OXFORD IN THE TWENTIES
435
and Old Moore or some other form of naive and self-gratulatory
religion. There were many Anglo-Catholics. One of these was a tall,
gross young man with a sweeping Jewish nose, rich wet lips and a
wish to convert people. He kept saying 'My dear, my dear,' and,
when he neared the sacred topic, his bosom would expand like a
prima donna's; he wanted the limelight and cultivated people with
reputations, especially bad ones. He used to say: 'I can't bear
Jews; I suppose it's because I have a very slight strain [sic] of
Jewish blood in me myself.' When he left Oxford he did arduous
and efficient slum-work in the East End of London, afterwards
entered the church and spent some time in India in association with
Gandhi, evolving in place of his early passion for purple and
candles a program of Christian socialism.
Graham Shepard and I and most of our friends regarded all
persons who had any religious faith as museum specimens. We did
not deplore their existence any more than we deplored the existence
of the absurd buildings by Butterfield
in
Christ Church and Merton
or the existence of the would-be county families around Graham's
home in Surrey. Without this cast of grotesques the world would
be dull. For in every sphere we had a perverse taste for the
grotesque.
For instance we used to organize readings of plays such as
The
Jew
of Malta
or
The White Devil
in a room lit by candles stuck
in beer-bottles and a skull on the table with radishes in its eye–
sockets. We bought strange fruits such as persimmons and passion–
fruit and I got myself an ashplant in order to be like Stephen
Dedalus and trained it to carry tram-tickets in its mouth. Going
to a concert by the Dolmetsch family I tried to induce a trance-state
and, while listening to the harpsichord, secured a picture of a
chimpanzee hobbling along a street, holding above its head a large
metal basin into which people were throwing coins from the
windows.
In the summer, when Graham and I shared a canoe, instead
of going up the Cherwell as was the custom, we used
t~
paddle
along the evil-smelling canal through the slums or up the Isis past
the gas-drums. One May morning in 1927 we were on this stretch
of the Isis watching a dragon-fly among the cow-parsley and shards
on the bank when a goods train came over the railway bridge and
we made a chant out of the names on the trucks-Hickleton, Hickle-
