No More Learning

Already, at sixteen, he knew which side
he was on. He was AGAINST the money-god and all his swinish priesthood. He had
declared war on money; but secretly, of course.

It was when he was seventeen that his father died, leaving about two hundred pounds.
Julia had been at work for some years now. During 1918 and 1919 she had worked in a
Government office, and after that she took a course of cookery and got a job in a nasty,
ladylike little teashop near Earl’s Court Underground Station. She worked a seventy-two
hour week and was given her lunch and tea and twenty-five shillings; out of this she
contributed twelve shillings a week, often more, to the household expenses. Obviously
the best thing to do, now that Mr Comstock was dead, would have been to take Gordon
away from school, find him a job, and let Julia have the two hundred pounds to set up a
teashop of her own. But here the habitual Comstock folly about money stepped in.
Neither Julia nor her mother would hear of Gordon leaving school. With the strange
idealistic snobbishness of the middle classes, they were willing to go to the workhouse
sooner than let Gordon leave school before the statutory age of eighteen. The two
hundred pounds, or more than half of it, must be used in completing Gordon’s
‘education’. Gordon let them do it. He had declared war on money but that did not
prevent him from being damnably selfish. Of course he dreaded this business of going to
work. What boy wouldn’t dread it? Pen-pushing in some filthy office — God! His uncles
and aunts were already talking dismally about ‘getting Gordon settled in life’. They saw
everything in tenns of ‘good’ jobs. Young Smith had got such a ‘good’ job in a bank, and
young Jones had got such a ‘good’ job in an insurance office. It made him sick to hear
them. They seemed to want to see every young man in England nailed down in the coffin
of a ‘good’ job.



Meanwhile, money had got to be earned. Before her marriage Gordon’s mother had been
a music teacher, and even since then she had taken pupils, sporadically, when the family
were in lower water than usual. She now decided that she would start giving lessons
again. It was fairly easy to get pupils in the suburbs — they were living in Acton — and
with the music fees and Julia’s contribution they could probably ‘manage’ for the next
year or two. But the state of Mrs Comstock’s lungs was now something more than
‘delicate’. The doctor who had attended her husband before his death had put his
stethoscope to her chest and looked serious. He had told her to take care of herself, keep
warm, eat nourishing food, and, above all, avoid fatigue. The fidgeting, tiring job of
giving piano lessons was, of course, the worst possible thing for her. Gordon knew
nothing of this. Julia knew, however. It was a secret between the two women, carefully
kept from Gordon.

A year went by. Gordon spent it rather miserably, more and more embarrassed by his
shabby clothes and lack of pocket-money, which made girls an object of terror to him.
However, the New Age accepted one of his poems that year. Meanwhile, his mother sat
on comfortless piano stools in draughty drawing-rooms, giving lessons at two shillings an
hour. And then Gordon left school, and fat interfering Uncle Walter, who had business
connexions in a small way, came forward and said that a friend of a friend of his could
get Gordon ever such a ‘good’ job in the accounts department of a red lead firm. It was
really a splendid job — a wonderful opening for a young man. If Gordon buckled to work
in the right spirit he might be a Big Pot one of these days. Gordon’s soul squirmed.
Suddenly, as weak people do, he stiffened, and, to the horror of the whole family, refused
even to try for the job.

There were fearful rows, of course. They could not understand him. It seemed to them a
kind of blasphemy to refuse such a ‘good’ job when you got the chance of it. He kept
reiterating that he didn’t want THAT KIND of job. Then what DID he want? they all
demanded. He wanted to ‘write’, he told them sullenly. But how could he possibly make
a living by ‘writing’? they demanded again. And of course he couldn’t answer. At the
back of his mind was the idea that he could somehow live by writing poetry; but that was
too absurd even to be mentioned. But at any rate, he wasn’t going into business, into the
money-world. He would have a job, but not a ‘good’ job. None of them had the vaguest
idea what he meant. His mother wept, even Julia ‘went for’ him, and all round him there



were uncles and aunts (he still had six or seven of them left) feebly volleying and
incompetently thundering. And after three days a dreadful thing happened. In the middle
of supper his mother was seized by a violent fit of coughing, put her hand to her breast,
fell forward, and began bleeding at the mouth.

