I suppose that even the most outrageously sincere of men are to some extent poseurs, if not to themselves, then to other people. The artistic temperament must either attitudinise or die. Posturing is the most delicate, the most dangerous, of all the arts. To pose before others is risky, but to pose before oneself is most hazardous, for no one in the world is so easy to deceive, and so ready to be deceived, as oneself, and to be deluded by a fancy picture that one has drawn and painted in hectic moments is to appear to the world as a fantastic clown.
Deluded thus, it appears to me, is W. B. Yeats. He is, of course, a fine though not a great poet: no reasonable man can question that. And there are lines and verses of his that have become woven into the very texture of my mind. Moreover, I recognise that it is futile to quarrel with a man because he is not other than he is. Yet I do quarrel with him. I remember a photograph of Yeats, a photograph I have not seen for ten or twelve years, wherein he appears conscious of nothing in the world but himself, conscious of nothing but his hair, his eyes, his hands—especially his hands. His fingers are so long that one is surprised that, his palm resting on his knee, they do not reach to the floor. It is, I concede, a human weakness for a man whom Nature has gifted (or do I mean cursed?) with the appearance of a poet, to play up to Nature and help her by delicate titivations. But to do this successfully, one must have an overwhelming [264] personality—a personality like that of Shelley, of Byron, of Swinburne. It is a simple matter to look like a poet, but to impose that look on mankind is given to few. It is not given to W. B. Yeats.
How is it, I wonder, that one rather admires Æ for believing in the objective existence of strange gods and spirits, and yet despises Yeats for sharing this belief? It is, I think, because one feels that Æ has a solid, even massive, intellect controlling his fantasy, whereas Yeats’ intellect is not distinguished either by subtlety or massiveness. Yeats believes what he wishes to believe; Æ believes only what he must. Yeats has an incurable aching for the picturesque, and whilst he believes that he is “helped” by the supernatural, I think that this help is derived from his own imaginings, if indeed the question of “help” comes in at all.
Why, then, should I wish to meet this man whom, it is clear, I regard as self-deluded and for whom my respect is mingled with a feeling that is not very far removed from dislike? Really, I do not know. His attitude of mind is not uncommon, and I have met many men and women his equal in intellectual force. I think that perhaps I wish to study at first hand a mind that is so exquisite in its refinement, so sensitive in its moods, so invariably right in its choice of words. From all the tens of thousands of words that exist, how difficult it is to select the one word that is inevitable! And how slender and fragile a man’s work becomes when his mind must perforce invariably pounce upon the one only word! The great writers were not so fastidious. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac and a hundred others: take, if you wish, any half-dozen words from almost any page of their writings and substitute six others, and what will be lost thereby? Scott and Byron and Balzac, and even Shelley and Keats, have, I think, not more than a hundred or so pages that could not with safety be tampered with in this manner.
[265]
There is something lily-fingered and, to me, something
disagreeable and effeminate in a writer who, at all times
and seasons, searches and burrows for the mot juste. I
am curious about such writers, curious though I know
instinctively that they love letters more than they love
life. To me such men are incomprehensible, and in them,
somewhere, something is wrong. Men who do not feel
lust for life have thin necks, or shallow pates, or neurasthenia....
Perhaps, after all, I am something of a
student of nerve trouble, and wish to meet Yeats in order
to satisfy myself what precisely is lacking in him.
It is a popular fallacy that versatility is invariably accompanied by shallowness, whereas, of course, almost all men of great genius have been peculiarly and even marvellously versatile. For me, versatility has most powerful attraction. The man with only one talent is as uninteresting as the man with no talent at all. Perhaps Hilaire Belloc has retained his hold on me because he is continually surprising me. He has done so many different and opposed things so admirably, that it seems impossible he should strike out in yet another line; but I know very well that before twelve months have gone he will have turned his amazing powers in still another direction, and will accomplish his task better than any other living man can do it.
