After college, I went down to Croydon, near London, to teach—at a hundred pounds a year. It was a new school, and hard work. The actual teaching I didn’t mind, and the boys, on the whole, I liked very much—they were of all sorts—but the so-called school discipline, the bossiness, the false sort of power one was obliged to assume, all that I hated.
It was when I was at Croydon, when I was twenty-three, that a girlfriend sent some poems of mine to the English Review. Ford Madox Hueffer was then editor, for a brief, brilliant while. He wrote to me, and asked me to come and see him. And he was most kind. He got Heinemann’s to publish The White Peacock at once. Hueffer said to me “Your book has got every fault that the English novel can have, but you have genius.” —They never seemed to grudge me genius, because, perhaps, it is something that can be legitimately patronised. But published I was, and always have been, without any effort on my part. They always allowed me“genius”, and every other fault the English novelist can have.
Hueffer introduced me to Edward Garnett, and no-one could have been kinder than he was, helping, advising, asking me down for the week-end to his house in Kent. In those school-teaching days, it was an adventure. And London was an adventure. Ezra Pound was another adventure, and the Bayswater world he introduced me to. And then Austin Harrison, who took over the English Review, would ask me to dinner or to a theatre, and I met all kinds of people.
And that I have not got a thousand friends, and a place in England among the esteemed, is entirely my own fault. The door to “success” has been held open to me. The social ladder has been put ready for me to climb. I have known all kinds of people, and been treated quite well by everyone, practically, whom I have known personally.
Yet here I am, nowhere, as it were, and infinitely an outsider. And of my own choice.
It is only this year, since coming back to Europe from America that I have asked myself why. Why, why, why could I never go through the open door, into the other world· Why am I forever on the outskirts·