Gordon was terrified. His mother did not die, as it happened, but she looked deathly as
they carried her upstairs. Gordon rushed for the doctor. For several days his mother lay at
death’s door. It was the draughty drawing-rooms and the trudging to and fro in all
weathers that had done it. Gordon hung helplessly about the house, a dreadful feeling of
guilt mingling with his misery. He did not exactly know but he half divined, that his
mother had killed herself in order to pay his school fees. After this he could not go on
opposing her any longer. He went to Uncle Walter and told him that he would take that
job in the red lead firm, if they would give it him. So Uncle Walter spoke to his friend,
and the friend spoke to his friend, and Gordon was sent for and interviewed by an old
gentleman with badly fitting false teeth, and finally was given a job, on probation. He
started on twenty-five bob a week. And with this firm he remained six years.

They moved away from Acton and took a flat in a desolate red block of flats somewhere
in the Paddington district. Mrs Comstock had brought her piano, and when she had got
some of her strength back she gave occasional lessons. Gordon’s wages were gradually
raised, and the three of them ‘managed’, more or less. It was Julia and Mrs Comstock
who did most of the ‘managing’. Gordon still had a boy’s selfishness about money. At
the office he got on not absolutely badly. It was said of him that he was worth his wages
but wasn’t the type that Makes Good. In a way the utter contempt that he had for his
work made things easier for him. He could put up with this meaningless office-life,
because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. Somehow, sometime, God
knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his
‘writing’. Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by ‘writing’; and
you’d feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a ‘writer’, would you not? The
types he saw all round him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That was what it
meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a
villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical little bowler-hatted sneak — Strube’s Tittle
man’ — the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and
stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the B. B. C. Symphony Concert, and



then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife ‘feels in the mood’! What a fate!
No, it isn’t like that that one was meant to live. One’s got to get right out of it, out of the
money-stink. It was a kind of plot that he was nursing. He was as though dedicated to this
war against money. But it was still a secret. The people at the office never suspected him
of unorthodox ideas. They never even found out that he wrote poetry — not that there was
much to find out, for in six years he had less than twenty poems printed in the magazines.
To look at, he was just the same as any other City clerk — just a soldier in the strap-
hanging army that sways eastward at morning, westward at night in the carriages of the
Underground.

He was twenty-four when his mother died. The family was breaking up. Only four of the
older generation of Comstocks were left now — Aunt Angela, Aunt Charlotte, Uncle
Walter, and another uncle who died a year later. Gordon and Julia gave up the flat.
Gordon took a furnished room in Doughty Street (he felt vaguely literary, living in
Bloomsbury), and Julia moved to Earl’s Court, to be near the shop. Julia was nearly thirty
now, and looked much older. She was thinner than ever, though healthy enough, and
there was grey in her hair. She still worked twelve hours a day, and in six years her wages
had only risen by ten shillings a week. The horribly ladylike lady who kept the teashop
was a semi-friend as well as an employer, and thus could sweat and bully Julia to the tune
of ‘dearest’ and ‘darling’. Four months after his mother’s death Gordon suddenly walked
out of his job. He gave the firm no reasons. They imagined that he was going to ‘better
himself, and — luckily, as it turned out — gave him quite good references. He had not
even thought of looking for another job. He wanted to bum his boats. From now on he
would breathe free air, free of the money-stink. He had not consciously waited for his
mother to die before doing this; still, it was his mother’s death that had nerved him to it.

Of course there was another and more desolating row in what was left of the family. They
thought Gordon must have gone mad. Over and over again he tried, quite vainly, to
explain to them why he would not yield himself to the servitude of a ‘good’ job. ‘But
what are you going to live on? What are you going to live on? ’ was what they all wailed
at him. He refused to think seriously about it. Of course, he still harboured the notion that
he could make a living of sorts by ‘writing’. By this time he had got to know Ravelston,
editor of Antichrist, and Ravelston, besides printing his poems, managed to get him
books to review occasionally. His literary prospects were not so bleak as they had been



six years ago. But still, it was not the desire to ‘write’ that was his real motive. To get out
of the money-world — that was what he wanted. Vaguely he looked forward to some kind
of moneyless, anchorite existence. He had a feeling that if you genuinely despise money
you can keep going somehow, like the birds of the air. He forgot that the birds of the air
don’t pay room-rent. The poet starving in a garret — but starving, somehow, not
uncomfortably — that was his vision of himself.

