A Literary Tea-party

Abstract

At a literary tea party, where the most strenuously besieged person was Margaret Kennedy, just then resting on the laurels she had won with The Constant Nymph,¹ a curiously untidy person in a morning-coat, which bore evidence that he had put it on under protest, came up to me, with a very fetching grin on his face and a curiously girlish, hysterical voice. I guessed immediately that he was D. H. Lawrence. He at once conveyed to me his disapproval of nearly everybody else in the room, and this, coupled with his jolly sort of approval of my Polyglots² and a lot of advice as to what I should avoid as a writer, all proffered in the most cheerful way, surprised me agreeably, since I had imagined Lawrence to be a disgruntled individual. He told me I had an absolutely original humour; that I should eschew sentimentality like poison; and that he thought I displayed an uncalled-for fear of death. Though feeling that nothing could be more baleful for the natural development of my own talent than the influence of that great rough force contorted into soured rhetoric, I nevertheless said to him at once, feeling that the occasion demanded it: ‘You’re the only one we younger men can now look up to.’ He lapped it up, grinning with an air which suggested that he agreed with me, and later remarked to someone how pleasant it was at last to have met an intelligent man.

From Memoirs of a Polyglot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931) pp. 224–9. A shorter version appeared in the Saturday Review, cli (20 June 1931) pp. 893–4.