Mr. Eliot and Wystan, from As I Walked Down New Grub Street, by Walter Allen (1981)

I have always thought of him as Mr. Eliot. When I went to London I ran into people who referred to him as Tom Eliot: I soon realised this did not always mean that they had met him. I saw him many times, so often indeed that it seemed to me that ifyou had your being in central London you could not not see him, for he was part of it. I sat opposite him in tube trains. I saw him in theatres, I stood behind him in a queue to buy stamps at Holborn Post Office, I saw him in restaurants in Soho, I recall I was once in the lift with him at Notting Hill underground station. In 1938 and 1939 I went on occasion at lunchtime to a pub called The Friend at Hand behind Russell Square tube station for the express purpose of seeing Mr Eliot come into the saloon bar, carrying his rolled umbrella and wearing his gent’s city clothes and black trilby hat. Without speaking a word to anyone, he would drink his double whisky before going to his lunch engagement.

Towards the end of the Fifties, at a late-night party at the Savoy Hotel I saw him dancing with his young wife. And soon after this I met him. He invited me to have tea with him in his office at Faber’s, for I was thinking of writing a book on Wyndham Lewis, who had recently died. He was very cordial and gracious. He had known Lewis from the time he first arrived in England, and Lewis had told me with some pride that Mr. Eliot went round to his flat every Thursday evening to read to him, for these were the years of Lewis’s blindness. 1 was after information. Mr. Eliot was an amiable sphinx. “You know,” he said, “I never felt I really knew Lewis.” That was all he would vouchsafe. It was a wonderfully baffling meeting.

In his memoir, As I Walked Down New Grub Street (1981), English novelist and critic Walter Allen offers a set of recollections that is perhaps a little closer to popcorn than steak in terms of substance. Not that Allen was not a solid and serious writer. Raised in a lower middle class household in Birmingham, his roots were more in the factories and mines than in the quads or cricket fields. Unable to win an Oxford scholarship, he had to settle for one to his hometown university, and forever after chafed against the innate bias in favor of Oxbridge held by much of the English literary establishment of his time.

Graduating in the midst of the Depression, Allen fought against the tide and insisted in making his way as a working writer. Although he eventually took academic jobs to keep from starving, but the time of the Second World War, he had made it to London. There, as a long-time member of the staff of The New Statesman as well as a novelist in his own right, he came to know many of the best writers of his generation, including L. P. Hartley, Joyce Cary, and Graham Greene. Greene was the best-known of them, and Allen was at first a bit of an imitator. He was fascinated by Greene’s exotic travels and his obsession with sin–although Malcolm Muggeridge once cautioned Allen, “Where Graham is, sin stops.”

He also made friends with a loose set of writers that is sometimes referred to as the Birmingham Group. Although Allen was the stand-out survivor of the lot, the best known of the group was his close friend, the novelist John Hampson, author of Saturday Night at the Greyhound. Hampson introduced him to W. H. Auden, whom Allen came to know as Wystan. Allen recounts how Auden contrived to get Hampson married:

He had married Erika, Thomas Mann’s daughter, in order to provide her with a British passport. It somehow seemed typical of him that the woman he had done this service for should have been the daughter of the most illustrious of living novelists. He persuaded John, who was homosexual, that he should marry Erika Mann’s friend Therese Giehse, an actress and a very fine one, later associated with Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble and at this time running an anti-Nazi cabaret in Zurich for which Auden wrote some satirical sketches. Hampson asked me what I thought of Wystan’s suggestion. He was obviously wistfully attracted by its romantic appeal. I suppose I said all the conventional things; I advised caution; later, he might discover he wasn’t homosexual, fall in love with a woman and want to marry in a real sense. Now I see my advice as comic: Hampson was ten years older than I and knew incomparably more of life. He listened to me and said: “Wystan says, ‘What are buggers for?'” I knew I was defeated. Put in that form, Auden’s appeal, I realised, was irresistible.

Following the civil ceremony near Victoria Station, the wedding party retired to a nearby pub:

Well, John and Therese were married in the eyes of Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary, if not in God’s. Wystan chivvied us down the stairs. In the street he said: “We all need a drink”and led the way to a large mock-Tudor pub on the other side of the High Street. We seated ourselves in an empty lounge. The barmaid came, and “Large brandies all round,” Wystan ordered. When she brought them, “Is there a piano here?” he demanded. “Yes, sir,” she said, “but you can’t play it.” This made Wystan very indignant. “Who is to stop me?” he wanted to know. The girl answered: “It’s Mr.____. He’s dead. He’s in there.” She pointed to the billiard room. Led by Auden, we rose and went into the billiard room. There was a coffin on the billiard table. An occasion when Wystan was not allowed to play Hymns Ancient and Modern.

As I Walked Down New Grub Street, by Walter Allen
William Heinemann Ltd., 1981