The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He
learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’
when you are half starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs when
you owe three weeks’ rent and your landlady is listening for you. Moreover, in those
seven months he wrote practically nothing. The first effect of poverty is that it kills
thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from
money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money
until you have enough of it to live on — a ‘competence’, as the beastly middle-class
phrase goes. Finally he was turned out of his room, after a vulgar row. He was three days
and four nights in the street. It was bloody. Three mornings, on the advice of another man
he met on the Embankment, he spent in Billingsgate, helping to shove fish-barrows up
the twisty little hills from Billingsgate into Eastcheap. ‘Twopence an up’ was what you
got, and the work knocked hell out of your thigh muscles. There were crowds of people
on the same job, and you had to wait your turn; you were lucky if you made eighteen-
pence between four in the morning and nine. After three days of it Gordon gave up. What
was the use? He was beaten. There was nothing for it but to go back to his family, borrow
some money, and find another job.

But now, of course, there was no job to be had. For months he lived by cadging on the
family. Julia kept him going till the last penny of her tiny savings was gone. It was
abominable. Here was the outcome of all his fine attitudes! He had renounced ambition,
made war on money, and all it led to was cadging from his sister! And Julia, he knew, felt
his failure far more than she felt the loss of her savings. She had had such hopes of
Gordon. He alone of all the Comstocks had had it in him to ‘succeed’. Even now she
believed that somehow, some day, he was going to retrieve the family fortunes. He was
so ‘clever’ — surely he could make money if he tried! For two whole months Gordon
stayed with Aunt Angela in her little house at Highgate — poor, faded, mummified Aunt



Angela, who even for herself had barely enough to eat. All this time he searched
desperately for work. Uncle Walter could not help him. His influence in the business
world, never large, was now practically nil. At last, however, in a quite unexpected way,
the luck turned. A friend of a friend of Julia’s employer’s brother managed to get Gordon
a job in the accounts department of the New Albion Publicity Company.

The New Albion was one of those publicity firms which have sprung up everywhere
since the War — the fungi, as you might say, that sprout from a decaying capitalism. It
was a smallish rising firm and took every class of publicity it could get. It designed a
certain number of large-scale posters for oatmeal stout, self-raising flour, and so forth,
but its main line was millinery and cosmetic advertisements in the women’s illustrated
papers, besides minor ads in twopenny weeklies, such as Whiterose Pills for Female
Disorders, Your Horoscope Cast by Professor Raratongo, The Seven Secrets of Venus,
New Hope for the Ruptured, Earn Five Pounds a Week in your Spare Time, and Cyprolax
Hair Lotion Banishes all Unpleasant Intruders. There was a large staff of commercial
artists, of course. It was here that Gordon first made the acquaintance of Rosemary. She
was in the ‘studio’ and helped to design fashion plates. It was a long time before he
actually spoke to her. At first he knew her merely as a remote personage, small, dark,
with swift movements, distinctly attractive but rather intimidating. When they passed one
another in the corridors she eyed him ironically, as though she knew all about him and
considered him a bit of a joke; nevertheless she seemed to look at him a little oftener than
was necessary. He had nothing to do with her side of the business. He was in the accounts
department, a mere clerk on three quid a week.

The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in
spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that
publicity — advertising — is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. In the red
lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial honour and usefulness.
But such things would have been laughed at in the New Albion. Most of the employees
were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is
sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine;
advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism
there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god. Gordon studied them
unobtrusively. As before, he did his work passably well and his fellow-employees looked



down on him. Nothing had changed in his inner mind. He still despised and repudiated
the money-code. Somehow, sooner or later, he was going to escape from it; even now,
after his first fiasco, he still plotted to escape. He was IN the money world, but not OF it.
As for the types about him, the little bowler-hatted worms who never turned, and the go-
getters, the American business-college gutter-crawlers, they rather amused him than not.
He liked studying their slavish keep-your-job mentality. He was the chiel amang them
takin’ notes.