Nearly twenty years have gone since early one spring I walked alone across Devon from Ilfracombe to Exeter and from Exeter to Land’s End. Now, I went alone simply because Belloc had walked alone across much of France and Italy, and the spirit of imitation was then, as it is now, very strong within me. I had just read his glorious Path to Rome, and I carried a copy of the first edition in my haversack, reading it by the wayside and forgetting my loneliness (for I was many times pathetically lonely) in Belloc’s most excellent company. I pondered [266] over the nature of this man for many hours, envying him, and thinking that a man with such great and diverse gifts must be reckoned among the happiest people alive. I remember that during the weeks I walked in Devon and Cornwall I copied him as far as I could in the most minute particular, and at Clovelly, one golden evening as I stood talking with some tall, Spanish-looking fishermen, I suddenly made up my mind that I would write to him. I do not know what I wrote, but a couple of days later a reply came from him telling me that my letter had given him more pleasure than any of the enthusiastic reviews in the papers. This letter I pasted in my copy of The Path to Rome, and in 1915 a friend begged me to allow him to take it with him to France. He had a copy of his own, but he wished to take mine. That friend (our worship of Belloc was one of the many things we had in common) now lies dead, and I like to think that his comrades buried my precious book with him.
My imitation of, and devotion to, Belloc led me into several amusing scrapes, and I recollect arriving ruefully at Helston one wet afternoon and seeking shelter at an inn called, I think, The Angel. Having arranged to proceed to Penzance by train early in the evening, I went to bed whilst they dried my clothes. Whilst in bed, I recalled that Belloc had often praised Beaune and that I had never tasted it. So I ordered a bottle, drank it at about 4 P.M.—and promptly went to sleep for twelve hours!
Even now, on the borderland of middle age, I cannot pick up a new book of Belloc’s without a little thrill: he is so clean, so bravely prejudiced, so courageous. He is a lover of wine and beer, of literature, of the Sussex downs, of the great small things of life: a mystic, a man of affairs, a poet. What, indeed, is he not that is fine and noble and free?
[267]
In the musical world one is accustomed to infant
prodigies; very rarely do they develop their powers.
But in the literary world infant prodigies are rare, and
at the moment I can recall among writers of the past the
boy Chatterton and that not quite so remarkable but,
nevertheless, very distinguished youth, Oliver Madox
Brown. In our own days we have had two or three men
of letters whose first work, written in their late teens or
early twenties, promised more, I think, than their later
books have fulfilled. I am thinking more particularly
of Edwin Pugh and William Romaine Paterson, the latter
of whom usually writes under the pseudonym of “Benjamin
Swift.”
Many of us must remember Benjamin Swift’s Nancy Noon, a strange novel that jerked the literary world into excitement two decades ago. The writer of it was but a boy, and though a few critics declared that he “derived” from Meredith, it was almost universally acknowledged that, for sheer originality both in style and in its general outlook upon the world, the novel was head and shoulders above any contemporary literature. So we all kept a close watch upon Benjamin Swift, reading each fresh work (and there were many fresh works, for the new-comer was very productive) with an eager anticipation which, alas! was foiled again and again. I remember six or eight of his books, each lit with genius, but all a little crude and violent and not one of them indicating that the writer’s mind was becoming more mature. It was a vigorous, eruptive mind with which one was in contact, but it was also a mind in such incessant turmoil that one searched in vain in each of its products for that “point of rest” which Coventry Patmore maintains is a sine qua non of all fine works of art.
In some way that I forget Benjamin Swift and I got into correspondence, and I still possess a bundle of his letters, mostly about his work. I remember that in one [268] of my letters I ventured to indicate what I thought were some of his faults: I called in question his knowledge of music, I expressed disapproval of his violence, and I told him I feared that he was in danger of settling down to being a mere “eccentric” writer. My letter, as might have been expected, produced no effect, and though I have not read his latest works (in dug-outs and trenches one reads everything that comes to hand, but Benjamin Swift has to be sought), I am given to understand that they are in many ways like his first efforts—outré, violent, eruptive, yet distinguished and glowing here and there with a genius that is always hectic.
