Good-bye to all that

I did two useful pieces of educational work in Egypt. I ordered a library of standard textbooks of English literature for the Faculty Library at the University (from which I hope Mr. Bonamy Dobrée, my successor, profited). And I acted as examiner to the diploma class of the Higher Training College which provided English teachers for the primary and secondary schools. The following is the substance of a letter handed to me for information as a member of the Board of Examiners concerned:

To The Principal,
Higher Training College, Cairo.

Sir,

In accordance with your instructions, I beg to submit the following statement of the works read by the Diploma Class for the forthcoming examination in English Literature (1580 to 1788) and in Science:

ENGLISH LITERATURE

1. Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
2. Lobban’s The Spectator Club, p. 39, and Sir Roger and the Widow, p. 51; (111) 5 Essays of Addison, Fans, p. 64; The Vision of Mirza, p. 72; Sir Roger at the Assizes, p. 68; Sir Roger at the Abbey, p. 81; Sir Roger at the Play, p. 86.
3. Galsworthy’s Justice.
4. Dryden:
   1. With Class 4A, the following poems in Hales’ Longer English Poems:
      1. Mac Flecknoe (omitting lines 76–77; 83–86; 142–145; 154–155; 160–165; 170–181; 192–197).
      2. The Song for St. Cecilia’s Day (Hales’, p. 32).
      3. Alexander’s Feast (Hales’, p. 34).
   2. With Class 4b, the extracts from Absolam and Achitophel, in Gwynn’s Masters of English Literature, p. 144–145 (characters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham).
5. Pope:
   1. With 4a, in Hales’ Longer English Poems: The Rape of the Lock (omitting lines 27–104; 221–282; 449–466; 483 to the end).
   2. With 4b, the character of ‘Atticus,’ in Gwynn’s Masters of Eng. Lit., p. 181.
6. Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, in Hales’, p. 65 (omitting lines 241–343).
7. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. (All done by 4a; but only to the end of chap. 19 in 4b.)
8. Goldsmith’s The Traveller, in Hales’, p. 91.
9. Gray’s Elegy, in Hales’, p. 79.

I regret that lack of time has prevented us from studying the works of Milton and Spenser or the prose works of Dr. Johnson.

SCIENCE

1. Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 6 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
2. The first seven chapters of Sir Ray Lankester’s Science from an Easy Chair.

I have the honour to be, Sir,

Your obedient servant, etc.

These are my contemporary comments, pinned to the letter:

‘When some forty years ago England superseded France as the controlling European Power in Egypt, English was at first taught in the schools as an alternative to French, but gradually became dominant as the European administrative language, though French remained the chief language of commerce and culture. As a result, the young Egyptian, who now definitely claims himself a European and denies his African inheritance, has come to have two distinct minds (switched off and on casually)—the irresponsible hedonistic café and cinema mind, which leans towards French, and the grave moralizing bureaucratic mind, which leans towards English. Early English educationalists in Egypt shrewdly decided to give their students a moralistic character-forming view of English literature; and this tradition continues as a counterpoise to the boulevard view of life absorbed from translations of French yellow-back novels. But the student of 1926 is not so well-instructed in English as his predecessor of ten years ago, because the English educational staff has gradually been liquidated, and the teaching of English is now principally in the hands of Egyptians, former students, who are not born teachers or disciplinarians. The Western spirit of freedom as naively interpreted by the Egyptian student greatly hinders Egyptian education. The primary and secondary schools, not to mention the University, are always either on strike, threatening a strike, or prevented from striking by being given a holiday. So work gets more and more behindhand. Even the Higher Training College is not free from such disturbances, which possibly account for the regretted neglect of Milton, Spenser, and the prose works of Dr. Johnson. This Diploma Class consists of students who, after some twelve years’ study of English, the last four or five years under English instructors, are now qualifying to teach the language and literature to their compatriots.

