THE first time I met Colonel T. E. Lawrence, he happened to be wearing full evening dress. That must have been in February or March 1920, and the occasion was a guest-night at All Souls’, where he had been awarded a seven-years’ Fellowship. The formality of evening dress concentrates attention on eyes, and Lawrence’s eyes immediately held me. They were startlingly blue, even by artificial light, and never met the eyes of the person he addressed, but flickered up and down as though making an inventory of clothes and limbs. I was only an accidental guest and knew few people there. Lawrence, talking to the Regius Professor of Divinity about the influence of the Syrian Greek philosophers on early Christianity, and especially of the importance of the University of Gadara close to the Lake of Galilee, mentioned that St James had quoted one of the Gadarene philosophers (I think, Mnasalcus) in his Epistle. He went on to speak of Meleager, and the other Syrian-Greek contributors to the Greek Anthology, whose poems he intended to publish in English translation. I joined in the conversation and mentioned a morning-star image which Meleager once used in rather an un-Greek way. Lawrence turned to me. ‘You must be Graves the poet? I read a book of yours in Egypt in 1917, and thought it pretty good.’
This was embarrassing, but kind. He soon began asking me about the younger poets: he was out of touch with contemporary work, he said. I told him what I knew.
Lawrence had not long finished with the Peace Conference, where he acted as adviser to the Emir Feisal, and was now tinkering at the second draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his Fellowship having been granted him on condition that he wrote the book as a formal history of the Arab Revolt.
I used to visit his rooms in the mornings between lectures, but not before eleven o’clock or half past, because he worked by night, going to bed at dawn. Though he never drank himself, he would always send his scout to fetch me a silver goblet of audit ale. Audit ale, brewed in the College, was as soft as barley-water but of great strength. Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein had once come down to Oxford to open a new museum; he lunched at All Souls’ before the ceremony, the mildness of the audit ale deceived him, and later that afternoon they took him back to the station in a cab with the blinds drawn.
I knew nothing definite of Lawrence’s wartime activities, though my brother Philip had been with him in the Intelligence Department at Cairo in 1915, making out the Turkish Order of Battle. I did not question him about the Revolt, partly because he seemed to dislike the subject – Lowell Thomas was now lecturing in the United States on ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – and partly because of a convention between him and me that the war should not be mentioned: we were both suffering from its effects and enjoying Oxford as a too-good-to-be-true relaxation. Thus, though the long, closely-written foolscap sheets of The Seven Pillars were always stacked in a neat pile on his living-room table, I restrained my curiosity. He occasionally spoke of his archaeological work in Mesopotamia before the war; but poetry, especially modern poetry, was what we discussed most.
He wanted to meet what poets there were, and through me came to know, among others, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Masefield, and, later, Thomas Hardy. He frankly envied poets. He felt that they had some sort of secret which he might be able to grasp and profit from. He made Charles Doughty his chief hero and got an introduction to him through Hogarth, Curator of the Ashmolean Museum, whom he regarded as a second father. Lawrence envisaged the poet’s secret as a technical mastery of words rather than as a particular mode of living and thinking. I had not yet learned enough to be able to dispute this, and when I did begin to learn, some years later, found Lawrence difficult to convince. To him, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry were parallel activities, differing only in the medium used. Lawrence told me: ‘When I asked Doughty why he had made that Arabian journey, his answer was that he had gone there “to redeem the English language from the slough into which it has fallen since the time of Spenser”.’ These words of Doughty’s seem to have made a great impression on Lawrence, and largely account, I think, for his furious keying-up of style in The Seven Pillars.
Vachel Lindsay, the American poet, an extremely simple man – Middle-Western clay with a golden streak – came to Oxford, and I persuaded Sir Walter Raleigh, the Professor of English Literature, to let him have a lecture hall for a poetry-reading. Everyone enjoyed the performance, which was an exercise in elocution and mime, not a reading. Afterwards, Lawrence invited Lindsay and his old mother and myself to lunch in his rooms. Lawrence’s scout, scandalized to hear that Lindsay belonged to the Illinois Anti-Saloon League, asked permission to lay on his place a copy of verses composed in 1661 by a fellow of the College. One stanza ran:
The poet divine that cannot reach wine,
Because that his money doth many times faile,
Will hit on the vein to make a good strain,
If he be but inspired with a pot of good ale.