Years ago, Swift invited me to call on him whenever I should happen to be in town, and though I should very much like to meet him, I have never accepted his invitation. One is like that. One shrinks from satisfying one’s curiosity. I picture Benjamin Swift as bearing a resemblance to Strindberg, but in my mind’s eye his lips are thinner and straighter than Strindberg’s, and his eyes are more vehement.
What is it, I wonder, that prevents this writer from ranking among the great? His intellect is wide and deep enough, his literary talent is very considerable, and his experience of life has been exceptionally varied. There is a twist in his genius, a maggot in his brain. He sees life grotesquely; some of the people he creates are like the men and women one meets in nightmares.
Sometimes I amuse myself by inventing conversations between people opposed in temperament—e.g. Sir Owen Seaman and Mr Hall Caine, Mr John Galsworthy and “Marmaduke,” Little Tich and Lord Morley, and I often wish a brain much brighter than my own (Mr Max Beerbohm’s, for example) would occupy its idle hours in writing a book of such conversations. I commend the idea to Mr E. V. Lucas, also, and to Messrs A. A. Milne [269] and Bernard Shaw (only Shaw’s fun is apt to be so distressingly emphatic and double-fisted).
Among the dead, I make Sir Richard Burton meet and talk with Herbert Spencer, and I always call this conversation The Man and the Mummy. It is strange, but we have not, so far as I am aware, any record of Burton’s rich and provocative conversation, though I have been assured by men who knew him well that his talk was the best they had heard. Sir Richard Burton is one of the men whom I most wish to meet, and perhaps when my happy sojourn on this planet comes to a close, I shall be allowed to serve him in some humble capacity. To me he has always seemed to belong to Elizabethan times, and I think that he must often have cursed at Fate for placing him in the middle of a century that could not fully understand or appreciate him.
In our own days we have many young men of a spirit akin to that of Burton, though not one of them may possess a tithe of his genius or of his colossal intellect. I refer, of course, to our numerous soldier-poets—gallant young men of thought and action, of quick and generous sympathy, of noble aspiration. Most of you who read what I am now writing must know at least one man belonging to this type, for there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them—men who, but for the war, would probably never have written a line of poetry, but whose souls have been stirred and whose hearts have been fired by the grandest emotion that can urge mankind to self-sacrifice: I mean the never-dying emotion of patriotism—that emotion at which the sexless sneer, which the “cosmopolitan” regards with amusement, and for which men of imagination and grit gladly die.
One soldier of this type I knew intimately, and I would gladly know many of those others who have thrilled us with their poems. Let me describe my friend to you. He is no longer young: his precise age is thirty-five: but [270] he was among those who, early in August, 1914, after first putting his small affairs in order, enlisted in Lord Kitchener’s Army. He made no fuss about it, and told none but his most intimate friends what he had done. I met him a few months after he had joined up; he was then a Corporal, and seemed to me the happiest man I had met for many a day. He told me that he had begun to write “seriously,” for hitherto his scribbling had been of a cursory and trivial nature. But he showed me none of his work, and it was not until he had been in France some little time that his verses began to appear in one or two reviews. Having been granted a commission, he quickly rose to the rank of Captain. He was mentioned in dispatches twice and, having led a particularly successful bombing raid on the enemy’s trenches, was awarded the Military Cross.
