No More Learning

Above, a coarse rich voice was singing,
‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? ’ A very fat man of thirty-eight or nine came round
the angle of the stairs, with the light dancing step peculiar to fat men, dressed in a smart
grey suit, yellow shoes, a rakish trilby hat, and a belted blue overcoat of startling
vulgarity. This was Flaxman, the first-floor lodger and travelling representative of the
Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. He saluted Gordon with a lemon-coloured glove as
he came down.

‘Hullo, chappie! ’ he said blithely. (Flaxman called everyone ‘chappie’. ) ‘How’s life with
you? ’

‘Bloody,’ said Gordon shortly.

Flaxman had reached the bottom of the stairs. He threw a roly-poly ann affectionately
round Gordon’s shoulders.

‘Cheer up, old man, cheer up! You look like a bloody funeral. I’m off down to the
Crichton. Come on down and have a quick one. ’

‘I can’t. I’ve got to work. ’

‘Oh, hell! Be matey, can’t you? What’s the good of mooning about up here? Come on
down to the Cri and we’ll pinch the barmaid’s bum. ’

Gordon wriggled free of Flaxman’ s arm. Like all small frail people, he hated being
touched. Flaxman merely grinned, with the typical fat man’s good humour. He was really
horribly fat. He filled his trousers as though he had been melted and then poured into
them. But of course, like other fat people, he never admitted to being fat. No fat person



ever uses the word ‘fat’ if there is any way of avoiding it. ‘Stout’ is the word they use —
or, better still, ‘robust’. A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as
‘robust’. Flaxman, at his first meeting with Gordon, had been on the point of calling
himself ‘robust’, but something in Gordon’s greenish eye had deterred him. He
compromised on ‘stout’ instead.

‘I do admit, chappie,’ he said, ‘to being — well, just a wee bit on the stout side. Nothing
unwholesome, you know. ’ He patted the vague frontier between his belly and his chest.
‘Good firm flesh. I’m pretty nippy on my feet, as a matter of fact. But — well, I suppose
you might call me STOUT. ’

‘Like Cortez,’ Gordon suggested.

‘Cortez? Cortez? Was that the chappie who was always wandering about in the
mountains in Mexico? ’

‘That’s the fellow. He was stout, but he had eagle eyes. ’

‘Ah? Now that’s funny. Because the wife said something rather like that to me once.
“George,” she said, “you’ve got the most wonderful eyes in the world. You’ve got eyes
just like an eagle,” she said. That would be before she married me, you’ll understand. ’

Flaxman was living apart from his wife at the moment. A little while back the Queen of
Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. had unexpectedly paid out a bonus of thirty pounds to all its
travellers, and at the same time Flaxman and two others had been sent across to Paris to
press the new Sexapeal Naturetint lipstick on various French firms. Flaxman had not
thought it necessary to mention the thirty pounds to his wife. He had had the time of his
life on that Paris trip, of course. Even now, three months afterwards, his mouth watered
when he spoke of it. He used to entertain Gordon with luscious descriptions. Ten days in
Paris with thirty quid that wifie hadn’t heard about! Oh boy! But unfortunately there had
been a leakage somewhere; Flaxman had got home to find retribution awaiting him. His
wife had broken his head with a cut-glass whisky decanter, a wedding present which they
had had for fourteen years, and then fled to her mother’s house, taking the children with
her. Hence Flaxman’s exile in Willowbed Road. But he wasn’t letting it worry him. It
would blow over, no doubt; it had happened several times before.



Gordon made another attempt to get past Flaxman and escape up the stairs. The dreadful
thing was that in his heart he was pining to go with him. He needed a drink so badly — the
mere mention of the Crichton Arms had made him feel thirsty. But it was impossible, of
course; he had no money. Flaxman put an ann across the stairs, barring his way. He was
genuinely fond of Gordon. He considered him ‘clever’ — ‘cleverness’, to him, being a
kind of amiable lunacy. Moreover, he detested being alone, even for so short a time as it
would take him to walk to the pub.

