And she has made me the laily worm
That lies at the fit o’ the tree
Laily, or The Worm, soon became a figure as important to our lives as The Watcher in Spanish himself. We referred to him in terms of disgust which were almost affectionate. He was the typical swotter, the book-worm, the academic pothunter; but, at the same time, being eager to succeed with and be accepted by the Poshocracy he was careful to pretend an enthusiasm for athletics and the team spirit. In fact, we contradicted ourselves a good deal in describing him—our own standards and prejudices being, at this time, in a highly confused and contradictory state.
Our conception of ‘the Combine’ and our burlesque cult of the Sinister coloured the most trivial incidents of our everyday life. We were psychic tourists, setting out to discover a metaphysical University City. Everywhere, we encountered enemy agents. We recognized them instantly, by the discreetly threatening tones of their voices. One afternoon, I was buying some clothes at a draper’s. ‘This tie’s rather nicer,’ I said. And the shopman, with what we later described as a ‘reptilian sneer,’ answered smilingly: ‘Yes—they’re all rather nicer …’ There was a college waiter who murmured into one’s ear, as he took the order: ‘Most certainly, sir.’ This man seemed positively fiend-like: he must surely be an important spy. Our enemies, we liked to imagine, were perfectly well aware of our activities; they knew that we alone, of all the undergraduates in Cambridge, had seen through their tremendous and imposing bluff. Therefore, in due time, we should be dealt with. But there was no hurry. For the present, they contented themselves with warning us, through the mouths of their myriad underlings, that we had better be careful, we were observed, we were only here on sufferance. Chalmers swore that he had seen a servant leave a pair of cleaned shoes on the steps of the college chapel: ‘That’s their headquarters.’ One evening, as we were strolling along Silver Street, we happened to turn off into an unfamiliar alley, where there was a strange-looking, rusty-hinged little old door in a high blank wall. Chalmers said: ‘It’s the doorway into the Other Town.’
This idea of ‘The Other Town’ appealed to us greatly; for it offered a way of escape from Cambridge altogether. It was much more exciting than our attempts to dramatize the prosaic figures of the dons. Here was a world which the dons didn’t even dream existed, although, we said, it was right in their very midst. ‘The Other Town’ began as an extremely vague, mystical conception, emanating from a few romantic-sinister phrases. Exactly like two children, we pretended to each other to know far more about it than we actually said; each new improvisation was tacitly accepted as a statement of existing fact. To admit that we were merely playing a sophisticated kind of nursery game would, of course, have made the game itself impossible. So we capped each other’s fantastic inventions—drawing, for the furniture of our private fairy-story world, on memories of Alice in Wonderland, Beatrix Potter and Grimm, and on the imagery of Sir Thomas Browne, Poe and the ballads. We examined, with new interest, the three Dürer engravings in Chalmers’ room. Melencolia specially excited us. We speculated endlessly as to the significance of the ladder, the bell, the tablet with its curious signs and figures, the sinister-looking instrument sticking out from beneath the angel’s skirts, in the right-hand bottom corner. What was the meaning of the enormous star or sun, blazing with immense beams under the rainbow, in a black sky? How should one understand the inscription on the wings of the small flying dragon? Was it ‘Melencolia One’ or ‘Melencolia, I’? Needless to say, we disdained the standard works of art criticism which could, no doubt, have answered all these questions. How could such books tell you anything worth knowing? They had been written by dons.
‘The Other Town’ could best be visited by night. So every evening, after supper, we wandered the cold foggy streets, away from the lights and the shops, down back alleys to the water’s edge. We leant over clammy stone parapets, in a state of trance-like fascination, auto-hypnotized by the tones of our own voices and the ink-black movement of the stream. Sometimes, we dropped pennies into the water. One evening, I happened to read aloud the name under a fluttering gaslamp: ‘Garret Hostel Bridge.’ ‘The Rats’ Hostel!’ Chalmers suddenly exclaimed. We often conversed in surrealist phrases of this kind. Now we both became abnormally excited: it seemed to us that an all-important statement had been made. At last, by pure accident, we had stumbled upon the key-words which expressed the inmost nature of the Other Town. ‘The Rats’ Hostel,’ we kept repeating to each other, as we hurried back to our rooms to discuss this astonishing revelation.
