Stephen Spender
THE LIFE OF LITERATURE*
During my last year at Oxford, I became secretary of the
University English Club. This enabled me to enlarge my acquaint–
anceship with writers by inviting, amongst others, Walter de la Mare,
Edmund Blunden,
J.
C. Squire, Humbert Wolfe,
J.
B. Priestley,
William Plomer, to speak. I began to realize now that the poet in
our time is essentially a man with another job, tired, overburdened,
who cannot live from his poetry, and is in danger of clinging to it out
of self-esteem. All these poets, with a great sympathy for youth, were
most friendly in revealing themselves, generously overlooked the in–
convenience they had been caused by the wrong advice I had written
them about trains. They often delivered their sad advice on the
literary life, like ghosts in Purgatory, conscious of comparative failure
of their illusions but still glowing with the faint halo of a vision.
When he heard that I wished to write poetry, Edmund Blunden
exclaimed: "Whatever you do, don't review books as I did," as Paolo
and Francesca relate that it was reading a book which led to their
downfall. And
J.
S. Squire at the end of a rather convivial evening
eyed me with a wavering severity to ask : "What do you intend to
do with your life, young man?" "Write poetry." "Then you will be
like me," he sighed, as one of those shades warns before surrendering
himself to the flames. "You will write poetry until you are twenty
or twenty-one. Then yon will fall in love with a fair young girl and
you will write more poetry. Then you will marry that girl and you
will write reviews and journalism. Then you will have a fine young
strapping baby, and you will write more reviews and journalism.
Then, when you are my age, you will think: 'Well, perhaps, after
all, to have marrie.d that maiden and had those children is worth
more than to have written 400 sonnets.'" And Humbert Wolfe said:
*
The first part of this chapter from an autobiographical work in progress
appeared in the November issue.
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