‘Come on, chappie! ’ he urged. ‘You want a Guinness to buck you up, that’s what you
want. You haven’t seen the new girl they’ve got in the saloon bar yet. Oh, boy! There’s a
peach for you! ’

‘So that’s why you’re all dolled up, is it? ’ said Gordon, looking coldly at Flaxman’s
yellow gloves.

‘You bet it is, chappie! Coo, what a peach! Ash blonde she is. And she knows a thing or
two, that girlie does. I gave her a stick of our Sexapeal Naturetint last night. You ought to
have seen her wag her little bottom at me as she went past my table. Does she give me the
palpitations? Does she? Oh, boy! ’

Flaxman wriggled lascivously. His tongue appeared between his lips. Then, suddenly
pretending that Gordon was the ash-blonde barmaid, he seized him by the waist and gave
him a tender squeeze. Gordon shoved him away. For a moment the desire to go down to
the Crichton Anns was so ravishing that it almost overcame him. Oh, for a pint of beer!
He seemed almost to feel it going down his throat. If only he had had any money! Even
sevenpence for a pint. But what was the use? Twopence halfpenny in pocket. You can’t
let other people buy your drinks for you.

‘Oh, leave me alone, for God’s sake! ’ he said irritably, stepping out of Flaxman’s reach,
and went up the stairs without looking back.

Flaxman settled his hat on his head and made for the front door, mildly offended. Gordon
reflected dully that it was always like this nowadays. He was for ever snubbing friendly
advances. Of course it was money that was at the bottom of it, always money. You can’t
be friendly, you can’t even be civil, when you have no money in your pocket. A spasm of



self-pity went through him. His heart yearned for the saloon bar at the Crichton; the
lovely smell of beer, the warmth and bright lights, the cheery voices, the clatter of glasses
on the beer- wet bar. Money, money! He went on, up the dark evil-smelling stairs. The
thought of his cold lonely bedroom at the top of the house was like a doom before him.

On the second floor lived Lorenheim, a dark, meagre, lizard-like creature of uncertain age
and race, who made about thirty-five shillings a week by touting vacuum-cleaners.
Gordon always went very hurriedly past Lorenheim’s door. Lorenheim was one of those
people who have not a single friend in the world and who are devoured by a lust for
company. His loneliness was so deadly that if you so much as slowed your pace outside
his door he was liable to pounce out upon you and half drag, half wheedle you in to listen
to intenninable paranoiac tales of girls he had seduced and employers he had scored off.
And his room was more cold and squalid than even a lodging-house bedroom has any
right to be. There were always half-eaten bits of bread and margarine lying about
everywhere. The only other lodger in the house was an engineer of some kind, employed
on nightwork. Gordon only saw him occasionally — a massive man with a grim,
discoloured face, who wore a bowler hat indoors and out.

In the familiar darkness of his room, Gordon felt for the gas-jet and lighted it. The room
was medium-sized, not big enough to be curtained into two, but too big to be sufficiently
warmed by one defective oil lamp. It had the sort of furniture you expect in a top floor
back. White-quilted single-bed; brown lino floor-covering; wash-hand-stand with jug and
basin of that cheap white ware which you can never see without thinking of chamberpots.
On the window-sill there was a sickly aspidistra in a green-glazed pot.

Up against this, under the window, there was a kitchen table with an inkstained green
cloth. This was Gordon’s ‘writing’ table. It was only after a bitter struggle that he had
induced Mrs Wisbeach to give him a kitchen table instead of the bamboo ‘occasional’
table — a mere stand for the aspidistra — which she considered proper for a top floor back.
And even now there was endless nagging because Gordon would never allow his table to
be ‘tidied up’. The table was in a permanent mess. It was almost covered with a muddle
of papers, perhaps two hundred sheets of sermon paper, grimy and dog-eared, and all
written on and crossed out and written on again — a sort of sordid labyrinth of papers to
which only Gordon possessed the key. There was a film of dust over everything, and



there were several foul little trays containing tobacco ash and the twisted stubs of
cigarettes. Except for a few books on the mantelpiece, this table, with its mess of papers,
was the sole mark Gordon’s personality had left on the room.