‘The Egyptian student is embarrassingly friendly, very quick at learning by heart, disorderly, lazy, rhetorical, slow to reason, and absolutely without any curiosity for general knowledge. The most satisfactory way to treat him is with a good-humoured sarcasm, which he respects; but if he once gets politically excited nothing is any use but an affected violent loss of temper. When introduced to the simpler regions of English literature he finds himself most in sympathy with the eighteenth century; and the English instructor, if he wishes to get any results at all, must be ready to regard Shakespeare, Galsworthy and Conan Doyle as either immature or decadent figures in relation to the classical period. The Science referred to in the attached letter is supposed to educate the student in twentieth-century rationalism, to which he gives an eighteenth-century cast. The following essay is the work of one Mahmoud Mohammed Mahmoud of the Diploma Class, and refers principally to two chapters of Sir Ray Lankester’s Science from an Easy Chair:

Environment as a Factor in Evolution

This is the theory of evolutions. Once it was thought that the earth’s crust was caused by catastrophes, but when Darwin came into the world and had a good deal of philosophy, he said: ‘All different kinds of species differ gradually as we go backwards and there is no catastrophes, and if we apply the fact upon previous predecessors we reach simpler and simpler predecessors, until we reach the Nature.’ Man, also, is under the evolutions. None can deny this if he could deny the sun in daylight. A child from the beginning of his birthday possesses instincts like to suckle his food from the mamel of his mother and many others. But he is free of habits and he is weak as anything. Then he is introduced into a house and usually finds himself among parents, and his body is either cleansed or left to the dirts. This shows his environment. Superficial thinkers are apt to look on environment as (at best) a trifle motive in bringing up, but learned men believe that a child born in the presence of some women who say a bad word, this word, as believed by them, remains in the brain of the child until it ejects.

Environment quickly supplies modification. The life of mountainous goats leads them to train themselves on jumping. The camel is flat-footed with hoofs for the sand. Some kind of cattle were wild in the past but lived in plain lands and changed into gentle sheep. The frog when young has her tail and nostrils like the fish, suitable for life at sea, but changing her environment, the tail decreased. The sea is broad and changeable, so those who live at sea are changeable and mysterious. Put a cow in a dirty damp place and she will become more and more slender until she die. Also horses; horse had five fingers on his legs but now one only from running for water in the draught. Climate also affects bodily habits of the dear Europeans who live in Egypt. They who were smart and patient and strong with a skin worth the name of weatherproof become also fatigable and fond of leisure.... From the theory we learn that human beings should be improved like the beasts by creating healthy youngs and by good Freubel education.

‘The next short specimen essay by Mohammed Mahmoud Mohammed is in answer to the question: “What impression do you get from Shakespeare of the character of Lady Macbeth?”:

The Character of Lady Macbeth

Sir, to write shortly, Lady Macbeth was brave and venturesome; but she had no tact. She says to Macbeth: ‘Now the opportunity creates itself, lose it not. Where is your manlihood in these suitable circumstances? I have children and I know the love of a mother’s heart. But you must know I would dash the child’s head and drive away the boneless teeth which are milking me rather than to give a promise and then leave it.’

Macbeth says: ‘But we may fail.’

‘Fail?’ says L. M. ‘But stick to the point and we will not fail. Leave the rest to me. I shall put drugs in the grooms’ drink and we shall ascuse them.’

Macbeth says: ‘You are fit to lay men-children only.’

The impression on the reader becomes very great and feels with anger.

‘And this from the hand of Mahmoud Mahmoud Mohammed, offered as a formal exercise in English composition:

The Best Use of Leisure Time

Leisure time is a variety to tireful affairs. God Almighty created the Universe in six days and took a rest in the seventh. He wished to teach us the necessity of leisure time. Man soon discovered by experience that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ But this leisure time may be dangerous and ill-used if the mind will not take its handle and move it wisely to different directions. Many people love idleness. It is a great prodigality which leads to ruin. Many Egyptians spend their times in cafés longing for women and tracking them with their eyes, which corrupts and pollutes manners. They are perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime. Others try to have rest through gumbling, which is the scourge of society and individual. But let us rather enjoy external nature, the beautiful leavy trees, the flourishing fields, and the vast lawns of green grass starred with myriads of flowers of greater or small size. There the birds sing and build their nests, the meandering canals flow with fresh water, and the happy peasants, toiling afar from the multitude of town life, purify the human wishes from personal stain. Also museums are instructive. It is quite wrong to keep to usual work and fatigable studies, but quite right to free our minds from the web of wordly affairs in which they are entangled.

Yes, let us with the lark leave our beds to enjoy the cool breeze before sunrise. Let us when the lasy or luxurious are snoring or sunk in their debaucheries sit under the shady trees and meditate. We can think of God, the river and the moon, and enjoy the reading of Gray’s Elegy to perfection. We shall brush the dues on the lawn at sunrise, for,

A country life is sweat

In moderate cold and heat.

