ing that "it is really lack of tal–
ent and not Jack of money that
prevents people from writing."
A second indispensable precept
that he discovered early in life was
that "the first thing for a writer
to do is to get rid of his father
and mother." This he did by creat–
ing, for the deception of his fam–
ily, an imaginary yacht and taking
off on endless fictitious cruises,
while actually living quietly in a
hotel in a small Italian town with
his brother. Here he began to dis–
cover that his gift of great physi–
cal vitality-he is never depressed
for more than forty-eight hours at
a stretch-was invaluable to him
as a writer; he also learned that,
while by nature and unbringing he
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SPENDER, Stephen-Returning to
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T. S. ELIOT: A Selected Critique,
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T. S. ELIOT: Collected Poems
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(Poems)
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was both accustomed and predis–
posed to beautiful surroundings,
he could work under almost any
circumstances.
From the moment that he began
to write seriously, he deliberately
cultivated the maximum versatility
and as much wit and fun as he
could use without endangering the
content of his work-all this in de–
liberate opposition to the stuffy
middle-class pretentiousness and
Bloomsbury clique-forming which
he felt were draining the life from
the English literature of the time.
When accused of frivolity he com–
forted himself with the thought of
Voltaire who was, he thinks, an
"essentially frivolous man" waging
war on the bogus in a way similar
to his own. His own work, he be–
lieves, has developed steadily from
his first successful novel
Before the
Bombardment
through poetry, es–
says, and travel books to its cul–
mination in his autobiography. He
chose the latter form for his major
work because he could use his tal–
ents as a novelist to describe his
vast and varied circle of friends
and acquaintances, and as a social
historian to record the shifting so- .
cial ·scenes that he has lived
through.
About contemporary artistic ac–
tivity in England he is not imme–
diately optimistic. The conditions
for young writers are very dis–
couraging: there is no paper and
publishers use most of what they
have for established successes; the
