928
PARTISAN REVIEW
is
not real, but outside Oxford in industry, or abroad, or in the coun–
tryside, or amongst the workers, there is a kind of life where we would
be real," such an attitude immediately suggested the objection that
to seek a reality outside the conditions of one's own existence is a
demonstration of one's unreality.
If
one is real, one
is
real in being
oneself, and not in becoming someone else. Yet being Oxford under–
graduates had robbed us of confidence in our own reality. My friend
Gabriel Carritt said we were unreal because we were "little intellec–
tuals" who cared about experiences at second hand through books and
art rather than directly from contact with life and nature. He would
argue that the "hearties," the athletes, were "real" because when
they did such things as ride horses or kick footballs about they be–
came in their minds that which they did with their bodies; thus they
lost the self-consciousness which was the reason for our sense of un–
reality. Gabriel was particularly critical of me. "You never look at
anything. You don't become a tree or a field when you are in the
country. You just go on thinking your own thoughts. Or else, when
you do look at something it becomes a description of itself in your
mind. Now, when Dick Crossman goes into the country, he climbs a
tree and spits into the wind. Honest Dick Crossman, he is always
one with nature." This cut the ground from under my feet and made
me more self-conscious than ever. Indeed by discussing the problem we
certainly did not make ourselves less self-conscious.
In a way, discussions of this sort are the delight of Oxford, and
it
is
certainly impossible to think of their taking place anywhere else
in the world. But at the same time we felt a real unease, even a kind
of terror. We wanted to write poetry, we wanted to believe, we
wanted to love, we wanted, in a word to live without excuse or evasion,
and we felt that the power to do these things was being taken away
from us. Oxford created a thin wall of excessive consciousness be–
tween all things and the performance of them. It graded everyone
as an intellectual, an aesthete, even an Oxford poet, or a hearty, and
undoubtedly it has left its veneer, showing in manner, accent and
behaviour on thousands of people. It was perhaps symptomatic that
nothing made my own philosophy tutor more furious than the sug–
gestion that any activity of the human mind could be called "uncon–
scious," or that there was an "unconscious" part of the mind.
"If
there
is
an
unconscious,
how can I know unless I am conscious of it,