Or we may read the Best Companions, books full of honourable passions, wise moral and good pathos: reading maketh a full man, nobody will deny Bacon. Or we may easily get a musical instrument at little price. ‘Every schoolboy knows’ that music is a moral law which gives a soul to the universe. Criminals can be cured by the sweet power of music. The whale came up from the dark depths of the sea to carry the Greek musician because it was affected by the sweet harmonies which hold a mirror up to nature. Are we not better than the whale? Also gymnastic clubs are spread everywhere. Why do a youth not pass his leisure time in widdening his chest? Because a sound mind is in a sound body. Yet it is a physiological fact that the blacksmith cannot spend his leisure time in striking iron or the soldier in military exercises. The blacksmith may go to see the Egyptian Exhibition, and the soldier may go to the sea to practice swimming or to the mountains to know its caves in order that he may take shelter in time of war.

Milton knew the best uses of leisure time. He used to sit to his books reading, and to his music playing, and so put his name among the immortals. That was the case of Byron, Napoleon, Addison, and Palmerstone. And if a man is unhappy, says an ancient philosopher, it is his own fault. He can be happy if his leisure time brings profit and not disgrace.

‘The Diploma Class students are supposed to be four years in advance of my own, and, not being of the moneyed class, are more interested in passing their examinations with distinction. Also, since their careers as teachers of English depend on the continuance of the British military occupation, they take the morality of this regime more seriously than the University students, who are mostly the sons of pashas. These, with few exceptions, suffer from the bankruptcy of modern Egyptian life; they are able to take neither European culture nor their own Islamic traditions seriously. So far as I can make out from talking with the more intelligent of them, what Egypt asks for is a European government and education free of European political domination, but with a European technical personnel in the key positions, which it cannot do without and will pay highly for. Egypt can never be a great independent spiritual or political force in the Near East, but because of its wealth it can become at least the commercial centre of Islamic orthodoxy. Turkey is already a modern European country; Egypt will remain for some time yet eighteenth-century in spirit—a compromise between political romanticism and religious classicism. For a generation or two yet the descendants of the landowners enriched by European administration will continue to “spend their times in cafés longing for women,” and to be “perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime,” while “the happy peasants” go on “toiling afar from the multitude of town life.” And my professional successors will continue to become “fatigable and fond of leisure.”’

For I had already decided to resign. So had the professor of Latin, my only English colleague. And the one-legged professor of French Literature, who was an honest man. The others stayed on.

The Egyptians were most hospitable. I attended one heavy banquet, at the Semiramis Hotel, given by the Minister of Education. Tall Sudanese waiters dressed in red robes served a succession of the most magnificent dishes that I have seen anywhere, even on the films. I remember particularly a great model of the Cairo Citadel in ice, with the doors and windows filled with caviare which one scooped out with a golden Moorish spoon. I heard recently that this banquet, which must have cost thousands, has not yet been paid for. I found little to do in Egypt (since I had no intention of mixing with the British official class, joining the golf club, or paying official calls) but eat coffee-ices at Groppi’s, visit the open-air cinemas and sit at home in our flat at Heliopolis and get on with writing. My sister, who lived near, continued sisterly. During the season of the Khamsin, a hot wind which sent the temperature up on one occasion to 113 degrees in the shade, I put the finishing touches to a book called Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language. I also worked on a study of the English ballad.

The best thing that I saw in Egypt was the noble face of old King Seti the Good unwrapped of its mummy-cloths in the Cairo Museum. Nearly all the best things in Egypt were dead. The funniest thing was a French bedroom farce played in Arabic by Syrian actors in a native theatre. The men and women of the cast had, for religious reasons, to keep on opposite sides of the stage. They sang French songs (in translation), varying the tunes with the quarter-tones and shrieks and trills of their own music. The audience talked all the time and ate peanuts, oranges, sunflower-seeds and heads of lettuces.

I went to call on Lord Lloyd just before the close of the academic year, which was at the end of May. Soon after I was invited to dine at the Residency. I won twenty piastres off him at bridge and was told to collect it from his A.D.C. He asked me how I found Egypt and I said: ‘All right,’ with an intonation that made him catch me up quickly. ‘Only all right?’ That was all that passed between us. He believed in his job more than I did in mine. He used to drive through Cairo in a powerful car, with a Union Jack flying from it, at about sixty miles an hour. He had motor-cyclist outriders to clear the way—Sir Lee Stack, the Sirdar, had been killed the year before while driving through Cairo and a traffic jam had materially helped his assassins. One day I was shown the spot near the Ministry of Education where it happened; there was a crowd at the spot which I at first took for a party of sightseers, but the attraction proved to be a naked woman lying on the pavement, laughing wildly and waving her arms. She was one of the hashish dope-cases that were very common in Egypt. The crowd was jeering at her; the policeman a few yards off paid no attention.

