DWIGHT MACDONALD WAS replaced by Melvin Lasky, who became the American co-editor of Encounter halfway through 1959. I don’t remember meeting the other editors of Encounter but I have a strong memory of Lasky.
The offices of Encounter consisted of a few rooms at the top of Panton House, a building on a side street between Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. From the window of my father’s office one could see Horatio Nelson on top of his column, larger than life and vaguely inhuman in the weathered darkness that lay beneath his wedge-shaped hat. He stood on roofs of slate that glittered like the sea. I could stare at him for a long time from inside this cluttered room before turning back to the tin filing cabinets and the overloaded desk.
On the wall hung a lithograph given to Stephen by Jean Cocteau. It showed Baudelaire looking longingly at a sack of money. The sack had wings and was flying away and the piercing look of Baudelaire was unable to stop it.
Across a corridor the office organizer, Margot Walmsley, kept charge of a much neater room. She was ash-blonde and fluffy and whenever she became flustered, she stammered. When years later Mum and I learned that she worked for British Intelligence, all we could do was laugh. It was so unexpected, yet so obvious. If the CIA was running something in England, British Intelligence would have had to participate.
Melvin Lasky’s office lay between Margot’s and Dad’s. Lasky was short, with a hard belly held in check by a waistcoat. His nostrils were large and he, like Kristol and Macdonald, wore a goatee. Behind him on the wall hung a dozen photos of himself next to various important people, and they also had goatees. Some of these photos were plausible: Lasky with Sidney Hook, for instance. I didn’t know anything about Hook other than that he was as near to being a communist as it was possible to be while simultaneously loathing all communist regimes. But Lasky with Leon Trotsky? Lasky with Sigmund Freud? The cumulative impression was that they were all fake. I think Dad and I laughed about this over lunch at the Asiatique, a cheap Chinese restaurant off Trafalgar Square. It was surely childish to hang these things on the wall, we thought.
The duel between Lasky and Spender had elements of snobbery on my father’s part. At one point he told a colleague that the trouble with Lasky, as with Macdonald and Kristol, is that they all came out of ‘the Bronx Box’. He was referring to the common background of Trostkyite radicalism which, in England, counted for nothing. But there’s also the suggestion that Lasky wasn’t altogether a gentleman.
Lasky was certainly no fool, but he and my father were playing to a different set of rules. Mel had no use for Stephen’s wishy-washy liberalism. He knew more about contemporary history, he was a fast and shrewd journalist and he paid attention to every piece of information that came out of the Soviet world. He could be arrogant and hard to work with and he made no secret of the fact that he thought the ‘creative’ side of Encounter was nothing but window-dressing for the serious business of writing articles on politics. ‘Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap’ was what he thought about the uses of literacy.
Yet the differences between Spender and Lasky only strengthened the total effect of Encounter. If a short story set in London’s bohemia appeared next to an article by the young Labour policy-maker Tony Crosland on the need for Labour to set itself new goals, the effect was to consolidate the Englishness of Encounter. London’s brand of socialism wasn’t as far to the left as that of the north of England, but it had a powerful tradition of its own. (Think of Charles Dickens.) But, come to that, British socialism had nothing to do with the United States. The mood of Encounter was British, which meant that the American political influence was left in the background.
Both Irving Kristol and Mel Lasky later boasted that they’d helped to push the British Labour Party towards the centre. But it takes two to tango. The Gaitskell wing of the Labour Party knew that Labour would never win elections if its radical base was not toned down. Encounter was the perfect magazine for Tony Crosland’s articles.
Lasky, trained in the ‘box’ or boxing-ring of City College, used the same ruthless tactics that the old American communists had used to infiltrate left-wing organizations in New York before the war: the interminable meeting, the overruled decision and the suppressed minute. Perhaps he expected Stephen to recognize this elaborate game and join in. The fact that he didn’t merely proved to Lasky that Spender was a weakling.
In a letter to Reynolds written in 1960, Stephen described how Mel worked.
What Melvin Lasky does is quite simply to accept so much material that there is no room in which to print most of it and I am reduced to having to write to people saying we cannot take anything. He also does not tell me what he accepts, and usually I learn about it weeks later. I am protesting as hard as I can, but conversations with him are almost impossible. He simply filibusters if you protest about anything, wastes hours going over every small point, and refuses ever to admit that he knows what you are talking about. He is the most wriggly person I have ever met.
