BOOKS
Nights Out in the Thirties
BY HUGH GORDON PORTEUS n EMINISCENCES of the recent past seldom rise ,,,much above the level of the gossip column. They are apt to invest with a spurious glamour persons and events whose main claim to attention is merely that they have already been widely publicised. Nobody knows this better than Mr. Rayner Heppenstall.* He is deceived neither by the romance of the times he reviews nor by the names they inflated, nor by the appetite for public gossip about either. As to names, he is clearly diffident about cashing in on any faint glow that may reflect on him from the flashier stars. 'I met Cecil Day Lewis towards the close of the Thirties. I talked and corresponded with Stephen Spender earlier. I once saw Auden in a theatre foyer.' Yet these three (he doesn't mention Mr. Louis MacNeice) did not seem to him to 'dominate the age.' Nor, in his opinion, did the four on whose weak points he trains his probing telescope. They make an odd cluster. With Orwell—Eric Blair—the author lived fora spell, terminated by the incident of the Shooting Stick, here republished in a toned-down version from the periodical in which it first appeared five years ago. The other targets are Eric Gill ('scopo- philiac, voyeur . . . exhibitionist and transvcst- 1st'), John Middleton Murry (`the best-hated man of his time') and that darling of the post-war generation, Dylan Thomas CO God, I'm so tired of sleeping with women I don't even like').
. Since I was myself involved with these figures, will not pretend to be any more impersonal than .Mr. Heppenstall, who etches their portraits here with such tenderly malicious mordancy. I crossed nibs with Gill and Murry, for whom I must confess to having felt a temperamental antipathy. Mr. Heppenstall, who chanced to catalogue their libraries, hobnobbed much with both and gleefully parades snaps of them en pantoufles. Who would expect to find the coldly ruminative annotator and reinterpreter, Murry, nibbling our author all over with kisses, as he does on page 130 ('Dear boy, dear boy, dear boy, dear boy . . .')? Or to happen upon Gill, that fine Dominican carver, making water in Ditch- ling `to the greater glory of God'? The enlarged time-exposures that follow these snapshots do nothing to cancel my early impression that two men whom I had always recognised as gifted were also detestable moralising humbugs.
With the entry of the debonair young Dylan. Thomas in 1934, 1 feel instantly at home. By then I knew Blair and Mr. Heppenstall too, and from that time on our paths criss-crossed often, in pubs and at parties, while we all four wrote for the same papers. Notable among these was The New English Weekly, where Orage was the dynamic editor. Mr. Heppenstall covered the bal- let. Blair had a political column. I had another column and was, besides, art critic. We all lived largely on reviewing and on the sale of review copies. Later that year, Orage fell dead in the studio after delivering a broadcast on social * FOUR ARSRNTEUS. By Rayncr Heppenstall. (Barrie and Rockliff, 138. 6d.)
credit. A little earlier, he had opened commerce with Dylan by demanding 'if he was a virgin.' And intellectually, at least, Dylan was indeed.
Uneasy with highbrows in general and ever mistrustful of politicos, Dylan nevertheless was, of course, in small congenial gatherings, very good company. Mr. Heppenstall describes some typical 'Nights Out' with Dylan. In Red Lion Square, for example, Dylan once helped a posse of police to propel a drink-crazed Rayner to Clerkenwell Police Station. And when the policeman on one arm gave the prisoner a wrench nasty enough to draw a yell, Dylan 'with a horrid chuckle' brutally twisted the other. At the Orwell-Heppenstall ménage I was myself one night put to bed helpless and raving. On the other hand, I was able to help subdue Dylan at a very staid Criterion meeting (the Quarterly, not the Restaurant), where his complaints about the paucity of the sherry (it was armagnac) had been followed up with an audible 'bet old Eliot sups up gin in his bathroom'—Eliot whom he almost worshipped.
From Mr. Heppenstall's anecdotes it might seem that by and large we were no better than the beats of today. There were some differences. We wore no distinguishing rig. Beer was cheaper and stronger, travel across London was cheaper and swifter, but we had no more money than our pens could earn. We were not, moreover, harried by the press, in the wake of advertisers, into a self-conscious flock of bleating muttons. We also, like Mr. Heppenstall, cherished our older mentors. If we had differences with (say) Sir Herbert Read, we didn't dismiss him as a square. But we would pull one another's legs, and even insult each other mildly in print from time to time (I called Mr. Heppenstall's poems 'bloody but unbowed') just to demonstrate that we be- longed to no gang and that all was well between us. Dylan would egg us on to violence and mimic everyone, not excluding his friends the Sitwells. He could be entertaining, at various levels, as well as outrageous. And then, despite an almost total lack of learning, or of intellectual curiosity, he displayed an intelligence and a wit so lively as to make Orwell seem a dullard by contrast. Dylan had something, too, of which few would accuse either Orwell or Mr. Heppen- stall : an overdeveloped sense of humour.
