No More Learning

Sell him a
copy of Women in Love. How it would disappoint him!

But no! The Welsh solicitor had funked it. He tucked his umbrella under his ann and
moved off with righteously turned backside. But doubtless tonight, when darkness hid his
blushes, he’d slink into one of the rubber-shops and buy High Jinks in a Parisian
Convent, by Sadie Blackeyes.

Gordon turned away from the door and back to the book-shelves. In the shelves to your
left as you came out of the library the new and nearly-new books were kept — a patch of
bright colour that was meant to catch the eye of anyone glancing through the glass door.
Their sleek unspotted backs seemed to yearn at you from the shelves. ‘Buy me, buy me! ’
they seemed to be saying. Novels fresh from the press — still unravished brides, pining for
the paperknife to deflower them — and review copies, like youthful widows, blooming
still though virgin no longer, and here and there, in sets of half a dozen, those pathetic
spinster-things, ‘remainders’, still guarding hopefully their long preserv’d virginity.
Gordon turned his eyes away from the ‘remainders’. They called up evil memories. The
single wretched little book that he himself had published, two years ago, had sold exactly
a hundred and fifty-three copies and then been ‘remaindered’; and even as a ‘remainder’
it hadn’t sold. He passed the new books by and paused in front of the shelves which ran
at right angles to them and which contained more second-hand books.

Over to the right were shelves of poetry. Those in front of him were prose, a
miscellaneous lot. Upwards and downwards they were graded, from clean and expensive
at eye-level to cheap and dingy at top and bottom. In all book-shops there goes on a



savage Darwinian struggle in which the works of living men gravitate to eye-level and
the works of dead men go up or down — down to Gehenna or up to the throne, but always
away from any position where they will be noticed. Down in the bottom shelves the
‘classics’, the extinct monsters of the Victorian age, were quietly rotting. Scott, Carlyle,
Meredith, Ruskin, Pater, Stevenson — you could hardly read the names upon their broad
dowdy backs. In the top shelves, almost out of sight, slept the pudgy biographies of
dukes. Below those, saleable still and therefore placed within reach, was ‘religious’
literature — all sects and all creeds, lumped indiscriminately together. The World Beyond,
by the author of Spirit Hands Have Touched me. Dean Farrar’s Life of Christ. Jesus the
First Rotarian. Father Hilaire Chestnut’s latest book of R. C. propaganda. Religion
always sells provided it is soppy enough. Below, exactly at eye-level, was the
contemporary stuff. Priestley’s latest. Dinky little books of reprinted ‘middles’. Cheer-up
‘humour’ from Herbert and Knox and Milne. Some highbrow stuff as well. A novel or
two by Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. Smart pseudo-Strachey predigested biographies.
Snooty, refined books on safe painters and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts
who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary
reviews.

Dull-eyed, he gazed at the wall of books. He hated the whole lot of them, old and new,
highbrow and lowbrow, snooty and chirpy. The mere sight of them brought home to him
his own sterility. For here was he, supposedly a ‘writer’, and he couldn’t even ‘write’! It
wasn’t merely a question of not getting published; it was that he produced nothing, or
next to nothing. And all that tripe cluttering the shelves — well, at any rate it existed; it
was an achievement of sorts. Even the Dells and Deepings do at least turn out their yearly
acre of print. But it was the snooty ‘cultured’ kind of books that he hated the worst.
Books of criticism and belles-lettres. The kind of thing that those moneyed young beasts
from Cambridge write almost in their sleep — and that Gordon himself might have written
if he had had a little more money. Money and culture! In a country like England you can
no more be cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club. With the same
instinct that makes a child waggle a loose tooth, he took out a snooty-looking volume —
Some Aspects of the Italian Baroque — opened it, read a paragraph, and shoved it back
with mingled loathing and envy. That devastating omniscience! That noxious, horn-
spectacled refinement! And the money that such refinement means! For after all, what is
there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for



influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money
writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money,
only money.

He jingled the coins in his pocket. He was nearly thirty and had accomplished nothing;
only his miserable book of poems that had fallen flatter than any pancake. And ever
since, for two whole years, he had been struggling in the labyrinth of a dreadful book that
never got any further, and which, as he knew in his moments of clarity, never would get
any further. It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the
power to ‘write’. He clung to that as to an article of faith. Money, money, all is money!
Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? Invention,
energy, wit, style, charm — they’ve all got to be paid for in hard cash.

