The Literary Life
The Crest on the Silver. By Geoffrey Grigson, (Cresset Press. us.) THIS is Mr. Grigson's autobiography. It bears the date 1930-1949, but it is not the fruit of nineteen years' labour. Mr. Grigson wrote it intermittently, when most of his time was taken up with other " bread-and-butter " jobs—journalism, publishing, the B.B.C. The result is a shapeless book, deliberately jazzy (to ward off bore- dom ?) and unsettled alike in sequence, style and substance. Even so, it is somehow compelling, and if not " eminently readable," at least interesting, as most autobiographies are.
Mr. Grigson was born in 1905. His ancestors were better off than he has been: gentlefolk, often clergymen, owning land in East Anglia. They were not the sort of people who would need or want to think about money. Mr. Grigson has never been able to forget it. He cannot have felt as a child that he was particularly wanted. He was the seventh son, by a third wife, of a clergyman aged fifty-nine. There was barely enough money left to take him to a public school and St. Edmund Hall. The story he tells of his early years has echoes of many others—loneliness at home, misery at school, and the liberating joys of Oxford mitigated by a sense of being out of things. His consolations- were the natural world— his home as a child was in Cornwall—and reading.
Oxford brought the added pleasure of extravagance. But he went to an unfashionable college, and although his first verses were published there, he was not embraced by the Christ Church literary smarties, whose hopes for poetry were pinned on Mr. Thomas Driberg. Mr. Grigson writes without regret of the idleness of his undergraduate life, his preoccupation with young women,'and the Third he took in Oxford's snare for, literary minds, the English Honours School. These are the best chapters of the book ; it is later that the story gets confused. There is some account of Mr.
Grigson's work as an usher in peculiar schools, a job offered and rejected at a Norwich mustard-works, and finally of Fleet Street.
Mr. Grigson was first a London correspondent of the Yorkshire Post and later assistant literary editor of the Morning Post. Both sound tolerable jobs, but Mr. Grigson writes of those years with such a deadly lack of relish, with such resentful resignation, that
readers may begin to suspect -him of self-pity.- That would be untrue. On the contrary, Mr. Grigson has not enough compassion
for the subject of his book. And where he has hardened his heart against himself, there is a danger of its seeming to be hardened against others. In fact, he has no sharper likes and dislikes than most men of letters, though he is frank in proclaiming them.
The end of the Morning Post was the end of Mr. Grigson's work in Fleet Street proper. Afterwards he became a publisher's adviser, and, when war began, an official of the B.B.C. monitoring service at Evesham—not a congenial job, but followed by a better one at Bristol. Mr. Grigson's first wife died in 1937 ; when war was near he was married again, this time to an Austrian girl he snatched from the shadow of the Nazis. I think Mr. Grigson is unfair to himself in what he writes about his sexual relations. He mentions the casual, pointless ones ; he shies from the tragedy of his first wife's death, and from telling of his love for her and for his second wife. He gives a better picture of his parents and brothers—the real measure of the distance and the closeness—and there is no attempt to dramatise the decimation of the family as one after another of the brothers fell in the two world wars.
No one who did not already know could learn from this book the importance of Mr. Grigson as a liferary critic. Yet he is not an inconsiderable one. Whether he has been right or wrong (and on the subject of Miss Sitwell's poems I think he has been absurdly wrong), he has always thought for himself. Apart from Mr. Wyndham Lewis, he seems to have little admiration for his fellow- critics, especially the sort that move in schools. He is too modest (and this, like most of Mr. Grigson's virtues, is not well under- stood) and too exacting to be able to report with satisfaction on what he has done in New Verse and other journals he has edited. He probably believes, with Mr. Cyril Connolly, that only the master- piece is worth it ; and, as with Mr. Connolly, the masterpiece has
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