There is, I know, nothing very unusual in this bare record as I have set it down; the unusual, indeed extraordinary, nature of this case is that before the war my friend had been a reserved, unadventurous but very capable bank clerk, quite undistinguished and apparently without ambition. But hidden fires must from his youth have been smouldering in his heart, and it required the war’s disturbance and excitement to blow these ashes into flame, and the war’s opportunity was needed to disclose of what fine material he was made. I flatter myself that I had always known his nature was fine and distinguished, for though he was a bank clerk one would never have guessed it from his conversation and demeanour. I also know that, generations ago, his forbears played a by-no-means ignoble part in our country’s history, and for that reason alone I felt that, though concealed, there were imagination and aspiration abiding in his soul.
One of my friends, Anna Wickham, knows D. H. Lawrence very well, and one day I asked her if she [271] would arrange for me to meet him at her house. But she brushed aside the suggestion with the few words that she was not particularly interested in Lawrence and that my time might be wasted if spent with him. Such a suggestion amazed, and still amazes me, and I cannot but think that Anna Wickham had never troubled to read any of D. H. Lawrence’s writings, for it often happens among literary people that close friends do not look at each other’s work.
To me D. H. Lawrence is perhaps the most peculiarly original English writer living. In his poems he is so egoistic as almost to seem like an egomaniac, and in two or three of his novels he is obsessed and overwhelmed by the passion of sex. Yet in Sons and Lovers, and in that wonderful first book of his called, I think, The Red Peacock, he gets clean away from himself, and is as objective as all great creative artists are and should be. Every writer must, of course, portray life in terms of himself, but only small men continually thrust themselves and themselves only on to an embarrassed public. But Lawrence has an insatiable curiosity about himself, and it seems at times as though he is not anxious to discover or uncover life, but to penetrate to the deeps of his own nature and shout out at the top of his voice what he has found there. In such egoism, there is, of course, strength as well as weakness, and the very fault, so grave and so calamitous, that bars him from achieving great work is, nevertheless, an attraction to those who are much intrigued by psychology.
There are, are there not? two kinds of imaginative literature: the kind we read without more than a passing thought for the man or woman who has written it; and the kind we read primarily because we are enormously interested in the personality and temperament of the man or woman from whom that literature comes. In removing himself to Italy instead of throwing himself heart and soul into the ugly but extraordinary life that these years are [272] giving us, D. H. Lawrence is, I believe, evading his destiny and is thereby weakening the gifts and tampering with the intellect of a man whose name should stand near the head of all contemporary writers.
If Mr Lawrence should by chance read these pages, he will acquit me of impertinence if he remembers that he has taken the public into his confidence, and that he must expect the public to make some comment upon what he, uninvited, has told us.
After what I have written you may find it difficult, if not altogether impossible, to regard me as a guileless youth. Yet I ask you so to regard me. For, if I be not guileless, how can one explain the whole-hearted enjoyment I used to derive from my occasional visits to the Crab Tree Club in Soho, and the Cabaret Club in Heddon Street during the twelve months before the war?
I had been a considerable time in London before it occurred to me that there was any other way of spending the night except in bed. Evenings, of course, were spent either at home, the theatre, the Café Royal, a concert hall, a music hall, or at friends’ flats and studios, and though it is true that sometimes friends induced you to stay, or you induced friends to stay, until dawn, yet these long hours were never deliberately planned beforehand.
But I had the Café Royal habit, and the Café Royal, in a sort of way, used to be an ante-chamber to various night clubs. At midnight, or shortly after, when I left the Café with my friends, I used to find that, instead of proceeding to their respective homes, they went to one place or another where you made revelry and talked nonsense and, perchance, drank what proved at eight o’clock next morning to have been a little more than was good for you.
“Come with us to the Crab Tree,” said two or three friends on one of these occasions.
[274]
And go I did. It was my very first visit to a night club,
and I expected to find I know not what scenes of dissipation
and naughtiness. I imagined that I should meet
women even more strange than some of the strange women
of the Café Royal, that I should behold dresses so daring
that they could no longer be called dresses at all, that the
music would be ravishing, the conversation sparkling,
the men distinguished, the food delicate beyond words,
the wine of a perfect bouquet. Instead, after walking
up a flight of stairs, I found a large bare room with five
men in it, one of them being the bar-tender who, behind
rows of bottles of whisky and stout, was polishing glasses.
