THE
LIFE OF
LITERATURE
disconcerted because de la Mare asked him dozens of question
throughout the whole afternoon, without ever waiting for an answer.
As
he was going, the friend reflected sadly: "Mter all, de la Mare
is getting very old." At the door de la Mare said: "I know I've asked
many many questions this afternoon and never waited for an answer.
But don't you agree that it's much more important to ask questions
th.an to answer them?"
During the period of my early meetings with the Great, I ex–
perienced those agonies of longing for their friendship which can
h.ardly be described to those who do not understand what it is for
a young man to start trembling when he recognizes in a crowd a face
of which he has seen the photograph in the newspapers; or who
does not know what it is to be seized with longing as with the most
violent thirst, to be spoken to by the best-known person in a room.
I ask myself whether such an emotion is simply that of falling in
love. But I do not think so. Essential to it are shame and humiliation
which are different from love.
By the time I left Oxford, my conception of contemporary
literature had greatly changed. I was now almost exclusively inter–
ested in one kind of writing-"the modern." My appreciation was
now confined to a very few modern writers; especially those who had
modernist tendencies: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Sitwell,
Ezra Pound, Henry Green, Herbert Read, to name
.a
few. There were
a few writers, not experimental artists whom I also admired : W. B.
Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, to name two. Then there were a number
of books I read with great interest but which did not seem to me to
contribute anything to the literary experimentalism which I thought
of as the significant purpose of contemporary literature : I include
among these all the very interesting books of experiences of the war,
including T. E. Lawrence's
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
a book of great
factual and autobiogr;;tphical interest, but written in a style improvised
magnificently for the occasion by an eccentric adventurous don with–
out a natural gift of style.
I judged the "modern" indeed not so much by the subject
matter as by the arrangement of words on the printed page : an
arrangement concentrated on producing clear and sharp images,
avoiding unnecessary words and cliches, suggesting thought through
1313