During the days that followed, ‘The Rats’ Hostel’ became gradually defined in our minds as a name for a certain atmosphere, a genre: the special brand of medieval surrealism which we had made our own. (I use the term ‘surrealism’ simply for the purpose of explanation: we had, of course, no idea that a surrealist movement already existed on the Continent. Had we known this—such was our indiscriminate horror of all ‘movements’—we should most probably have abandoned the Rats’ Hostel altogether.) Soon we began to describe as ‘rats’ any object, animal, scene, place or phrase which seemed connected, however obscurely, with our general conception of the ‘Rats’ Hostel,’ ‘Rats’ were, of course, the entire menagerie of Dürer—the skinny greyhound, the fat pussy-like lion, the serpents entwined in Death’s crown, the lizard, the horned and snouted Devil, the gentle-eyed, crafty-looking horse—and all his emblems—the hour-glass, the suspended pumpkin, the scales, the lodestone, the compasses and the skull. Graveyards were ‘rats’ and very old gnarled trees, and cave mouths overhung with ivy, and certain Latin phrases, like: ‘Rursus ad astra feror.’ In fact, we used the new word more and more loosely and indiscriminately, until it came to mean, simply, ‘romantic’ or ‘quaint.’
At the height of our ‘Rats’ Hostel’ phase, Chalmers wrote a poem which contains some typical examples of our private vocabulary:
You who must ponder cause and act
Historian, from the quag of fact
Search out, propound a cause for this—
The cross of life we bear who miss
Life’s truth, and grope with baffled hands
About a stage none understands.
It is an old word how the door
Has closed on other mimes before,
And how time counterchecks man’s jest,
And stops the jolly lips with pest,
And how the blague of splendid state
Is hushed beyond the wormhouse gate;
Death is a saw men comprehend,
A truth no history can mend.
But for our pain propound a cause.
We should be glad of nature’s laws,
And take, unquestioning, this crust
Of various life, this freak of dust.
We should have mind to mark the gleam
In the strong chaos of time’s stream,
And in this hubbub and this night
Glimpse the unapparent light …
It is an old word how clowns pass
To a green bridewell under grass.
Search out, propound a cause for this—
The cross of life we bear who miss
Life’s truth, and grope with baffled hands
About a stage none understands.
As the ‘Rats’ Hostel’ was our own discovery and property, so it followed that its denizens were our natural allies. Our enemies were their enemies. If we pretended to believe that Laily and his colleagues were plotting day and night against us, we said also that, very soon, the powers of the Hostel would counter-attack. Chalmers made a ballad which began:
About the middle of night, a Thing with fins
Came to reprove the Tutor for his sins …
(The rest, unfortunately, is not printable. And it wasn’t merely a gang of medieval bogies that was on our side; we claimed the support of the ghosts of our favourite writers, particularly of Wilfred Owen, Katherine Mansfield and Emily Brontë. These three (‘Wilfred, Kathy and Emmy,’ as we cal
led them) seemed in some way specially connected with our idea of the Rats’ Hostel. We talked about them as if they were personal friends, wondered what they would have said on certain occasions, how they would have behaved, what advice they would have given us. One thing we never for a moment doubted: that they would have loathed Cambridge and all its works.
Looking back, I think that those first two University terms have been amongst the most enjoyable parts of my whole life. I had sufficient money, and no worries and as long as I could be together with Chalmers, which was all day and most of the night, the word boredom didn’t exist. I was in a continuous state of extreme mental excitement. Every idea we discussed seemed startling and brilliantly new. My official education was, it is true, at a standstill: but Chalmers was educating me all the time. Under his influence, I began to read the poetry I had been pretending for years to admire. I also started to take, mildly and gingerly, to alcohol. The icy layers of my puritan priggishness, which were thicker far than he ever suspected, had begun, very slowly, to thaw.
