OXFORD AND GERMANY
933
been a Rhodes schdlar at University College, when he was revisiting
Oxford. He asked me, almost as soon as I had met him, to stay with
him
and his family at Hamburg, and I as promptly accepted. I did
not stay at
his
horne for long, but this invitation was my introduction
to Hamburg and to Germany. The visit introduced me immediately to
that reality which my friends and I had been in search of at Oxford,
and after this my last year at Oxford seemed a pale dream.
Hamburg was my first experience of a great continental city. Its
great harbor and its lake were the hard and the soft, the poor and
the rich, the masculine and the feminine, enclosed like living organs
within the physical town itself. The life of the port was poor and
hard, the life of the lake rich and luxuriant. My hosts inhabited one
of the large houses on the shore of the lake, the Alster. I used often
to walk round the lake from the rich houses to the center of the city,
and then through the city down to the port, the San Pauli district.
The lime trees along the lake shores gave off their scent and the lake
had often a veil-like texture and was a chalk blue color. Round it there
were willow trees and grassy paths and gardens. Across the surface
of the water, with the trees of the far shore behind them, and beyond
the trees, the Hanseatic spires of the city, the sails of boats were slowly
carried like petals drifting through the whole summer.
As
I walked along this lake shore to the town, I often became
as it were intoxicated with the sense of my own life. Drums and
flags seemed to march through my brain, it was as though my blood
were a flowing procession of music, sensations of unwritten poems
exploded
in
my mind. It seemed as though within the universe an em–
brace of recognition took place between the imagination within my–
self and the love outside. When I reached the center of the town, I
would go
to
some cafe and write poetry or the novel I was engaged
on. Strangely enough, in Hamburg I could think of myself as a poet,
I could write in cafes without feeling self-conscious, whereas at Ox–
ford I could not sit in a room and open a book without feeling that I
was playing one of the Oxford roles.
My host introduced me to friends of his in Hamburg, and these
friends invited me to parties in their houses, to swimming in the
lake, to excursions in canoes. Problems of living one's life which
in
England among my own contemporaries of my own class seemed
tied up into knots, lay unravelled in their hands like simple, if
some~