I attended a levee at the Abdin Palace, King Fuad’s Cairo residence. It began early, at nine o’clock in the morning. The King gave honourable precedence to the staff of the University; it came in soon after the diplomatic corps and the Ministers of the Crown and some time before the army. While still in England I had been warned to buy suitable clothes—a morning coat and trousers—for this occasion. To be really correct my coat should have had green facings, green being the national colour of Egypt, but I was told that this would not be insisted upon. Opinions differed greatly as to what was suitable Court-dress; most of the French professors arrived in full evening dress with swallowtail coats and white waistcoats, others wore ordinary dinner jackets. Most of them had opera-hats; they all had decorations round their necks. They looked like stragglers from an all-night fancy-dress ball. After signing my name in the two large hotel registers, one belonging to the King and the other to the Queen, I was given a refreshing rice-drink, a courtesy of the Queen’s. I then went up the noble marble staircase. On every other step stood an enormous black soldier, royally uniformed, with a lance in his hand. My soldier’s eye commented on their somewhat listless attitudes; but, no doubt, they pulled themselves smartly to attention when the Egyptian army general staff went past. I had been warned that when I met King Fuad I must not be surprised at anything extraordinary I heard; a curious wheezing cry was apt to burst from his throat occasionally when he was nervous. When he was a child his family had been shot up by an assassin employed by interested relatives; and Fuad had taken cover under a table and, though wounded, had survived. We were moved from room to room. At last a quiet Turkish-looking gentleman of middle age, wearing regulation Court-dress, greeted us deferentially in French; I took him for the Grand Chamberlain. I bowed and said the same thing in French as the professor in front of me had said, and expected to be led next to the Throne Room. But the next stage was the cloak-room once more. I had already met King Fuad. And no Eastern magnificence or wheezing cry.

I attended a royal soiree a few days later. The chief event was a theatrical variety show. The performance was predominantly Italian. King Fuad had been educated in Italy, where he attained the rank of captain in the Italian cavalry, and had a great regard for Italian culture. (He was ignorant of English, but was a good French scholar.) The performance belonged to the 1870’s. There was a discreet blonde shepherdess who did a hopping dance in ankle-length skirts, and a discreet tenor who confined his passion to his top notes; and there was a well-behaved comedian who made nice little jokes for the Queen. I clapped him, because I liked him better than the others, and everybody looked round at me; I realized that I had done the wrong thing. An official whispered to me that it was a command performance and that the actors were, therefore, entitled to no applause. Unless His Majesty was himself amused the turns must be greeted in silence. I was wearing Court-dress again but, not to be outdone by the Frenchmen, I had put on my three campaigning medals—and wished that I had that St. Anne of the Third Class with the Crossed Swords. And the refreshments! I will not attempt to describe that Arabian Night buffet; it was so splendid indeed that it has remained a mere blur in my memory. I pocketed some particularly fantastic confections to bring home to the children.

What caused me most surprise in Egypt was the great number of camels there. I had thought of them only as picture-postcard animals. I had not expected to see thousands of them in the streets of Cairo, holding up the motor traffic—in long trains, tied head to rump, with great sacks of green fodder on their backs.

Our children were a great anxiety. They had to drink boiled milk and boiled water and be watched all the time to prevent them from taking off their topees and blue veils. Then they all got measles and were carried off to an isolation hospital, where they were fed on all the things that we had been particular since their birth not to give them; and the native nurses stole their toys. They returned very thin and wretched-looking and we wondered if we should ever get them safely home. We booked our passages some time at the end of May. We had only just enough money for third-class on a small Italian boat with a cargo of onions. We disembarked at Venice and stopped a day there. After Egypt, Venice seemed like Heaven. It could never again be to me what it was that day. I had a European egg in Venice. Egyptian eggs were about the size of a pigeon’s egg and always tasted strongly of the garlic which seemed to form a large part of the diet of the Egyptian fowl.

