in that exact and solemn tone, might suggest that the Surrealists, whenever it were practical, would have chosen to live in castles. In general, however, they were more modestly housed. Most of them, including Breton himself when in Paris, made do with studios or apartments, and even those painters who were later to achieve prosperity and retire to the country appear to have favored modern houses, or at any rate nothing so grandiose as a château.

Financial considerations apart, this yearning for the castle and the rejection of it as a suitable place to live is indicative of a dichotomy in the Surrealist soul; an aristocratic imagination at odds with the belief in the necessity for

continuous revolution and, for many years, "the triumph of the proletariat."

Above all there was the constant but by no means successful struggle to avoid the takeover of the visual aspects of Surrealism by fashionable society, whose decorators and couturiers recognized it as an easy and attractive method of amusing their bored and novelty-obsessed clients.

The solution for the hard-core Surrealists themselves, was, in the main, to cultivate a certain austerity in their daily lives. Their own interiors presented an almost academic banality relieved only by the pictures they hung on their walls and the objects they displayed on the carefully arranged shelves; bour-

geois order and good sense, even personal modesty dictated their surroundings. Imaginative extravagance surfaced only in their collections.

The classic Surrealist interior looks more like an alchemist's cell than anything else. Its effect was of the poetic incongruity of a sixteenth-century "cabinet of curiosities"; fantasy corrected by a severe geometry.

Breton occupied successively two studios at 42 rue Fontaine, Montmartre, and if the extraordinary facts they contained were replaced by, say, Egyptian or Greek antiquities, they could have been the apartments of an archaeologist of severe tastes. Their furniture was solid and practical, their color scheme restrained to the point of drabness. Writing of the earlier and larger studio, André Thirion described it as "Like one big museum." Everything "had its place." This curatorlike approach might appear at odds with the Surrealist aim of breaking down the barriers between dream and reality, but there were two prejudices that may help to explain this "normality": the Surrealist mistrust of aesthetics and their vigorous rejection of bohemianism. Dali alone, as we shall see, was willing and eager to embrace both extravagance and luxury, to allow his obsessions and later on their exhibitionist exploitation to invade his living space. The rest of them lived like doctors or academics.

The most extreme example of this rule, extreme even to the point of caricature, was the painter René Magritte. According to our mutual friend, the late Belgian poet and collagist E.L.T. Mesens, Magritte's penurious youth was spent in apartments of necessary austerity, but by the time I came to know him, comparative prosperity allowed him to buy a somewhat characteristic, detached house at 97 rue des Mimosas in a respectable suburb of

Top: In Magritte's bedroom, his tiny painting; above, Magritte in his living room, 1965

DUANE MICHALS

48

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COMMENTARY

Brussels, a villa guarded by a succession of small identical dogs all of which, irrespective of sex, were called "Lulu."

The yapping of "Lulu" and the
chime of a two-toned bell does some-
thing to prepare one for an interior of
inspired banality, less indeed than that
of a doctor or academic than of a well-
to-do car salesman. Georgette Ma-
gritte is extremely house-proud.
Everything is polished and shining, as
much today as it was during her hus-
band's lifetime. Of Magritte's own íco-
nography there is, apart from a few of
his pictures and a bottle painted to re-
semble a nude, only his bowler hat and,
hanging on the stairs, a tuba. For the
rest there is a baby grand piano in the
living room, rugs of rather garish Ori-
ental design, silk curtains, two gilt
cherubs, while on every flat surface
there are collections of china birds on
china twigs, and "novelty" clocks play
little tunes more or less on the hour, so
that for five minutes or so the house
whirs and chirps like a tiny fun-fair.
Magritte had no studio. He painted at
an easel in a small annex to the bed-
room, painted furthermore with such
care that there was no need for any-
thing under the easel to protect the car-
pet, while he himself worked in a dark
suit and sober tie, looking like a slightly
old-fashioned and punctilious bank
teller.

When I questioned Mesens as to the

DUANE MICHALS

Magritte worked on an uncovered Oriental
carpet in his studio.

