As Cummings used to say in New York a little later: If you’re going to get drunk it’s safer to wear a dress suit.

My attitude was somewhat different. Literary invention could never be made really reputable. A writer who took his trade seriously would be sure to get more kicks than ha’pence. He would be lucky if he stayed out of jail. In my revulsion against wartime stupidities, as a priest takes a vow of celibacy, I had taken a private vow of allegiance to an imaginary humanist republic which to me represented the struggle for life against the back drag of death and stagnation. Figures like Giordano Bruno, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne presided over my republic of letters. Among its latter day saints I classed Shelley, Stendhal, Flaubert, possibly Walt Whitman and Rimbaud.