PARTISAN REVIEW
The names of Jack Squire, De la Mare, John Freeman, thrilled
through the drawing room, but not, as I imagined them, like kingfish–
ers and humming-birds, but somewhat banally, like ordinary people,
in
terms of what they were doing, whom they were seeing, how they
were making a living. They were mostly doing, seeing and earning in
ways which seemed to me rather unpoetic.
But my uncle had now a more sensitive perception than I of
the poetic yearning which underlay Kendon's remarks, and, still
more, his long silences: the yearning of the young literary man to
get away from here, to get to London. My uncle knew all the men
of whom Kendon spoke, for when he had edited the
Westminster
Gazette,
he had published their poems in comers of the weekly edition
of that newspaper,
The Saturday Westminster,
and he had given
them reviewing work with which they supplemented the few guineas
they earned from their verses. The attitude of my uncle to these poets
WaS
rather that which some great city station master, responsible for
the trains going to all parts of the world, might have, supposing that
in
the neighborhood of the station there were a strange breed of
railwaymen who insisted on devoting their lives to shunting the smal–
lest trains exclusively
in
little side-lines: as one who thought in terms
of the largest traffic extended over the largest world he would feel
surprised at such an attitude, but at the same time he would have
an uneasy half-envious feeling that there was a certain purism about
these lovers of their little engines. He might also arrange, (as did
my uncle, with
The Saturday Westminster)
to develop a little nucleus
of lines devoted to pure shunting, doling out some of the shareholders'
money to these purists, and at the same time strangely perturbed
(especially after listening for forty years to the opinions of Aunt
May) by certain irregularities
in
their morals.
He himself when he first went into journalism had contrived
never to earn less than ten pounds a week, which was a considerable
sum in the 'eighties. Even so he had to spend four years pegging this
up to a considerably higher sum before he dared to propose to my
Aunt.
An
example of protracted selectivity which, if one contem–
plated my aunt, was a two-edged warning: for one could hardly help
reflecting that perhaps he should have given himself still longer to
choose: or alternatively, that
if
he couldn't make a better choice in
four years, he might as well have lumped my aunt in the first fort-
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