PARTISAN REVIEW
would sometimes visit her neighbors: one of these was Lytton Strachey.
Strachey with his long russet brown beard,and his high squeaky voice
was certainly the most astonishing of the Bloomsbury group. He
combined strikingly their gaiety with their intermittent chilliness.
Sometimes he would play childish games such as the one we played
one Christmas called "up Jenkins"; often he would discourse bril–
liantly and maliciously; at times there was something insidiously sug–
gestive about his giggling manner; at times he would sit in his chair
without saying a word to anyone. He was delicate and hypochon–
driachal. But despite his oddness, his invalidism, his facetiousness,
there was a devotion for his friends which commanded their loyalty
so much that his death was a greater blow than any other to those
who knew him well.
Others with whom I stayed were Harold Nicolson and his wife
Victoria Sackville West, who then had a beautiful house in Kent.
Harold was a strange combination of contradictory qualities: a cau–
tious, discreet, intelligent man obsessed nevertheless with a passionate
desire to give himself away, commit some enormous indiscretion,
some unexpected blunder. Despite his rubicund florid appearance,
which reminded me of some naughty Regency uncle doomed to be
warned off the grounds by a prim generation of Victorian nephews
and nieces, there was something a little haunted about him as though
he were pursued for ever by humiliations and indiscretions. A funda–
mental undecidedness of his nature made it difficult for me to have
confidence in his good will which I was later to remember as his
realest quality. I always felt that for him a moment more important
than the particular present one, was waiting round the corner and
that he was half looking for it with a faint but discernible focussing
onto an absent object of his eyes. Yet now that I look back on these
days when I was twenty one, I see that, through being put off by
superficial qualities to which I was very sensitive and by which I
felt perhaps slighted, I failed to accept opportunities of friendship
which were offered to me.
It
now seems to me that my nervousness
was a form of ingratitude. But one unspoken friendship I always
felt confident in though little was ever said between us: this was with
Vita Sackville West. Her passion for poetry and the country, her
real humility, touched me profoundly and gave me a confidence
which I often think of.
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