ON THE 11TH NOVEMBER, 1922, AUTHORITY  granted me a passport that permitted me to proceed to France. There was, as I passed through Trafalgar Square, a dense fog and the results of a general election coming in … an immense shouting mob in a muffled and vast obscurity. The roars made the fog sway in vast curtains over the baffled light-standard. That for me was the last of England.

It was perhaps November that had done it: or perhaps America, or perhaps an election agent…. I don’t think I could have lived, with damaged lungs, through a third English winter. It had seemed to rise up before me like a black wall that I could never cross…. And America had come creeping in.

I had by then written a book—indeed I had written four … in the winters when one could not get out on the land…. And indeed, with my immense bailiff, Standing, and various other helpers, I had more leisure…. So one book had been published—a sort of survey of letters and thought in England of the day…. I should imagine it was not a very good book. It was mostly propaganda for Ezra and his various schools of Imagistes, Vorticistes and vers libristes, and it must have been written in some bitterness…. No doubt it was even a little mad. I was still bitter about the treatment of any ex-comrades in arms. Those years come back to me as a sort of fog in which people moved about dimly, forging one’s cheques, losing one’s manuscripts, sewing tares amongst one’s potatoes, and doing what they could to suppress one. In it one was completely isolated and forgotten.

Indeed I do not think I had many contacts with the outer world, being hidden in a green—a far too green—corner of England, on a hill-top that was almost inaccessible to motor traffic, under an immense screen of giant beeches. But I must have had some contacts. Fabians, as has always been the case on hilltops, drifted about and seemed to regard me as a brand to be snatched from the fires of militarism and Teutophobia and to be turned into a whitened fingerpost on the road towards Guild Socialism…. And Mr. Pound appeared, aloft on the seat of my immense high dog-cart, like a bewildered Stuart pretender visiting a repellent portion of his realms. For Mr. Pound hated the country, though I will put it on record that he can carve a sucking pig as few others can. With him I quarrelled about vers libres and he shortly afterwards left England and acquired his mastery of the more resounding rhythms. About the same time I had a visit from Mr. F. S. Flint, the beautiful imagiste poet who, unfortunately, had had a difference with Mr. Pound about French poetry and declared that he had given up writing poetry of his own…. That gang, which had given London its chance to become an Art Centre of the world, had, to my great mournfulness, disappeared as the Rhine separates at its mouth and sinks into Dutch sands. Gaudier Brzeska had been killed; I had lost touch with H. D. and Mr. Percy Wyndham Lewis…. Conrad wrote to say that he had not earned a penny for over two years…. And we had ninety days of drought!

Then my book was published…. It met with no attention whatever. The gentleman who had approached me at the French Embassy wrote that it appeared to have been written in my dressing-gown and slippers. A gentleman on The Times—which was still the property of Lord Northcliffe and on which I was black-listed—declared that I seemed to think myself a literary personage, but I wasn’t. Both statements were true. I nearly always write in my dressing-gown and slippers. I am doing it at this moment—in a room that looks over the Mediterranean…. I tumble out of bed soon after it is dawn, put on those offending garments and start to write. I do my thinking for the day, in bed, looking at the sea as it dimly appears and, with my thoughts fresh in my mind, go straight to my writing. In that way I have finished work by ten or thereabouts; for the rest of the day I can garden. It seems as good a way as any other. I cannot understand why that gentleman was so offended…. Mr. H. G. Wells used to write in that way: I daresay he still does….

And then America came creeping in. Poetry, under the editorship of Miss Harriet Monroe, suddenly, out of the blue, awarded me a prize for the best poem of the year. I was making a stake-and-binder hedge on the top of the twelve-acre field with the glorious view when the letter was brought me…. My gigantic sows were for ever breaking out. Their gentleman friend lived at Fittleworth, two miles down the hill, and they were a great nuisance, for nothing in the world could stop them. Normally, when you live on a common, you have to fence out, not fence in. My beasts had grazing rights, and if the neighbours’ fences did not keep them out I had no responsibility for any damage they did. But that dread plague, the foot-and-mouth disease, appeared in that part of Sussex and there was a penalty of £50 for every beast of yours that was found on a road. That did not apply as far as the Common was concerned. Unfortunately Fittleworth was off the Common and that attractive boar lived next to the rose-covered, thatched cottage that was the police station.

And it was really agony to two stout gentlemen like myself and Mr. Standing to have to chase those enamoured and monstrous quadrupeds up and down those roof-like, beech-grown declivities, assisted by the red-headed hind and Joseph, the stable-boy, and the kitchen-maid and the carpenter and his wife all yelling and beating tins—and all to almost no purpose. That county was Sussex, and the emblem of Sussex is a hog and its motto: “Wunt be druv,” and those were Sussex sows, impervious to blows, deaf to objurgations, indifferent, when love filled their bosoms, to the choicest porcine condiments…. Yet there was one thing they feared!

On one dreadful afternoon we had been completely worsted. We wiped our dripping brows and lumbered, Standing and I, to the shed where the cider-barrels were. The red-headed Irishman went back to his digging of the potatoes, Joseph to his more uncongenial boots, the kitchen-maid who dearly loved scampering over the hillside to her novelette in the scullery; Hunt, the carpenter, to his boards, and his wife to her washing, and their son, who was in the Royal Artillery, to his damnable bugle. And the great sow, Anna, was over the hills and away down to her beau.

