A World of My Own Read Free

town. I said, ‘First the two of you will have a drink with me.’ I could see the bars were full of laughing people. ‘You are not teetotallers?’ I asked.
    ‘No,’ the girl said.
    ‘Then you choose the nicest pub.’
    All the time there stayed with me that sense of inexplicable happiness. If only I could go back one day to the little town of Horden which exists in My Own World, but not in the world I share.

II

Some Famous Writers

I Have Known
    An odd thing about this World of My Own is that it contains no living writers. It seems that a writer whom I have the pleasure of knowing must die before he enters my secret world.
Henry James
    On April 28, 1988, I found myself on a most disagreeable river trip to Bogotá in the company of Henry James. The boat left after midnight and we had to find our way along the quay in complete darkness, carrying our hand baggage. I would have turned back if it had not been for the determination of the great author, and my admiration for his work.
    What made things worse was the loud voice of an official—invisible in the darkness—who was continually shouting threats. ‘Anyone who tries to comeon board without a ticket will be fined one thousand dollars.’ In the crowd pushing to get onto the boat it was impossible even to show our tickets.
    There was no place to sit—we just managed to squeeze ourselves into a corridor tightly packed, mainly by women—but I heard no complaint from Henry James. At some place on the river the boat stopped for a few minutes and a few passengers got off. Surely, I urged James, we could take the opportunity and escape too, but no, James wouldn’t hear of it. We must go on to the bitter end. ‘For scientific reasons,’ he told me.
Robert Graves
    One night I had a happy encounter by the roadside with Robert Graves, who looked as young as when I had known him in the Common World when he lived near Oxford in 1923. He was pleased to see me again and recalled a chance meeting we had once had on the Italian frontier, which I had forgotten. I told him how much I had always admired his poems, even in the twenties, and how I still treasured a copy of his first poems,
Over the Brazier
.
    ‘Do you remember,’ I asked him, ‘my own awful book of verse,
Babbling April
, about which you were kind in the case of one poem?’ I teasingly added,‘Now the book is fetching even a higher price at auction than your own first book.’
Jean Cocteau
    In November 1983 I met Jean Cocteau at a party and was pleasantly surprised. As I told him frankly, I expected to find his eyes cold, but they were understanding, even affectionate. His boyfriend turned up a little later dead drunk.
Ford Madox Ford
    Talking to Ford Madox Ford I wanted to express my admiration for one of his books, which concerned the Spanish Civil War. He said he had never written such a book. Searching in vain for the title, I went to my bookshelves to find a book of his which might list the other. I found only two volumes in the Bodley Head edition—one a book of essays which I didn’t know at all. His other titles were not given. Suddenly (several times I had begun to say
For Whom the Bell …
but checked myself) the title came to me—
Some Do Not
.
    We went for a very pretty country walk together.He told me of a legend that the Holy Virgin, standing on a hill, had bent down and picked out of the river we were passing a man who was drowning seven miles away from her.
    ‘But the land is quite flat,’ I said.
    ‘Not if you look closer. It slopes down past that old millhouse to the lock.’ People had spoken to me of the woman who kept the lock—a wonderful cook with a great interest in local history, which she tried to pass on to her sons.
    We began to cross a field—nervously on my part, because it contained one large bull and a young one that showed itself too interested in our movements. I edged back on the road and, looking round, I saw the young bull had mounted on Ford’s shoulders. He