Good-bye to All That

I found it difficult to write my thesis. The Illogical Element in English Poetry, in the required academic style, and decided to make it an ordinary book. I rewrote it some nine times; and did not like the final result. I was trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry, which could only be fully understood, I wrote, by studying the latent associations of the words used – the obvious prose sense being often in direct opposition to the latent content. The book’s weakness lay in its not clearly distinguishing between a poet’s supra-logical thought processes and the sub-logical process of the common psychopath.

Very thin, very nervous, and with about four years’ loss of sleep to make up, I was waiting until I got well enough to go to Oxford on the Government educational grant. I knew that it would be years before I could face anything but a quiet country life. My disabilities were many: I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping. I felt ashamed of myself as a drag on Nancy, but had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone’s orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing.

The Guest-master showed me a library of twenty thousand volumes, hundreds of them black-letter. The librarian, an old monk from Béthune, begged me for an accurate account of the damage done to his quarter of the town. The Guest-master asked whether I should like to read any of the books. There were all kinds: history, botany, music, architecture, engineering, almost every other lay subject. I asked him whether they had a poetry section. He smiled kindly and said, no, poetry could not be regarded as improving.

Clive Bell, England’s leading art critic and a conscientious objector, looked after the cows on the manor farm; he had been allowed to do this. ‘work of national importance’ instead of going into the army. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, and the Hon. Bertrand Russell were frequent visitors. Aldous was unfit, otherwise he would certainly have been in the army like Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Herbert Read, Siegfried, Wilfred Owen, myself, and most other young writers of the time, none of whom now believed in the war.