A year later he wrote again to Reynolds:
I am getting to the stage of really detesting Lasky, who is the kind of person, clever, devious, philistine, whom I find it almost impossible to deal with … There is his endless commissioning of things without my knowledge, and the difficulty I therefore have ever to get things I have chosen or suggested (and got him to agree to) with the magazine. If ever I complain to the Congress they pretend to sympathise and perhaps do say something to Lasky. But he is in fact their man, being on their committees for deciding the projects of the Congress, and that sort of thing. Added to all this Josselson, the key man and father figure of the Congress has had two strokes, adores Lasky, and would probably have another stroke if I said what I really think. Above all, of course, they worship success. To them to say that we have a duty not to accept things and then not use them, or not to keep writers waiting 18 months before something is published – that we really have a responsibility to literature, which is writers – is pious cant.
In June 1962, Stephen wrote to Auden saying that unfortunately he’d lost Wystan’s recent translations from Brecht. I can imagine Lasky finding these on Dad’s desk at the Encounter office and just dumping them in the bin. Lasky hated Brecht. One of his greatest journalistic scoops on Der Monat had been to challenge Brecht to write an article critical of the Soviet Union, in answer to an article by Lasky criticizing the United States. Lasky published his. Brecht didn’t reply, and Lasky left the page empty with an editorial note saying they were still waiting for Brecht’s article.
In October 1959, a few months after Engaged in Writing was published, Stephen received a letter from Boris Pasternak. It was handwritten, and in English – a careful letter. It was clearly an overture of some kind.
Ostensibly Pasternak was commenting on some Encounter articles about his novel Dr Zhivago. But he went out of his way to mention that certain lines from an early poem by Spender had always meant a great deal to him. It was wonderful for Stephen to hear this. ‘The idea that Pasternak knew these lines, and had perhaps carried them round in his head for twenty five years, really thrilled me, more than any review I have ever read. I think the parrotlike way in which people say there is no “communication” nowadays is rubbish really; communication is having the faith that if you do your utmost someone somewhere does and will understand this and sometime somewhere you will know it.’
A correspondence ensued, though Stephen found it hard to keep things simple. He was besieged by Russian specialists advising him what to say. ‘I have received so much advice from Pasternak experts that I almost wish I hadn’t got into all this.’
Towards the end of the first letter, Pasternak had written: ‘My situation is worse, more unbearable and endangered than I can say or you think of.’ This wasn’t rhetoric. It was the truth. Nobody in the West could imagine the claustrophobia of a society in which nothing could be discussed and the penalties for non-conformity, if expressed in public, were so severe.
Lasky wanted to rush this into print and create a ‘stir’, but Stephen hesitated. He did not want Pasternak to get into trouble. Indeed, the letters were only published after Pasternak’s death in May 1960. Pasternak’s heirs immediately disowned them, and Stephen was appalled, but just as he was about to publish an apology he received a message through the Russian grapevine that Pasternak had wanted them to be published. It was just that nobody could ever have said so, officially.
In January 1960, after he’d received the Pasternak letters but six months before they were published, Stephen travelled to Moscow in the company of Muriel Buttinger, who wanted to make contact with a sculptor she’d befriended in the 1920s.
Through the British Embassy in Moscow, Stephen arranged to visit the Union of Soviet Writers. It took a day or two, and when he arrived he was met by two women who explained in a friendly way that all the writers he wanted to meet were unavailable, and that not many ‘specialists’ had ever heard of his work. If he came back on Tuesday maybe they’d be able to arrange ‘a small gathering’.
Undiscouraged, Stephen told them that he thought the present arrangement of official meetings between writers of the East and the West was too cumbersome. Perhaps something simpler could be arranged? ‘I thought it would be a good idea if a dozen or so people could go away together for a week or two and exchange their views in a quieter and simpler atmosphere without banquets and publicity. They were amused at this suggestion and seemed to think that it would be asking an awful lot of the participants.’ Their laughter covered their embarrassment. It was highly unlikely that the Soviet authorities would agree to such a proposal.
Word went round that Spender was in Moscow. Since he’d accompanied Muriel in a private capacity, he did not represent anyone but himself. A couple of days later, at one in the morning, he received an unexpected telephone call from an old friend: Guy Burgess. They arranged to see each other on the following day.
