The innocent critic
Peter Quennell
The Contrary Experience Herbert Read (Secker and Warburg, £3.25) Subtitled on the dust-cover, though not on the title-page, 'The Autobiography of Herbert Read', this is neither, strictly speaking, an autobiography nor, of course, a new book, but the reissue of a collection of autobiographical essays that first appeared in 1962, and then incorporated an account of the author's childhood published nearly thirty years earlier. It was worth re-printing. Despite the fact that it tells no continuous story, and that extracts from Herbert Read's war-diary are followed by a description of his bleak, unprofitable school-life — after which he revert to the war-period and draws a particularly vivid picture of the chaotic British retreat during the early months of 1918 — an admirable self-portrait does at length emerge.
Herbert Read was a good man — "the most gentle man I have ever known," writes Graham Greene, in his excellent Personal Foreword. I knew him far less well; but my recollection § completely accord with those of Graham Greene. Unlike his close friend T. S. Eliot, who, for all his sterling human qualities, sometimes produced an effect of vague disquietude — accentuated, now and then, by a slightly harrowing facetiousness — Read displayed a modest self-assurance that immediately put one's mind at rest, and banished constraint or professional embarrassment for any occasion he attended. He spoke softly, smiled readily and easily, and had large luminous eyes that appeared to reflect not only a keen intelligence but a naturally hopeful soul. One felt sure that, whatever he might think of the world — and, as this book shows, he had been bitterly disillusioned — he was devoted to his fellow men, and retained a Shelleyan belief in their ultimate perfectibility. He was always eager to salute unrecognised genius; with the result, I fear, that he occasionally failed to distinguish noisy barnyard geese and royal swans.
Among his chief assets, private and literary, were the memories of a happy childhood. Born in 1893, he was the son of a prosperous Yorkshire farmer, and until his ninth year, enjoyed the delightful surt.oUndings — the hills and fields round Kirkby Moorside — to which he would return in later life. 'The Innocent Eye,' the earliest essay published here, and certainly the best-written, is a memorable evocation of his vanished youth, composed
under the influence of Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth-century poet and visionary with whom he shared a gift of recapturing the exquisite freshness of a child's approach to Nature, when the corn is still "orient and immortal wheat" that "never should be reaped, nor was ever sown," but seems to have "stood from everlasting to everlasting." His father's sudden death destroyed this earthly paradise; idyllic innocence was succeeded by harsh experience; and he was destined to grow up behind the grim walls of a monastic northern orphanage.
Having emerged, he obtained a minor post — his salary of twenty pounds a year — at a local Savings Bank, whence he escaped, with the help of a diminutive inheritance, on which he had borrowed from one of his father's friends, to Leeds University. Then came the war; and, while he was in the front line, he began to write the series of diary-letters that form the substance of his second section. By this stage he was already an aspiring poet — he had "become conscious of the art of poetry," he tells us, at the age of sixteen — and, besides writing lyric verse himself, he had met on leave some of the brightest luminaries of the modern literary firmament, including Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell.
Thenceforward Read's progress was comparatively smooth; and from a secure, but tedious job at the Treasury he graduated to an assistant keepership at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the professorship of fine art at 'Edinburgh and the editorship of the Burlington Magazine. In his unobtrusive way he became a public personage, and as such a worthy subject for an AngloAmerican encyclopaedia, which informs us that he paid a great deal of attention "to the defence and championing of new movements in art . . . functionalism, theories of social utility, abstract art and surrealism." In this capacity he adopted a critical prose-style that frequently tended to become opaque; and Graham Greene admits that he enjoyed Read's other works — for example, the reviews of detective novels he contributed to Night and Day, the short-lived periodical that Greene edited — "more than that long series of art books" which were apt to hide "his real genius as a poet, critic and autobiographer."
As a literary historian, moreover, Read was not invariably accurate. His well-known study of Wordsworth is a stimulating but somewhat misleading book. Not long ago, when I discussed the poet myself, I accepted much too readily some of the opinions he advanced and got into serious trouble with an aggrieved Wordsworth ian, scholar. Read claims, for example, that Wordsworth's 'abandonment' of his mistress, Annette Vallon — whom, to be quite fair, he never really abandoned — had cost him at once "his faith in youth and
change" and his "fundamental honesty." Yet how can we believe that the Prelude, on which he embarked a considerable time after he had bidden Annette a reluctant goodbye, was the product of a faithless and fundamentally dishonest spirit? In other passages, too, the biographer adjusts his material to suit a preconceived thesis.
If I do not hesitate to criticise the critic, it is because I have no doubt of his genuine integrity. Herbert Read belonged to a period when few 'men of will' failed to print some rather silly statements, and when most saw the struggle between Left and Right — as illustrated by the contrast between Wordsworth, the supporter of the French Revolu tion, and Wordsworth, the archconservative — in unnecessarily simple outline. Should Read err, he erred from the highest motives, and his autobiographical sketches reveal throughout his charm and candour. The most appealing is unquestionably 'The Innocent Eye,' which Greene says that he considers "perhaps the best autobiography in our language;" but each of the essays that succeeds it deserves affectionate and careful reading. The style develops — sometimes, I think, for the worse; but the current of sensibility remains continuous. As Greene remarks, they are "autobiographies with a steel thread" and that thread was supplied by the vision of the Good Life that the writer had received in childhood.
Peter Quennell, poet and critic, is now working on an autobiography.
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