And Standing interspersed his reminiscences of the hard old cider that the local earl used to give his workmen with the rueful words:

“Fifty pounds. It do seem a lot of money to lose over a sow…. It do seem a lot of money to lose over a sow…. Fifty pounds….”

And I was, equally ruefully, thinking about overdrafts and interviews with a sympathetic but obdurate bank manager….

A voice called from above the hedge—a lady’s voice:

“Hullo, Standing: Hi, Standing…. Here’s your pig…. Here’s the sow, Anna …” and there she was, trembling with eagerness to be let into her sty….

That heroic lady, wheeling a perambulator with a baby in it, had been coming up Fittleworth hill. She had met Anna and had driven the perambulator right against that monstrosity…. That had been too much for the sow, who dreaded perambulators as she feared no fiends. The sow had tried to make a break through a turnip-field, but everywhere she went she met the perambulator, the lady occupying a strategic position on the road. So the sow had given in…. And we locked and bolted her in her sty, and we went to make up the gap in the hedge the sow had made … and Miss Monroe’s amazing cheque came from the Middle West—from Porcopolis itself….

The first queer thought that came into my head was:

“Now I will get a chien de berger alsacien, a police dog. And call him Chicago! …”

I don’t know why that came to me. I had never been conscious of wanting a police dog. I do not like dogs much unless they can be made to be useful, and I don’t believe you could train a police dog to herd pigs….

In any case, it must have been an odd piece of double or triple cerebration. For whilst I was feeling thankful that someone—anyone in the world had noticed my poor poem, and meditating purchasing the dog, and thanking God that Anna, by a miracle, was in her sty, Standing said:

“I do hear it be a wonderful country….”

I said:

“What country? … Where? …”

He said:

“This here South of France…. They do say it do be a wonderful country.”

I said:

“Yes: it’s a wonderful country. But who’s been talking about it?”

He said:

“You, Cahpt’n! You did say that if you had a few more windfalls you could get away to the South of France…. I hear it do be a wonderful country. They say the bees do work there all the year round. Here in the winter they has to creep to their haims and dorm till the spring….”

Queer cerebration—for I had been quite unconscious of having mentioned the South of France….

The New York Times said the other day that I am a master of the time-shift and duplicate cerebration in the novel. I daresay I am: at any rate I try to be … and if I have that ambition it is—it amuses me to think—the product, born that moment, of Miss Monroe, walking in the shadow of the water-tower in the city of hogs—and of queer, heavy, badger-like Standing, with his old dialect that was just half Anglo-Saxon and half forgotten French words—in the county whose emblem is also a hog….

These things came together…. I should otherwise show more respect for the home of Poetry than to call it Porcopolis—a forgotten name.

Next day Standing had gone to Pulborough market to sell the eggs and I was feeding Anna in her sty. I was covered with mud to the eyes, in old khaki, shorts and an old army shirt….

A voice said over the hedge:

“Didn’t I once meet you at Henry James’s?”

Standing above me on the bank was the comfortable and distinguished figure of Sir Edward Elgar. I did not remember having met him at Henry James’s, but I knew him for the local great man—and of course as the composer of the Dream of Gerontius—and Land of Hope and Glory….

There came into my mind suddenly the words:

It worried me slightly that I could no longer be certain of all the phrases of that ceremonial for the disbanding of a battalion…. Nothing in the world was further from my thoughts than writing about the late war. But I suppose the idea was somewhere in my own subconsciousness, for I said to myself:

“If I do not do something about it soon it is possible I shall forget about the details….” And I wondered how the common friend of myself and Sir Edward would have treated that intractable subject. I imagined the tortuous mind getting to work, the New England scrupulousness, the terrific involutions … and for the rest of the day and for several days more I lost myself in working out an imaginary war novel on the lines of What Maisie Knew.

Then after a period of immense rains when it had dried a little and I was going to carry a pail of corn down to the bottom of the twelve-acre an immense shining automobile stopped outside the top hedge. Two ladies like apparitions from a fashion paper descended and asked me the way to Mrs. Higgins’s. Mrs. Higgins’s was a thatched cottage just outside the hedge at the bottom of my land. They were going to see about Miss Higgins, who had advertised herself as being a professed cook….

I told them they had better not go down. They wore what appeared to be dancing pumps and the most elegant stockings, and woodmen had been hauling timber up the path, which in the best of times was like a small water-course. But they chanced it. Either they must have been good plucked ones or they needed a cook very badly.

It had been long since I had met such creatures. It appeared that they had been at a garden-party at Sir Edward’s. They sank in mud to the knee over and over again, but they persisted and talked to me as if I were a bâtman of their husbands’ regiment, saying once or twice: “My good man….”

They came out of Mrs. Higgins’s cottage. I waited for them outside to show them back over a dry path in my own copse. Mrs. Higgins must have primed them, for I had become for them the poor wounded and broken officer fellow…. It was: “Captain F——” this and “Captain F ——” that in the best style of ladies bountiful visiting a sick camp.

