The title pages read: ‘The Works of Christopher Marlowe. Volume the First (Second, Third) [wreath ornament] ‘Marlowe renown’d for his rare art and wit Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit.’ London: William Pickering, Chancery Lane; Talboys and Wheeler, Oxford; J. Combe and Son, Leicester. MDCCCXXVI.’
This birthday present introduced me to Christopher Marlowe, and for a year or more I was drunk on his plays. I read the plays in quite a careful way. In Act II, Scene II, of Tamburlaine the Great, there is a line which Pickering’s edition reads as ‘His arms and fingers long, and snowy-white’. My pencil note, slipped in, reads: ‘Sinewy is now the generally accepted emendation to snowy-white’. It would indeed be surprising if Marlowe had praised Tamburlaine for his lady-like hands.
I found my imagination stirred by all of Marlowe’s plays. I delighted in the bravura poetry of Tamburlaine the Great. I wrote to John Gielgud, asking him to put on a performance of The Jew of Malta, not realizing how anti-Semitic it was, but taken with the beauty of the verse.
I realized, of course, that The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus was Marlowe’s masterpiece. The closing scene, in which Faustus faces his death and damnation, is of Shakespearian quality.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!2
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d. Oh I’ll leap up to heav’n! – who pulls me down? See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament: One drop of blood will save me; oh, my Christ!
My imagination was so gorged with Marlowe that, when I went back to Charterhouse, I wrote two full-length tragedies in my version of Elizabethan blank verse. The plots were full of murders, and were placed in sixteenth-century Italy, about which I knew next to nothing. I remember that one of the more sinister characters was called Bagnio. These plays are lost, which I cannot regret.
Unfortunately, jaundice is a disease which produces clinical depression, and I suffered for the next two years from an adolescent depression which, though intermittent, was at times acute. I remember a degree of exhaustion which made it hard to rise from a chair, even when I was sitting in a draught. In such a depression, as many will know only too well, all pleasure, interest and zest disappear from life. At the time I had never seen television, but the effect of depression is to grey the world, as though one was turning the colour control from vivid to black and white.
The school authorities were naturally disturbed, but fortunately they were flexible. I sometimes went to class, and sometimes not. I often stayed in bed until lunchtime, and occasionally did not get up at all. Admittedly I read a lot in bed, so the time was not wholly wasted. Somehow I stumbled through School Certificate with respectable but not scholarly marks. The two matrons at Verites, Mrs Lewis and Mrs Peel-Yates, fluctuated between wondering whether I was malingering or was so seriously ill that they should no longer take responsibility for me. They were, however, very kind.
The school doctor, a healthy-minded man, was convinced that I was a malingerer who ought to be restored to ordinary school discipline. My physical symptoms, which were not extreme, centred on my sinuses. He sent me to a Harley Street ear, nose and throat specialist, Mr Gill Carey, who had the background of an international rugby player, from New Zealand, or perhaps from Australia. He was, in my life, the good physician who may have saved my sanity. He examined the X-rays and shone a torch into the back of my mouth. He saw that my sinuses were in no great disorder. I left the room; he then told my mother that I was reasonably healthy in my sinuses but tired and run down; that I was not a malingerer, but should not have any pressure put on me; that I should be permanently excused from games and the Officers’ Training Corps, but might, if I wished, play an occasional game of cricket in the summer, as I seemed to enjoy that. He wrote a letter to the school doctor to that effect.
That solved the school and the games problem, and thereafter the depression gradually abated, though it was only at Oxford, six or seven years later, that I had the last attack of it which I can remember. During the more acute phase of the depression I had suicidal ideas. I talked about suicide to my friends, including Gerald Priestland, who later became the much-admired religious correspondent of the BBC. Suicide ends the career of Somerset Lloyd Jones in Simon Raven’s Arms for Oblivion novels, a character which is loosely based on the less agreeable aspects of my schoolboy personality.
I argued with Bob Arrowsmith that both Socrates and Jesus Christ had committed suicide, because they could both have avoided their deaths; it was not his sort of argument, and it embarrassed him, though he tried to frame a reply. I never actually made any attempt at suicide, but I can remember looking at my father’s wartime pistol, and wondering how it worked. I can also remember a moment in Charterhouse chapel when I simply wished that I could be removed from an earth which I found so pointless and returned to what seemed to me a lost state of happiness. I could not understand what I was doing in this strange and ugly century, when the eighteenth century had been so much better.
Literature continued to be a great consolation. I read Edgar Allan Poe, a sinister though romantic author I cannot now stand. I also read Shakespeare, and when, in 1943, I saw Gielgud’s Hamlet, the Shakespearian melancholy – ‘Oh that this too solid flesh would melt’ – summed up my mood precisely. So did Gray’s Elegy, which I read in a state of acute depression. Gray’s elegiac depression offers a benign and calming alternative; one is still depressed, but in a nostalgic style.
Undoubtedly depression affected, and even dominated, my period at school. Nowadays it would probably have been diagnosed and I would have been put on some mood-altering pill, which might or might not have improved it. I am, however, glad to have experienced it, and even gladder that it has not so far recurred, as I rather expected it to, in later life. It gave me an understanding of the shadowy side of my own nature, and a better sympathy with the tragic condition of human life. I think it gave me somewhat more insight than I might have had into the gusty emotional weather of adolescence in others. Depression – if it is survived – is an exploration as well as a disaster.
In my worst year, from the autumn of 1942 to the summer of 1943, I was taught by a most sympathetic master, V. S. H. Russell, nicknamed ‘Sniffy’. He was not a very good teacher in his class, but he was a brilliant teacher outside the classroom. He was a man of wide learning, and sympathetic to anyone who was going through a bad time. He was the housemaster of Hodgsonites, and I used to drop round to his house after school to talk over school gossip, in which he delighted, and about literature and the progress of the war, where, of course, many of his recent pupils were fighting.
Arrowsmith and Russell were both classicists. They believed that the study of the languages of Latin and Greek provided the only sound basis of education; this belief had dominated public school and grammar school education in England since the time of Erasmus and Linacre. Up to my fifteenth birthday, I received, without the floggings which used to accompany it, the same classical education as John Locke would have had at Westminster under the great Busby, Horace Walpole would have had at Eton, or as my father had under Thomas Ethelbert Page at Charterhouse. It was more limited in scope than modern systems of education, more vigorous in its mental discipline and more intense. I am glad that I belonged to the last generation educated in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.
The grammar and public school classical teaching retained its imperial purpose when I was at school. Clifton and Charterhouse were a practical training for, among other things, governing nations and fighting wars. This faded away within a few years of the independence of India, which brought the British Empire to an end. Britain no longer needed to train boys to become colonial officials; deference to authority slipped away from the national culture and education.
By the end of my second term in the Classical Under Sixth it became clear to me that I was never going to make a classical scholar, even of the humblest kind. Nevertheless, there had to be a battle if I was to change my specialization. The classical side of Brooke Hall, which is the masters’ common room at Charterhouse, would not easily give up. Arrowsmith advised strongly against a change; Russell, as was his nature, was less dogmatic; Irvine opposed it though with decreasing confidence. My housemaster, Jasper Holmes, was a scientist, but was well