Mrs Lindsay had been warned by friends to comment on nothing unusual that she met at Oxford, and when Lawrence brought out the College gold service in her honour, she took this to be the ordinary thing at a University luncheon party – apologized for it as being of no great antiquity: but the College had been patriotic during the Civil War and melted down all its plate to help pay King Charles’s expenses while he made Oxford his headquarters.
Lawrence’s rooms were dark and oak-panelled, with a large table and a desk as the principal furniture. There were also two heavy leather chairs, simply acquired. An American oil-financier had come in suddenly one day when I was there and said: ‘I am here from the States, Colonel Lawrence, to ask a single question. You are the only man who will answer it honestly. Do Middle-Eastern conditions justify my putting any money in South Arabian oil?’
Lawrence, without rising, quietly answered: ‘No.’
‘That’s all I wanted to know; it was worth coming for. Thank you, and good day!’ In his brief glance about the room he missed something and, on his way home through London, chose the chairs and had them sent to Lawrence with his card.
Other things in the room were pictures, including Augustus John’s portrait of the Emir Feisal, which Lawrence, I believe, bought from John with the diamond he had worn as a mark of honour in his Arab headdress; his books, including a Kelmscott Chaucer,three prayer-rugs, the gift of Arab leaders, one of them with a lapis-lazuli sheen on the nap; the Tell Shawm station bell from the Hedjaz Railway; and on the mantelpiece a four-thousand-year-old toy – a clay soldier on horseback from a child’s grave at Carchemish, where Lawrence had dug before the war.
I was working on a new book of poems, which reflected my haunted condition; it appeared later under the title of The Pierglass. Lawrence made a number of suggestions for improving these poems, most of which I adopted. He behaved very much like an undergraduate at times. One day I happened to visit the top of the Radcliffe Camera and look down on the roofs of neighbouring colleges. From a pinnacle of All Souls’ fluttered a small crimson Hedjaz flag: Lawrence had been a famous roof-climber when up at Jesus College twelve years before this. He told me of two or three schemes for brightening All Souls’ and Oxford generally. One was for improving the rotten turf in the Quadrangle; he had suggested at a College meeting that it should be manured or replaced; no action was taken. He now proposed to plant mushrooms on it, so that they would be forced to returf the whole extent; and consulted a mushroom expert in town. But the technical difficulties of mushroom culture proved to be great, and Lawrence went away to help Winston Churchill with the Middle-Eastern settlement of 1922 before they could be overcome.
Another scheme, for which he enlisted my help, was to steal the Magdalen College deer. We would drive them one early morning into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls’, having persuaded the College to answer the Magdalen protests with a declaration that it was the All Souls’ herd, pastured there from time immemorial. Great things were expected of this raid, but we needed Lawrence as the stage-manager; so it fell through when he left us. However, he engineered a successful strike by the College servants for better pay and hours, and such a thing had never happened before since the foundation of the University. Lawrence also proposed to present the College with a peacock which, once accepted, would be found to bear the name ‘Nathaniel’ – after Lord Curzon, an enemy of Lawrence’s, and Vice-Chancellor of the University. One morning I went to his rooms, and he introduced me to a visitor there: ‘Ezra Pound: Robert Graves – you will dislike each other,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked afterwards, having felt very uncomfortable in Pound’s presence.
‘They tell me that he’s Longfellow’s grand-nephew, and when a man’s a modernist that takes some living down.’
At the same time Lawrence was getting to know the leading painters and sculptors, and trying to grasp their secret, too. He used to sit as a model, to see what they made of him, and compare the results.
Recently, I saw Sir William Orpen’s version – a curious almost libellous magnification of a seldom-seen element in Lawrence’s character – a sort of street-urchin furtiveness. It counter-balances Augustus John’s too sentimentally heroic portrait.
Professor Edgeworth, of All Souls’, avoided conversational English, persistently using words and phrases that one expects to meet only in books. One evening, Lawrence returned from a visit to London, and Edgeworth met him at the gate. ‘Was it very caliginous in the Metropolis?’
‘Somewhat caliginous, but not altogether inspissated,’ Lawrence replied gravely.
I remember having tea with him at Fuller’s Tea Shop, and the scandal he caused by clapping his hands for the waitress in oriental fashion. And one afternoon he rang the station bell from his window into the Quadrangle. ‘Good God,’ I said, ‘you’ll wake the whole College!’
‘It needs waking up.’