50

HOUSE & GARDEN

COMMENTARY

spirit behind this suburban “castle,”
he told me that Magritte, on principle,
never interfered with his wife’s taste.
Nevertheless, I got the impression that
this most sardonic of the Surrealists en-
joyed the effect on those earnest admir-
ers who visited him during his later
years. He was a great deadpan comedi-
an, intransigent in his “normality”
most of the time which, as a result,
made his very frequent and carefully
judged acts of outrage appear the more
forceful. Similarly the tuba on the stairs
and the bottle painted to look like a
nude woman and placed among the
clocks and china birds carry an exag-
gerated charge.

In his work too, Magritte constantly
relied on the panic of the ordinary. His
rooms are mostly petit-bourgeois, his
objects mass-produced. Two of his
carpets from the rue de Mimosas are to
be seen on the floor in *Personal Values*,
a painting of a bedroom in which huge
toilet articles have taken over. His pi-
ano, enclosed by a wedding ring, is the
subject of *The Fortunate Hand*. His

wife, Georgette, is the model for al-
most all of his unnerving sexual specu-
lations. Even "Lulu" in the guise of
*The Civilizer* makes a solitary appear-
ance. Yet Magritte also speculated oc-
asionally on the Gothic castle. In *The
Castle of the Pyrenees*, it is carved from
the rock on which it stands, a huge
boulder floating over the sea. In *Al-
mayer's Folly*, a medieval tower is
shown against a red-gold back-cloth. It
has been literally "pulled up by the
roots."

Magritte's cheerful and possibly
careful lack of given taste was rare.
Most of those associated with the
movement were closer to Breton's seri-
ous negation of décor. Mesens himself
lived for most of his life in a series of
London apartments neutral in color
certainly, but with understated "good"
furniture, mostly English Regency.
Here too the magnificent collection of
paintings, the marvelous objects both
primitive and folkloric, established
that familiar ambience in which most
of the Surrealists felt, in the most literal

sense, "at home."

On the other hand, when it came to
public manifestations the group resort-
ed to very elaborate means to create the
kind of Surrealist "reality" one might
have expected to find in their own
apartments. The great exhibitions,
most often staged under the direction
of Marcel Duchamp, were aimed to
sabotage the customary reverent ap-
proach to the display of artworks. The
international exhibition held in Paris
in 1938 was perhaps the most sensa-
tional and certainly created the maxi-
mum frisson. Apart from the pictures
and objects there were 1,200 sacks of
coal hanging from the ceiling, the floor
was uneven and scattered with leaves
and twigs. There was a lighted brazier,
four luxurious if disheveled beds, one
in each corner, and a pool surrounded
by pampas grass. Several of the paint-
ings were hung on static "revolving
doors." At the opening the visitors
were handed torches to examine the
pictures and the lighting was kept very
low, but the torches ran out, the artists
complained, and for the rest of the run
the illumination was turned up.

Outside in the lobby was an old taxi
overgrown with ivy. Inside a steady ar-
tificial downpour of rain fell on the oc-
cupants, a goggled chauffeur, his head
encased in a shark's jaws while his cus-
tomer, an erotic shop-window dummy
slumped in the back, provided a prom-
enade for a number of large Burgun-
dian snails. This was the work of
Salvador Dali.

The opening was a success but large-
ly with the very public the Surrealists,
with the exception of Dali, most de-
spised: the fashionable, the snobbish,
*le tout Paris*. The problem arose be-
cause of the shift on emphasis in the
movement from the poets to the paint-
ers. Initially, during the "heroic" era of
the twenties, the visual arts had acted
as the handmaiden of the movement.
By the thirties this was no longer the
case. Paintings and sculpture, unlike
poetry and polemics, have a commer-
cial value, and the Surrealist artists,
despite Breton's slightly confused
misgivings, earned their living from
their work. It must be pointed out that
both Breton and Éluard supplemented
their meager earnings as writers by pic-
ture dealing.