Of the other men, three were members who had just
arrived, and the fourth was the pianist who, later on, was
to play rag-time for the dancers.
I stood for a moment on the threshold of this empty room, feeling rather exasperated that I had come hither.
“It’s all right,” said one of my friends, a little pugnacious Scotsman with a nose and chin like Wagner’s; “wait a bit. Things will soon brighten up.”
So we stepped to the bar and engaged the pianist in conversation. He was something of a scholar and had made a study of rag-time from the historical point of view. He played me two or three examples of rag-time which he declared occurred in Bach, and I accepted his word, though I looked at him incredulously.
The note of that night was youth. There was no hectic excitement, no Bacchic frenzy: everybody was jolly glad to be alive. Somebody has defined happiness as conscious pleasure. If that definition holds good, then I was happy that night, for I remember saying to myself: “I am coming here again.” I loved the feeling of life the place gave me; the exhilaration of it seemed to pierce into my marrow. I did not want to talk to anybody. I merely wanted to sit back and watch everything: the [275] furtive smiles of half-shy women who, happy in the arms of those they loved, were afraid to reveal too much of their happiness; the most delicate ankles of a slim girl I knew, but whose name (was it Kitty or Mimi?) I only half remembered; the kaleidoscope of colour on the platform where the dancers were. The women were like flowers—orchids suddenly endowed with movement.... I compared the scene with the spectacle afforded me by Murray’s Club a few nights previously, when Ivan Heald and I were taken there for an hour or two. Some ladies at Murray’s had had green hair, but only a poet like Baudelaire can wear green hair with success. But at Murray’s the people were all old. Young girls of twenty were old. Everybody was old except the aged, and they pranced and frisked to prove their unconquerable youth.... But at this jolly Crab Tree youth was in the air, in the music, in the laughter.
And, feeling a little intoxicated with happiness, I allowed a gentle melancholy to steal over me, as one sometimes does in certain moods. I thought of Paris, for this scene reminded me of Paris: I was full of longing for Paris, and I remembered how in the spring of 1912 I used to sit in an attic in the Quartier Latin wondering and wondering. By that curious power that the mind, when a little excited, seems to possess—I mean the power of transferring one from a scene where one is happy to a scene where one would be still happier—I saw myself aimlessly strolling beneath the plane-trees on the banks of the Seine. I took out a pencil and wrote:
These verses (though you would hardly think so) cost me infinite trouble, and when I had finished them I looked up from my scrawl and saw that the room was half-empty.
“Is it so late then?” I asked a man sitting next to me. I saw it was Aleister Crowley, and he looked at me rather balefully.
“No: so early. Six o’clock, to be precise.”
And he turned his back on me and gazed at a wall on which no pictures hung.
So I picked up my straw hat and tried to find my Scots friend. He was sitting behind the piano, talking very earnestly to a man I did not know.
“Oh, Nicol Bain,” said I, “I am so hungry.”
The streets were strewn with sunshine, and Bain took off his hat and looked long and long at the blue sky.
“How damned fine to be alive!” he exclaimed.
“How long have you been alive?” I asked.
“Only since I came to London.”
“I was alive for three years in Manchester, but during all those years I sat at a desk pretending to be a clerk, [277] I was dead, quite dead. So, you see, we really are young. You are about five, and I am nearly seven.”
He steered me into a restaurant which appeared to cater specially for night-birds, and Bain ate bacon and eggs, whilst I feasted on a dish of strawberries, brown bread and coffee.
“I would,” said I, “much prefer to have bacon and eggs, but strawberries seem to be more in the picture, don’t you think? I am sure I am behaving very nobly to fit into the picture at the expense of my yearning inside.... And now, where can we get a bath?”
