Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

52 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
the group, was studying English at Birmingham University.
Th e group widened when Leslie Halward, reading O’Brien’s piece, decided to get in
touch with Chamberlain and Hampson. He noted:
Chamberlain’s reply was very vague, intimating that it would not be a bad idea
if we had tea together somewhere, some time. Hampson’s was much more to the
point. It began: “Do you know a pub off Corporation Street…?”…and stated
that at seven o’ clock on the following Th ursday evening he and Allen would be
there. (Halward 247)
Chamberlain’s aloofness was characteristic. Allen described him as “very much the
public school man” who “knew London at least as well as he did Birmingham and…had
his own circle there” (68). Halward’s fi rst impressions of Hampson were not favourable:
he found him “a frail little gentleman…toying with a glass that had a drop of whiskey in
the bottom” (247). However, he quickly hit it off with both Hampson and Allen and the
Th ursday evening meetings became a regular fi xture.
By this point, John Hampson had been established as part of Bloomsbury with the
publication of Saturday Night at the Greyhound. Allen wrote that the novel “had brought
John into contact with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, both of whom he idolised, and had
brought him the friendship of Forster, whom he adored” and that his chest of drawers at
this time displayed photographs of Hampson with Virginia Woolf and Forster (62). Allen
himself also forged strong links with the younger generation of Bloomsbury through
his studies at Birmingham University, in particular with Louis MacNeice. MacNeice had
come to Birmingham as a Classics tutor in 1930 and Allen wrote: “I realised later that
probably the most important thing that had happened to me [at university] was that I
met Louis MacNeice” (45). Th e poet wrote in his own autobiography that in 1936 “literary
London was just beginning to recognise something called the Birmingham School of
novelists” stating that “they wrote about the People with a knowledge available to very few
Londoners” that he found “very refreshing” (Strings 154).
MacNeice’s attitude to Birmingham itself is best documented by his 1933 poem,
“Birmingham,” in which he describes life in the suburbs where the masses “endeavour to
fi nd God and score one over the neighbour / By climbing tentatively upward on jerrybuilt
beauty and sweated labour” (Collected Poems 17). In Autumn Journal he rather disparagingly
describes his time at the university:
I came to live in this hazy city
To work in a building caked with grime
Teaching the classics to Midland students…
And to hear the prison-like lecture room resound
To Homer in a Dudley accent. (115)
Allen said that whilst being taught by MacNeice he “gazed at him as at a rare wild
animal caged in a redbrick university and quite out of place there” (45). He catches Mac-
Neice’s own early feelings about Birmingham, although for MacNeice the wildness is
Birmingham’s and not his own. In his autobiography MacNeice describes the reactions of