Nevertheless, as he looked along the shelves he felt himself a little comforted. So many
of the books were faded and unreadable. After all, we’re all in the same boat. Memento
mori. For you and for me and for the snooty young men from Cambridge, the same
oblivion waits — though doubtless it’ll wait rather longer for those snooty young men
from Cambridge. He looked at the time-dulled ‘classics’ near his feet. Dead, all dead.
Carlyle and Ruskin and Meredith and Stevenson — all are dead, God rot them. He glanced
over their faded titles. Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ha, ha! That’s good.
Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson! Its top edge was black with dust. Dust thou
art, to dust returnest. Gordon kicked Stevenson’s buckram backside. Art there, old false-
penny? You’re cold meat, if ever Scotchman was.

Ping! The shop bell. Gordon turned round. Two customers, for the library.

A dejected, round-shouldered, lower-class woman, looking like a draggled duck nosing
among garbage, seeped in, fumbling with a rush basket. In her wake hopped a plump
little sparrow of a woman, red-cheeked, middle-middle class, carrying under her arm a
copy of The Forsyte Saga — title outwards, so that passers-by could spot her for a high-
brow.

Gordon had taken off his sour expression. He greeted them with the homey, family-
doctor geniality reserved for library-subscribers.



‘Good afternoon, Mrs Weaver. Good afternoon, Mrs Penn. What terrible weather! ’


‘Shocking! ’ said Mrs Penn.

He stood aside to let them pass. Mrs Weaver upset her rush basket and spilled on to the
floor a much-thumbed copy of Ethel M. Dell’s Silver Wedding. Mrs Penn’s bright bird-
eye lighted upon it. Behind Mrs Weaver’s back she smiled up to Gordon, archly, as
highbrow to highbrow. Dell! The lowness of it! The books these lower classes read!
Understandingly, he smiled back. They passed into the library, highbrow to highbrow
smiling.

Mrs Penn laid The Forsyte Saga on the table and turned her sparrow-bosom upon
Gordon. She was always very affable to Gordon. She addressed him as Mister Comstock,
shopwalker though he was, and held literary conversations with him. There was the free-
masonry of highbrows between them.

‘I hope you enjoyed The Forsyte Saga, Mrs Penn? ’

‘What a perfectly MARVEFFOUS achievement that book is, Mr Comstock! Do you
know that that makes the fourth time I’ve read it? An epic, a real epic! ’

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in
alphabetical order.

‘I don’t know what to ‘ave this week, that I don’t,’ she mumbled through untidy lips. ‘My
daughter she keeps on at me to ‘ave a try at Deeping. She’s great on Deeping, my
daughter is. But my son-in-law, now, ‘e’s more for Burroughs. I don’t know, I’m sure. ’

A spasm passed over Mrs Penn’s face at the mention of Burroughs. She turned her back
markedly on Mrs Weaver.

‘What I feel, Mr Comstock, is that there’s something so BIG about Galsworthy. He’s so
broad, so universal, and yet at the same time so thoroughly English in spirit, so HUMAN.
His books are real HUMAN documents. ’



‘And Priestley, too,’ said Gordon. ‘I think Priestley’s such an awfully fine writer, don’t
you? ’

‘Oh, he is! So big, so broad, so human! And so essentially English! ’

Mrs Weaver pursed her lips. Behind them were three isolated yellow teeth.

‘I think p’raps I can do better’n ‘ave another Dell,’ she said. ‘You ‘ave got some more
Dells, ‘aven’t you? I DO enjoy a good read of Dell, I must say. I says to my daughter, I
says, “You can keep your Deepings and your Burroughses. Give me Dell,” I says. ’

Ding Dong Dell! Dukes and dogwhips! Mrs Penn’s eye signalled highbrow irony.
Gordon returned her signal. Keep in with Mrs Penn! A good, steady customer.

‘Oh, certainly, Mrs Weaver. We’ve got a whole shelf by Ethel M. Dell. Would you like
The Desire of his Life? Or perhaps you’ve read that. Then what about The Alter of
Honour? ’

‘I wonder whether you have Hugh Walpole’s latest book? ’ said Mrs Penn. ‘I feel in the
mood this week for something epic, something BIG. Now Walpole, you know, I consider
a really GREAT writer, I put him second only to Galsworthy. There’s something so BIG
about him. And yet he’s so human with it. ’

‘And so essentially English,’ said Gordon.