Then they found that to be a terribly lonely place. What did I do in the long winter nights? … I was ready to be the poor wounded and broken foot-logger if it pleased them…. I said:

“Oh, you know … I … er … smoke a pipe, don’t you know….”

One of them announced herself as Mrs. Major So-and-So of somewhere away to the east on the chalk downs. The other was Miss So-and-So, the major’s sister.

Miss So-and-So said:

“Don’t you ever read a book?”

I said:

“Er … yes … I don’t mind takin’ a read in a book…. Now and then, you know….”

The Mrs. Major said:

“Oh, but you ought to read books…. It’s a good thing to do…. It broadens the mind…. You’ll go rusty if you never read books….”

Two or three days afterwards there arrived in my porch an immense parcel of books. I took it that some paper had had the impertinence to send me books for review, and I did not open the parcel. Someone else did, however, and found a singular assortment of novels. There were works by Mr. Edgar Wallace and Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim, and works of Mr. Archibald Marshall, and Conrad’s Chance and Galsworthy’s Island Pharisees…. And they were accompanied by a card of Mrs. Major So-and-So bearing the words:

“In memory of your kindness…. Do read some of these books. There is something here for every taste. You appear to be quite an intelligent man. It is a pity to let yourself rust….” But what most pleased me was that the parcel contained two novels by Major So-and-So himself.

They were productions of an almost incredible youth and innocence. You would have thought that Major—who had gone through the war in all its horror—had lived all his life in a rose-covered vicarage and the society of blameless milkmaids…. But there was a certain narrative gift, and as far as they went, the subjects were rather ingenious.

So, being in the mood, I sat down and wrote an immensely long letter to Mrs. Major So-and-So—about her husband’s books. I gave him counsel as I have so often given counsel to the innumerable beginners who send me manuscripts or first books. Only I took more trouble. I took those books to pieces and turned them inside out, I suggested alterations, analysed phrases and pointed out where it would have been a good thing to use the device of the time-shift…. Yes, I took some trouble with that letter….

Two days later I got a post-card signed with the initials of the Major’s wife and containing the two words:

“You beast!” and a quotation from one of my books.

But, once started working on the idea of the construction of novels, my mind went on and on…. And communications from America went on dropping in. They came from the East and they came from the West, and they came from in between. They were mostly about my verse. I had thought no one knew that I wrote verse. Then they began to be about my lately published book which had sold a hundred copies in England and had not appeared at all in the United States. One Western University announced that its English class was using that work as a textbook of nineteenth-century literature.

That is not as astonishing as it sounds. I think my book was the only au fond study of Vorticism and Imagism and 1913 vers libre that at the time existed. Those activities of Mr. Pound and his young friends had died in London. But during the war they had sown seeds in New York about West 8th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and in the North-Western  University in Chicago and in places like Iowa or Berkeley, Cal…. I fancy those seeds have not yet died there….

As I have elsewhere recounted, there came then a letter and an article about my work from a real Professor in a great Western University. That Don had pursued me through life with the persistency of a sleuth in a moving picture. No word of mine had he left unread: there seemed to be no phase of my life to which he had not applied the microscope. He provided me, moreover, with a full-fledged philosophy, religious views and a disbelief in the Infallibility of the Pope. It appeared that, years before, he had gone up the Rhine as far as Heidelberg on the same boat as myself. “But,” he wrote modestly, “although I have read over a thousand anecdotes by this writer, in not one of them does he mention myself. So I can only imagine that my personality made no impression at all upon him.”

Next came—not by letter, but in person—an intense and very energetic journalist from one of Mr. Hearst’s papers. He professed a knowledge of my work and career, at least equal to those of the Professor of English, but I think he must have acquired it not by hard reading, but, as it were, by the grace of God. He stayed with me for some time, but if I ever, as must be the case with even quite retiring writers, mentioned one of my books it always happened to be one that, by accident, he had not read. I was none the less flattered that one with such varied attainments should even give himself the trouble to imagine he had read me.

There was nothing that fellow had not done. He had fought and farmed and camped in virgin forests and shot grizzlies and tracked down murderers and felled giant oaks and fought desperadoes. Unfortunately my tools did not suit him. He volunteered to drive the mare to the mill for middlings. He came back leading that amiable beast, having overturned the cart into a stream and broken off one of the wheels whilst the middlings melted in the water. I should have thought it impossible to make that mare do anything wrong. You could let off a firecracker under her tail and she would do not more than wag her ears. My friend, however, said he was unused to that sort of harness. In the Far West they drive with the reins crossed…. He professed to share my passion for garlic and pulled up and devoured a large part of my plantation. He told the doctor who administered the stomach pump that the garlic you bought in Avenue A. was different….

But his great achievement was in felling trees. He described with enormous animation to Standing—who regarded him as a fabulous monster!—how he had cut down a hundred of the giant California redwood pines in—I think, an afternoon. Standing said:

“’Is Lordship would pay him a pretty penny to be ’is wood-reeve!” and we went to cut some of my oak saplings, about as big as my thigh. Standing and I, when we used an axe, would take it near the end of the helve with the left hand and then, sliding our rights up to the axe-head would use the left for strength in the down stroke and the right for guidance and weight. In that way we usually, with little fatigue, could go on for most of an afternoon. They must have used different axes in California…. My young friend grasped his firmly with both hands at the lowest extremity of the helve. He whirled it round and round his head as if he were giving a display with Indian clubs. Then he let go at the tree. The axe-head glanced off and cut off the heel of his shoe.

