THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
terns of words which fascinated me, but of course that was in Latin,
which was more difficult. Believe me, I would still like to write
something purely literary, if I had the time and leisure to amuse
myself in that way. But you see," glancing at my prodigious aunt
May, "I have to sing for my supper." When my uncle spoke in this
way, he seemed to me like a benevolent gaoler, his drawing room
groaned with invisible chains, and my little secret .ambition suddenly
seemed like a bomb concealed in the room, timed to go off in a few
years, while I longed to say: "But for me poetry is not just a game
of words. I want to be a poet." And looking round his room with
all the heavy furniture, the framed water colors, the chests and silks
ransacked from her beloved "the East," by Aunt May, I felt like
crying out what I still believe to be a real question (though now it
turns against myself) : "Why, if you can create something 'literary,'
do you have to 'sing for your supper'? Why don't you live in a garret
and be neglected and starve, so long as a line, a poem, may be re–
membered for a hundred years?"
Kendon, my uncle had told me,
was
poor and neglected. "A
poet is lucky today if he sells five hundred copies of .a slim volume
of verses." And then my uncle would go on to say that the public
was not to blame for this neglect of the modems, because none of
them was "great." They were all "petits maitres," not to be com–
pared with Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne, who, in their hey–
day, sold in tens of thousands. And if some modem poet, such as that
young fellow
T.
S. Eliot, attempted to write verse which was not all
about skylarks, then he only succeeded in being fashionable. "And
believe me, in my time, I have seen any number of literary fashions
become the talk of the town and then fade away."
But my uncle could not discourage me. Indeed, neglect, starva–
tion, cliqueiness, marrying actresses and modernism-all the detri–
mental attributes of poets in the minds of my uncle and .aunt-so
far from damping my enthusiasm seemed secret clues leading to the
life of fame which I desired.
When Frank Kendon came, I could only look at him. He had
(I think) sandy hair over an unassuming face, and he was dressed in
tweeds. He sat quietly in a chair, did not look at me, and ate cake.
He was very silent and my uncle had to question him to get him to
talk at all. When he did talk, it was to discuss literary life in London.
1195