One day a curious thing happened. Somebody chanced to see a poem of Gordon’s in a
magazine, and put it about that they ‘had a poet in the office’. Of course Gordon was
laughed at, not ill-naturedly, by the other clerks. They nicknamed him ‘the bard’ from
that day forth. But though amused, they were also faintly contemptuous. It confirmed all
their ideas about Gordon. A fellow who wrote poetry wasn’t exactly the type to Make
Good.
But the thing had an unexpected sequel. About the time when the clerks grew tired
of chaffing Gordon, Mr Erskine, the managing director, who had hitherto taken only the
minimum notice of him, sent for him and interviewed him.

Mr Erskine was a large, slow-moving man with a broad, healthy, expressionless face.
From his appearance and the slowness of his speech you would have guessed with
confidence that he had something to do with either agriculture or cattle-breeding. His wits
were as slow as his movements, and he was the kind of man who never hears of anything
until everybody else has stopped talking about it. How such a man came to be in charge
of an advertising agency, only the strange gods of capitalism know. But he was quite a
likeable person. He had not that sniffish, buttoned-up spirit that usually goes with an
ability to make money. And in a way his fat-wittedness stood him in good stead. Being
insensible to popular prejudice, he could assess people on their merits; consequently, he
was rather good at choosing talented employees. The news that Gordon had written
poems, so far from shocking him, vaguely impressed him. They wanted literary talents in
the New Albion. Having sent for Gordon, he studied him in a somnolent, sidelong way
and asked him a number of inconclusive questions. He never listened to Gordon’s
answers, but punctuated his questions with a noise that sounded like ‘Hm, hm, hm. ’
Wrote poetry, did he? Oh yes? Hm. And had it printed in the papers? Hm, hm. Suppose
they paid you for that kind of thing? Not much, eh? No, suppose not. Hm, hm. Poetry?



Hm. A bit difficult, that must be. Getting the lines the same length, and all that. Hm, hm.
Write anything else? Stories, and so forth? Hm. Oh yes? Very interesting. Hm!

Then, without further questions, he promoted Gordon to a special post as secretary — in
effect, apprentice — to Mr Clew, the New Albion’s head copywriter. Like every other
advertising agency, the New Albion was constantly in search of copywriters with a touch
of imagination. It is a curious fact, but it is much easier to find competent draughtsmen
than to find people who can think of slogans like ‘Q. T. Sauce keeps Hubby Smiling’ and
‘Kiddies clamour for their Breakfast Crisps’. Gordon’s wages were not raised for the
moment, but the firm had their eye on him. With luck he might be a full-fledged
copywriter in a year’s time. It was an unmistakable chance to Make Good.

For six months he was working with Mr Clew. Mr Clew was a harassed man of about
forty, with wiry hair into which he often plunged his fingers. He worked in a stuffy little
office whose walls were entirely papered with his past triumphs in the form of posters.
He took Gordon under his wing in a friendly way, showed him the ropes, and was even
ready to listen to his suggestions. At that time they were working on a line of magazine
ads for April Dew, the great new deodorant which the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites
Co. (this was Flaxman’s firm, curiously enough) were putting on the market. Gordon
started on the job with secret loathing. But now there was a quite unexpected
development. It was that Gordon showed, almost from the start, a remarkable talent for
copywriting. He could compose an ad as though he had been born to it. The vivid phrase
that sticks and rankles, the neat little para, that packs a world of lies into a hundred
words — they came to him almost unsought. He had always had a gift for words, but this
was the first time he had used it successfully. Mr Clew thought him very promising.
Gordon watched his own development, first with surprise, then with amusement, and
finally with a kind of horror. THIS, then, was what he was coming to! Writing lies to
tickle the money out of fools’ pockets! There was a beastly irony, too, in the fact that he,
who wanted to be a ‘writer’, should score his sole success in writing ads for deodorants.
However, that was less unusual than he imagined. Most copywriters, they say, are
novelists manques; or is it the other way about?