It was beastly cold. Gordon thought he would light the oil lamp. He lifted it — it felt very
light; the spare oil can also was empty — no oil till Friday. He applied a match; a dull
yellow flame crept unwillingly round the wick. It might bum for a couple of hours, with
any luck. As Gordon threw away the match his eye fell upon the aspidistra in its grass-
green pot. It was a peculiarly mangy specimen. It had only seven leaves and never
seemed to put forth any new ones. Gordon had a sort of secret feud with the aspidistra.
Many a time he had furtively attempted to kill it — starving it of water, grinding hot
cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth. But the beastly things are
practically immortal. In almost any circumstances they can preserve a wilting, diseased
existence. Gordon stood up and deliberately wiped his kerosiny fingers on the aspidistra
leaves.

At this moment Mrs Wisbeach’s voice rang shrewishly up the stairs:

‘Mister Corn-stock! ’

Gordon went to the door. ‘Yes? ’ he called down.

‘Your supper’s been waiting for you this ten minutes. Why can’t you come down and
have it, ‘stead of keeping me waiting for the washing up? ’

Gordon went down. The dining-room was on the first floor, at the back, opposite
Flaxman’s room. It was a cold, close-smelling room, twilit even at midday. There were
more aspidistras in it than Gordon had ever accurately counted. They were all over the
place — on the sideboard, on the floor, on ‘occasional’ tables; in the window there was a
sort of florist’s stand of them, blocking out the light. In the half-darkness, with aspidistras
all about you, you had the feeling of being in some sunless aquarium amid the dreary
foliage of water-flowers. Gordon’s supper was set out, waiting for him, in the circle of
white light that the cracked gas-jet cast upon the table cloth. He sat down with his back to
the fireplace (there was an aspidistra in the grate instead of a fire) and ate his plate of cold



beef and his two slices of crumbly white bread, with Canadian butter, mousetrap cheese
and Pan Yan pickle, and drank a glass of cold but musty water.

When he went back to his room the oil lamp had got going, more or less. It was hot
enough to boil a kettle by, he thought. And now for the great event of the evening — his
illicit cup of tea. He made himself a cup of tea almost every night, in the deadliest
secrecy. Mrs Wisbeach refused to give her lodgers tea with their supper, because she
‘couldn’t be bothered with hotting up extra water’, but at the same time making tea in
your bedroom was strictly forbidden. Gordon looked with disgust at the muddled papers
on the table. He told himself defiantly that he wasn’t going to do any work tonight. He
would have a cup of tea and smoke up his remaining cigarettes, and read King Lear or
Sherlock Holmes. His books were on the mantelpiece beside the alann clock —
Shakespeare in the Everyman edition, Sherlock Holmes, Villon’s poems, Roderick
Random, Les Fleurs du Mai, a pile of French novels. But he read nothing nowadays,
except Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes. Meanwhile, that cup of tea.

Gordon went to the door, pushed it ajar, and listened. No sound of Mrs Wisbeach. You
had to be very careful; she was quite capable of sneaking upstairs and catching you in the
act. This tea-making was the major household offence, next to bringing a woman in.
Quietly he bolted the door, dragged his cheap suitcase from under the bed, and unlocked
it. From it he extracted a sixpenny Woolworth’s kettle, a packet of Fyons’ tea, a tin of
condensed milk, a tea-pot, and a cup. They were all packed in newspaper to prevent them
from chinking.