There was also the problem of fin-
nancing certain expensive manifesta-

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Please accept my reservation to *The Pope John Paul II Porcelain Sculpture*. I understand this sculpture will be crafted of fine imported porcelain, hand-painted in vivid color, and decorated with 22kt gold. I need send no money now. I will be billed for the sculpture in two monthly installments of $32.50 each.

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COMMENTARY

tions such as the publication of limited
editions and films, and the move from
the austerity of the early magazines
with their few and smudgy illustrations
toward a more luxurious format. To
achieve funding compromise was a ne-
cessity. The "proletariat" were unlike-
ly to cough up the money for such
extravagant ventures.

Edward James, who paid for several
numbers of *Minotaure*, the glossy,
splendidly produced magazine which
from 1933 on had become the Surreal-
ists' house journal, told me that where-
as the painters, of whom he was a gen-
erous patron, treated him as a friend,
Breton and Eluard made it clear that
for them he was no more than a rich
dilettante to be made use of.

Dali joined the group in 1929 at the
moment when the ideological crisis
with the communists was just begin-
ning to brew. He brought with him an
imagination working at full throttle
and an immense facility, but no par-
ticular commitment to any ideology
beyond his own obsession. By the time

the break with the communists had be-
come absolute and several of the dis-
tinguished founders of the movement
had been expelled or resigned
for political differences, Dali had
emerged, for the public at any rate, as
*the* Surrealist. For Breton it was evi-
dent that Dali's gifts, his controlled
paranoia, his inspired mania, had res-
cued Surrealism at a moment when it

appeared to be on the edge of ideologi-
cal bankruptcy. On the debit side his
open social *arrivisme*, which with typi-
cally hysterical ingenuity he justified as
"surrealist," offered a serious threat to
the purity of the movement.

Dali alone lived in an interior similar
to that of the Surrealist exhibitions. He
kept his cutlery, for example, in draw-
ers concealed in the body of an erect
stuffed polar bear, a gift from Edward
James that he dyed pink. Nor did he
confine himself to creating his own dé-
cor. He painted a picture of an apart-
ment that simultaneously created the
illusion of Mae West's face, and al-
though this was never realized, her lips
in the form of a pink satin sofa were
manufactured in a small edition and
found their way into several fashion-
able drawing rooms.

His house in Port Lligat is his vulgar
monument; a stage set in which care-
fully placed fetishes provide easy pick-
ings for lazy journalists. A friend of
mine told me that he once went there
for lunch. The main course was lobster
with chocolate sauce. The table on the
terrace was elaborately set with silver
candelabra. The candles were ceremo-
niously lit, but the flames, as it was
broad daylight, were invisible. "Dali,"
says Edward James, "is like a comedian
who ran out of jokes thirty years ago."

The war saved Surrealism from
*snobbismes*. Many of the leading Su-
realists spent the war years in America,
where those painters who practiced
automatism were to have a consider-
able effect on the future Abstract Ex-
pressionists. Robert Motherwell told
me that Breton used to lead him and
other young New York painters
around the junk shops on the East Side
demanding that they identify which
objects were or were not Surrealist. For
a time there was considerable excite-
ment around the movement; maga-
zines were published, exhibitions held,
but it didn't "take."

After the war Breton returned to
Paris and relaunched Surrealist activi-
ties, but there was no renewed danger
of appropriation by the beau monde.
Most of the geniuses of the movement
had or were soon to part company to
be replaced by noisy young yes-men of
little talent. Surrealism, for the smart
and the intellectuals, had become a
"bore." The pictures were another
matter. The work of the great artists

Man Ray's Paris studio/apartment, c. 1925

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HOUSE & GARDEN

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COMMENTARY

slowly reemerged as investments or en-
tered the museums. The revolutionary
spirit that had inspired them was large-
ly forgotten or deliberately ignored.

