Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1284

Mr. Burlingham, -- `` C.C.B. '' -- wrote to me once about an old friend of mine, S. K. Ratcliffe, whom I had first met in London in 1914 and who also came out for a week-end in Weston.

`` Did you ever know a man with greater zest for information??

And his memory, like an elephant's, stored with precise knowledge of men and things and happenings ''.

His wife, Katie, `` as gay as a lark and as lively as a gazelle '', -- she was then seventy-six, -- had `` a sense of humour that has been denied S.K., but neither has any aesthetic perceptions.

People and books are enough for them ''.

S.K. was visiting C.C.B. and, not waiting for breakfast, he was off to the University Club, where he spent hours writing obituaries of living Americans for The Manchester Guardian or The Glasgow Herald.

Later, rising ninety, he was beset by publishers for the story of his life and miracles, as he put it, but, calling himself the Needy Knife-grinder, he had spent his time writing short articles and long letters and could not get even a small popular book done.

Then, all but blind, he said there was nothing in Back to Methuselah --, -- `` G.B.S. ought to have known that '', -- and `` I look at my bookshelves despairingly, knowing that I can have nothing more to do with them ''.

However, at eighty-five, he had still been busy writing articles, reviewing and speaking, and I had never before known an Englishman who had visited and lectured in three quarters of the United States.

Finally, colleges and clubs took the line that speakers from England were not wanted any longer, even speakers like S.K., so unlike the novelists and poets who had patronized the Americans for many years.

With their facile generalizations about the United States, these mediocrities, as they often were, had been great successes.

While S.K. did not like Dylan Thomas, I liked his poems very much, but I made the mistake of telling Dylan Thomas so, whereupon he said to me, `` I suppose you think you know all about me ''.

I should have replied, `` I probably know something about the best part of you ''.

But I only thought of that in the middle of the night.