He had his regular procedure for making tea. First he half filled the kettle with water
from the jug and set it on the oil stove. Then he knelt down and spread out a piece of
newspaper. Yesterday’s tea-leaves were still in the pot, of course. He shook them out on
to the newspaper, cleaned out the pot with his thumb and folded the leaves into a bundle.
Presently he would smuggle them downstairs. That was always the most risky part —
getting rid of the used tea-leaves. It was like the difficulty murderers have in disposing of
the body. As for the cup, he always washed it in his hand basin in the morning. A squalid
business. It sickened him, sometimes. It was queer how furtively you had to live in Mrs
Wisbeach’ s house. You had the feeling that she was always watching you; and indeed,
she was given to tiptoeing up and downstairs at all hours, in hope of catching the lodgers



up to mischief. It was one of those houses where you cannot even go to the W. C. in peace
because of the feeling that somebody is listening to you.

Gordon unbolted the door again and listened intently. No one stirring. Ah! A clatter of
crockery far below. Mrs Wisbeach was washing up the supper things.
Probably safe to go
down, then.

He tiptoed down, clutching the damp bundle of tea-leaves against his breast. The W. C.
was on the second floor. At the angle of the stairs he halted, listened a moment longer.
Ah! Another clatter of crockery.

All clear! Gordon Comstock, poet (‘of exceptional promise’. The Times Lit. Supp. had
said), hurriedly slipped into the W. C. , flung his tea-leaves down the waste-pipe, and
pulled the plug. Then he hurried back to his room, rebolted the door, and, with
precautions against noise, brewed himself a fresh pot of tea.

The room was passably warm by now. The tea and a cigarette worked their short-lived
magic. He began to feel a little less bored and angry. Should he do a spot of work after
all? He ought to work, of course. He always hated himself afterwards when he had
wasted a whole evening. Half unwillingly, he shoved his chair up to the table. It needed
an effort even to disturb that frightful jungle of papers. He pulled a few grimy sheets
towards him, spread them out, and looked at them. God, what a mess! Written on, scored
out, written over, scored out again, till they were like poor old hacked cancer-patients
after twenty operations. But the handwriting, where it was not crossed out, was delicate
and ‘scholarly’. With pain and trouble Gordon had acquired that ‘scholarly’ hand, so
different from the beastly copper-plate they had taught him at school.

Perhaps he WOULD work; for a little while, anyway. He rummaged in the litter of
papers. Where was that passage he had been working on yesterday? The poem was an
immensely long one — that is, it was going to be immensely long when it was finished —
two thousand lines or so, in rhyme royal, describing a day in London. London Pleasures,
its name was. It was a huge, ambitious project — the kind of thing that should only be
undertaken by people with endless leisure. Gordon had not grasped that fact when he
began the poem; he grasped it now, however. How light-heartedly he had begun it, two
years ago! When he had chucked up everything and descended into the slime of poverty,



the conception of this poem had been at least a part of his motive. He had felt so certain,
then, that he was equal to it. But somehow, almost from the start, London Pleasures had
gone wrong. It was too big for him, that was the truth. It had never really progressed, it
had simply fallen apart into a series of fragments. And out of two years’ work that was all
that he had to show — just fragments, incomplete in themselves and impossible to join
together. On every one of those sheets of paper there was some hacked scrap of verse
which had been written and rewritten and rewritten over intervals of months. There were
not five hundred lines that you could say were definitely finished. And he had lost the
power to add to it any longer; he could only tinker with this passage or that, groping now
here, now there, in its confusion. It was no longer a thing that he created, it was merely a
nightmare with which he struggled.

For the rest, in two whole years he had produced nothing except a handful of short
poems — perhaps a score in all. It was so rarely that he could attain the peace of mind in
which poetry, or prose for that matter, has got to be written. The times when he ‘could
not’ work grew commoner and commoner. Of all types of human being, only the artist
takes it upon him to say that he ‘cannot’ work. But it is quite true; there ARE times when
one cannot work. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means
squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of
failure — above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid
a week? And in loneliness no decent book was ever written. It was quite certain that
London Pleasures would never be the poem he had conceived — it was quite certain,
indeed, that it would never even be finished. And in the moments when he faced facts
Gordon himself was aware of this.