Official Surrealism produced no architecture and mistrusted contemporary décor as frivolous, but this was not to say that it restricted its enthusiasm to “the Gothic castle and its accessories.” In Paris, during its early days, the young poets selected “Privileged Places” where they recognized the Surrealist spirit. There was the Passage de l’Opéra, the principal subject of Aragon’s marvelous book *The Paris Peasant*, and soon to be pulled down. Here the Dadaists had met. Here poetry stalked. Breton himself named several spots in his anti-novel *Nadja*, perhaps the purest exposition of the Surrealist life ever written. There is, to quote from the caption under one of the mysterious photographs that illustrate the book, “...the very beautiful and very useless Porte St. Denis.” Max Ernst, in his collage novel *Une Semaine de Bonté*, celebrated certain corners: “La Cour de Dragon,” “Le Lion de Belfort,” while the Buttes-Chaumont park in Montmartre with its Suicides’ Bridge held a great fascination for them all.

It was Dali who, almost alone, recognized the then-despised Art Nouveau as “edible architecture” and began the reinstatement of perhaps its greatest practitioner, Antonio Gaudí. He also, but here with markedly less enthusiasm from the rest of the group, became obsessed with the palaces and grottos of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria...

In a jungle in Mexico, Edward James, now in his late seventies, is building an extraordinary collection of totally original concrete follies. To enable the work to continue he is forced, from time to time, to sell some of the great Dalis or other Surrealists he bought during the thirties. With no architectural training and only local labor, James's towers and columns, spanned by bridges, linked by paths, rise slowly above the voracious vegetation. The "rich dilettante" has committed himself, with a rigor of which Breton would surely be proud, to a gratuitous act of touching purity. Surrealism may have joined the Gothic castle as history, but the search for "a point of fixation" continues. □