Standing screamed! … That elderly, tough, bristling giant of a man gave a high scream like a horse that has broken its back. He went chalk-pale under his week’s bristles and said:

“I could do with a gill of ’is Lordship’s brandy!”

Then he turned on that young man like one of the grizzly bears he had shot. He described how Jim Selby had cut his leg clean through at the shin and how Jack Wilmot had killed his little daughter standing near him.

“I’ve seen fools!” he said. “But never a fool like you! Do you think a haxe is the teaspoon your mother fed pap to you with….” And on and on and on…. When it came to carrying these logs up the hill he selected—he was the master of the team—the heaviest and longest of all for that hero to stagger under.

“No, Cahpt’n,” he said, when I remonstrated, “Yon one’s felled in Caliyifornyer…. Let’m carry in Old England….”

So Mr. Hearst’s star provided infinite amazement in Sussex. In the end he took down by shorthand my best story and sold it to a London magazine for £16 that I could well have done with myself…. I don’t know why people do things like that to me. I suppose they think I don’t notice….

There came afterwards through the summer a number of, as it were, paler Americans, most of them asking for no more than autographs. And I began to feel as if I must have a large American public…. Years ago, as I have elsewhere related, S. S. McClure had told me that my books would never sell in America because Americans could not tell whether I was or was not in earnest, whilst they would not sell in England because the English knew that I was too damn in earnest.

I began to think that some quality of earnestness must have gotten into my work. It perhaps transcended in that quality what had disturbed hitherto my compatriots…. And I contemplated at last a novel….

It was, however, the coming of the Middle West that gave me the final tilt towards Literature and away, alas apparently for ever, from hogs! … I will here interpose a note on the marketing of hogs. For it was hogs that made Chicago what she was, and it was in the end Chicago, with its North Western University, that tipped my scale away from them. The wise student of agricultural markets will tell you—as you could very well tell him!—that to make money by hogs you must buy when the market is low and market when it is high…. That is easy, but, alas, I have never had money to buy with when the market was low, only when, as in this case, it was at its very apex! Though my hogs increased in girth and progeny, in exactly the same progression the market fell. Thus when at last I sold I broke exactly even, my considerable herd of swine fetching almost to a penny what my original two or three pedigree beasts had cost in 1919. So that, if we put the pork and hams that we ate and sold against what we bought in the way of food for the hogs, I had lost only my time and labour. This, though it might have disappointed another man, was eminently satisfactory to me, since it was the money brought in by those beasts and other stock that let me eventually make my break-away to Provence. So Anna and her sisters and descendants proved to be money pigs. But for them I should have frittered away both my time and my money. Moreover, the labour spent on them in the open air had enormously improved my health, and robust health is a necessity for any very large literary undertaking!

Letters then, had for some time been coming to me from the North Western University. I guessed it to be—as indeed it was!—a regular nest of singing birds. And there was about those letters from the unknown a certain freshness at once of outlook and expression…. My old bones stirred….

Then came several agreeable young men and then a letter from Mr. Cunninghame Graham introducing other young men from the Middle West. That immense region appeared to hear of that incomparable writer of English and noble horseman at about the same moment as it heard of myself. The letter giving the name and address of one of these young men I immediately lost, and although I remembered the young man’s name I could not for the life of me remember the address, except that it was near either Earl’s Court or Gloucester Road station on the Underground. Mr. Graham’s letter had been so generous in praise of the young poet, that I addressed two letters to him in that neighbourhood, the one being addressed simply: “Near Earl’s Court Station,” and the other “near Gloucester Road.” His Majesty’s intelligent post-office promptly delivered the first into the hands of Mr. Glenway Westcott and returned the second to me.

So destiny and the mail service conspired to make me write. For if Mr. Westcott had not paid me a visit of some duration, I do not think that I should have taken seriously again to writing. He was himself charming, intelligent in the extreme and a delicious poet just having his first affair with the muse. That in itself was good enough. But, in addition, he gave me an idea of a great background of youth, intelligence and energy in æsthetic pursuits. It was as if a sort of French Romantic movement that in its æsthetic aims alone was not specifically romantic—as if a great stirring of æsthetic life were taking place on the shores of those Lakes. I saw indeed, even then, that it must be from there that an initial spurt towards new literary life must come—if it was to come from anywhere. Here was a vast country of new and hitherto unknown intelligences. And it was the one great tract in the Western World that had remained at once unstirred and unwearied by the late war. It was virgin soil indeed.

I must make the confession of selfishness that it was rather in the light of a possible audience than as a ground to produce masterpieces that I viewed that new public. If one is to write one must have at least the mirage of an audience, and I could not see anywhere else in the world any body of men that could, by the light of the wildest optimism, be expected to give me any kind of suffrage. These young men seemed already to have accepted my ideas.

