Dedicatory Epilogue
To
Laura Riding
I have used your World’s End as an introductory motto, but you will be glad to find no reference at all to yourself in the body of this book. I have not mentioned the Survey of Modernist Poetry and the Pamphlet against Anthologies as works of collaboration between you and me, though these books appear in publishers’ catalogues and obviously put much of my own previous critical writing out of account. And though I have mentioned printing, I have not given details of it, or even said that it was with you, printing and publishing in partnership as The Seizin Press. Because of you the last chapters have a ghostly look.
The reason of all this is, of course, that by mentioning you as a character in my autobiography I would seem to be denying you in your true quality of one living invisibly, against kind, as dead, beyond event. And yet the silence is false if it makes the book seem to have been written forward from where I was instead of backward from where you are. If the direction of the book were forward I should still be inside the body of it, arguing morals, literature, politics, suffering violent physical experiences, falling in and out of love, making and losing friends, enduring blindly in time; instead of here outside, writing this letter to you, as one also living against kind—indeed, rather against myself.
You know the autobiography of that Lord Herbert of Cherbury whose son founded the Royal Welch Fusiliers; how he was educated as a gentleman, studied at Oxford, married young, travelled, played games, fought in Northern France and wrote books; until at last his active life ended with a sudden clap of thunder from the blue sky which did ‘so comfort and cheer’ him that he resolved at last, at this sign, to print his book De Veritate, concerning truth. If you were to appear in my De Veritate it could only be as ‘this loud though yet gentle noise ... one fair day in the summer, my casement being opened towards the south, the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring.’
For could the story of your coming be told between an Islip Parish Council Meeting and a conference of the professors of the Faculty of Letters at Cairo University? How she and I happening by seeming accident upon your teasing Quids, were drawn to write to you, who were in America, asking you to come to us. How, though you knew no more of us than we of you, and indeed less (for you knew me at a disadvantage, by my poems of the war), you forthwith came. And how there was thereupon a unity to which you and I pledged our faith and she her pleasure. How we went together to the land where the dead parade the streets and there met with demons and returned with the demons still treading behind. And how they drove us up and down the land.
That was the beginning of the end, and the end and after is yours. Yet I must relieve your parable of all anecdote of mine. I must tell, for instance, that in its extreme course in April last I re-lived the changes of many past years. That when I must suddenly hurry off to Ireland I found myself on the very boat, from Fishguard, that had been my hospital-boat twelve years before. That at Limerick I met Old Ireland herself sitting black-shawled and mourning on the station bench and telling of the Fall. And so to the beautiful city of Sligo celebrated in song by my father. And the next train back, this time by the Wales of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. And the next day to Rouen with you and her, to recollect the hill-top where you seemed to die as the one on which I had seemed to die thirteen years before. And then immediately back. And then, later in the same month, my sudden journey to Hilton in Huntingdon, to a farm with memories of her as I first knew her, to burst in upon—as it happened—David Garnett (whom I had never met before), gulping his vintage port and scandalizing him with my soldier’s oaths as I denied him a speaking part in your parable.
After which.
After which, anecdotes of yours, travesties of the parable and so precious to me as vulgar glosses on it. How on April 27th, 1929 it was a fourth-storey window and a stone area and you were dying. And how it was a joke between Harold the stretcher-bearer and myself that you did not die, but survived your dying, lucid interval.
After which.
After which, may I recall, since you would not care to do so yourself, with what professional appreciation (on May 16th) Mr. Lake is reported to have observed to those that stood by him in the operating theatre: ‘It is rarely that one sees the spinal-cord exposed to view—especially at right-angles to itself.’
After which.
After which, let me also recall on my own account my story The Shout, which, though written two years ago, belongs here; blind and slow like all prophecies—it has left you out entirely. And, because you are left out, it is an anecdote of mine.
After which.
After which, even anecdotes fail. No more anecdotes. And, of course, no more politics, religion, conversations, literature, arguments, dances, drunks, time, crowds, games, fun, unhappiness. I no longer repeat to myself: ‘He who shall endure to the end, shall be saved.’ It is enough now to say that I have endured. My lung, still barometric of foul weather, speaks of endurance, as your spine, barometric of fair weather, speaks of salvation.