‘I’ll ring you back later, then, I’m in a hurry. I only wanted to tell you that Nicholas Farringdon’s dead. Remember that book of his he never published — he gave you the manuscript. Well, it might be worth something now, and I thought —‘
‘Nick’s dead? Hold on please, Jane. I have a customer waiting here to buy a book. Hold on.’
‘I’ll ring you later.’
*
Nicholas came, then, to dine at the club.
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perished in his Pride;
‘Who is that?’
‘It’s Joanna Childe, she teaches elocution, you must meet her.’
The twittering movements at other points in the room, Joanna’s singular voice, the beautiful aspects of poverty and charm amongst these girls in the brown-papered drawing-room, Selina, furled like a long soft sash, in her chair, came to Nicholas in a gratuitous flow. Months of boredom had subdued him to intoxication by an experience which, at another time, might itself have bored him.
Some days later he took Jane to a party to meet the people she longed to meet, young male poets in corduroy trousers and young female poets with waist-length hair, or at least females who typed the poetry and slept with the poets, it was nearly the same thing. Nicholas took her to supper at Bertorelli’s; then he took her to a poetry reading at a hired meeting-house in the Fulham Road; then he took her on to a party with some of the people he had collected from the reading. One of the poets who was well thought of had acquired a job at Associated News in Fleet Street, in honour of which he had purchased a pair of luxurious pigskin gloves; he displayed these proudly. There was an air of a resistance movement against the world at this poetry meeting. Poets seemed to understand each other with a secret instinct, almost a kind of prearrangement, and it was plain that the poet with the gloves would never show off these poetic gloves so frankly, or expect to be understood so well in relation to them, at his new job in Fleet Street or anywhere else, as here.
Some were men demobilized from the non-combatant corps. Some had been unfit for service for obvious reasons — a nervous twitch of the facial muscles, bad eyesight, or a limp. Others were still in battle dress. Nicholas had been out of the Army since the month after Dunkirk, from which he had escaped with a wound in the thumb; his release from the army had followed a mild nervous disorder in the month after Dunkirk.
Nicholas stood noticeably aloof at the poets’ gathering, but although he greeted his friends with a decided reserve, it was evident that he wanted Jane to savour her full joy of it. In fact, he wanted her to invite him again to the May of Teck Club, as dawned on her later in the evening.
The poets read their poems, two each, and were applauded. Some of these poets were to fail and fade into a no-man’s-land of Soho public houses in a few years’ time, and become the familiar messes of literary life. Some, with many talents, faltered, in time, from lack of stamina, gave up and took a job in advertising or publishing, detesting literary people above all. Others succeeded and became paradoxes; they did not always continue to write poetry, or even poetry exclusively.
One of these young poets Ernest Claymore, later became a mystical stockbroker of the 1960s, spending his week-days urgently in the City, three weekends each month at his country cottage — an establishment of fourteen rooms, where he ignored his wife and, alone in his study, wrote Thought — and one week-end a month in retreat at a monastery. In the 19605 Ernest Claymore read a book a week in bed before sleep, and sometimes addressed a letter to the press about a book review: ‘Sir, Maybe I’m dim. I have read your review of …‘; he was to publish three short books of philosophy which everyone could easily understand indeed; at the moment in question, the summer of 1945, he was a dark-eyed young poet at the poetry recital, and had just finished reading, with husky force, his second contribution:
I in my troubled night of the dove clove brightly my Path from the tomb of love incessantly to redress my Articulate womb, that new and necessary rose,
exposing my …
He belonged to the Cosmic school of poets. Jane, perceiving that he was orthosexual by definition of his manner and appearance, was uncertain whether to cultivate him for future acquaintance or whether to hang on to Nicholas. She managed to do both, since Nicholas brought along this dark husky poet, this stockbroker to be, to the party which followed, and there Jane was able to make a future assignment with him before Nicholas drew her aside to inquire further into the mysterious life of the May of Teck Club.
‘It’s just a girls’ hostel,’ she said, ‘that’s all it boils down to.’
Beer was served in jam-jars, which was an affectation of the highest order, since jam-jars were at that time in shorter supply than glasses and mugs. The house where the party was held was in Hampstead. There was a stifling crowd. The hosts, Nicholas said, were communist intellectuals.. He led her up to a bedroom where they sat on the edge of an unmade bed and looked, with philosophical exhaustion on Nicholas’s side, and on hers the enthusiasm of the neophyte Bohemian, at the bare boards of the floor. The people of the house, said Nicholas, were undeniably communist intellectuals, as one could see from the variety of dyspepsia remedies on the bathroom shelf. He said he would point them out to her on the way downstairs when they rejoined the party. By no means, said Nicholas, did the hosts expect to meet their guests at this party. ‘Tell me about Selina,’ said Nicholas.
Jane’s dark hair was piled on top of her head. She had a large face. The only attractive thing about her was her youth and those mental areas of in-experience she was not yet conscious of. She had forgotten for the time being that her job was to reduce Nicholas’s literary morale as far as possible, and was treacherously behaving as if he were the genius that, before the week was out, he claimed to be in the letter he got her to forge for him in Charles Morgan’s name. Nicholas had decided to do everything nice for Jane, except sleep with her, in the interests of two projects: the publication of his book and his infiltration of the May of Teck Club in general and Selina in particular. ‘Tell me more about Selina.’ Jane did not then, or at any time, realize that he had received from his first visit to the May of Teck Club a poetic image that teased his mind and pestered him for details as he now pestered Jane. She knew nothing of his boredom and social discontent. She did not see the May of Teck Club as a microcosmic ideal society; far from it. The beautiful heedless poverty of a Golden Age did not come into the shilling meter life which any sane girl would regard only as a temporary one until better opportunities occurred.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
The voice had wafted with the night breeze into the drawing-room. Nicholas said, now, ‘Tell me about the elocution teacher.’