‘Oh, of course! So essentially English! ’

‘I b’lieve I’ll jest ‘ave The Way of an Eagle over again,’ said Mrs Weaver finally. ‘You
don’t never seem to get tired of The Way of an Eagle, do you, now? ’

‘It’s certainly astonishingly popular,’ said Gordon, diplomatically, his eye on Mrs Penn.

‘Oh, asTONishingly! ’ echoed Mrs Penn, ironically, her eye on Gordon.

He took their twopences and sent them happy away, Mrs Penn with Walpole’s Rogue
Herries and Mrs Weaver with The Way of an Eagle.



Soon he had wandered back to the other room and towards the shelves of poetry. A
melancholy fascination, those shelves had for him. His own wretched book was there —
skied, of course, high up among the unsaleable. Mice, by Gordon Comstock; a sneaky
little foolscap octavo, price three and sixpence but now reduced to a bob. Of the thirteen
B. F. s who had reviewed it (and The Times Lit. Supp. had declared that it showed
‘exceptional promise’) not one had seen the none too subtle joke of that title. And in the
two years he had been at McKechnie’s bookshop, not a single customer, not a single one,
had ever taken Mice out of its shelf.

There were fifteen or twenty shelves of poetry. Gordon regarded them sourly. Dud stuff,
for the most part. A little above eye-level, already on their way to heaven and oblivion,
were the poets of yesteryear, the stars of his earlier youth. Yeats, Davies, Housman,
Thomas, De la Mare, Hardy. Dead stars. Below them, exactly at eye-level, were the
squibs of the passing minute. Eliot, Pound, Auden, Campbell, Day Lewis, Spender. Very
damp squibs, that lot. Dead stars above, damp squibs below. Shall we ever again get a
writer worth reading? But Lawrence was all right, and Joyce even better before he went
off his coconut. And if we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we
saw him, so choked as we are with trash?

Ping! Shop bell. Gordon turned. Another customer.

A youth of twenty, cherry-lipped, with gilded hair, tripped Nancifully in. Moneyed,
obviously. He had the golden aura of money. He had been in the shop before. Gordon
assumed the gentlemanly-servile mien reserved for new customers. He repeated the usual
formula:

‘Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you?
Are you looking for any particular book? ’

‘Oh, no, not weally. ’ An R-less Nancy voice. ‘May I just BWOWSE? I simply couldn’t
wesist your fwont window. I have such a tewwible weakness for bookshops! So I just
floated in — tee-hee! ’


Float out again, then, Nancy. Gordon smiled a cultured smile, as booklover to booklover.



‘Oh, please do. We like people to look round. Are you interested in poetry, by any
chance? ’

‘Oh, of course! I ADORE poetwy! ’

Of course! Mangy little snob. There was a sub-artistic look about his clothes. Gordon slid
a ‘slim’ red volume from the poetry shelves.

‘These are just out. They might interest you, perhaps. They’re translations — something
rather out of the common. Translations from the Bulgarian. ’

Very subtle, that. Now leave him to himself. That’s the proper way with customers. Don’t
hustle them; let them browse for twenty minutes or so; then they get ashamed and buy
something. Gordon moved to the door, discreetly, keeping out of Nancy’s way; yet
casually, one hand in his pocket, with the insouciant air proper to a gentleman.

Outside, the slimy street looked grey and drear. From somewhere round the corner came
the clatter of hooves, a cold hollow sound. Caught by the wind, the dark columns of
smoke from the chimneys veered over and rolled flatly down the sloping roofs. Ah!

Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward tumty tumty (something like ‘murky’) air.

Good. But the impulse faded. His eye fell again upon the ad-posters across the street.

He almost wanted to laugh at them, they were so feeble, so dead-alive, so unappetizing.
As though anybody could be tempted by THOSE! Like succubi with pimply backsides.
But they depressed him all the same. The money-stink, everywhere the money-stink. He
stole a glance at the Nancy, who had drifted away from the poetry shelves and taken out a
large expensive book on the Russian ballet. He was holding it delicately between his pink
non-prehensile paws, as a squirrel holds a nut, studying the photographs. Gordon knew
his type. The moneyed ‘artistic’ young man. Not an artist himself, exactly, but a hanger-
on of the arts; frequenter of studios, retailer of scandal. A nice-looking boy, though, for
all his Nancitude. The skin at the back of his neck was as silky-smooth as the inside of a
shell. You can’t have a skin like that under five hundred a year. A sort of chann he had, a
glamour, like all moneyed people. Money and charm; who shall separate them?