Stephen wrote a record of their meeting. He had not sought it, therefore the initiative was with Burgess. His predominant feeling was one of compassion: Burgess wanted to justify himself. He told Stephen that his flight from England did not mean he was guilty of anything. He’d only intended to accompany Maclean to Prague and then come back to London. Maclean had panicked because of the ferocious attentions of the American police when he’d been working in Washington.
Now and again Guy referred to Stephen as an ‘American agent’, and when Stephen protested, Burgess backed off saying it was ‘only a tease’. He seemed to remember every single occasion when they’d met: a conversation before the war in a Paris bar about a tragi-comic episode in Stephen’s life when he’d tried psychoanalysis. Once, Stephen had lent Guy his flat. And when John Cornford, the young communist poet who was killed in the Spanish Civil War, had as a schoolboy sent Stephen his poems, Stephen had written him a six-page letter of advice. Burgess knew this, too. He was evoking a list of good works: to flatter his listener, or was this just nostalgia? These incidents, all of which Stephen had forgotten, gave an air of having been polished as lovingly as a jeweller polishes stones. Stephen didn’t know what to make of it. Burgess was behaving ‘like some ex-consular official you meet in a bar at Singapore and who puzzles you by his references to the days when he knew the great, and helped determine policy’.
There came the moment when Burgess tried to describe what he’d actually done: which, he said, was to hand over information about what people had discussed, in those high diplomatic and political circles he’d frequented. What was wrong with that, he asked defiantly? Burgess said that Churchill, when in opposition before the war, had often passed information to Maisky, the Russian Ambassador. During the war British and Russian intelligence officers had met regularly, and ‘the rules of secrecy were more or less ignored or considered to be suspended’.
Stephen said cautiously that it wasn’t clear to him ‘what was the borderland dividing giving away information from giving away real secrets’. If Dave Springhall had ended up in prison for having given the Russians some plans for an aircraft, he said – well, that was one kind of betrayal. Perhaps just handing on information fell into a different category. The example came from personal knowledge. Springhall was one of the commissars whom he’d had to confront in Spain when he’d tried to save Tony Hyndman.
A few weeks later, at a party back in London, Stephen was approached by the Home Secretary R. A. Butler. He told Stephen that if Burgess wanted to come back to England, he personally would have no objection – though he supposed that the boys in MI5 might have other views. If Stephen were to write to him …? Stephen didn’t follow this up. It didn’t seem to offer Burgess any guarantee against prosecution.
A second figure intruded into this strange predicament: Tom Driberg. At this time, Driberg was a journalist, a former Labour MP and member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. He urged Stephen not to encourage Burgess to come back. Driberg knew Burgess well and had published a respectful biography of him. Stephen deduced that Driberg did not want Burgess to reappear in London and start naming names.
I met Tom Driberg in the street with my father soon after these events. It was the only time I saw him. I thought that he was loud and invasive, and although Dad was friendly, I detected a certain hesitation on his part.
As he and I walked away he murmured, ‘That man is supposed to have been Moscow’s representative inside the British Parliament.’ I said I didn’t understand. He explained that Driberg came from the communist wing of the Labour Party, and if the government needed to communicate something urgently to Moscow, well, they could rely on Tom to deliver the message.
I was shocked. It went against the whole concept of ‘us’ against ‘them’: the capitalists against the commies. There was a war in progress, not a nearby war, a distant war, a domino-theory war, a ‘cold’ war – but still a war. What was this private-chat option?
He said, with all his usual mildness, ‘I think it’s good when people go on talking to each other, don’t you?’
Nothing could bring out more forcibly the difference between English and American relations with Russia at that time. American intellectuals couldn’t even meet ‘real’ communists, because the McCarran Act kept them out of the USA; and here was Tom Driberg who apparently could pick up a phone and call his friends in Moscow whenever he felt like it. Meanwhile in London, though many people were shocked by the defection of Burgess and Maclean, it was assumed they had valid reasons for whatever it was they were supposed to have done. None of their friends rejected them with outraged cries of ‘traitor’.
Years later, the art historian John Pope-Hennessy told me that when Anthony Blunt first heard that he was under investigation, he put on his coat, walked down to the MI5 building off Whitehall, walked through the guards and up to the third floor, found his file, put it under his coat and walked out again, unchallenged. This slowed down the investigation considerably! Pope-Hennessy thought it was a wonderful scene: ‘Anthony was a very arrogant man. I can just imagine him doing it.’ And he laughed.