Yet all the same, and all the more for that very reason, he went on with it. It was
something to cling to. It was a way of hitting back at his poverty and his loneliness. And
after all, there were times when the mood of creation returned, or seemed to return. It
returned tonight, for just a little while — just as long as it takes to smoke two cigarettes.
With smoke tickling his lungs, he abstracted himself from the mean and actual world. He
drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written. The gas-jet sang soothing
overhead. Words became vivid and momentous things. A couplet, written a year ago and
left as unfinished, caught his eye with a note of doubt. He repeated it to himself, over and
over. It was wrong, somehow. It had seemed all right, a year ago; now, on the other hand,



it seemed subtly vulgar. He rummaged among the sheets of foolscap till he found one that
had nothing written on the back, turned it over, wrote the couplet out anew, wrote a
dozen different versions of it, repeated each of them over and over to himself. Finally
there was none that satisfied him. The couplet would have to go. It was cheap and vulgar.
He found the original sheet of paper and scored the couplet out with thick lines. And in
doing this there was a sense of achievement, of time not wasted, as though the destruction
of much labour were in some way an act of creation.

Suddenly a double knock deep below made the whole house rattle. Gordon started. His
mind fled upwards from the abyss. The post! London Pleasures was forgotten.

His heart fluttered. Perhaps Rosemary HAD written. Besides, there were those two
poems he had sent to the magazines. One of them, indeed, he had almost given up as lost;
he had sent it to an American paper, the Californian Review, months ago. Probably they
wouldn’t even bother to send it back. But the other was with an English paper, the
Primrose Quarterly. He had wild hopes of that one. The Primrose Quarterly was one of
those poisonous literary papers in which the fashionable Nancy Boy and the professional
Roman Catholic walk bras dessus, bras dessous. It was also by a long way the most
influential literary paper in England. You were a made man once you had had a poem in
it. In his heart Gordon knew that the Primrose Quarterly would never print his poems. He
wasn’t up to their standard. Still, miracles sometimes happen; or, if not miracles,
accidents. After all, they’d had his poem six weeks. Would they keep it six weeks if they
didn’t mean to accept it? He tried to quell the insane hope. But at the worst there was a
chance that Rosemary had written. It was four whole days since she had written. She
wouldn’t do it, perhaps, if she knew how it disappointed him. Her letters — long, ill-spelt
letters, full of absurd jokes and protestations of love for him — meant far more to him than
she could ever understand. They were a reminder that there was still somebody in the
world who cared for him. They even made up for the times when some beast had sent
back one of his poems; and, as a matter of fact, the magazines always did send back his
poems, except Antichrist, whose editor, Ravelston, was his personal friend.

There was a shuffling below. It was always some minutes before Mrs Wisbeach brought
the letters upstairs. She liked to paw them about, feel them to see how thick they were,
read their postmarks, hold them up to the light and speculate on their contents, before



yielding them to their rightful owners. She exercised a sort of droit du seigneur over
letters. Coming to her house, they were, she felt, at least partially hers. If you had gone to
the front door and collected your own letters she would have resented it bitterly. On the
other hand, she also resented the labour of carrying them upstairs. You would hear her
footsteps very slowly ascending, and then, if there was a letter for you, there would be
loud aggrieved breathing on the landing — this to let you know that you had put Mrs
Wisbeach out of breath by dragging her up all those stairs. Finally, with a little impatient
grunt, the letters would be shoved under your door.

Mrs Wisbeach was coming up the stairs. Gordon listened. The footsteps paused on the
first floor. A letter for Flaxman. They ascended, paused again on the second floor. A
letter for the engineer. Gordon’s heart beat painfully. A letter, please God, a letter! More
footsteps. Ascending or descending? They were coming nearer, surely! Ah, no, no! The
sound grew fainter. She was going down again. The footsteps died away. No letters.