That in England I should ever have any hearers I knew to be impossible. More or less consciously for me to be in touch with youth is a necessity if I am to write, so that I have gone on writing until my hair is as white as it ever will be and still it is usual for critics to write of me—usually with distaste—as belonging to the Younger School. But in England at that date there appeared to be no youth—outside the workhouse or the gaol. The young men that I saw were charming and well-mannered, but the charming and well-mannered are no audience for me. Indeed, there seems to be about me something repellent to the well-bred English mind. I presume I am too much in earnest!

And the few contracts I had with literary London were not such as to inspirit me. Conrad wrote, as I have said, that for two years he had not earned a penny by his pen. Mr. Cunninghame Graham wrote that he had no readers at all. My own work had not sold a hundred copies in England…. And there was Mr. Coppard….

I don’t know what made Mr. Coppard come and stay with me…. Or perhaps I do. My old friend the —— Review, under a new editorship, was pursuing the very admirable policy of preserving in what it published a reasonable balance between creative and what is called “serious” writing. I bought it one day at a bookstall, and came upon a piece of work that made me at once see that a new force existed in England. It was a story by Mr. Coppard relating how, when he was nearly starving, he had bought some bananas. I had never till then heard of Mr. Coppard…. Then I saw other stories by that writer, and I became convinced that England possessed a short-story writer as great as any there ever had been. Of that opinion I remain….

I happened to have tried my own hand at a short story. I was never any good at that form. I need length—and as often as not quite preposterous length—to get an effect. But as I was convinced I could not then write anything competent, I thought I might as well try that form as any other. I did not feel proud of that story—but if one is to live one must have some illusions as to work one has just finished, and I sent it to the —— Review. I added to my accompanying letter some sentences of admiration for Mr. Coppard’s stories, and said that I should be obliged if the Editor would get someone in his office to send me Mr. Coppard’s address.

That story came back with astonishing promptitude. By the post-mark on the stamp I could see that it could not have been in the office of that journal for more than ten minutes…. It had been time enough for someone to write on the printed slip of rejection a message to the effect that the writer would have imagined that I could have told from inspection of the columns of the Review that that journal demanded at least a glimmering of technical ability in the short stories that it printed. He added that they never gave the addresses of their contributors to outsiders.

I understood that whoever wrote that could not have liked me much. I fancy—but indeed I know—that he talked about what he had written to one or other of the amiable young men about Fleet Street who had been down to see me. At any rate a day or two later the young man in question wrote to me to say that Mr. Coppard would consent to honour me with a visit if I would write and invite him.

Then Mr. Coppard came. I have said that he produced on me the impression of a gipsy. I had taken him, from his writings, to be Irish or Welsh, but he was neither, and, with his exquisite perception of form, he could not be English like myself. So I formed in my mind the conviction that he must be a gipsy and that conviction gained immensely when I met him, dark, lean, hard in physique as in intellect, and with piercing dark eyes under a deep hat-brim, sitting on beech-logs, and giving out all the wisdom of an ancient and cruel world.

From what he chose to relate of his biography—of how, from being employed as a little boy by a kindly sweating tailor, he came at last to be secretary of the local branch of the Fabian Society in Oxford, and met the more intelligent of the undergraduates, all the while working in an electric-light bulb factory and reading unceasingly Conrad and other writers in that day unknown—I gathered that this real prophet had met with very little honour in the country he had honoured by his birth. It was not merely that for an extended space of time he had had practically nothing but raw grated carrots to eat in a lost cottage in a damp corner. I had lately—and at times frequent enough before and since I have—been through sufficient experiences of lost, damp cottages and little to eat to know that such vicissitudes do the writer himself little but good. I am not one of those who believe that the writer should have knowledge of millionaire yachting on the Ægean or Palace Hotels on the Côte d’Azur. I would rather pass my life in the dampest of damp hovels and nothing is more deleterious for a writer than to devote serious attention to the fixings of a Blue Train. If in short he cannot imagine for himself what happens in yachts, palaces and drawing-rooms he may as well not start out on the career of writer…. But it is bitter bad for a country that it should have a writer of the genius of Mr. Coppard and let him live in lost cottages on a diet of grated carrots. It proves itself to be a country that no writer will love and that all will leave as soon as they can. I care, in fact, very little about the personal vicissitudes of artists. Hardships will kill some but make men of more. But I will, if I can, live in a country where the arts are at least enough honoured to get their practitioners, again at least, lip service…. Here, when I am writing, when I am finishing a book, the grocer and the butcher and the laundress and the proprietor of the bureau de tabac, all learn of the fact through no volition of mine and, if members of my family go through the village they will at every step be stopped by inquirers asking how the work progresses, whether I am bearing up under the strain, and how long it will take. My landlord will travel to distant forests to get me a root of asphodel, because all poets must have asphodel! … Why, only yesterday, there was living in that village a poet—American, not even French. Because of the fall of the dollar he left precipitately. His landlady was at a loss to understand his departure, and when told that the reason had in fact been nothing but pennilessness:

“My God!” she exclaimed, “if I had known that…. The great poet! … He could have had my house for nothing, and I would have found food for him and his family…. For good, if neces sary….”

