From the Elephant's Back (29 page)

By now the war had begun to narrow to a close: history was being changed around us. We were to find ourselves being gradually dispersed by circumstance, thrown on to new trajectories by the vagaries of private destiny or by the work we were doing. Seferis, Spencer, Dorian Cooke, Gwyn Williams, G.S. Fraser, Terence Tiller
[10]
.…It was clear that if the magazine were to survive us it would lack both contributors and the impulse and freshness which had first created it. Besides, we were jealous of it, and did not want to confide it to other hands. The preface to our last issue, a joint one, read as follows:

A CHANGE OF LANDSCAPE

When we were relatively cut off from England and the term of our stay in the Middle East seemed likely to be indefinite, there was an evident place for a local verse periodical.
Personal Landscape
was accordingly started in January 1942. For three years it has provided a vehicle, the only one available in English, for serious poets and critics in the Middle East. It has also, at a time when propaganda colours all perspectives, emphasized those “personal landscapes” which lie obstinately outside national and political frontiers.
[11]
Today, with the end of the European war almost in sight, poets, like others, are beginning to leave the Middle East, and for those who remain there is no longer literary isolation. With the improvement in communications a manuscript reaches London in a week and periodicals come out here in roughly the same time. Soon, in fact, there will no longer be any need for an English verse periodical in this part of the world. For this reason the present number is to be the last. We prefer to die at meridian.

This last issue contained Spencer's fine poem “Auction Room,” together with poems by Tiller, Hugh Gordon Porteus, and some translations from Cavafy by Amy Nimr (Lady Smart). It also contained a brief obituary note on Keith Douglas, who had been killed in the Normandy landings.
[12]
The news of his death saddened and infuriated us all, but I think Spencer, who had known him best, felt worst about it. It was ominous for it somehow underlined all the other partings which were in the air. We had begun to disperse to different places—Athens, Madrid, Belgrade.…

In my own case the future landscapes were to be Rhodes, Buenos Aires, Belgrade, Cyprus, Provence. Spencer's trajectory took him to Greece, Madrid, London and, lastly, Vienna.
[13]
We kept, so to speak, a mental image of each other's whereabouts and often, in our long journeys round the globe, managed to spend a few hours in each other's company. The
Personal Landscape
period constituted a sort of extra personal link, a private geography almost; a place-name was subtly altered by the mere knowledge that one or other of our friends—our
Personal Landscape
friends—was there
en poste
. So it was that I managed to spend time ashore at Lisbon to meet Harold Edwards, the Skelton specialist, who first translated the novels of Albert Cossery into English. (He and his wife committed suicide under mysterious circumstances some years later.)
[14]
He was a very close friend of Spencer and the news of his death came as a shock to us all. But the winds of chance which carried Seferis to Cape Town and Ankara, Dorian Cooke to Serbia, Patrick Leigh-Fermor from Crete to Hamburg and back to Greece, carried Spencer himself back briefly to his beloved Athens for a while and then to Madrid.
[15]

We met occasionally in odd places, usually unexpectedly; once with Roy Campbell at the Black Swan in Notting Hill Gate, once in a lift in the Colonial Office, once at Oxford. Last of all it was at Edinburgh. Henry Miller and I were preparing to do battle with the infidel in the Mackewan Hall when the phone rang and David Abercrombie's
[16]
voice said: “Would you like the phone number of Bernard Spencer? He is leaving for Vienna tonight. You might just catch him.” It was in keeping with all the other meetings, what Bernard called “a swift glancing blow.” We sat round a kitchen table for an all too brief hour and exchanged all the gossip of the day. He was in sparkling form and full of plans for future work. He had recently married a beautiful young Scots girl and she had changed his luck for it. At least he had managed to find a publisher for his poems. I have seldom seen him so gay.

I think he tended to see us rather as a band of intellectual mercenaries, being pushed about all over the globe at the behest of invisible powers, but remaining always united in a curious sort of way—bound together by this war-period and by the fact that we were all casehardened travellers, in a way displaced persons; too much travel had turned us into professional ex-patriates, restless for the flavour of foreign cities, and who would never (it was too late) settle down again except in some remote place—a Greek island, Lisbon, Toledo, Alexandria. But the rallying point of predilection would always be Athens and if ever we could manage to get posted there.…Yes, these meetings always began by an exchange of news. Where was Bernard, Ines, Robin, Gwyn, Dorian, Keith, Harold?
[17]
It was a sort of litany of the Cairo period; we were a band of migrants maintaining in this way a tenuous hold on each other's affections, unchanged by time and distance. I think this, too, was what we had in mind in choosing an epigraph for the last number of
Personal Landscape
; it was a comic quotation from the diary of an Elizabethan merchant traveller called John Sanderson who had spent the years 1585–86 in Egypt. In a passage he recalls his somewhat colourful Middle East acquaintance in the following terms:

Gobo Garaway died with wenching at Scio. Charles Merrell, the whore-monger, shott dead throughe the head in the way to Alepo by a janesary shutinge at a pigion. Envious Barli died a begar at the Grange; Lumbard at London, no lesse; Harman, a knave and a roge; Tient, a knave graver. Midnall the cocould, alive at the Indies. Pate dead at Sidon; W. Aldrich at Modon; Field in the West Contry with his froward wife is fadlinge; and Bourne (Davi) with marchandisinge makes much peddling, and now is bankrout and (some say) a cockold.
[18]

It carries the compound ring of distance, nostalgia, and personal loneliness which is, I think, the occupational disease of the poet and traveller alike.

The Other Eliot

1965

WHEN I GREW TO KNOW HIM
a little better and to value his own creative richness at its true worth I took the liberty of arranging the letters of his name thus, Tse-Lio-t,
[1]
to suggest that there was a Chinese Taoist sage lurking under the sober cloak of his Anglo-Catholicism: the change amused him, and he did not demur. I think he probably felt that, dogmatic theology aside, there was a suitable kind of root relationship between the rarest and ripest experience in both ways of viewing the world—the Eastern and the Western. There was such breadth and scope to his mind that it was possible to elicit an unusual range of sympathies from him for matters which lay far outside the range of his own personal preoccupations. That is why I feel that I knew him quite well, though in fact I know nothing about him; I know no more about his life than
Who's Who
can tell me. The hazards of literary business threw him in my path in my early twenties as a publisher of my poems, and as one of the most truthful and gentle critics I have ever met.

The literary eminence of the house of Faber & Faber
[2]
today always gives one the impression that it is much older than it in fact is; one thinks of it as a sort of Murray
[3]
hallowed by several generations of fine publishing and resonant with great names like Byron or Moore. It enjoys this sort of status despite the fact that it is an extremely young firm; I remember its being founded in the twenties under the name of Faber & Gwyer. The point of these remarks is to suggest that much of its present eminence is due to Eliot's work; to his farseeing advisory work, which led to the publication of all the best poetry and critical work of the time. No, not all; but very nearly.

If this was for me a fruitful and rewarding relationship, it was entirely due to this painstaking and gentle man whose mind had so fine a cutting edge, and who undertook his duties so seriously and with such method that he went far beyond them in his dealings with the young writers of the house. I cannot believe that my experiences with Eliot the publisher were any different from those enjoyed by other poets and writers from the same stable. The real mystery is where the devil he found time to deal with us all in such detail, criticising, consoling, and encouraging. In my case it can only be accounted for by suggesting that he was some sort of saint; poor man, he had to deal with an argumentative, combative, opinionated young man—a self-inflated ego betraying all the marks of insecurity and vanity. At times it was necessary to cut me down to size, and whenever I succeeded in irritating him too much, he would do it with such breathtaking elegance and style that it left me gasping. But always without heat, without vanity, charitably. It was unpardonable! Moreover, his views were backed up by accurate and factual work, incredibly detailed and pondered, so that I was torn between exasperation at the justice of his remarks and shame at having driven him to waste so much time explaining things so painstakingly to the refractory child he must have assumed me to be.

A wicked man indeed, for he was seldom wrong, and what is worse, he was never splenetic or small-minded. Happily I have preserved all the letters he wrote me, in which business affairs are often tempered by a witty aside or a penetrating judgement, and they make excellent reading today.
[4]
From them I can judge how formative an influence he was upon me, not as a writer so much but as a friendly counsellor of letters.
[5]
The public image of him at that time was of a rather humourless literary bonze of the Sainte-Beuve type. (It should be remembered that at the period of which I am writing he had not yet published his plays and his
Four Quartets
. His fame, which, was considerable, rested upon some criticism and upon poems like
The Waste Land
and
Ash Wednesday
.) Needless to say he did not correspond at all to this literary image. When first I met him I found his gravity rather intimidating; but as I saw more of him I found that laughter was very near the surface. It came in sudden little flashes.

Henry Miller, who said that he always visualised Eliot as a “leanfaced Calvinist,” was most astonished and intrigued when I returned to Paris with an account of my first two meetings with him. So much so, in fact, that he started reading him with attention and prevailed upon me to engineer a meeting with him in London, a meeting which duly took place in a little flat in Notting Hill Gate, loaned to me by Anaïs Nin's husband, Hugh Guiler, the painter.
[6]
I think Eliot himself was a little intimidated by the thought of meeting the renegade hero of
Tropic of Cancer
in the flesh, while Miller was still half convinced that Eliot would be dressed like a Swiss pastor. At any rate, the relief on both sides was very apparent, and I remember a great deal of laughter. They got on famously; and it was now that Eliot made one of those gestures which displayed not only his kindness but the unswerving, uncompromising truthfulness which from then on was to characterise for me everything he did and thought. He offered Miller a blurb for his book, and myself a prefatory note for
The Black Book
.
[7]
This could have compromised his reputation somewhat, for by the standards of the day both of us were “unsavoury writers” (choice phrase), while Eliot's own great reputation was tremendously respectable. But no; he liked the books, and without thought to himself offered us his help. He always had this unfaltering honesty in his dealings. From this delightful evening one small scrap of conversation comes back.

ELIOT: Of course there is more than one kind of pornography; often it has nothing to do with four-letter words.
[8]

MILLER: Who are you thinking of?

ELIOT [with immense seraphic gravity]: Actually, Charles Morgan.
[9]

“My dear Durrell, I'm sorry that you found my letter acid; I thought it was perfectly sweet myself. But if you like the acid I shall see what I can do…” (1937)

But he was too much of an aristocrat of letters not to scorn the sitting duck, and even at his most acid he remained kind without indulgence. Intellectually, he was not a boxer but a judo expert.

5 Nov. 1937

Dear Durrell; I have read the “Poet's Horn Book” with interest and with some apprehension. Let me say at once that for reasons which have nothing to do with its merit I don't think the
Criterion
is quite the place for it. I don't like to publish articles in the
Criterion
in which my own work is one of the subjects discussed, and on the other hand, if you cut me out of this article it would not only mutilate the article but would in a way have as bad an effect as if you left me in. That is to say, it might give the impression that I liked to publish articles which criticised several of my contemporaries but left me alone. So if you publish it I think it had better appear elsewhere.

Now first considering the article without relation to yourself. It seems to me that you make out an admirable case if the presuppositions are admitted. But these presuppositions are very great and it would indeed take a good deal of study to find out exactly what they are, as I am not sure that they are all quite conscious. But one can use as some test of the validity of the premises one's instinctive feeling about the conclusions. It seems to me that there must be something wrong about the presumptions behind a course of reasoning which leads you to dismiss Ezra Pound in a phrase, and to deal with Wyndham Lewis, one of the most living of living writers, in the same category as—and indeed as somewhat less significant than—Aldous Huxley who is one of the deadest. Surely the fact that Lewis writes good English and the fact that Aldous Huxley does not are relevant?