3.
However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage
in literary activities. To begin with there was the
 made-to-order
stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without
much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote
vers d' occasion, semicomic poems which I could turn
out at what now seems to me astonishing speed -- at
fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation
of Aristophanes, in about a week -- and helped to edit
school magazines, both printed and in manuscript.
These
magazines were the most pitiful
burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took
far less trouble with them than I now would with the
cheapest journalism. But side by side with all
this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out
a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this
was the making up of a continuous "story"
about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind.
I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents.
As a very small child I used to imagine that I was,
say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of
thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story
"ceased to be
narcissistic in
a crude way and became more and more a mere description
of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes
at a time this kind of thing would be running through
my head: "He pushed the door open and entered the
room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering
through the muslin
curtains, slanted
on to the table, where a matchbox, half open, lay beside
the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved
across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell
cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc., etc. This habit
continued till I was about twenty-five, right through
my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and
did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making
this descriptive effort almost against my will, under
a kind of compulsion from outside. The "story"
must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various
writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I
remember it always had the same meticulous
descriptive quality.
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