Naturally, many came to know Dylan and Orwell, neither of whom was exactly inaccessible, during the next few crucial years. Their relative independence took on an absolute value as the majority shambled up to toe the party line. It was this independence of character, consistent in Orwell if intermittent in Dylan, which made their presence among us valuable despite their formid- able limitations. Both were possessed by a nar- row and restless spirit. Neither Mr. Heppen- stall nor myself could imagine Dylan or Orwell taking serious pleasure in the contemplation of painting or listening to string quartets. And in conversation one found a whole range of topics barred. Orwell I liked from our first encounter. But until well after the war we simply bored one another stiff. Mr. Heppenstall observes that Blait `seemed ill-read' and that 'the kind of novel Eric wrote seemed to us not worth writing.' He lists some of Orwell's absurd aversions, and notes in him that inability to grasp the importance of context, which led him to condemn people on the strength of 'a single sentence they could be shewn to have written.' Doesn't Mr. Heppenstall underestimate the differences of background between himself and Eric Blair? I think be does. The Shooting Stick episode is a grotesque example of a clash of two different types of social conditioning. And I think Mr. Heppenstall over- looks another thing. He fails to bring out the contrast between the gradual advance in Orwell '5 sagacity over the years, and the gradual sad dissipation of Dylan's original gifts.
The years 1936 to 1939 were the most signifi' cant of the Thirties. A letter of Dylan's reminds me that I saw a lot of him in 1936, when his verse came under the influence, not a happy one in his case, of surrealisme. But this was also the yea! of the Spanish Civil War, an event so momentot0 that it might be said to provide a key, or set of keys, to almost everything that has followed politically ever since. Dylan was not more asleeP to these matters than most of his highbrow Left' wing acquaintances. What, then, were Mr. HOP' penstall's reactions to that historic moment? 'Nobody told me,' he protests, 'until weeks after' wards,' for 'in those days it never occurred t43 me to buy a newspaper.' No less astonishing was the naiveté, the confident ignorance of Orwell. with whom I exchanged an hour's argument on the eve of his departure for Barcelona. Such in' attentiveness to foreseeable events and ascertain' able facts was quite widespread throughout the intelligentsia at the time. In these and many other respects Emotionals would be a more de' serving word for these Thirties Intellectuals. No doubt some of our elders and statesmen knew better, though the pull-devil-pull-baker mach,' inery of government virtually disarmed us, face° with the coming war against Fascism. But so far as the younger intellectuals were concerned. I can still put my finger on the pulse of the period : by April, 1938, there was such a harvest of little mags and special numbers that I was able to fill ten Criterion pages with a summary survey.
Orwell had the uncommon courage to tell the truth as he found it. He returned from Win, a changed man. From then until after the Second World War I saw nothing of him, and indeed met Dylan, during the war, only once. The cot' trast between their respective pre-war and Pe.s,t; war characters therefore struck me forcibly. 1-1", others, I had come down on leave, from Se°,`; land, to find Dylan in the Swiss Hotel. Li". others, I had been horrified by Dylan's grossno! (Mr. Heppenstall notes the change as early 3: December, 1939), which seemed not mere.1',1 physical. He seemed stunned. Later I found he,. stuffed my uniform pockets full of 1-06e:{ Strikes. After the war Dylan again seeing inescapable: Dylan drunk, Dylan sober, DY,"0 the seedy comedian now playing Lear as well 3 the Fool. In public, he could still put on .j splendid performance. In private, he exhibil`6 the false gaiety of despair, or seemed speech and faded. It was Mr. Augustus John, vitiho the three of us lunched together one day, '4:.30 skipped nimbly upstairs after a squealing 1t01.1.. waitress, while the veteran Dylan addressed „ self moodily to the remains of the chianti. '(1 Heppenstall confirms that Dylan was at the self of his tether before he literally drank birrl,c4 to death. After the war Orwell no longer dresi.05 like a tramp, no longer talked like a tyro. preoccupation now was with problems of politi- cal power. But he thought in purely national terms. He seemed to me unduly optimistic about the political future, which we discussed more than once over bottles of hock into the small hours. He was unable to take Asians seriously, after his Burmese days, and dismissed my fan- tasies about the potential growth of China.
Other figures than these appear vignetted neatly in the pages of Mr. Heppenstall's book, which opens a refreshing angle on a much mis- understood tract of time. For straight biography the reader will seek elsewhere. For formal literary assessments there are the studiously un- fair critiques by Mr. Grigson of Dylan Thomas, and by Wyndham Lewis (in The Writer and the Absolute) of George Orwell. It remains for me to add that with such value-judgments as Mr. Heppenstall ventures in this chronicle of the years we shared I find myself in pretty close accord. Since he is a poet as well as a producer, it is all engagingly written. If a little slight.
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