THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
night. All my uncle's examples acted in a strangely inverse direction
on me in my life: so that it was when I thought of Aunt May that
I decided to marry my first wife within three weeks of our meeting.
Perhaps an equally
WlWise
decision in its way, except that the en–
gagement marriage and all were over within the space of three years.
My uncle had a deep, almost tender sympathy for young poets,
and when Frank Kendon was gone, he sighed deeply and said: "How
I pity that young man!" "Why?," I asked astonished, for to me the
life of Kendon appeared an uninterrupted idyll, and if he had seemed
a little melancholy at tea, slighting my uncle (I thought) and not so
much as glancing at myself, I assumed this to be because he was
fortified in his talent: "Why?" "Because," said my uncle, "He is eating
his
heart out here in the country, poor young man. He longs to be in
the town with
his
Freemans and Squires and other fry."
I was a little disappointed that Kendon had not looked at me,
not even when my uncle had explained to him that this young
nephew also fancied himself as a maker of patterns out of words. I
had prayed for a sympathetic glance of recognition, I had hoped that
he would, while accepting my obeisance, see the halo of my own
idea which shone around my head. However, a small incident occurred
which reaffirmed my vision of Kendon. For shortly after his visit was
ended it so happened that my uncle and I went for a ride in a hired
car (my uncle could never afford a car: he hired them at enormous
expense) and, just outside Marden, we passed Kendon on the road.
When we had rolled by, he stood there in the cloud of our dust, he
stood alone in the road, stick in hand, absorbed in
his
thoughts, and
I felt as though
his
imagination possessed the whole landscape, as
though the trees and oasts and hop fields of Kent leaned against
his face and entered through his eyes, changing there into a branch
of words, like a branch of coral. "He doesn't want a lift. He doesn't
want to be disturbed by us. He has
his
thoughts," said my uncle, and
I realized at that moment that he, who had denied his own dreams,
could enter into the dreams of others.
In these days, I thought of poetry as the invocation through
words of a secret world within the world of actuality. I did not like
the poetry of every poet, and only a few poems gave me the sensation
which I felt to be poetry, yet I assumed that nearly every poet who
had published in the anthology
Poems of Today
was a poet, and that
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