I was lying this morning before dawn, looking at the Mediterranean framed in a tall oblong by the pillars of the terrace. The lights of the Island of St. M—— were still burning; the lighthouse at the entry of the harbour flashed hurriedly and without ceasing. As abruptly as if a conductor had raised his bâton the chorus of small birds began. There was no visible greyness. Nevertheless, that was the salute to the saffron finger of the dawn. Ulysses, it is said, once put in for shelter in the cave beneath the garden.

The bird chorus is an unceasing, silver pizzicato. There are none of the great woodwind performers that you get in the immense uproar of the London dawn. Here they eat all the thrushes and blackbirds and larger warblers. They call them, as I have said, all grives, and in consequence the vines are devoured by Eudernes, Pyrales, Grisettes, Erinoses,” Cochineal beetles, wasps, hornets…. But the little voices fuse into one volume. It drowns the courtship of the frogs and the silver bell-note of the toad that have sounded all night.

A greyness is there and a single, agonising note infinitely prolonged. Instantly the chorus of small ones ceases—as picadors, banderilleros, and all the rest of the corrida fall to mere spectators when the great shining one advances solitary over the sand. The lights of St. M—— die; the sea is like listening, grey satin. The lighthouse turns more slowly, so as to miss no note. It is the nightingale:

The first beam of the sun struck on the white foot a-top of the mountainous island. The flash of the lighthouse was no more there. That soloist concluded his rhapsody. It was the silence of dawn.

I went down into the garden to see how the pimentos we had pricked out last evening had got through the night. The nights are still too cool—cold even!—to let things make the progress they should when the sun is down…. But the first beams of the sun are as warm as in an English July….

I went back to lie down and think…. I went back to London in September, 1922…. Someone had asked me to a dinner at the Kettners’ to meet Mr. Sinclair Lewis and his wife…. Mrs. Lewis had a golden sheath-gown and her golden hair coiled over her ears. I sat between her and Miss May Sinclair and opposite to Mr. H. G. Wells and an American lady journalist—Mrs. Ryan, I think—and various of the English great. I should not have gone there if I had known they would be there. I felt like a toad in a dress-waistcoat pocket….

The dinner was—of course!—given by Mr. Henry Forman, the editor of Collier’s Weekly, who sent me to report the Cardinals’ Consistory at Rome. He had a great admiration for my style—years ago. I know it was real because, not only did he ask me from amongst my hogs to that dinner, but, years after, he asked me to his house on Reading Ridge. It looks over to the distant, romantic gleam of the Sound as, from Le Revest des Eaux here, you look over a more Southern Sea. And he opened his last bottle of Perrier-Jouet, which he had kept against my chance coming, ever since the descent of the 18th Amendment on those climes. You must sincerely admire a man’s style if you do that for him. Why: it is to treat you like Apollo, the very god of stylists!

I wonder if he still admires my style! For it is one of the tragedies of the long literary round that they drop out one by one, your admirers! You mark, as it were, a day of praise with a red mile-stone…. Then, years afterward, you get a letter saying—or they say to you … as Mr. Watts Dunton said to Mr.—afterwards Sir—Hall Caine:

“H——, you left us long ago. And since then we have seen from the public prints that you have written some books…”

Years ago—I should say in 1913—I was on the top of a bus in front of the Bon Marché. I saw Miss Gertrude Stein driving with a snail-like precision her Ford car. It was a vehicle of the original model of my namesake, and with its great height above the roadway gave to Miss Stein, driving, the air of awfulness of Pope or Pharaoh, borne aloft and swaying on their golden thrones. I sprang down from my bus in order to pursue that phenomenon, for I had been going to call on her. I wanted to speak to her. I was leaving Paris that afternoon, and should have no opportunity for a long time.

I do not remember what it was exactly that I wanted to talk to her about. I have had so many and such long arguments with that old friend—or enemy—that they seem to fuse, the one into the other in an unbroken chain of battle. It must, however, have been about the sculpture of either Mr. Joseph Epstein or poor Gaudier Brzeska. She had written—or more probably she was reported to me as having said—something caustic and contemptuous, probably about Gaudier. And at that date Miss Stein was both Pope and Pharaoh of the picture-buying world.

At any rate I was determined to have it out with her about something and I trotted on, keeping that procession in sight for quite a number of blocks. She out-distanced me in a stretch of roadway that was quite clear of traffic, whereas the pavements were blocked. It occurred to me that she must be going to Picasso’s: I took a taxi. But she was not at Picasso’s. A number of people were, and they were all disliking the new stage in which that cubist found himself, all having been enthusiastic patrons of his earlier representational work. Upon one of them—I think it was that prominent dilettante, the Compte de Beaumont—the painter turned and said:

“You used in the old days to say that I drew better than Raphael and painted better than Velasquez. You said it, not I. I never said it.” How then was it that they—being nobodies—dared to question him—the divine master, by their own accounts!—if in his wisdom he saw fit to take other directions? Did they imagine that he could no longer draw better than Raphael, or was it to be imagined that they thought that they, the nobodies of the audience, made the masterpieces of the divine draughtsman? That was probably what they did think…. Then let them go away and find other divine artists to paint, under their directions, works which were better than those of Raphael.