After that first visit I went frequently to the Crab Tree Club. There I met many poets and journalists and artists, and there, one night, a poet—a great strapping fellow, all bone and sinew and muscle—loudly challenged me to fight him. He is a man of some genius, well known both here and in America. The exact cause of his quarrel with me I have forgotten, but it appeared that, unwittingly, I had done him some real injury—or he thought I had. He spoke heatedly to me and I replied still more heatedly. Suddenly, he rose, faced me menacingly, and shouted:
“All right, then. Come and fight it out. Come and fight it out downstairs.”
He looked at me with loathing.
I must have paled, I think, for I know that his terrific anger was like an onslaught. But I realised that I must accept his challenge. I hated the thought of what was before me, and hoped it would soon be over.
“Very good. We’ll go downstairs.”
I felt a hand tighten approvingly on my arm and, looking round, saw Ivan Heald. He came with me.
“Slog him, Gerald,” he said earnestly.
But I felt most unheroic, and I know that as I made my way to the door I was trembling a little.
[278]
The whole room was interested now, and I realised
that we were going to have spectators. And then the
unexpected happened. The Club Secretary and a few
committee men rushed between us, dragging my sudden
enemy away. I was glad to be separated, for I was afraid
of him.... Is it possible that he was afraid of me?
Augustus John used to come sometimes, and I remember chatting with P. G. Konody about Byzantine architecture, about which I think I know something. But one did not go to the Crab Tree for serious conversation. It was the diversion of excitement we all sought....
I think that for some weeks in the spring of 1914 I felt like a character in a rather second-rate novel. Literally, I was intoxicated with life. And so full of vitality did I feel that I scarcely found time for sleep. I remember walking with my wife from Soho to Battersea Park in the early hours of a June or July morning after being up all night. Several friends accompanied us, and though we ought to have felt extremely jaded, we were as fresh as paint at our seven o’clock breakfast of cherries and coffee and honey. I tried to feel like George Meredith as I ate, for I had read somewhere that he frequently breakfasted on honey and coffee and fruit.... The imitative instincts that we little artists have! How strange it is! We can never be ourselves for long. We are always imagining ourselves to be someone else more distinguished, or more interesting. We are always insatiably curious about the feelings and thoughts of others. Pale imitators we are. And when we snatch at our personalities, how feeble they seem ... how feeble they are.
One frightfully busy week an invitation came to us from Madame Strindberg to sup with her at the Sign of the Golden Calf, popularly known as The Cabaret. We [279] did not particularly want to go, but I had been deeply interested in August Strindberg ever since I had read Max Nordau’s Degeneration (that, I think, is not the title, but you know the book I mean) and I had wished to learn more about this strange vitriolic personality, and since Strindberg himself was dead, Madame Strindberg seemed to be the best person to whom to go for information.
The Cabaret was in a large cellar at the end of Heddon Street, and the narrow way was blocked up with taxis as our own cab sped round the corner from Regent Street. The place was nearly full, and a Frenchman with a little waxed moustache was singing Two Eyes of Grey, with his eyes glued to the ceiling in a stupidly sentimental manner, and I recollect that our first impulse was to turn and flee. One hears such songs, I am told, in Bolton and Oldham, and, I dare say, in the London suburbs, but that Madame Strindberg should come all the way from Sweden and bring a man all the way from France to sing the latest inanity was incredible. But my eye caught some fantastically carved figures that leered and leaned from the great, thick posts supporting the roof. These painted creatures were attractive and promising and futuristic, and:
“At all events, we’ll drink a bottle of champagne before we go,” said I, as a waiter drew us to a table and announced that supper was about to be served. “For champagne always helps,” I added.
And, really, for an hour or two I required a little artificial stimulus in order to survive the dullness of the musical programme.
“Whoever the people are who run this place,” I said to a pale, elderly man who sat opposite to me, “they are extraordinarily stupid. They get Frank Harris to lecture one evening and give us inane music the next. One doesn’t come to a night club to be flapdoodled.”
