OXFORD IN THE TWENTIES
431
the picture (they were to enter it after the Slump, when Oxford
discovered politics).
Oxford in 1926 was just at the end of its period of post-war
deliberate decadence-the careful matching of would-be putrescent
colors. At the first party I went to there was no drink but cham–
pagne, a young man played by himself with a spotted stuffed dog
on a string and the air was full of the pansy phrase 'my dear.' I
discovered that in Oxford homosexuality and 'intelligence,' hetero–
sexuality and brawn, were almost inexorably paired. This left me
out in the cold and I took to drink.
Coming of a temperance family, drunkenness had always
been for me a symbol of freedom. It was a kicking overboard of
the lumber of puritan ethics; it was a quick road to fantasy; it
achieved a communion among those whom sobriety divided. I had
heard a temperance lecturer explain that alcohol impairs the mind
through weakening the synapses of the brain and I was willing to
believe this; we have more mind than is comfortable anyway, the
same again and to hell with the synapses. And the distortions of
drunkenness made objects more real, more 'significant,' even on a
morning after emphasizing, as Picasso did, the jugness of the jug
and the bowlness of the bowl. A friend of mine told me that he
felt the same way when he had a bad cold; he recovered that vivid–
ness of visual objects which we all had had as children and had
lost. We continued to envy or think we envied children.
After the first exultation of having two rooms of my own and
listening to the crickets in the college kitchen and watching the
Jacobean buildings turn plum-coloured at tea-time, I became de–
pressed by Oxford. The climate was muggy and there were none
of th.e geniuses around that there ought to be. I used to get up very
late and cut my lectures, because the lecturers were inaudible or
dull. I hated my tutorials-the endless interpolation into Greek
compositions of phrases carefully collected from writers of the
proper period; I thought that was a game for the 'monsters,' i.e.
the grammar school boys, those distorted little creatures
~ith
black
teeth who held their forks by the middle and were set on making a
career. I used to sit wedged between these ·monsters at dinner,
listening superciliously as they discussed Noel Coward and Ber–
nard Shaw; in my opinion no one intelligent would mention such
writers.
