Speak, Memory

Very soon I turned away from politics and concentrated on literature. I invited to my Cambridge rooms the vermilion shields and blue lightning of the Song of Igor’s Campaign (that incomparable and mysterious epic of the late twelfth or late eighteenth century), the poetry of Pushkin and Tyutchev, the prose of Gogol and Tolstoy, and also the wonderful works of the great Russian naturalists who had explored and described the wilds of Central Asia. At a bookstall in the Market Place, I unexpectedly came upon a Russian work, a secondhand copy of Dahl’s Interpretative Dictionary of the Living Russian Language in four volumes. I bought it and resolved to read at least ten pages per day, jotting down such words and expressions as might especially please me, and I kept this up for a considerable time. My fear of losing or corrupting, through alien influence, the only thing I had salvaged from Russia—her language—became positively morbid and considerably more harassing than the fear I was to experience two decades later of my never being able to bring my English prose anywhere close to the level of my Russian. I used to sit up far into the night, surrounded by an almost Quixotic accumulation of unwieldy volumes, and make polished and rather sterile Russian poems not so much out of the live cells of some compelling emotion as around a vivid term or a verbal image that I wanted to use for its own sake. It would have horrified me at the time to discover what I see so clearly now, the direct influence upon my Russian structures of various contemporaneous (“Georgian”) English verse patterns that were running about my room and all over me like tame mice. And to think of the labor I expended! Suddenly, in the small hours of a November morning, I would become conscious of the silence and chill (my second winter in Cambridge seems to have been the coldest, and most prolific one). The red and blue flames wherein I had been seeing a fabled battle had sunk to the lugubrious glow of an arctic sunset among hoary firs. Still I could not force myself to go to bed, dreading not so much insomnia as the inevitable double systole, abetted by the cold of the sheets, and also the curious affection called anxietas tibiarum, a painful condition of unrest, an excruciating increase of muscular sense, which leads to a continual change in the position of one’s limbs. So I would heap on more coals and help revive the flames by spreading a sheet of the London Times over the smoking black jaws of the fireplace, thus screening completely its open recess. A humming noise would start behind the taut paper, which would acquire the smoothness of drumskin and the beauty of luminous parchment. Presently, as the hum turned into a roar, an orange-colored spot would appear in the middle of the sheet, and whatever patch of print happened to be there (for example, “The League does not command a guinea or a gun,” or “…  the revenges that Nemesis has had upon Allied hesitation and indecision in Eastern and Central Europe …”) stood out with ominous clarity—until suddenly the orange spot burst. Then the flaming sheet, with the whirr of a liberated phoenix, would fly up the chimney to join the stars. It cost one a fine of twelve shillings if that firebird was observed.

The literary set, Nesbit and his friends, while commending my nocturnal labors, frowned upon various other things I went in for, such as entomology, practical jokes, girls, and, especially, athletics. Of the games I played at Cambridge, soccer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period. I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender. Photographers, reverently bending one knee, snap him in the act of making a spectacular dive across the goal mouth to deflect with his fingertips a low, lightning-like shot, and the stadium roars in approval as he remains for a moment or two lying full length where he fell, his goal still intact.