I am not Picasso. My sympathies are altogether with revolutionary work and with no other. I would rather read work of Miss Stein or Mr. Joyce or look at the work of Picasso himself than consider the work of a gentleman who wrote like Thackeray or drew like Apelles. They may write or draw better than either master: I can do without them. But I cannot see that my own work is in the least revolutionary. I go on my way like a nice old gentleman at a tea-party. Occasionally it strikes me that if I change a little my method of sequence in presenting scenes, or shorten my sentences and occasionally put in instead of chasing out all assonances, I may feel a little better. But all over the world there are, I am aware, gentlemen and ladies lamenting that I don’t write as I wrote when I was eighteen or twenty-seven or thirty-six or forty-five. Or even fifty-four.

There is a German Professor, in Hamburg, I think, who castigates me for no longer imitating the verse of the Minnesingers; a critic in New York asks each time I produce a book, why don’t I continue the adventures of the hero of a book I was sick and tired of ten years ago; painters upbraid me for no longer writing about Art as I used to do in 1913; Mr. Gordon Craig burst in on me the other day and said, from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., that I never should be any good again unless I once more dabbled in theatrical managing and propaganda, as I did in the early days of the Irish Theatre. My most cherished disciple banged me over the head the other day because I try nowadays to break up my sentences a little. Hemingway, I was told, had done that until he was quite written out. Was I to gain immortality imitating Hemingway? Let me pull myself together.

I didn’t know that I was imitating Mr. Hemingway. I may have been. I am not above taking anything from anybody if it will help me not to be bored by my own rhythms. I sometimes get a shock, as if in a nightmare, at hearing my own voice going on and on. And on. Little, short sentences are conversations. Wave answers wave. It is no longer monologue that flows and flows, and how can you stop it? … But if you do stop it you lose disciples and patrons. You can only hope to pick up others.

Sometimes you do not…. Berkeley, Cal., used to be a regular centre for the dissemination of my writings. That was because of the efforts of the Professor of English. I have mentioned him several times out of gratitude, because the article in which he provided me with a philosophy and said I disbelieved in the infallibility of the Pope, gave me my initial shove back into literature. I have, it must be apparent, no philosophy and subscribe to the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Why shouldn’t I? It does not seem to matter much. All the same it was Professor Marsden Price who made me again suffer from writer’s cramp.

One should not meet one’s life heroes. The poor professor came to stay with me on that farm and he was dismayed. He was on his way to Strasbourg for his Sabbatical year and he expected to find me looking like a poet. I looked like a tramp dressed in military clothes that I had rescued from a scarecrow, and talking of hogs. And after dinner—it was midsummer and the days very long—we made him ted hay—in evening-dress.—I have always dressed for dinner when I was farming.—And it was warm and American evening-dress is not made for tedding hay!—And my house having been built before the discovery of the United States, contained nothing in the way of what the French call conforts modernes…. I have said that I am indifferent to comfort…. And after a long summer day of farming I am usually indifferent to literary conversation….

So in his first lecture on his return from Strasbourg to Berkeley, the Professor took it out of me by saying that I was inarticulate and—this was what was bitter—that I did not talk German as well as I thought I did…. I daresay I am inarticulate. At tea-parties I find it difficult to know what to talk about and frequently wish that I had made notes for conversational openings on my shirt-cuffs…. But I had never thought about how I talked German any more than I think about how I wind up the clock. I just talk—as I talk half a dozen languages…. So how could the Professor measure my own estimate of my powers over the tongue of Mr. Hitler? …

That rankled for years. At last I found myself in Strasbourg. The day of my revenge had come. I positively seized a postcard and wrote upon it that I did not wonder the Professor thought my German faulty—if that was where he learnt his language! … The language of Strasbourg, like everything else in Alsace since the war, is admirable. It is better than German German—but it is not the German of Goethe. Or even of President Hindenburg!

It was a regrettable incident. I should not have written that postcard. I never indulged in any other controversy in my life. So to punish me no one from Berkeley, Cal., ever now asks me for autographs….

It all came really from dressing for dinner. I don’t quite know why I do dress for dinner. My grandfather always did it. He said that, after a hard day’s work, when you were covered with paint you had to change your clothes and you might just as well put on a boiled rag and what goes with it as anything else. Marwood also used to dress always. He said it was economical. It gives your day clothes a longer life and evening things last for ever. Certainly that dress-suit in which I entertained Professor Price and tedded hay bore Marwood out, for I had had it—in 1922—since 1898, and most of my other clothes must have been nearly as old…. But I think I do it because I like the feel of broadcloth and silk on my hands after I have been all day in the open and the dreadful mud…. America in any case went on closing in on me.

At Mrs. Forman’s dinner the brilliant and noisy conversation turned on nothing but boxing. Kid Lewis was fighting someone—it may have been Carpentier trying to stage a return. Everyone of the great at that table except Miss May Sinclair bet a little on one or the other. I myself have never made a bet on a sporting event in my life. Mr. Sinclair Lewis took bets with the gay désinvolture of a bookie at the Derby. He backed his namesake, and I didn’t know whether to be more concerned at the amount he stood to lose or impressed by the fact that a mere novelist could even contemplate such high finance…. And the talk about boxing went on and on and on….

I myself might have talked. It was a little my subject. The Welch Regiment was famous for its boxers. We had produced Bombardier Wells, the incomparable Jimmy Wilde, the famous Ted Driscoll. I had refereed at innumerable boxing matches, and had, of course, put on the gloves a little. But I held my tongue in face of my literary betters.