We planned to collaborate in a burlesque on contemporary writers, in the style of a Government Blue-book. I said: ‘First we must get a Blue-book and study it.’ He agreed to buy one next time he went to London. When he asked at the Stationery Office for a Blue-book, the clerk asked: ‘Which Blue-book? We have hundreds.’
‘Whichever you like.’
Mistaking his indifference for guilty embarrassment, the clerk handed him the report of a Royal Commission on Venereal Disease.
I teased him once for standing on the fender over the fire; I pretended that he did it to make himself look taller. He denied this hotly, insisting that the onus of proving oneself of any use in the world lay with tall people like myself. This encouraged me to a ragging pretence of physical violence; but I immediately stopped when I caught the look in his face. I had surprised his morbid horror of being touched.
I took no part in undergraduate life, seldom visiting St John’s except to draw my Government grant and Exhibition money; and refused to pay the College games’ subscription, as being unfit for games myself and having no leisure to watch them. Most of my friends were at Balliol and Queen’s, and Wadham had a prior claim on my loyalty.
At this time I had little to do with the children; they were in the hands of Nancy and the nurse. Nancy felt that she needed some activity besides drawing, but could not decide what. One evening, in the middle of the long vacation, she suddenly said: ‘I must get away out of all this at once. Boar’s Hill stifles me. Let’s go off on bicycles somewhere.’
We packed a few things and rode off in the general direction of Devon. The nights were coldish and, not having brought any blankets, we bicycled by night and slept by day. We rode across Salisbury Plain in the moonlight, passing Stonehenge, and several deserted army camps which had an even more ghostly look. They could provide accommodation for a million men: the number of men killed in the British and Overseas Forces during the war. Finding ourselves near Dorchester, we turned aside to visit Thomas Hardy, whom we had met not long before when he came to get his honorary doctor’s degree at Oxford. Hardy was active and gay, with none of the aphasia and wandering of attention that we had noticed in him there.
I have kept a record of our talk with him. He welcomed us as representatives of the post-war generation, claiming to live such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the Morning Post’s account of the Red Terror. Then he asked about Nancy’s hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and why she kept her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you are old-fashioned! I knew an old couple here sixty years ago who did the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient family, the Paradelles, long decayed into peasantry), and she would never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer used my army rank. I explained that I had resigned my commission. ‘But you have a right to it; I should certainly keep my rank if I had one, and feel very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’
He told us that he was now engaged in restoring a Norman font in a church near by – only the bowl, but he enjoyed doing a bit of his old work again. Nancy mentioned that our children were not baptized. Interested, but not scandalized, he remarked that his mother had always said that, at any rate, there could be no harm in baptism, and that she would not like her children to blame her in after-life for leaving any duty to them undone. ‘I have usually found that what my mother said was right.’ He told us that, to his mind, the new generation of clergymen were very much better than the last… Though he now went to church only three times a year – one visit to each of the three neighbouring churches – he could not forget that in his boyhood the church had been the centre of all musical, literary, and artistic education in a village, He talked about the string-orchestras at Wessex churches, in one of which his father, grandfather, and he himself had taken part; and regretted their disappearance. He mentioned that the clergyman who appears as Mr St Clair in Tess of the D‘Urbervilles had protested to the War Office about the Sunday brass-band performances at the Dorchester Barracks, and been the cause of headquarters’ no longer being sent to this very popular station.
We took tea in the drawing-room which, like the rest of the house, was cluttered with furniture and ornaments. Hardy had an affection for accumulated possessions, and Mrs Hardy loved him too well to suggest that anything at all should be removed. With a cup of tea in his hand, he made jokes about bishops at the Athenaeum Club and imitated their episcopal tones when they ordered: ‘China tea and a little bread and butter.’ ‘Yes, my lord!’ Apparently, he considered bishops fair game, but soon began censuring Sir Edmund Gosse, who had recently stayed with them, for a breach of good taste in imitating his old friend Henry James’s way of drinking soup. Loyalty to his friends was always a passion with Hardy.
After tea we went into the garden, where he asked to see some of my new poems. I fetched him one, and he wondered whether he might offer a suggestion: the phrase ‘the scent of thyme’, which occurred in it was, he said, one of the clichés which poets of his generation had studied to avoid. Could I perhaps alter it? When I replied that his contemporaries had avoided it so well that I could now use it without offence, he withdrew the objection.
‘Do you write easily?’ he inquired.
‘This poem is in its sixth draft and will probably be finished in two more.’
‘Why!’ he said, ‘I have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.’