The Queen of Sheba were very pleased with their ads. Mr Erskine also was pleased.
Gordon’s wages were raised by ten shillings a week. And it was now that Gordon grew



frightened. Money was getting him after all. He was sliding down, down, into the money-
sty. A little more and he would be stuck in it for life. It is queer how these things happen.
You set your face against success, you swear never to Make Good — you honestly believe
that you couldn’t Make Good even if you wanted to; and then something happens along,
some mere chance, and you find yourself Making Good almost automatically. He saw
that now or never was the time to escape. He had got to get out of it — out of the money-
world, irrevocably, before he was too far involved.

But this time he wasn’t going to be starved into submission. He went to Ravelston and
asked his help. He told him that he wanted some kind of job; not a ‘good’ job, but a job
that would keep his body without wholly buying his soul. Ravelston understood perfectly.
The distinction between a job and a ‘good’ job did not have to be explained to him; nor
did he point out to Gordon the folly of what he was doing. That was the great thing about
Ravelston. He could always see another person’s point of view. It was having money that
did it, no doubt; for the rich can afford to be intelligent. Moreover, being rich himself, he
could find jobs for other people. After only a fortnight he told Gordon of something that
might suit him. A Mr McKechnie, a rather dilapidated second-hand bookseller with
whom Ravelston dealt occasionally, was looking for an assistant. He did not want a
trained assistant who would expect full wages; he wanted somebody who looked like a
gentleman and could talk about books — somebody to impress the more bookish
customers. It was the very reverse of a ‘good’ job. The hours were long, the pay was
wretched — two pounds a week — and there was no chance of advancement. It was a blind-
alley job. And, of course, a blind-alley job was the very thing Gordon was looking for.
He went and saw Mr McKechnie, a sleepy, benign old Scotchman with a red nose and a
white beard stained by snuff, and was taken on without demur. At this time, too, his
volume of poems, Mice, was going to press. The seventh publisher to whom he had sent
it had accepted it. Gordon did not know that this was Ravelston’ s doing. Ravelston was a
personal friend of the publisher. He was always arranging this kind of thing, stealthily,
for obscure poets. Gordon thought the future was opening before him. He was a made
man — or, by Smilesian, aspidistral standards, UNmade.

He gave a month’s notice at the office. It was a painful business altogether. Julia, of
course, was more distressed than ever at this second abandonment of a ‘good’ job. By
this time Gordon had got to know Rosemary. She did not try to prevent him from



throwing up his job. It was against her code to interfere — ‘You’ve got to live your own
life,’ was always her attitude. But she did not in the least understand why he was doing it.
The thing that most upset him, curiously enough, was his interview with Mr Erskine. Mr
Erskine was genuinely kind. He did not want Gordon to leave the firm, and said so
frankly. With a sort of elephantine politeness he refrained from calling Gordon a young
fool. He did, however, ask him why he was leaving. Somehow, Gordon could not bring
himself to avoid answering or to say — the only thing Mr Erskine would have
understood — that he was going after a better-paid job. He blurted out shamefacedly that
he ‘didn’t think business suited him’ and that he ‘wanted to go in for writing’. Mr Erskine
was noncommittal. Writing, eh? Hm. Much money in that sort of thing nowadays? Not
much, eh? Hm. No, suppose not. Hm. Gordon, feeling and looking ridiculous, mumbled
that he had ‘got a book just coming out’. A book of poems, he added with difficulty in
pronouncing the word. Mr Erskine regarded him sidelong before remarking:

‘Poetry, eh? Hm. Poetry? Make a living out of that sort of thing, do you think? ’

‘Well — not a living, exactly. But it would help. ’

‘Hm — well! You know best, I expect. If you want a job any time, come back to us. I dare
say we could find room for you. We can do with your sort here. Don’t forget. ’

Gordon left with a hateful feeling of having behaved perversely and ungratefully. But he
had got to do it; he had got to get out of the money- world. It was queer. All over England
young men were eating their hearts out for lack of jobs, and here was he, Gordon, to
whom the very word ‘job’ was faintly nauseous, having jobs thrust unwanted upon him.
It was an example of the fact that you can get anything in this world if you genuinely
don’t want it. Moreover, Mr Erskine’s words stuck in his mind. Probably he had meant
what he said. Probably there WOULD be a job waiting for Gordon if he chose to go back.
So his boats were only half burned. The New Albion was a doom before him as well as
behind.

