MY parents were most disappointed when, because of the shop crisis and my illness, I failed to take the B.A. degree at Oxford. But Sir Walter Raleigh, as head of the English School, allowed me to sit for the later degree of Bachelor of Letters, and present a written thesis on any subject I chose. He also agreed to be my tutor on condition that he should not be expected to tutor me. He thought well of my poetry, and suggested that we should only meet as friends. Sir Walter was engaged at the time on the official history of the war in the air, and wanted practical flying experience for the task. The R.A.F. took him up as often as he needed, but he caught typhoid fever on a flight out East and died. His death so saddened me that I did not apply for another tutor.
I found it difficult to write my thesis. The Illogical Element in English Poetry, in the required academic style, and decided to make it an ordinary book. I rewrote it some nine times; and did not like the final result. I was trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry, which could only be fully understood, I wrote, by studying the latent associations of the words used – the obvious prose sense being often in direct opposition to the latent content. The book’s weakness lay in its not clearly distinguishing between a poet’s supra-logical thought processes and the sub-logical process of the common psychopath.
I published a volume of poems every year from 1920 to 1925; after The Pierglass, which appeared in 1921, I made no attempt to please the ordinary reading public, and did not even flatter myself that I was conferring benefits on posterity; I had no reason to suppose that posterity would be more appreciative than my contemporaries. I never wrote unless a poem pressed to be written. Though assuming a reader of intelligence and sensibility, and envisaging his possible reactions to my words, I no longer identified him with any particular group of readers or (taking courage from Hardy) with critics of poetry. He was no more real a person than the conventional figure put in the foreground of an architectural design to indicate the size of a building. This greater strictness in writing, which showed in Whipperginny, laid me open to accusations of trying to get publicity and increase my sales by a wilful clowning modernism.
I made several attempts during these years to rid myself of the poison of war memories by finishing my novel, but had to abandon it – ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot, and yet not sure enough of myself to turn it back into undisguised history, as here.
I knew most of the poets then writing; they included Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells, and many more. I liked Davies because he came from South Wales and was afraid of the dark, and because once, I heard, he made out a list of poets and crossed them off one by one as he decided that they were not true poets – until only two names were left – his own, and mine! He was very jealous of de la Mare and had bought a pistol, with which he used to take pot-shots at a photograph of de la Mare’s on the upper landing of his house. But I liked de la Mare, too, for his gentleness, and the hard work he obviously put into his poems – I was always interested in the writing-technique of my fellow-poets. I once asked whether he had not worried for hours over the lines:
Ah, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose…
and, in the end, been dissatisfied. De la Mare ruefully admitted that he was forced to leave the assonance ‘Roves and rose’, because no synonym for ‘roves’ seemed strong enough. In 1925, I agreed to collaborate with T. S. Eliot, then a harassed bank clerk, in a book about modern poetry to which we would each contribute essays, but the plan fell through.
I seldom saw Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell now. When I did, I always felt uncomfortably rustic in their society. One autumn, Osbert sent me a present of a brace of grouse. They came from Renishaw, the Derbyshire family seat, in a bag labelled: ‘With Captain Sitwell’s compliment to Captain Graves.’ Nancy and I could neither of us face the task of plucking and gutting and roasting the birds, so we gave them to a neighbour. I wrote to Osbert: ‘Captain Graves acknowledges with thanks Captain Sitwell’s gift of Captain Grouse.’ But we made friends with his sister Edith. It was a surprise, after reading her wild avant garde poems, to find her gentle, domesticated, and even devout. When she came to stay with us she spent her time sitting on the sofa and hemming handkerchiefs. She used to write to Nancy and me frequently, but our friendship ended in 1926.
I met none of my surviving army friends, with the very occasional exception of Siegfried. Edmund Blunden had gone as Professor of English Literature to Tokyo. Lawrence enlisted in the R.A.F. as soon as the Middle Eastern settlement went through, but a Labour member gave notice of a question in the House about his presence there under an assumed name, and the Air Ministry dismissed him. He was now a private in the Royal Tank Corps and hating it. When Sir Walter Raleigh died, I felt my connexion with Oxford University broken; and when Rivers died, and George Mallory on Everest, the death of my friends seemed to be following me in peacetime as relentlessly as in war.
A feeling of ill luck clouded these years. Islip had ceased to be a country refuge. I found myself resorting to the wartime technique of getting through things somehow, anyhow, in the hope that they would mend. Nancy’s poor health led her to do less and less work. Our finances were improved by an allowance from her father that covered the extra expense of the new children – we now had two hundred pounds a year – but cottage life with four of them under six years old, and Nancy ill, showed signs of palling. I might have, after all, had to violate my oath and take a teaching job. But for that I needed a degree; so I completed my thesis, which I published as Poetic Unreason, and handed it in, already printed, to the examining board. To my surprise, they accepted it, and now I had my B.Litt.’s degree. However, I did not want a preparatory or secondary school job, which would keep me away from home all day; Nancy could not bear having anyone else but myself and her taking care of the children. There seemed no solution to my problem.
Then the doctor told us that if Nancy wished to regain her health she must spend the winter in Egypt. Thus, the only appointment that could possibly meet the case would be an independent teaching job in Egypt, at a very high salary, and with little work to do. A week or two later (this is how things have always happened in emergencies) I was invited to offer myself as a candidate for the post of Professor of English Literature at the newly-founded Royal Egyptian University, Cairo. I had been recommended, I found out afterwards, by two or three influential men, among them Arnold Bennett, always a good friend to me, and the first critic who spoke out strongly for my poems in the daily Press; and Lawrence, who had known Lord Lloyd, then High Commissioner of Egypt, during the Arab Revolt. The salary, including the passage money, amounted to fourteen hundred pounds a year. I fortified these recommendations with others: from my neighbour, Colonel John Buchan, and from Mr Asquith, now the Earl of Oxford, who had taken a fatherly interest in me and often visited our cottage at Islip.
I got the appointment. The indirect proceeds from poem-writing can be enormously higher than the direct ones.