He said that he could once sit down and write novels by a time-table, but that poetry always came to him by accident, which perhaps was why he prized it more highly.
He spoke disparagingly of his novels, though admitting that he had enjoyed writing certain chapters. As we walked around the garden, Hardy paused at a spot near the greenhouse. He had once been pruning a tree when an idea for a story suddenly entered his head. The best story he had ever conceived, and it came complete with characters, setting, and even some of the dialogue. But not having pencil or paper with him, and wanting to finish his pruning before the weather broke, he took no notes. By the time he sat down at his table to recall the story, all was utterly gone. ‘Always carry a pencil and paper,’ he said, adding: ‘Of course, even if I remembered that story now, I couldn’t write it. I’m past novel-writing. But I often wonder what it can have been.’
That night at dinner he grew enthusiastic in praise of cyder, which he had drunk since a boy, as the finest medicine he knew. I suggested that in his Message to the American People, which he had just been asked to write, he might take the opportunity to recommend cyder.
Hardy complained of autograph-hunters and their persistence. He did not like leaving letters unanswered, and if he did so, these people pestered him the more. He was upset that morning by a letter from an autograph-fiend, which began:
Dear Mr Hardy,
I am interested to know why the devil you don’t reply to my request…
He asked me for advice, and jumped at the suggestion that a mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital – ‘Swanage Children’s Hospital’, he put in – which would forward a receipt.
He regarded professional critics as parasites, no less noxious than autograph-hunters, wished the world rid of them, and also regretted having listened to them as a young man; on their advice he had cut out from his early poems dialect-words which possessed no ordinary English equivalents. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them complained of a line: ‘his shape smalled in the distance.’ Now, what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little. Once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and found it there right enough – only to read on and discover that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, saying that these were negligible because he did not come of literary stock. But he admitted that a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he worked as a young man used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once, a few years later, when Lawrence ventured to say something disparaging about Homer’s Iliad, he protested: ‘Oh, but I admire it greatly. Why, it’s in the Mannion class!’ Lawrence at first thought that Hardy was having a little joke.)
We left the next day, after another of Hardy’s attacks on the critics at breakfast. He complained that they accused him of pessimism. One critic singled out as an example of gloom his poem on the woman whose house burned down on her wedding night. ‘Of course it’s a humorous piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see that. On reading his criticism, I went through my last collection of poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C according as they were sad, neutral, or cheerful. I found them in pretty equal proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’
In his opinion, vers libre could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’ Of his own poems he told me that, once written, he cared very little what happened to them.
He described his war-work, rejoicing to have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he admitted, ‘but it was a hundred times better than sitting on a Military Tribunal and sending young men to the war who did not want to go.’
We never saw Hardy again, though he gave us a standing invitation to stay with him.
From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the shop-window, and advised her about framing the prints which she was selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock, and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work, the week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved figure for a week or two after we were gone. This gave Nancy the idea of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill, a large residential district with no shop nearer than three miles away. We could buy a second-hand army hut, stock it with confectionery, groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically, and make our fortune. I promised to help her while the vacation lasted.
But army huts could not be bought at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a ring); so a local carpenter built a shop to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close to the road. The work got finished in good time, and we bought the stock. The Daily Mirror advertised the opening on its front page with the heading ‘SHOP-KEEPING ON PARNASSUS’ and crowds came up from Oxford to look at us. We soon began to realize that it must either be a large general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door and bringing inferior foods with ‘take it or leave it’), or a small sweet and tobacco shop that offered no challenge to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building had to be enlarged, and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock purchased. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the day, while Nancy went round to the big houses for the daily orders. Term had now begun, and I should have been attending lectures in Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand, and with the other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’s gardener’s wife.
Finally, the shop business ousted everything, not only Nancy’s painting but my University work, and Nancy’s proper supervision of the house and children. We engaged a boy to call for orders, and soon had the custom of every resident on Boar’s Hill, except two or three. Even Mrs Masefield used to visit us once a week. She always bought the same tin of sink-powder and packet of soap-flakes, paying money down from a cash-box which she carried with her. The moral problems of trade interested me. Nancy and I both found it very difficult at this time of fluctuating prices to be really honest; we could not resist the temptation of under-charging the poor villagers of Wootton, who were frequent customers, and recovering our money from the richer residents. Playing at Robin Hood came easily to me. Nobody ever detected the fraud; it was as easy as shelling peas, the boy said, who also took his turn behind the counter. We found that most people bought tea by price and not by quality. If we happened to be out of the tea, selling at ninepence a quarter, which Mrs So-and-so always bought, refusing the eightpenny tea, and if Mrs So-and-so asked for it in a hurry, we used to make up a pound of the sevenpenny, which was the same colour as the ninepenny, and charge it at ninepence. The difference would not be noticed.