Gordon thought of Ravelston, his charming, rich friend, editor of Antichrist, of whom he
was extravagantly fond, and whom he did not see so often as once in a fortnight; and of
Rosemary, his girl, who loved him — adored him, so she said — and who, all the same, had
never slept with him. Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be
purchased with money. If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t
love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how
right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven’t money, I DON’T speak with the
tongues of men and of angels.

He looked again at the ad-posters. He really hated them this time. That Vitamalt one, for
instance! ‘Hike all day on a slab of Vitamalt! ’ A youthful couple, boy and girl, in clean-
minded hiking kit, their hair picturesquely tousled by the wind, climbing a stile against a
Sussex landscape. That girl’s face! The awful bright tomboy cheeriness of it! The kind of
girl who goes in for Plenty of Clean Fun. Windswept. Tight khaki shorts but that doesn’t
mean you can pinch her backside. And next to them — Comer Table. ‘Comer Table
enjoys his meal with Bovex’. Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred.
The idiotic grinning face, like the face of a self-satisfied rat, the slick black hair, the silly
spectacles. Corner Table, heir of the ages; victor of Waterloo, Corner Table, Modern man
as his master want him to be. A docile little porker, sitting in the money-sty, drinking
Bovex.

Faces passed, wind-yellowed. A tram boomed across the square, and the clock over the
Prince of Wales stmck three. A couple of old creatures, a tramp or a beggar and his wife,
in long greasy overcoats that reached almost to the ground, were shuffling towards the
shop. Book-pinchers, by the look of them. Better keep an eye on the boxes outside. The
old man halted on the kerb a few yards away while his wife came to the door. She pushed
it open and looked up at Gordon, between grey strings of hair, with a sort of hopeful
malevolence.

‘Ju buy books? ’ she demanded hoarsely.

‘Sometimes. It depends what books they are. ’


‘I gossome LOVELY books ‘ere. ’



She came in, shutting the door with a clang. The Nancy glanced over his shoulder
distastefully and moved a step or two away, into the corner. The old woman had
produced a greasy little sack from under her overcoat. She moved confidentially nearer to
Gordon. She smelt of very, very old breadcrusts.

‘Will you ‘ave ‘em? ’ she said, clasping the neck of the sack. ‘Only ‘alf a crown the lot. ’
‘What are they? Let me see them, please. ’

‘LOVELY books, they are,’ she breathed, bending over to open the sack and emitting a
sudden very powerful whiff of breadcrusts.

“Ere! ’ she said, and thrust an armful of filthy-looking books almost into Gordon’s face.

They were an 1884 edition of Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels, and had the appearance of
having been slept on for many years. Gordon stepped back, suddenly revolted.

‘We can’t possibly buy those,’ he said shortly.

‘Can’t buy ‘em? WHY can’t yer buy ‘em? ’

‘Because they’re no use to us. We can’t sell that kind of thing. ’

‘Wotcher make me take ‘em out o’ me bag for, then? ’ demanded the old woman
ferociously.

Gordon made a detour round her, to avoid the smell, and held the door open, silently. No
use arguing. You had people of this type coming into the shop all day long. The old
woman made off, mumbling, with malevolence in the hump of her shoulders, and joined
her husband. He paused on the kerb to cough, so fruitily that you could hear him through
the door. A clot of phlegm, like a little white tongue, came slowly out between his lips
and was ejected into the gutter. Then the two old creatures shuffled away, beetle-like in
the long greasy overcoats that hid everything except their feet.



Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products. The throw-outs of the money-god.
All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description; creeping
like unclean beetles to the grave.

He gazed out at the graceless street. At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like
this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable. The
sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time, was strong upon him.
Somehow it was mixed up with the ad-posters opposite. He looked now with more seeing
eyes at those grinning yard-wide faces. After all, there was more there than mere
silliness, greed, and vulgarity. Comer Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a
flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of
doom. For can you not see, if you know how to look, that behind that slick self-
satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a
secret despair? The great death-wish of the modern world. Suicide pacts. Heads stuck in
gas-ovens in lonely maisonettes. French letters and Amen Pills. And the reverberations of
future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep threatening hum of the
propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs. It is all written in Corner Table’s face.

