Herbert Read, Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford

Abstract

Read was born in 1893, the same year as Owen, near Kirbymoorside, Yorkshire. The vale in which he lived as a child had once been a lake and was ‘flat as once the surface of the lake had been’. In The Innocent Eye he refers to the stillness of the rural world which in early years had helped nurture his mind’s innocence. His father, who had been a farmer, died in 1903, and his next five years were spent in Crossley’s boarding school, Halifax. Subsequently, he earned his living as a bank clerk in Leeds until, when he was eighteen, he entered the University; although, as he writes in The Contrary Experience, ‘what basis of disciplined education had been devised by the university authorities was completely swamped’ by his own voracious reading. He speaks of his education by contrasting ‘Character’ with ‘Personality’, observing the connection between ‘the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers’ with ‘the normal process of university education, in other words, the release from the older universities of men apt for the “Civil Service or business” ‘. To the building of ‘character’ and this ‘disciplined education’ with its closing of the mind and the senses, he opposes ‘personality’, which ‘is distinguished by immediacy and what I would call lability, or the capacity to change without loss of integrity’.