He took up his pen again. It was a quite futile gesture. She hadn’t written after all! The
little beast! He had not the smallest intention of doing any more work. Indeed, he could
not. The disappointment had taken all the heart out of him. Only five minutes ago his
poem had still seemed to him a living thing; now he knew it unmistakably for the
worthless tripe that it was. With a kind of nervous disgust he bundled the scattered sheets
together, stacked them in an untidy heap, and dumped them on the other side of the table,
under the aspidistra. He could not even bear to look at them any longer.

He got up. It was too early to go to bed; at least, he was not in the mood for it. He pined
for a bit of amusement — something cheap and easy. A seat in the pictures, cigarettes,
beer. Useless! No money to pay for any of them. He would read King Lear and forget this
filthy century. Finally, however, it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that he took
from the mantelpiece. Sherlock Holmes was his favourite of all books, because he knew
it by heart. The oil in the lamp was giving out and it was getting beastly cold. Gordon
dragged the quilt from his bed, wrapped it round his legs, and sat down to read. His right
elbow on the table, his hands under his coat to keep them warm, he read through ‘The
Adventure of the Speckled Band. ’ The little gas-mantle sighed above, the circular flame
of the oil lamp burned low, a thin bracket of fire, giving out no more heat than a candle.



Down in Mrs Wisbeach’s lair the clock struck half past ten. You could always hear it
striking at night. Ping-ping, ping-ping — a note of doom! The ticking of the alarm clock
on the mantelpiece became audible to Gordon again, bringing with it the consciousness of
the sinister passage of time. He looked about him. Another evening wasted. Hours, days,
years slipping by. Night after night, always the same. The lonely room, the womanless
bed; dust, cigarette ash, the aspidistra leaves. And he was thirty, nearly. In sheer self-
punishment he dragged forth a wad of London Pleasures, spread out the grimy sheets, and
looked at them as one looks at a skull for a memento mori. London Pleasures, by Gordon
Comstock, author of Mice. His magnum opus. The fruit (fruit, indeed! ) of two years’
work — that labyrinthine mess of words! And tonight’s achievement — two lines crossed
out; two lines backward instead of forward.

The lamp made a sound like a tiny hiccup and went out. With an effort Gordon stood up
and flung the quilt back on to his bed. Better get to bed, perhaps, before it got any colder.
He wandered over towards the bed. But wait. Work tomorrow. Wind the clock, set the
alarm. Nothing accomplished, nothing done, has earned a night’s repose.

It was some time before he could find the energy to undress. For a quarter of an hour,
perhaps, he lay on the bed fully dressed, his hands under his head. There was a crack on
the ceiling that resembled the map of Australia. Gordon contrived to work off his shoes
and socks without sitting up. He held up one foot and looked at it. A smallish, delicate
foot. Ineffectual, like his hands. Also, it was very dirty. It was nearly ten days since he
had a bath. Becoming ashamed of the dirtiness of his feet, he sagged into a sitting
position and undressed himself, throwing his clothes on to the floor. Then he turned out
the gas and slid between the sheets, shuddering, for he was naked. He always slept naked.
His last suit of pyjamas had gone west more than a year ago.

The clock downstairs struck eleven. As the first coldness of the sheets wore off, Gordon’s
mind went back to the poem he had begun that afternoon. He repeated in a whisper the
single stanza that was finished:

Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air, Torn posters flutter.



The octosyllables flicked to and fro. Click-click, click-click! The awful, mechanical
emptiness of it appalled him. It was like some futile little machine ticking over. Rhyme to
rhyme, click-click, click-click. Like the nodding of a clock-work doll. Poetry! The last
futility. He lay awake, aware of his own futility, of his thirty years, of the blind alley into
which he had led his life.