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["MEMOIRS", "TLS DECEMBER 24 1982: 1411", "Rambles with the rich", "Alastair Forbes", "BRYAN GUINNESS", "Potpourri from the Thirties", "174pp. Cygnet Press, Burford, W. £9.50\n0 970435 017", "EDWARD JAMES", "Swans Reflecting Elephants:", "My Early Years", "Edited by George Melly", "178pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.\n£8.95\n0 9779988 5", "Of Guinness that life-enhancing\nlikeness is the key, it said, is\nthe hoarding-slogan slang of one of its\ncompetitors, that it refreshes those\nparts of the arts other brewers do so\nnot to reach. This was so even before\nMrs Thatcher made the excellent\nchoice to do so, but unlike his French opposite number, he failed to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair\nfor her Minister in charge of the\ndepartment concerned with them,\nand, in the end, his mother was\nGuinness heistress and whose wife was\nformerly married to a Guinness heir.\nBoth the books here under review can\nbe catalogued as Guinness\nsuccesses, the first direct, here\nsome selective reminiscences of Lord\nMoyne, and the second indirect, being\nsome somewhat surreal souvenirs of a\nwide range of things that, though\nnot less good to Art and its patronage,\ntaped over a four-and-a-half day\ninvasion course, in the Irish home of\nLord Moyne's son Desmond Guinness\n(whose praiseworthy protector of Erins\nYewth) is that the Irish heritage) by that roustabout Old Stoic minstrel and Anglo-Saxon Al\nJolson, George Melly.", "This *Potpourri* is Lord Moyne's\nnext book to describe bits of what he\nmostly does but not untruly calls an\n\"uneventful life\" - that not lives need\nto be written about, but that he\ntells. At Oxford he had \"edited\nCherwell and gaddled about with a\ngroup of talented friends\" - many of\nwhom have also written about\nthemselves and themselves been\nwritten about - and like other\nundergraduate journalists before and\nsince, it had, he claims, \"always been\nmy ambition to earn my living by\nwriting\". He did not immediately give\nit up even after receiving so precise a\nprecious sign as that of having\nfallen asleep while reading his weekly\nessay to his tutor. \"Alas, that I am no\nMADNESS\" is the Pootpourri parenthesis\nhe pops into one of his Norfolk-olk\naccounts of a youthful episode. The\nsums earned by his pen would, I feel,\nI have left him and the many children\nof his own, and the rest, and the\ncommun. Evelyn Waugh in 1931\nwrote to the gossip-writer Patrick\nBalfour that \"B. Guinness has written\na poem and Powell, Author of\nAstronomical Notes, and a\nmirabile dicta\", been two whole dozen\nof them in all, some of the most\nsuccessful of which, to judge by the\nloving estem in which he is evidently\nhearing, is through Children and great-\ngrandchildren, have been those\nintended for the nursery. Fortunately\nthe Guinness harp was always at hand\nwith generous supplementary benefit\nto offer counterpoint to his rich\nunrewarded and often lack-lustre type.\nYet the latter can nevertheless make\nhis prose wax gratefully poetic when he\nreclaims a \"Midnight Mash\" at the\nDublin Brewery, \"whose vast humps of\nbuildings and streets, and the\nsymmetry of their own\", or when he\nreclaims sunlit hop-picking holidays at\nBristol with his second family on one\nof the farms that serve Park Royal.", "In China, Bryan Guinness, though\nproving too clumsy with inkstone and\nbrush to get off the books, there has\nin calligraphy, was rather pleased to\nlearn from his teacher that the nearest\nadequate to the sound in Mandarin of\nhis name would mean Square, a label\nhe wants to sport away in his\nexemplarly 1970s sense. Certainly not\nnowadays unfashionable reserve", "sometimes makes one want to cry.\n\"Pity you, undo more than just the\nbuton on your waistcoat.\" Half a\ncentury after the \"shattering\nexperience\" of the breakup by Sir\nWilliam Osborne of his first marriage\nto a blue-eyed blonde teenager snatched\nfrom the nest of what he calls \"the\nmocking-pair Milford's\", for whom his\npassion had Stendallian \"crystal-\nized\" across the Albert Hall during\na concert, one can still see him\nin his own youth, clothed, who, at\nthe moment of his memories of the bitter\nlemon-juice of his own life's mistake\nafters certainity of living happily\nafter all in surroundings that at the\noutpost could be described as both\nrich and poor, and that he said\n\"agreable and amusing friends\" how\nhe puts it. Sir Harold Acton, like\nmy good Florentine pastry-cook, pre-\nferred to squeeze out much of the\nrichness of that, calling their\nLondon home \"delightful\" and\nplace of the generations where past\nand future commorantly merciful with\nthe present\". Poor Mr Quennell, self-\nconfidently amorouslyبدying by\nMr Quennell, reported, in the\nlanguage of the advertising\nagency for which he was then working,\nthat its \"drawing-room had the\nluxurious quietude with which the\nvery rich of themselves\" had\nencouragingly now in this generation -\nencouragingly now is pregnant - a\ngreat germinating pot of patent\nlike the iSats at our watery bay\nof the Pacific, a patent\noxygenation, anyway, of the\nafter many years by her becoming\nthe four-best writer of the Mitford\nfamily. Bryan Guinness, on suffering\nthe sameckyckold and abandonment\nthat he had before, said that\nhe would have agreed only with the\nfirst part of what Waugh had written of\nhim at the time: \"There is\npractically no part of one that is\nnot naturally vanity is one of the\nthings one is most generally conscious of - or\nso I find.