If I’d said, ‘But he betrayed his country,’ Pope-Hennessy would have just changed the subject. It would have been a remark in bad taste. So, as an Englishman brought up within the rules, I kept quiet.
In 1960 I gave up rowing, with all that yucky business of comparing cocks among the steam, and joined the tribe of fencers.
One result of the Hungarian revolution was that Westminster had acquired a fantastic fencing teacher, Bela Imregi. Up until then fencing had been the sport of the non-sporty, who’d hang around dressed in white duck canvas, gossiping. Imregi taught us how to use our reflexes. Don’t think, move; and always move forward.
A friend among the fencers was Simon Baddeley. His speciality in épée was a flèche to the big toe of his opponent. Risky, because all the opponent needed to do was tuck back his toe and stretch forward and Simon would be hit in the head. But, because it was so unexpected, it worked well on away matches.
During one of these matches I happened to be talking about the British Museum. Simon said, ‘It’s in Bloomsbury, isn’t it?’ To which I said, ‘Where is Bloomsbury?’ Simon was the editor of a literary magazine, so he published a snippet somewhere in the back: ‘Spender, son of Stephen, asks “where is Bloomsbury?”’ Dad laughed when he saw it, but it made me wary of Simon.
One day Simon said, ‘Your father is part of the Establishment by now, isn’t he?’ I wasn’t going to ask, ‘What is the Establishment?’ and find another droll quote in Simon’s magazine. I had to edge around the subject. I learned that the Establishment stood for the skill with which England makes room for its critics, gives them a title or some other indication of rank and requires them to stand up for the very institution which up until then they’d done their best to challenge.
I didn’t like the implications of Simon’s joke. It occurred to me: can I ask my father, ‘Dad, are you a poet of the British Establishment?’ I knew that if I did, he would be offended. And Dad when he was offended really was upset, as if something much larger than his own feelings had been hurt. Did I want to descend so low? Could I? The answer was obviously no, I could not hurt my father. He was too weak.
Being a member of the Establishment attached Stephen to a much wider circle of English life than the restricted enclave of poetry. The next generation of British writers chose to live far from the centres of power. Philip Larkin in his library at Hull, for instance, complaining about his boring job – in fact complaining bitterly about practically everything. In his obtuse way, Larkin represented post-imperial England sinking back into a peripheral role after having controlled a third of the world’s surface. ‘Little England’ was a virtue born of necessity. My father hated it. I remember him reading Larkin’s first poems with a grim frown. Was he going to publish them in Encounter, I asked? Yes, he said; and sighed with exasperation.
In his willingness to go anywhere in the world on behalf of the British Council or the PEN Club or whatever, patriotism of a peculiar kind was involved. This patriotism had been clear to his friends Auden and Isherwood from a long way back. (‘Little England’ regarded this patriotism with misgivings. It seemed connected with Britain’s imperial past. The thought was wrong, but perhaps understandable for the times.)
Years before, in 1936, Stephen and Christopher had retreated to Sintra in Portugal, where they hoped to set up a small community of writers. There were tensions from the start, mainly between Tony and Christopher’s boyfriend Heinz, and the experiment did not last beyond the middle of March. At one point Christopher noted in his diary, ‘My days are all poisoned and I can no longer discuss things frankly with Stephen – because we are divided from each other by a secret mutual knowledge of our intentions: Stephen means to return to England if things get nasty – I don’t.’ The reference is to the imminent danger of war. Christopher had already made up his mind that if war broke out, he would not participate. His attachment to Heinz, and thence to Germany, precluded it.
Auden shared this feeling from about 1938, when he won the King’s Medal for Poetry. He knew this was ‘the end’, as he put it, because the prize signified his credentials as a freshly elected member of the Establishment. He did not want to become a respected icon of British literature.
My father’s credentials were confirmed in 1983, when he was given a knighthood. I was deeply upset at the time. I thought it cut him off from writing poetry. I wrote him a bitter letter hinting as much. He wrote an extraordinary reply. Life, he said, is very much like school. Sooner or later one has to join the Sixth Form. Most of his friends were in the Sixth Form already: Sir Isaiah, Sir Stuart, Sir Freddie. What’s wrong with that? (And besides, he added cunningly, think of the pleasure it would give Natasha when she becomes Lady Spender.)
