and admirably adapted to taste the dregs of all three. His soul was a camera obscura, lit by one little window of genius, where his imagination let in the suffering of others and intensified it by his own.6
Cogswell wrote a novel after the Great War entitled Ermitage and the Curate (1922). H.G. Wells, according to White, said, ‘it was one of three war books which would be remembered one hundred years after the war’.7 T.E. Lawrence referred to it as a book that impressed him.8 George Russell (Æ) reviewed it favourably and provides a summary:
The curate who preached war sermons and then felt compelled to volunteer, and the teacher he shamed into enlisting by his sermons, are the chief characters. We can feel the torture of exasperated nerves all through the book, sensitive men bullied, disciplined and yelled at, the vast military machine grinding remorselessly because it must, and yet at the end, for all the agony, we are not certain that the crushed souls are not better for all the torture of mind and body.9
Cogswell, according to White, ‘wanted to be a conscientious objector, not from cowardice but inherent conviction’. He prevaricated about joining the army in 1914, and White, by now his friend, ‘advised him to let himself be shot ten times over rather than go out to the shambles’.10 He did eventually, unlike White, join up and was ‘drafted to a Labour Battalion’, that is a non-combat section often used to employ pacifists. ‘There’, according to White, ‘he descended into objective hell and observed it with his subjective hell.’11 Drawing from these experiences he produced the book, ‘written lying on his bed in a room without a table’.12
Abandoning the idea of owning a school, probably the most inappropriate job that White ever considered, he spent some time tramping the countryside and working as a farm labourer before Dollie and he headed off to Canada. After a week she ‘cabled to her father for funds and returned home’.13 White remained there for another twelve months doing various jobs working as a horseman and in the logging camps. Dollie joined him again and persuaded him to return to Britain. He did not attempt to hide his utter failure: ‘I was not a backwoodsman. I was not a peasant, I was not a farm labourer. In respect to that abortive incarnation, I cursed Tolstoy and died.’ Not relishing ‘the prodigal son business’, he said, on the boat on the way back, ‘Dollie sat at the captain’s table, so I sat there too; but I felt like a slice off Lot’s wife.’14
Probably White’s most significant experience in those years was his sojourn in the Whiteway Colony:
a community of ‘free-thinkers’ which was established on the Cotswold Hills near Sheepscombe in 1898. The colony was conceived as an experiment in practical communism and the original members were strongly influenced by the teachings of Tolstoy with which they had become acquainted through the Croydon Brotherhood Church. However, the colony attracted a diversity of people as no single religious, philosophical or political creed was prescribed and over the years the lifestyle of many colonists evolved away from early principles.15
It has been variously described as an anarchistic community with a particular belief that sexual partnership was a flexible arrangement dogged by authoritative regulation in conventional society – free love, in other words. ‘Rumours of nudity and sexual orgies brought journalists and sightseers as well as hopeful applicants to live.’16 Even White’s description, which leaves the impression of a louche place, was possibly unfair to the sincerity of its members:
It started on a basis of pure Communism, with the usual admixture of pure crankdom. The ‘purest’ specimens debated such points as whether it was lawful to support the State by putting a postage stamp on a letter, or whether the moral legitimacy of gathering firewood in the adjacent landlord’s game-preserves was invalidated by the risk of angering the game-keeper. Meanwhile, the more mundanely-minded did the cooking and washing. [For this, read women]. Ultimately the latter kicked. […] The place had a reputation for looseness that was largely unfounded.17
White formed a friendship with Francis Sedlak who lived with Nellie Shaw ‘in a very adequate shack he had built with his own hands’.18 Described in his obituary (he died in 1929) as a ‘rebel Czech’ and ‘Hegelian philosopher’, Sedlak had formed a ