Kindle Notes & Highlights
This was The Picture of Dorian Gray reversed.
‘Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.’
The Lion and the Unicorn, he observed that ‘England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus’ which nevertheless ‘somehow … decayed [and] lost its ability, its daring, finally its ruthlessness.’4
Apparently unconcerned, he simply said, ‘Well, never mind, I’ll have Fanny’ – Francis Hare, her fifteen-year-old sister.
Richard Walmsley Blair
In 1875 he entered the Opium Department of the Province of Bengal, an uncovenanted member of the Indian Civil Service. As Assistant Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, grade 5 on 500 rupees per month, he could hardly have found a more remote and less exalted position at the lowest level in the order of precedence in the complex hierarchy of the Empire. His job was to oversee the growing of opium, mainly for export to China.
Jean Giraudoux, ‘which has bred more popes and fewer lovers than any other in the world’.
As was normal in British India, the Europeans lived separately from the native Indians and existed largely in ignorance of the local culture, cultivating among themselves a sense of exclusion and superiority – what George Orwell called ‘the pukka sahib pose’, living the lie that in exploiting the country and robbing its people they were solely committed to benefiting them.8
Motihari, a spectacular part of the world, veined by rivers and a lacework of lakes and with inspiring views towards the forested heights of the Nepalese Himalayas.
Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, H. G. Wells’s The Discovery of the Future, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss.
But then the district was struck by an outbreak of plague, and, not surprisingly, shortly after Eric’s birth, she persuaded Richard to bring her and their children to settle permanently in England.
Henley-on-Thames.
an obedient chubby-faced little Edwardian flag-wagger.
was forbidden to play with the plumber’s children; they were ‘common’ and I was told to keep away from them. This was snobbish, if you like, but it was also necessary, for middle-class people cannot afford to let their children grow up with vulgar accents. So, very early, the working class ceased to be a race of friendly and wonderful beings and became a race of enemies. We realised that they hated us, but we could never understand why, and naturally we set it down to pure, vicious malignity.32 Not only was he taught that the plumber’s children were ‘common’, but also that the lower classes
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R. H. Barham’s Gothic parodies, The Ingoldsby Legends,
‘Whatever happens, we have got/The maxim gun and they have not.’42
Sussex recommended by Charlie. David Ogilvy called it ‘an aristocratic Dotheboys Hall’ and Gavin Maxwell claimed it brought on his ‘night horrors’.
Orwell’s notorious memoir of the school, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’,
And those other boys no doubt picked up quickly on these differences, too, especially as Mrs Wilkes oozed snobbery and treated such visitors like royalty. The cult of Scotland, with its military tradition and royal connections, was something she was also eager to promote.
keeping up appearances
At that time, Eastbourne, a rather sedate Sussex coastal resort, was a centre for private education with more than eighty schools and dozens of private tutors listed in the local directory. St Cyprian’s stood on the western edge of the town, on Summerdown Road, on a rise looking over the links of the Eastbourne Golf Club towards the broad sweep of sea beyond.
The main aim at St Cyprian’s was to prepare boys for public school entrance, but especially through scholarships for Eton, Harrow, Wellington and Winchester. These were the schools from which the Establishment was mostly drawn, and on whose playing fields it was thought England’s battles were destined to be won by future heroes of Empire.
set her oversized bosoms in motion, she was known to the boys as ‘Flip’.
Above all else the school encouraged ‘character, character, character’,11 meaning asceticism, self-sacrifice, duty, public service and playing the game – all achieved through an emphasis on sport, military training, manliness reinforced by moral sermonising, shamings and beatings.
‘Top-notchers’ were always rich when young.
– this he especially disdained – the rote learning of dates which passed for History teaching.
great fictional detectives – Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carados, Chesterton’s Father Brown, and in particular, the crime stories of R. Austin Freeman featuring the forensic scientist Dr Thorndyke.
A. E. W. Mason and Leonard Merrick.
It was a fashion in those days for upper-class boys to be circumcised.
Shiplake,
Together they read through all the children’s favourites, Kenneth Grahame’s Golden Age, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, and a book from the Buddicoms’ library which he borrowed again and again – Wells’s AModern Utopia.
The Ingoldsby Legends.
with Compton Mackenzie’s great succès de scandale of 1913, Sinister Street,
common. Conrad Noel, the Christian socialist friend of Nellie Limouzin and
Elisa-Maria Langford Rae,
To do this he felt he had to reject the idea of ‘success in life’ as ‘spiritually ugly, a species of bullying’, and embrace failure.
Zinoviev letter (November 1924),
And on the social scene he would discover that the aesthetes who followed him at Eton, including Connolly and Acton, were now leading lights in that high-living, hedonistic, wildly behaved twenties generation, the so-called ‘Children of the Sun’.
He considered himself some sort of dissident, and was not unsympathetic to the Soviet Union, the great socialist experiment which had already cast its spell over several leading British, French and American writers – Shaw, Wells, Gide, Anatole France, John Dos Passos, and Theodore Dreisler.
He identified with writers such as Zola and Jack London, but had not yet found an ideological peg on which to hang his coat.
The walls were thin, and his room on the top floor was, according to Pitter, ‘as cold as charity’,16 but he was not in search of comfort, and the spartan conditions suited his mood. Working in his unheated attic, he sometimes had to warm his hands over a lighted candle before he could start writing, and wrote a story about
he became a fully fledged resident of ‘Grub Street’, that marginal world – ‘much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems’, according to Dr Johnson – where struggling writers scratch a living from book-reviewing,
Aunt Nellie was still living in Ladbroke Grove, and Ruth Pitter remembered them going there for dinner one evening. ‘She was living with some old Anarchist, I think … She gave us some fearsome dish such as one would have in Paris if one was a native Parisian and dreadfully hard up.’20 Nellie had been for some years an enthusiastic Esperantist and the ‘old anarchist’ was probably Eugène Adam, leader of Sennacica Associo Tutmonda (S.A.T. – the World Association of Non-Nationalists), an Esperantist association based in Paris, of whom she was an admirer.
Henry Mayhew,
Conrad Noel
Somerset Maugham’s novel Ashenden
Eugéne Adam and Nellie Limouzin, in an informal way, became his political tutors.
After staying briefly with an Esperantist family, he found a room in a cheap hotel at 6 rue du Pot de Fer leading to rue Mouffetarde in the fifth arrondissement, just a short walk from the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, Boulevard St Michael and Luxembourg Gardens, and close to the métro at Place Monge. It was a hotel and street he would make famous as the Hotel des Trois Moineaux in the rue du Coq d’Or in Down and Out in Paris and London – the most evocative portrait of the twilight world of the Paris clochard by an English writer of that period.
of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population – indeed, it has been reckoned that in the late twenties there were as many as 30,000 painters in Paris, most of them impostors. The populace had grown so hardened to artists that gruff-voiced Lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without attracting a glance, and along the Seine banks by Notre Dame it was almost
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On a less combative note, the French and the Czechs were discussing the idea of a United States of Europe, while in America Herbert Hoover was elected President.
