PARTISAN REVIEW
be restored, or, worse, can only
be
restored. I expect you know
Lichfield and remember the little square in the middle of the town
where there is a plaque on the railings to George Fox; and also an
unhappy :t;nonument to Dr. Johnson which looks like a depressed
artillery memorial done in pudding. What a lucky afterthought it was
to put (across the way where the buses stop) a rakish statue of
Boswell. I ran away from the Show to have a look at these
things
and to get a drink. But the Show was the thing. A scene so English,
to begin with. Rain. The white marquees, the white painted rails of
the ring and the pens, the blocks of parked cars, the queue trailing
through the spitting wet and the cold wind to the ice cream tent, the
wobbly loudspeaker desperately trying to sell the glut of programs;
and, pervading
all,
the rich smell of animals and the tart smell of
rainy grass. In England the grass, the public grass, defeats everything
in the end. And then, there were those white bulls dolled up like old
gentlemen at a wedding; those creamy cows; those shire horses gal–
umphing like Royalty; the eccentricities of the poultry tent; the queer
miniature fowl with their feathers growing the wrong way and their
petulant, alcoholic eyes and combs. Well, there it all was; what a
distraction! For to see is to start writing in one's head and my head
is lumbered up enough as it is. Too much Life. Enviable statues
in
the square with their eyes turned inward, musing on-what? And
then, after the cattle, the people, the gaitered, the white coated, the
mackintoshed, those bustling farming families,-people, the public,
society.
And, of course, my mind was dragged on to the thought of
other crowds like this: the yellow-faced swarm that pours out of
shipyards, say, at five o'clock, the swarm that traipses Oxford Street,
the mad swarms at the greyhound tracks; and then on to other
swarms, more sinister, the newspaper swarms--twenty million threat–
ened with starvation in India; the rival swarms in China; the swarms
of Jews protesting in New York; and the dreadful swarms in the
prison camps of Spain, Russia, Palestine, India; the enormous swarms
of the starved, the drowned, the killed of the war. We are surrounded
by unimaginable swarms of martyrs and victims. One is a chilled un–
believing outsider before the torpid and agonized crowds of the earth.
What am I going to write about-the crowds or the outsider, myself,
who hates them. For I do detest the amorphous and indistinguishable.
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