Books: Man of Four Lives

THE CONTRARY EXPERIENCE by Herbert Read. 356 pages. Horizon Press. $6.50.

A pacifist who has earned a decoration for gallantry in battle, an anarchist who has been a successful bureaucrat, a farmer’s son who is famous as an exponent of esthetic theory, a spokesman for the avant-garde who can nevertheless write in praise of an idyllic past. The typical Englishman who is all these things is Sir Herbert Read, 69, a highly singular man who needs not one but four autobiographies to do justice to his talent for plural living.

Men of the Moors. Sir Herbert, who despises institutional learning, and so, of course, became a professor (of fine arts at Edinburgh), writes with grace and clarity of his multiple lives. There is Herbert the dreaming farmboy on the moors of Yorkshire, Captain Read, M.C., D.S.O., an infantry captain in the Green Howards, and Herbert Read, the philosopher, poet and esthetician. Finally, because of his passionate belief that where a man lives is a vital part of man’s true history, he traces his roots in the past of Yorkshire’s lonely and beautiful North Riding, and describes the people who lived on its moors—farmers, millers, poets, soldiers, and more than one notable parson like Laurence Sterne. In effect, he says, “I am the sort of man these men were.”

In a larger sense, Read speaks as one of the millions of “alienated souls” of the modern world for whom heaven and hell do not exist, and who must look to their own origins for the polarities of the spirit. “The need for roots exists; the need which unappeased drives the human heart to paralysis and self-destruction.” Read is an atheist of religious temperament who has achieved the rare feat of transferring his natural reverence from God to God’s creation without falling into current humanistic idolatries about man. He hates political man and distrusts all human groups above the size of a British infantry platoon (30 men). Most of all he hates modern man’s “industrial civilization—a wilderness so arid and offensive that no organic life is possible within its limits.” Sir Herbert indeed seems to have solved what George Orwell viewed as the crucial problem of the age: how to maintain the moral values of Christianity in the face of a widespread collapse of belief in the immortality of the soul.

Innocent Heaven. Because of the grace and clarity of the writing, this rare autobiography can be read with pleasure for its own sake as a story. Read’s short, beautiful evocation of his childhood is quite against the current fashion of stories of children in which the authors seem to be seeking in childhood a source for the savageries of the age; for Sir Herbert it is quite simply a time of sacred innocence, belonging to “the kingdom of Heaven, where the eye is eternally innocent.”

The brutal shock of World War I can be felt as if it were yesterday as Read’s story moves from his youthful wonderland on the moors to the shambles of trench warfare. This is told in extracts from the diary of what is by now a remarkable man—a young poet and philosopher busy with things of the mind at the same time as he works at the exacting business of leading an infantry company into combat. When the war ends, “the naked warrior” (Naked Warriors is the title of one of his books) became a civil servant. This sets the pattern for Sir Herbert’s adult career as an official of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the first British writer on art of much consequence since John Ruskin.

His story ends with his retreat to that “miniature monastery”—a country house near his boyhood home. Such a civilized life is possible only for a few, and “it is not for long. The past has vanished and we are the last outposts of a civilization in retreat.”