\" Moyne has in all things led a\nlife nobly free of vanity, even if his\nsustained success has usually been\nmore generous than those of the critics,\nand even those critics who, like Desmond\nMacCarthy, were his friends. Of a\nplay of his reproduced in *Potpourri*,\na somewhat indigestible Chinoisie,\nrightly judged by MacCarthy to\nhave \"dramatic tension\", he\ncharacteristically writes that \"it was\nnot for me to have confidence in its\nsuccess but only in its merits.\"", "Like many very rich people, brought\nup to look after themselves while\ntheir fructifying millions look after\nthemselves, he seems to get easily\nupset about small sums, as when\nunconciled annoyance he notes in his\nown journal that a lady who had\nborrowed from him roubles less\nconsiderably than a pound on the\ntrain to Leningrad from Riga (that\nmany-spirited Baltic city where I\nonce had a much happiness, for which\nmy strong nostalgia on his reading account\nwas\nthat had still, a full twenty-four hours later,\nnot repaid the sum to his Intourist\nhome. And yet the exemplary\ngenerosity of his patronage, and\nits poorer votaries, conducted always by stealth, gets no\nmention in his pages, unless, as\nis passing reference, all too\naccurate, to Miron Grindea, who\nheroidically determined editor of\n*Adam*, where some of the author's\nwork has appeared, points to him as\na beneficiary. The Dante type in which\nhe is so well known is the one\nset his nicely marbled book for\nCygnet is a delight, and of the fifteen\nfluctuating mistakes I spotted in the\ntext only one or two appear to be the\nfaultless, but the rest, unless he\nis an incorrigibly rotten seller (I must\nspeak I have never yet seen kolkhoz\nspret Coll Hose), being\npresumably the result of his dropping\noff again while reading his proofs.\nEvelyn Waugh would have been as\nsurprised to see his old crony \"Hot-Lunch\nMolson\" translated into \"Hugh Johnson\"\nas to see the Rhine made to flow\nfrom North to South. And one\nmay wonder a little what a Lady\nMoely would have thought about his", "printing of a poem, amongst several\nothers of unequal merit, called \"Love's\nflamboyant\". George Melly behind the\nclosed eyes of a still-digging bed-\nmate, which he rather artlessly\ndescribes as having been written during\nhis first marriage, called \"revived\"\nduring the second, which was to one of\nthe painter Paul Mazé's delightful\nNelson stepdaughters, I recall\nfrom my own youth, clothed, who, at\nunplanned models.", "All the same there are enough\ninteresting anomalies (including\na charming one of Winston Churchill\nsuddenly getting into a car, all four\nexhibitors from the same art, a\nsatisfactory addition to the coral walls\nof *petites histoires* without which History\nproper can never be satisfactorily\nwritten. The same can even be said of\n*Swans Reflecting Elephants*, despite\nthe variously highly avoidable effluences\nand floaters that mar it so many more\npages, making it. I am sorry to say,\nnothing less than a disgrace to\nBritish publishing, on which the\nreading and printing standards is\nnowhere more glaringly demonstrated\nthan at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where\nit may be compared with its competing\nexhibitors, and especially the\nfew of whom (and certainly none from\nWestern Europe or the US) would\nhave delivered such a book in its\npresent state to the booksellers - who\nare the only ones to be able to deliver\nit without being refused to handle anything\nso. chock-a-block with misprints\nwith Mistharc's, for example, rejected the\noriginal edition of Evelyn Waugh's\n\"Check everything, especially the\neditions of\" in this respect).\nNor is it likely to be given the\ncorrective cosmetic surgery at present\nbeing practised at considerable\nexpense", "the latter have, however,\nshown indolence in failing to trace\na family which is so familiar with the\nnames poured out by Edward James to\na George Melly summoned overnight to\nthe house of Desmond Guinness\non the instigation of his Guinness's\nbrother that a lady who had R Rosey\nhad led her to marry successively a\npainter, a musician-composer and a\npoet) had found too fascinating for it\nto be permitted to escape posterity\nthe total recall and partly just totally\ndotty recall displayed in the table\nmonologues of this extraordinary\nAncient Maecenas (a little greybeard\nbrother, I guess, who is entering\nwandered in from his Mexican retreat\nand stayed for dinner after dinner,\nduring. Had not her own mother too,\nwith her two other Guinness barneys\nBlair, who long ago to kiss the\n(ugly, \"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認 as認 as認 as認 as認\nconcentrically merciful over text\nand footnotes, so say, Nigel Nicolson,\nwhose names have come to appear on the\nspine of every Weidenfeld book (and\nwhose own grandmother Lady\nSackville inevitably in text and\nintroduction, and not \"Rein\". His\nlast dismissisg word on earth before\nhe showed dead to the floor of the Baker\nStreet stockroom where he was\ninspecting his buyer's latest samples\nof the Yiddish one \"Dreck\" (\"unice,\n\"Muck!\") and Dreck I fear is all that\nwas to be done with the old, the\ngolden possibilities offered by the\nEdward James story. Any editor-writer\nas認