There are plenty of caricature scenes to look back on in Egypt. Among them, for instance, myself dressed in my smart yellow gaberdine suit and seated at a long, baize-covered table in the Faculty Conference Room. In front of me is a cup of Turkish coffee, a sun helmet, and a long record in French of the minutes of the last meeting. I am talking angry bad French at my Belgian and French colleagues in support of the young professor of Latin, who has just leaped to his feet, pale with hatred. He is declaring in worse French that he positively refuses to make a forced contribution of fifty piastres to a memorial wreath for one of the Frenchmen (who had just died), since he was never consulted. I am declaring that neither will I, blustering to him in English that so far as I am concerned all dead Frenchmen can go bury themselves at their own expense. The lofty, elegant room, once a harem drawing-room—a portrait of the late Khedive, with a large rent in it, hanging at a tipsy slant at one end of the room; at the other a large glass showcase, full of Egypto-Roman brass coins, all muddled together, their labels loose, in one corner. Through the window market-gardens, buffaloes, camels, countrywomen in black. Around the table my horrified, shrugging colleagues, turning to each other and saying: ‘Inoui.... Inoui....’ And outside the rebellious shouts of our students working themselves up for another strike.

The rest makes no more than conversation—of the Government clerk who was so doubly unfortunate as to be run over by a racing-car and to find that the driver was the eldest son of the Minister of Justice; and of the rich girl in search of a husband who went as paying guest at fifteen guineas a week to the senior Government official’s wife, agreeing to pay for all wines and cigars and extras when society came to dine, and who, meeting only senior Government officials and their wives, complained that she did not get her money’s worth; and of my night visit to the temple of a headless monkey-god, full of bats; and of the English cotton manufacturer who defended the conditions in his factory on the ground that the population of Egypt since the British came had been increasing far too rapidly, and that pulmonary consumption was one of the few checks on it; and of the student’s mother who, at the sports, said how much she regretted having put him on the mantelpiece when a baby and run off (being only twelve years old) to play with her dolls; and of ‘The Limit,’ so named by Australians during the war, who told my three years’ fortune by moonlight under the long shadow of the pyramid of Cheops—told it truly and phrased it falsely; and of the Arab cab-driver who was kind to his horses; and of my visit to Chawki Bey, the national poet of Egypt, in his Moorish mansion by the Nile, who was so like Thomas Hardy and in whose presence his sons, like good Turks, sat dutifully silent; and of the beggar in the bazaar with too many toes; and of the veiled vengeance there who tried to touch us; and of the official who, during the war, on a dream of dearth, had played Joseph, dumping half the wheat of Australia in Egypt, where it found no buyers and was at last eaten by donkeys and camels, and who told me that the whole secret of vivid writing was to use the active rather than the passive voice—to say ‘Amr-ibn-el-Ass conquered Egypt,’ rather than ‘Egypt was conquered by Amr-ibn-el-Ass’; and of a visit to ancient dead Heliopolis with its lovely landscape of green fields, its crooked palm trees, its water-wheels turned by oxen, and its single obelisk; and of the other Heliopolis, a brand-new dead town on the desert’s edge, built by a Belgian company, complete with racecourse and Luna Park, where the R.A.F. planes flew low at night among the houses, and where the bored wives of disappointed officials wrote novels which they never finished, and painted a little in water-colours; and of the little garden of our flat where I went walking on the first day among the fruit-trees and flowering shrubs, and how I came upon no less than eight lean and mangy cats dozing in the beds, and never walked there again; and of the numerous kites, their foul counterpart in the sky and in the palm trees; and, lastly, of that fabulous cross-breed between kite and cat which woke us every morning at dawn, a creature kept as a pet in a neighbouring tenement inhabited by Syrians and Greeks, whose strangled cock-a-doodle-doo was to me the dawn-cry of modern Egypt. (Empty cigar-box—no applause—and I thank you.)

So back to Islip; much to the disappointment of my parents, who thought that I had at last seen reason and settled down to an appointment suited equally to my needs and my talents; and to the undisguised relief of my sister-in-law.

The story trails off here. But to end it with the return from Egypt would be to round it off too bookishly, to finish on a note of comfortable suspense, an anticipation of the endless human sequel. I am taking care to rob you of this. It is not that sort of story. From a historical point of view it must be read, rather, as one of gradual disintegration. By the summer of 1926 the disintegration was already well-advanced. Incidents of autobiographical pertinence became fewer and fewer.

When we came back Nancy’s health was very much better, but none of us had any money left. There were a number of books to be sold, chiefly autographed first editions of modern poets; and Lawrence came to the rescue with a copy of his Seven Pillars marked, ‘Please sell when read,’ which fetched over three hundred pounds.