But how happy had he been, just at first, in Mr McKechnie’s bookshop! For a little
while — a very little while — he had the illusion of being really out of the money- world. Of
course the book-trade was a swindle, like all other trades; but how different a swindle!
Here was no hustling and Making Good, no gutter-crawling. No go-getter could put up



for ten minutes with the stagnant air of the book-trade. As for the work, it was very
simple. It was mainly a question of being in the shop ten hours a day. Mr McKechnie
wasn’t a bad old stick. He was a Scotchman, of course, but Scottish is as Scottish does.
At any rate he was reasonably free from avarice — his most distinctive trait seemed to be
laziness. He was also a teetotaller and belonged to some Nonconformist sect or other, but
this did not affect Gordon. Gordon had been at the shop about a month when Mice was
published. No less than thirteen papers reviewed it! And The Times Lit. Supp. said that it
showed ‘exceptional promise’. It was not till months later that he realized what a
hopeless failure Mice had really been.

And it was only now, when he was down to two quid a week and had practically cut
himself off from the prospect of earning more, that he grasped the real nature of the battle
he was fighting. The devil of it is that the glow of renunciation never lasts. Life on two
quid a week ceases to be a heroic gesture and becomes a dingy habit. Failure is as great a
swindle as success. He had thrown up his ‘good’ job and renounced ‘good’ jobs for ever.
Well, that was necessary. He did not want to go back on it. But it was no use pretending
that because his poverty was self-imposed he had escaped the ills that poverty drags in its
train. It was not a question of hardship. You don’t suffer real physical hardship on two
quid a week, and if you did it wouldn’t matter. It is in the brain and the soul that lack of
money damages you. Mental deadness, spiritual squalor — they seem to descend upon you
inescapably when your income drops below a certain point. Faith, hope, money — only a
saint could have the first two without having the third.

He was growing more mature. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. He had reached
the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing. The
spectacle of his surviving relatives depressed him more and more. As he grew older he
felt himself more akin to them. That was the way he was going! A few years more, and
he would be like that, just like that! He felt this even with Julia, whom he saw oftener
than his uncle and aunt. In spite of various resolves never to do it again, he still borrowed
money off Julia periodically. Julia’s hair was greying fast; there was a deep line scored
down each of her thin red cheeks. She had settled her life into a routine in which she was
not unhappy. There was her work at the shop, her ‘sewing’ at nights in her Earl’s Court
bed-sitting-room (second floor, back, nine bob a week unfurnished), her occasional
forgatherings with spinster friends as lonely as herself. It was the typical submerged life



of the penniless unmarried woman; she accepted it, hardly realizing that her destiny could
ever have been different. Yet in her way she suffered, more for Gordon than for herself.
The gradual decay of the family, the way they had died off and died off and left nothing
behind, was a sort of tragedy in her mind. Money, money! ‘None of us ever seems to
make any money! ’ was her perpetual lament. And of them all, Gordon alone had had the
chance to make money; and Gordon had chosen not to. He was sinking effortless into the
same rut of poverty as the others. After the first row was over, she was too decent to ‘go
for’ him again because he had thrown up his job at the New Albion. But his motives were
quite meaningless to her. In her wordless feminine way she knew that the sin against
money is the ultimate sin.

And as for Aunt Angela and Uncle Walter — oh dear, oh dear! What a couple! It made
Gordon feel ten years older every time he looked at them.

Uncle Walter, for example. Uncle Walter was very depressing. He was sixty-seven, and
what with his various ‘agencies’ and the dwindling remnants of his patrimony his income
might have been nearly three pounds a week.