More customers coming. Gordon stood back, gentlemanly-servile.

The door-bell clanged. Two upper-middle-class ladies sailed noisily in. One pink and
fruity, thirty-fivish, with voluptuous bosom burgeoning from her coat of squirrel-skin,
emitting a super-feminine scent of Panna violets: the other middle-aged, tough, and
curried — India, presumably. Close behind them a dark, grubby, shy young man slipped
through the doorway as apologetically as a cat. He was one of the shop’s best
customers — a flitting, solitary creature who was almost too shy to speak and who by
some strange manipulation kept himself always a day away from a shave.

Gordon repeated his formula:

‘Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book? ’

Fruity-face overwhelmed him with a smile, but curry-face decided to treat the question as
an impertinence. Ignoring Gordon, she drew fruity-face across to the shelves next to the
new books where the dog-books and cat-books were kept. The two of them immediately



began taking books out of the shelves and talking loudly. Curry-face had the voice of a
drill-sergeant. She was no doubt a colonel’s wife, or widow. The Nancy, still deep in the
big book on the Russian ballet, edged delicately away. His face said that he would leave
the shop if his privacy were disturbed again. The shy young man had already found his
way to the poetry shelves. The two ladies were fairly frequent visitors to the shop. They
always wanted to see books about cats and dogs, but never actually bought anything.
There were two whole shelves of dog-books and cat-books. ‘Ladies’ Comer,’ old
McKechnie called it.

Another customer arrived, for the library. An ugly girl of twenty, hatless, in a white
overall, with a sallow, blithering, honest face and powerful spectacles that distorted her
eyes. She was an assistant at a chemist’s shop. Gordon put on his homey library manner.
She smiled at him, and with a gait as clumsy as a bear’s followed him into the library.

‘What kind of book would you like this time, Miss Weeks? ’

‘Well’ — she clutched the front of her overall. Her distorted, black-treacle eyes beamed
trustfully into his. ‘Well, what I’d REALLY like’s a good hot-stuff love story. You
know — something MODERN. ’

‘Something modern? Something by Barbara Bedworthy for instance? Have you read
Almost a Virgin? ’

‘Oh no, not her. She’s too Deep. I can’t bear Deep books. But I want something — well,
YOU kn ow — MODERN. Sex-problems and divorce and all that. YOU know. ’

‘Modem, but not Deep,’ said Gordon, as lowbrow to lowbrow.

He ranged among the hot-stuff modern love-stories. There were not less than three
hundred of them in the library. From the front room came the voices of the two upper-
middle-class ladies, the one fruity, the other curried, disputing about dogs. They had
taken out one of the dog-books and were examining the photographs. Fruity-voice
enthused over the photograph of a Peke, the ickle angel pet, wiv his gweat big Soulful
eyes and his ickle black nosie — oh, so ducky-duck! But curry-voice — yes, undoubtedly a
colonel’s widow — said Pekes were soppy. Give her dogs with guts — dogs that would



fight, she said; she hated these soppy lapdogs, she said. ‘You have no Soul, Bedelia, no
Soul,’ said fruity-voice plaintively. The door-bell pinged again. Gordon handed the
chemist’s girl Seven Scarlet Nights and booked it on her ticket. She took a shabby leather
purse out of her overall pocket and paid him twopence.

He went back to the front room. The Nancy had put his book back in the wrong shelf and
vanished. A lean, straight-nosed, brisk woman, with sensible clothes and gold-rimmed
pince-nez — schoolmarm possibly, feminist certainly — came in and demanded Mrs
Wharton-Beverley’s history of the suffrage movement. With secret joy Gordon told her
that they hadn’t got it. She stabbed his male incompetence with gimlet eyes and went out
again. The thin young man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D. H.
Lawrence’s Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its head buried under its
wing.

Gordon waited by the door. Outside, a shabby-genteel old man with a strawberry nose
and a khaki muffler round his throat was picking over the books in the sixpenny box. The
two upper-middle-class ladies suddenly departed, leaving a litter of open books on the
table.