THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
plains such a simple decision. And yet there was not the slightest
reason why I should not have done so, except that Christopher had
so much the air of being a heroic captain facing terrible storms and
surrounded by a volunteer crew of potential characters in novels
'
which he would one day write. But although Christopher was cer-
tainly a dominating personality, I was more or less the same with
everyone.
If
an acquaintance would ask me to meet him at some street
corner in the middle of a town, and did not appear, I would wait for
three hours lest he should arrive and be inconvenienced at not find–
ing me: then, when he did appear, I would think that after all per–
haps now he would assume that I had left, and I would feel apologetic
for making him feel guilty. Moreover, these very traits of behavior
in myself which today I would find touching in a young person, I
despised. So I lived in a kind of vicious circle or relationships in which
there was always a reason for proving to myself that in every situa–
tion I was in the wrong. This lasted for many years.
In fact, a certain lack of fundamental independence does put
one in the wrong in all possible situations, because it means that one
is making demands on oneself which the other person would not re–
gard as reasonable, and thus one is putting him under an obligation
which he does not wish to recognize. All this may appear complicated,
but nothing is more complicated than the scruples of the timid.
Perhaps my greatest debt to Christopher is that he gave me
confidence in my work. He was more than a rebel who defied
parents, conventional morality, and so on. He had also created for
himself a mental atmosphere in which he breathed and worked freely
and where he loved his friends and admired their work, without caring
about judgments which were hostile to them. He was very sure in
his judgment and absolutely clear about
his
likes and dislikes. Auden
had so much confidence in him that he submitted all his poems to
Christopher for approval and destroyed all those which he did not
care for. In Christopher's mind my work really existed as something
worthy of consideration, apart from all other judgments, which I
could remain almost indifferent about, so long as he cared.
Christopher had no dealings with abstractions, generalizations,
evasions. He saw everyone as a personality whom he liked or disliked
quite apart from his pretensions. All talk about ideas and culture ex–
cited his suspicions. He disliked all discussion of ideas, resented mv
1327