In 1927 Jonathan Cape wrote to me suggesting that I should write a book for boys about Lawrence. There was not much time to do it to have it ready for autumn publication (about two months)—and Lawrence was in India and I had to get his permission and send parts of the manuscript there for him to read and pass. Lowell Thomas anticipated me with a Boy’s Book of Colonel Lawrence; so I decided to make mine a general book, three times the length of his, working eighteen hours a day at it. Most of those to whom I wrote for information about Lawrence, including His Majesty the King, gave me their help. The only rebuff I got was from George Bernard Shaw, who wrote me the following postcard:

Eyot St. Lawrence,
Welwyn, Herts.
8th June 1927.

A great mistake. You might as well try to write a funny book about Mark Twain. T. E. has got all out of himself that is to be got. His name will rouse expectations which you will necessarily disappoint. Cape will curse his folly for proposing such a thing, and never give you another commission. Write a book (if you must) about the dullest person you know; clerical if possible. Give yourself a chance.

G. B. S.

Just before Christmas the book was selling at the rate of ten thousand copies a week. I heard later that Shaw had mistaken me for my Daily Mail brother.

Shortly afterwards I had a reply, delayed for nine months, to an application that I had made, when things were bad, for an appointment as English lecturer in an Adult Education scheme. I was told that my qualifications were not considered sufficient. By this time I had lost all my academic manners and wrote wishing the entire committee in Baluchistan, to be tickled to death by wild butterflies.

In 1927, in a process of tidying-up, I published a collected book of my poems. One of the later ones began:

The book was selective rather than collective, intended as a disavowal of over half the poetry that I had so far printed. As Skelton told Fame, speaking of his regretted poem Apollo Whirled up his Chair, I had done what I could to scrape out the scrolls, To erase it for ever out of her ragman’s rolls. But I still permitted anthologists to print some of the rejected pieces if they paid highly enough—if they wanted them, that was their business and I was glad of the money. On the other hand I stopped contributing new poems to English and American periodicals. My critical writings I did not tidy up; but let them go out of print. In 1927 I began learning to print on a hand-press. In 1928 I continued learning to print.

On May 6th, 1929 Nancy and I suddenly parted company. I had already finished with nearly all my other leading and subsidiary characters, and dozens more whom I have not troubled to put in. I began to write my autobiography on May 23rd and write these words on July 24th, my thirty-fourth birthday; another month of final review and I shall have parted with myself for good. I have been able to draw on contemporary records for most of the facts, but in many passages memory has been the only source. My memory is good but not perfect. For instance, I can after two hearings remember the tune and words of any song that I like, and never afterwards forget them; but there are always odd discrepancies between my version and the original. So here, there must be many slight errors of one sort or another. No incidents, however, are invented or embellished. Some are, no doubt, in their wrong order; I am uncertain, for example, of the exact date and place of the megaphoned trench-conversation between the Royal Welch and the Germans, though I have a contemporary record of it. I am not sure of some of the less-important names (even of Lance-corporal Baxter’s, but it was at least a name like Baxter). To avoid the suggestion of libel I have disguised two names. Also, I make a general disclaimer of such opinions as I have recorded myself as holding from chapter to chapter, on education, nature, war, religion, literature, philosophy, psychology, politics, and so on. This is a story of what I was, not what I am. Wherever I have used autobiographical material in previous books and it does not tally with what I have written here, this is the story and that was literature.

I find myself wondering whether it is justified as a story. Yet I seem to have done most of the usual storybook things. I had, by the age of twenty-three, been born, initiated into a formal religion, travelled, learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame, and been killed. At the age of thirty-four many things still remain undone. For instance, I have never been on a journey of exploration, or in a submarine, aeroplane or civil court of law (except a magistrate’s court on the charge of ‘riding a vehicle, to wit a bicycle, without proper illumination, to wit a rear lamp’). I have never mastered any musical instrument, starved, committed civil murder, found buried treasure, engaged in unnatural vice, slept with a prostitute, or seen a corpse that has died a natural death. On the other hand, I have ridden on a locomotive, won a prize at the Olympic Games, become a member of the senior common-room at one Oxford college before becoming a member of the junior common-room at another, been examined by the police on suspicion of attempted murder, passed at dusk in a hail-storm within half a mile of Stromboli when it was in eruption, had a statue of myself erected in my lifetime in a London park, and learned to tell the truth—nearly.

The End