Yet, if patriotism lay somewhere inside Stephen’s many trips abroad, there was also the pleasure of leaving Little England behind. One of his last interviews consisted of a questionnaire in which he was asked what gave him most pleasure in life. He wrote, ‘Any voyage away from England.’ I was standing beside him at the time. We were in the garden of a villa outside Florence. I said, ‘You can’t write that.’ I added to what he’d written – it’s in my handwriting, ‘– and any voyage back to England.’ It was too late for him to opt out.
A month after Stephen came back from Moscow, Konstantin Fedin, Chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, arrived in London together with Alexander Tvardovsky, the main editor of the literary magazine Novy Mir. They told their hosts at the British Council that the one person they wanted to see was Stephen Spender.
He assumed that they just wanted to apologize for the snub he’d received from the ladies of the Writers’ Union in Moscow, but in fact they seemed genuinely interested in the idea of arranging private meetings of small groups of writers away from the eyes of officialdom, ‘if it was not conducted in setting one side against the other, and with interested parties looking over shoulders’.
Fedin at the time was a somewhat despised cultural bureaucrat. Tvardovsky was a more courageous figure, who subsequently got into trouble by insisting that Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago should be published in Russia. (It wasn’t.) It’s possible that Tvardovsky saw himself as a figure corresponding to that of Spender, in search of the same thing: better communication between writers.
Stephen took them to lunch at the Garrick Club. At the end of the meal, Tvardovsky referred to the idea of the seminars and said that it would be appropriate if Spender were to direct them. Stephen refused – which is interesting. If his initiative had been set up by the British Council or some other official body, he would surely have accepted on the spot. ‘I tried to make it clear that I did not wish them to feel they were committed to having me.’
This meal was followed by a private supper at Loudoun Road in April. Spender showed Fedin and Tvardovsky the guest list beforehand. They balked at one name: Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Opposition. No politicians, they said. Spender persuaded them that Gaitskell would not be present in any official capacity. He was a personal friend, and he was an intelligent man.
They must have been puzzled that Stephen, on the one hand so eager to take groups of writers away from politics, should want them to meet the head of the Labour Party. Unfortunately, he did not write a diary entry on this occasion but I vaguely remember it, as Gaitskell sat at the head of the table and, as usual, I’d passed the peanuts up to that moment.
A few years previously, Gaitskell himself had tried to tackle the question of improving cultural relations between the two countries. He’d spoken to Nikolai Mikhailov, a young assistant of Khrushchev’s. ‘The exchanges of culture in which he was so interested would only be of value if they were completely outside the propaganda sphere.’ But ‘he struck me as a young man who was desperately anxious to bring off more cultural interchanges because his job depended on it’. If he was only interested in plumping out his CV, it hardly seemed worth pursuing.
At Westminster it was still compulsory to take part in the Combined Cadet Force, an Officer Training Corps which was supposed to teach us military virtues. Our equipment went back to the First World War and some of the masters felt dubious about our activities; on the other hand we were studying history, and history includes battles, so we might as well learn what large-scale fighting involves.
My best friend at the time was Tristan Platt, another boy in Liddell’s House. He was a militant pacifist, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Following his lead, he and I began to challenge the OTC. During an exam in which we were asked to look at an Ordnance Survey map and describe how to get from A to B using ‘dead ground’, we invented a bus route which took us off the map to an imaginary pub. This did not go down well.
A few weeks later Major French, who was fanatical about the Corps, gave us a lecture about different weapons: the Sten gun which cost a mere five bob to build but was only effective at close quarters; and the Bren gun, ‘a beautiful weapon’, which was good up to a range of five hundred yards. Tristan raised his hand to ask a question. Yes? ‘Would you mind explaining to us what you mean by a beautiful weapon, Sir, given that you are describing a piece of machinery that can only be used for killing people?’ This also went down badly.
By this time our study at Liddell’s, a large room with desks for six boys, was beginning to discuss whether we shouldn’t take part in the Ban the Bomb protests that met now and again in Trafalgar Square. I had doubts about unilateral disarmament. The others were more committed. One boy was a fan of Bertrand Russell, but I had doubts about Russell too, because he’d advocated war against Russia in 1945, changing his mind immediately after the Russians had acquired the atom bomb. (It was logical but it was weird.) The fun of marching finally overtook our political arguments. Six of us went forth one Saturday afternoon clutching an umbrella with a message that read, ‘Eating People Is Wrong’. This was the only cause we could agree on. It was written in toothpaste and it melted in the rain.
