Journalist at Sea

Six months before his death, musing on the past, Murry wrote:

I have the feeling that I have been completely outside the main stream of literature: that I don’t ‘belong’ and indeed never have belonged. My concern has always been that of a moralist, and I have never been sufficient of the artist to be diverted from it. And yet the stubborn feeling persists that my ‘concern’ was shared in the old days by Lawrence and by Katherine: that I was, in some sense, their critical counterpart, and that the kind of seriousness we had has been lost. That distinguished us, absolutely, from the Bloomsburies. Eliot came nearer to it; but from him, too, there was an inevitable separation. None of us was, or ever could have become, capable of accepting dogmatic Christianity, as Eliot did. I am the sole remaining representative of our particular integrity, our particular concern. We were all socially outsiders, quite without the social and domestic tradition which the Bloomsburies, Aldous Huxley, and expatriate – plus royaliste que le roi – Eliot inherited. And, I think, experience came more naked and direct to us than to the others. To us, there was a sense in which they were all ‘phoneys’ (in the nuance of The Catcher in the Rye). Love meant more to us: we needed it more. ¹