We felt sorry for commercial travellers who sweated up the hill with their heavy bags of samples, usually on foot, and had to be sent away without any order. They would pitch a hard-luck tale, and often we relented and got in more stock than we needed. In gratitude they would tell us some of the tricks of the trade, advising us, for instance, never to cut cheese or bacon exactly to weight, but to make it an ounce or two more and over charge for this extra piece. ‘There’s few can do the sum before you take the stuff off the scales, and there’s fewer still who take the trouble to weigh up again when they get back home.’
The shop lasted six months. Prices began falling at the rate of about five per cent every week, the stock on our shelves had depreciated greatly in value, we had let several of the Wootton villagers run up bad debts. Then I went down with influenza, at the same time as Nancy quarrelled with the nurse and had to take the house and children herself. When we came to reckon things up, we decided to cut our losses; hoping to recoup the original expenditure, and even to be in pocket on the whole transaction, by selling the shop and goodwill to a large firm of Oxford grocers who wished to buy it as a branch establishment. Unfortunately, however, the site was not ours, and Mrs Masefield prevailed on the landlord not to let any ordinary business firm take over the shop from us, and thus spoil local amenities. No other site being available, we had to sell off what stock remained at bankruptcy prices to the wholesalers, and find a buyer for the building. Unfortunately again, the building was not made in bolted sections to be re-erected elsewhere; it could be sold only as timber, and during these six months the corner in timber had also been broken and prices fallen steeply. We recovered twenty pounds of the two hundred that had been spent on it, but were some five hundred pounds in debt to the wholesalers and others. A lawyer took everything in hand for us, and disposed of our assets; finally reducing the debt to some three hundred pounds. Nicholson sent Nancy a hundred-pound note (in a match-box) as his contribution, and Lawrence unexpectedly contributed the remainder. He gave me four chapters of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to sell for serial publication in the United States. As a point of honour, Lawrence refused to make any money out of the Revolt, even in the most indirect way; but if it could help a poet in difficulties, he saw no harm in that.
We gave the Masefields notice that the cottage would be free by the end of the June quarter 1921; but did not have any idea where to go, or what to do next. It seemed clear that we must get another cottage somewhere, live quietly, look after the children ourselves, and try to make what money we needed by writing and drawing. Nancy, who had taken charge of everything while I was ill, now set me the task of getting the cottage. It must be found in three weeks’ time.
I protested: ‘But you know there isn’t a single cottage for rent anywhere.’
‘Yes, but we simply have to get one.’
‘All right, then, describe it in detail. Since there are no cottages, we might as well get a no-cottage that we really like.’
‘Well, it must have six rooms, water indoors, a beamed attic, a walled-in garden, and it must be near the river. It must be in a village with shops, and yet a little removed from the village. The village must lie five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction from Boar’s Hill. The church must have a tower and not a spire – I’ve always hated spires. And we can afford only ten shillings a week unfurnished.’
I took down other details about soil, sanitation, windows, stairs, and kitchen sinks; laid a ruler across the Oxford ordnance map, and found five riverside villages which corresponded in general direction and distance with Nancy’s stipulation. Of these five villages, two proved on inquiry to possess shops; and, of these two, one had a towered church and the other a spired church.
I went to a firm of house-agents in Oxford and asked: ‘Have you any cottages to let unfurnished?’
The clerk laughed politely. ‘What I want is a cottage just outside the village of Islip, with a walled garden, six rooms, water in the house, a beamed attic, and at a rent of ten shillings a week.’
‘Oh, you mean the World’s End cottage? But that’s for sale, not for rent. However, it’s failed to find a buyer for two years, so perhaps the owner will let it go now at five hundred pounds, which is only half of what he originally asked.’
The next day Nancy came to Islip with me. She looked around and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right, but I shall have to cut down the cypress trees, and change those window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’
‘But the money! We haven’t the money.’
Nancy answered: ‘If we could find the exact house, surely we can find a mere lump sum of money?’
She was right. My mother very kindly bought the cottage for five hundred pounds and let it to us at ten shillings a week.