It seems odd now to think of the two of us, so excited, so passionately self-absorbed in that little fog-bound room, thirteen years ago—declaiming poetry, jumping on the table, shouting ‘J’en appelle!’ appealing to Wilfred or the Watcher in Spanish, keeping a journal of our imaginary lives called The Diary of Two Shapes, leaving on each other’s breakfast-tables a series of indecent stories about Laily and the dons, in which we, the narrators, figured as ‘Mr Hynd’ and ‘Mr Starn’—odd, when one remembers that this was the winter of Hitler’s Munich Putsch, of Mussolini’s final campaign against the democrats, of the first English Labour Government, of Lenin’s death. Hitler’s name was, I suppose, then hardly known to a dozen people in all Cambridge. Mussolini was enjoying a certain popularity: rugger and rowing men, at this epoch, frequently named their terriers ‘Musso.’ The Labour Government and all its works were, for ourselves, comprehended in the withering word ‘politics’ and therefore automatically dismissed as boring and vile. As for Lenin, he was a vaguely exotic figure, labelled, along with Trotsky, in our hazy minds as an ‘anarchist,’ and therefore worthy of mild benevolence. I think that, if we had seen his photograph, with the short stabbing beard and the Mongolian eyes, we might even have patronizingly pronounced him ‘rats.’
All this time, by fits and starts, I had been writing away at a novel—‘the novel,’ I might almost call it; for it was much less a work of art than a symptom—of a certain stage of pubic development in a member of a certain class, living in a certain country, and subjected to a certain system of education. Lions and Shadows was, in fact, a very typical specimen of the ‘cradle-to-coming-of-age’ narrative which young men like myself were producing in thousands of variations, not merely in England, but all over Europe and the United States. It was based, of course, upon a day-dream about my Youth—le vert paradis, from which I felt myself, as did my great army of colleagues, to be hopelessly and bitterly excluded. Such novels were written in equally large numbers prior to 1914, but with this difference: we young writers of the middle ’twenties were all suffering, more or less subconsciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn’t been old enough to take part in the European war. The shame, I have said, was subconscious: in my case, at any rate, it was suppressed by the strictest possible censorship. Had I become aware of it and dared to bring it up to the light, to discuss it, to make it the avowed motif of my story, Lions and Shadows would have ceased to be a curiosity for the psycho-analyst and become, instead, a genuine, perhaps a valuable, work of art. But I didn’t. And thousands of others didn’t, either.
The title was taken from a passage in Fiery Particles, by C. E. Montague (himself pre-eminently a writer of war stories): ‘arrant lovers of living, mighty hunters of lions or shadows …’ So far as I know, it has never been used on the cover of a published book: I hit upon it with a lot of pride. Actually, it would have been hard to discover a less suitable name for my novel. It was simply an emotional, romantic phrase which pleased me, without my consciously knowing why, because of its private reference to something buried deep within myself, something which made me feel excited and obscurely ashamed.
This feeling of guilty excitement, now I come to think about it, can also be explained. (I am only speaking for myself now. It may be that my readers, even those whose locked study drawers or lumber-rooms contain similar manuscripts, may find what follows quite meaningless or remote from their own experience.) Like most of my generation, I was obsessed by a complex of terrors and longings connected with the idea ‘War.’ ‘War,’ in this purely neurotic sense, meant The Test. The Test of your courage, of your maturity, of your sexual prowess: ‘Are you really a Man?’ Subconsciously, I believe, I longed to be subjected to this test; but I also dreaded failure. I dreaded failure so much—indeed, I was so certain that I should fail—that, consciously, I denied my longing to be tested, altogether. I denied my all-consuming morbid interest in the idea of ‘war.’ I pretended indifference. The War, I said, was obscene, not even thrilling, a nuisance, a bore.