“Flap——?” he queried.
[280]
“Flapdoodled. Yes. I mean these people who sing
and recite like a Penny Reading. They do these things
in Higher Wycombe and Bluzzerby-on-Stream. They
should not be done here.”
The pale man did not understand. He coughed behind a very white hand and delicately selected a nut.
And then Madame Strindberg approached our table. She had been pointed out to me half-an-hour previously and I had noted a pale little woman who appeared to examine her guests rather nervously. She looked cold and careworn. She was very silent, and her black clothing and white face struck a sombre note in all the moving light and colour of the large, warm room.
She came to the table and introduced herself to us, sitting down and placing a nervous little hand in mine. I soon discovered she had no conversation, for, try how she might, she could not say anything that mattered in the least. She chattered a little, made a few exclamations, and then sat silent. To me she seemed full of negations, denials. Personality she had, I daresay, but it did not arouse my interest in the least, and after I had paid her a few insincere compliments concerning the Club, I also sat silent. After a while, she was taken away to another table by some friends.
On subsequent occasions I saw her, but I do not remember that I had further communication with her except when I was made an honorary member of the Club, when I wrote to her a short note of thanks. She was no key to Strindberg: at all events, no key I could use.
Later on that night, the room roused itself from its semi-lethargy, and golden confetti and balls of coloured paper were thrown about by ladies and gentlemen who, not knowing each other, desired an acquaintanceship. The balls of paper unrolled themselves into long ribbons [281] which, catching on to projections from the supporting pillars, hung in long loops and festoons which, thickening, soon began to resemble a gigantic spider’s web. Silly musical toys were given us, and men and women—but especially women—made silly noises on them and giggled, or else shrieked uproariously.... Except for the supper, which was excellent, the evening was not a success, and I do not suppose I should have gone there again if I had not been in search of Frank Harris, or if Jack Kahane had not insisted upon my accompanying him.
I made a fairly extensive examination of London night clubs during the ensuing few months. One, near Blackfriars, admitted me to full membership on the payment of the sum of one shilling, and I used to go there—why, I know not—and throw darts at a board and drink beer. If I did not throw darts, I found I was deemed eccentric. So I threw darts.
Murray’s was beyond my means, and I found the people there untalented and plethoric. They ate too much. And another club devoted to “the” profession was full of trifling women and jaunty men. Actresses are dear children, but at night they become tiresome. And actors always want me to praise them. They always pretended to be quite familiar with my name, and invariably invited me to “have one.” Quite nice people, though, I assure you.
A night club is never for the old. Grey-haired people should always be at home after midnight. And there should be no card-playing. Dancing one would have of course, and music of the finest. And wine, and many pretty women, and a certain quietness, and invisible waiters, and a perfume of roses.... As I write, I ask myself: “Why should I not establish a night-club different from all the others?” It would be so easy to be [282] different; it would be so difficult for me not to be different.... One wants space, of course: I hate being crushed against very full-bosomed ladies.... Oh, and above all, I would have a big room set apart for the hour that comes after dawn. Empty bottles, spilt wine, stale tobacco-smoke, cigarette ends, all kinds of untidiness: how horrible these are in the sun of a May or June morning! Yes, we would all go at dawn into another room, a room coloured green, with narcissi, and jonquils and hyacinths on the tables: a room with open windows: a room with fruit spread invitingly: a room where one could still be gay and in which one need not feel sordid and spiritually jaded and spiritually unclean.... If you have the right mental outlook, you will never feel spiritually unclean after a night of riot, but all our London night clubs in pre-war days seemed to conspire together to make enjoyment unhealthy, gaiety a matter for after-regret, and exaltation a little disgraceful.... If someone will lend me a lot of money (or give it me—why shouldn’t he?) I will found a night club that will knock all the others into a cocked hat....