One day the Dean of Westminster, the Right Reverend Eric Abbott, delivered a sermon to us Westminster boys in the Abbey. He described a motor tour he’d made through Germany during a recent vacation. He gave us his thoughts on the Second World War and the necessity for patriotism and I dozed off. Suddenly he brought the sermon to a close with, ‘God give us something to live for, and God give us something to die for.’
Tristan, who’d been listening with great attention, got up and booed. I stood up beside him to be supportive.
The Dean was an independent authority whose office predated the Norman Conquest. He was older than the school by six hundred years – and the school had been founded by Queen Elizabeth I. We were ordered to apologise; and off we went. But Tristan had no intention of abandoning his pacifism. He told the Dean he was wrong to have made a warlike speech, however justifiable, in the House of God, since Christ had preached that we must love our neighbour, not try to kill him. The Dean grew angry but Tristan stuck to his theme, with me at his side murmuring occasionally, ‘I think he’s right, Sir.’
As a result of this, and on the grounds that we were irredeemably anti-militarist, Tristan and I were excused from further service in the Corps. Instead of stripping down a Lee-Enfield rifle, I was given permission to go to the Slade School of Fine Art to learn how to draw the nude. I don’t remember how the Slade came into the picture, but the head of it, Bill Coldstream, was an old friend of Dad’s.
The Slade was tucked away in the corner of the main quadrangle of University College, London. When I arrived, I found at the door a uniformed beadle with a big brass buckle round his waist. I presented myself to Coldstream, not knowing at the time how closely he was connected with several members of my family, though aware that my father had studied in a much earlier art school he’d organized somewhere along the Euston Road. I was free to do what I wanted, said Bill kindly, since I wasn’t officially on anyone’s books.
I went downstairs to the Life Class, a large room full of students sitting on their ‘donkeys’, a strange trestle table that was also a stool. They were drawing intently, holding up their pencils at arm’s length from time to time in order to measure something. No one spoke. I found a spare donkey, propped my sketchbook against the cross at one end and raised my eyes to the naked woman posing on a stand not far off. So far I hadn’t dared look at her. There she was, and I didn’t know what to do. Her back was towards me and she was leaning on one leg. She was fiftyish and stringy and, yes, she was absolutely and totally without clothes. I put the tip of my pencil against the paper and kept it there, wondering what to do next. Just then a spasm went up her left leg. I looked at my paper, and there was a nice fresh mark on it, made when I’d flinched in sympathy.
The Slade at the time was very keen on marks on paper. A drawing was often a succession of marks, the freshest one ‘qualifying’ those already in place. There was a distant echo of Cézanne, but crabbier. One teacher called these marks, ‘statements’. Thus you could have the sincerity of the statement and the integrity of the statement, and so on. A negative word was ‘arbitrary’, which could lead to ‘I feel this statement is a bit arbitrary.’ Some sense of truth was involved, as if there were a parallel between getting your words right in an essay on logic, and turning your marks on paper into a convincing elbow. One thing your marks must not be was decorative. The negative word in this case was ‘slick’. As in: ‘I don’t like Modigliani. He’s much too slick.’ Dexterity was a trap, because if you did something automatically, it couldn’t be sincere.
‘Slick’ signified consigning your soul to a generic formula inherited from the previous centuries, without scrutinising the object in front of you. Art must strive for the new, a fresh adventure taking place every time the artist sits down in front of the easel. The true artist reinvents the language. Art must not repeat itself. Art must be pushed forward. I couldn’t help thinking that if you did the same thing day after day for decades, it would become a habit, and at some point resistance to style would itself become a style.
Anyway, I wanted to be taught how to draw with skill.
A teacher came over to have a look at my drawing. He was so old he hadn’t even made it to the revolution of Cézanne. He was a relic from the age of Tonks, who’d taught Augustus John. He told me that I should study anatomy. The spinal column, he said, grows out of the pelvic basin in the same way that a geranium grows out of a flowerpot. On the side of my drawing he drew a delicate flowerpot-pelvis from which leafy vertebrae crept upwards. I thought this drawing was strange, but I liked it. Afterwards some students came up to me, grinning. This dear old thing was a figure of fun in the Life Class, a fossil dating from the days before sincerity had won.