In Lions and Shadows the War is hardly mentioned. Some of the older characters get involved in it, but their experiences are dismissed in a couple of paragraphs. The hero, Leonard Merrows, is still a preparatory schoolboy when the Armistice is signed. He is due to enter his public school, ‘Rugtonstead,’ in 1919. Then, quite suddenly, he gets rheumatic fever and is ill for several months. The doctor says his heart has been strained. ‘Rugtonstead’ is out of the question. Leonard must stay at home and have a private tutor. His disappointment and despair know no bounds. He becomes quite hysterical. Several chapters are devoted to describing his visions of the paradise he has missed. Boys whom he meets during the holidays ask him which school he is at: he lies, then admits the truth, and is ‘bitterly ashamed.’ Later (and these are depicted as his worst, basest moments) he even comes to have a sneaking feeling of relief that he didn’t go to ‘Rugtonstead’ after all: it is so comfortable at home, and then—perhaps he would have been a failure!
Thus it was that ‘War’ dodged the censor and insinuated itself into my book, disguised as ‘Rugtonstead,’ an English public school. But here we enter upon further complications. I myself had been to a public school. I knew, or had known while I was there, that public-school life wasn’t, in my heroic sense, a ‘test.’ It was a test, if you like, of social flexibility, of a capacity for ‘getting on’ with one’s contemporaries, of slyness, animal cunning, criminal resource—but certainly not of your fundamental ‘Manhood’ or the reverse. I had known all this: did I know it now?
No, I did not. I was rapidly forgetting the inconveniently prosaic truth about my old school. I was deliberately forgetting, because ‘war,’ which could never under any circumstances be allowed to appear in its own shape, needed a symbol—a symbol round which I could build up my daydreams about ‘The Test.’ Gradually, in the most utter secrecy, I began to evolve a cult of the public-school system. It was no good, of course, pretending that my own school career had been in any sense romantic, heroic, dangerous, epic—that wasn’t necessary. I built up the daydream of an heroic school career in which the central figure, the dream I, was an austere young prefect, called upon unexpectedly to captain a ‘bad’ house, surrounded by sneering critics and open enemies, fighting slackness, moral rottenness, grimly repressing his own romantic feelings towards a younger boy, and finally triumphing over all his obstacles, passing the test, emerging—a Man. Need I confess any more? How, in dark corners of bookshops, I furtively turned the pages of adventure stories designed for boys of twelve years old? No illustration was too crudely coloured, no yarn too steep for my consuming guilty appetite. How, behind locked doors, I exercised with a chest expander, bought after nightfall, with precautions such as a murderer might observe in purchasing his weapon? I went out of my way to tell the shopman that it was for my younger brother.
Soon, the dream was vivid enough to risk comparison with the reality. I joined a party which was to visit my old school in Sarg
ent’s car. We arrived late on a grey spring afternoon and left again at midnight. I did not see Mr Holmes. As we rushed towards Cambridge through the early hours before dawn along deserted roads, I remembered, with voluptuous excitement, the narrow dingy little studies, the bare wash-room, the iron stairs, and certain lamplit faces. The transformation was now complete. The reality was lost in the dream. It is so very easy, in the mature calm of a library, to sneer at all this homosexual romanticism. But the rulers of Fascist states do not sneer—they profoundly understand and make use of just these phantasies and longings. I wonder how, at this period, I should have reacted to the preaching of an English Fascist leader clever enough to serve up his ‘message’ in a suitably disguised and palatable form? He would have converted me, I think, inside half an hour—provided always that Chalmers hadn’t been there to interfere.
Needless to say, I avoided the whole subject in our conversations together. Chalmers had a way of smiling, faintly but acidly, puffing at his pipe and saying nothing. I hated this smile: it deflated my most extravagant enthusiasms in a moment. Even if I had tried to explain, I don’t think he would have understood. The idea of ‘The Test’ would have seemed to him amusingly neurotic or just meaningless. In these matters, he was much more adult than myself.
I had shown him the manuscript of Lions and Shadows two or three times; and he had seemed impressed, even excited by it. What impressed him was really, I think, not the literary merit but the extreme slickness of some of the passages; for Lions and Shadows is, as I look through it again, astonishingly slick. Chalmers envied my fatal facility for pastiche—of which he himself was luckily incapable: pastiche of Hugh Walpole, of Compton Mackenzie, of E. F. Benson. I churned it out, as smooth as butter—arch, pretty, competent, quaint.
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