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The Upward Anguish. By Humbert Wolfe. (Cassell. los. 6d.) WHEN whatever Muse presides over the writing of autobio- graphies began to prod Mr. Humbert Wolfe into continuing the reminiscences which he started in Once a Stranger, and badgered him into describing his four years at Oxford, he must, to judge from the title of his new book, have replied very much in the spirit of Aeneas to Dido :
" infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem."
But the Muse, luckily, was irresistible. For Mr. Wolfe had an extraordinarily, varied Oxford career, and many of the people with whom he was up—Julian Grenfell, Flecker, Shaw-Stewart, Mgr. Knox, G. M. Young—are already legendary. The Upward Anguish takes its place immediately with Sinister • Street as an exquisitely witty and truthful painting of a " golden Oxford afternoon." But it is more moving than fiction. The progress which started with Berto Wolff's placation of The public school spirit with Banbury cakes on the train from Bradford and German cigars when it sought to wreck his room, and ended in luncheons at All Souls (with Messrs. Amery, Young, and the Colonial Ministers) brought such pain as well as triumph to the brilliant, arrogant, but socially inept ascendant that the memory of it makes these pages sparkle with an angry malke, as well as a tenderness and wit, that Mr. Mackenzie's comfort- " ably upholstered story never achieves. And it is diverting to contrast The Upward Anguish with the recollections of another who in spite, one might almost say, of being at Wadham, made good—the Earl of Birkenhead. F. E. Smith stormed Oxford , easily with a dominant effrontery, and in what he wrote of his undergraduate days he lets you know it. He reached the Curzon standard of Oxonian success. U. Wolff; who knew he was a most superior person but never dined at Blenheim even once a week, was so much less of a pachyderm that his snubbed pride is still licking its wounds.
But the pain which some of Mr. Wolfe's preliminary gaffes and rebuffs caused him to suffer is his own affair. It provides a tang to a book whose main attraction for most of its readers must be its mellow and comprehensive evocation of an Elysian time. It may be that, in reporting his conversations and carousings with Flecker and the Rothensteins and Morrison and Gabriel Woods and the rest, Mr. Wolfe has remembered only the choicest of their cracks, or it may be that in filling up his
• memory's lacunae he has exercised his own indiscretion ; certainly, his character-sketches and conversation-pieces scin- tillate. In these days when A Yank at Oxford is exhibiting to us an undergraduate world where everything occurs in battalion- formation, the aplomb, the animosities, the erudition of his
charmingly self-conscious individualists make a palatable antidote. And it is pleasant to meet at least one scut whose discourse is not of the unforgettable beauties of Oxford's bells. " Mark my words,' I ses to him (it is U. Wolff's scout defend- ing his young gentleman to another scout), ` he looks queer, and he acts queer, but we'll 'ear more of him later.' In the PoliCe Court news,' ses he. ` Yes,' says I, if he cares to become a judge.' I reckon I 'ad 'im there."
One character only is missing. The Upward Anguish would have been a perfect continuation of Now a Stranger, had we been told more of what Consola, the passionately ambitious defender and encourager of her quaint, incalculable small son Berm, thought of it all when he was made free of the (-Arming Club, and All Souls, and. had his °biter dicta passed on for the approval of Mr. Balfour. I regret her absence.
RONALD LEWIN.
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