The frustration that I met with on every side in seeking

spiritual guidance led me to turn the more enthusiastically to

poetry. In my second year Denzil Batchelor came up and we
immediately became close friends. He was a young man with
shining brown eyes and a glowing voice, full of glory and
tragedy. His energy was prodigious poetry, football, drink,
work, social life, and always tragically in love. I never doubted
that he was one of the worlds great poets; and this also made it
easier for me to believe that I was another. I even followed suit
in persuading myself that I was a tragic lover, choosing for the
purpose an actress ten years my senior whom I had scarcely
spoken to. Only many years later, going over such scraps of
Denzils poems as had stuck in my memory, did I realize that
they were just melodious words, saying nothing. My own were
not even that.
Even apart from personal ability there was the question of
the spirit of the age, a force as impalpable but almost as binding
as the law of averages. If you toss a coin it is equally likely to
come down heads or tails; and if you toss it a hundred times
this applies equally each single time. Therefore, in theory, it
should be equally likely to come down heads all the hundred
times. But in fact the law of averages is so rigorous that it will
not vary more than two or three times either side of fifty.