It was unfortunate. Miss May Sinclair alone had no opinions on boxing—the world was boxing-mad in those days: I suppose it was the last reverberation of militarism. But Miss Sinclair—all praise to her—had no opinions about it. She, therefore, fixed upon me and demanded fifty pounds—for a poet at Oxford. The poet, she said, was a very good poet. He had, during the war, contracted tuberculosis of the brain whilst serving in his father’s khaki clothing-store. In return for those war services he was given two free years at Oxford. But these were coming to an end; the tuberculosis of the brain was no better, and it was imperative that the poor fellow should be sent to Palermo and kept there for two years more. Miss Sinclair said she thought that rich writers like herself and a celebrity at the other end of the table and I …

I said: “I beg your pardon….”

Miss Sinclair said that if the writers who had grown rich by writing, like myself, herself, and the other celebrity …

The celebrity at the other end of the table was the gentleman who had said in The Times that I thought I was a personage, but I wasn’t. He was saying that boxing had nothing to do with thews or sinews. It was a matter of relative brain convolutions. A man with short brain convolutions …

From the other side of the table Mr. Wells cried:

“What’s Fordie whispering to May? … Fordie, move your chair away from May’s…. We all want to hear….”

Miss Sinclair said:

“It is certainly your duty to subscribe to this fund…. You’ve done well by writing…. You’ve come into this large fortune….”

The celebrity at the other end of the table exclaimed:

“Give me the training of the smallest guttersnipe against the largest brute, and if he’s got the right convolutions …”

I couldn’t help it; I said:

“Did you ever see a fight …”

He went on:

“When Bombardier Wells fought Carpentier …”

I had been all through the training of Bombardier Wells. He had been Sergeant-Instructor in my battalion, and I had been all through the fight over and over again with him in the last four years. He had rotten legs.

I was in the worst of moods. I have made it a practice all my life to give anyone anything they asked for—supposing I had it…. I had not at the moment fifty pounds, but I had my capital in hogs…. I wondered if it was my duty to sell my hogs…. I was even then harassed beyond bearing by starving ex-soldiers. If Miss Sinclair’s protégé had served in anything else than a shoddy store I would have sold my hogs…. On the other hand he was a poet. Miss Sinclair said he was a good poet. It is one’s duty to help poets….

Mr. H. G. Wells exclaimed from the other side of the table:

“Fordie, move your chair away from May’s…. We want to hear….”

All the while Kid Lewis was fighting at the Albert Hall. I could see the firm flesh of those boxers though I was looking at Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, who was in a golden sheath gown and had her hair in bandeaux over her ears.

The celebrity said:

“The brain convolutions of Carpentier ..”

Miss Sinclair said:

“Come now, Fordie, it’s your duty. I am surprised at you. You pass for being generous….”

I exclaimed as loud as I could:

“Damn it all. Wells has got rotten legs! No man in spite of his excellent foot-work … Wells’s footwork is the best there is. But no man with legs like Wells’s can stand up in the limelight without his knees knocking together…. Wells can’t stand the lime light…. But look at Lewis…. There are legs for you….”

A lady said: “But we can’t see their legs! Couldn’t they stand up.”

Mr. Wells said to Mr. Forman:

“Look here: you make Fordie move his chair away from May’s.”

Miss Sinclair said hotly:

“What does he mean? … What’s the horrid little man? …”

The celebrity was looking disgusted at being interrupted by a nobody. He was wiping his lips with his  handkerchief. I wondered why he used his handkerchief instead of his napkin.

Mr. Wells said:

“Fordie knows everything…. He knows which man’s been doped or which is fighting on the cross…. He ought to share his information and not give it to a desperate gambler like May, who will double-cross us all.”

Miss Sinclair said:

“Don’t pay any attention to him…. I am trying to make you see that unless we writers stick together….”

The celebrity called from the other end of the table:

“Haw…. H. G., who’s your omniscient friend?”

Mr. Wells at that time had a little joke about my omniscience, just as he liked to tease Miss Sinclair about her sporting proclivities. He exclaimed:

“That’s …,” and he declaimed my name and titles.

It was as if the celebrity felt something disagreeing violently with him.

He said:

“Good God! Disgraceful! They told me that that fellow …”

I did not hear the end of his sentence, because at the moment there came the news of the result of the fight…. But I fancy “they” had told that fellow that, like everyone else who had served in the war, Mr. Wells’s omniscient friend was in either the workhouse or the gaol. Otherwise that celebrity would hardly have written what he had written in The Times. For to the Londoner it is incredible that you could leave London—even though it is to earn your living on a hogfarm or to idle by the Mediterranean—to the real ingrained Londoner it is incredible that you should leave London except under the stress of poverty or force majeure….

The only results of the great fight that I can remember was that Mr. Sinclair Lewis raked in a great number of banknotes. He garnered them from the tablecloth and stuffed them into his hat. Then he inverted the hatful over the hands of one of the waiters! It was an impressive gesture and gave one to dream of what, in America, may await the novelist who unites, as Henry James would have said, considerable technical ability to an enviable gift of popularity.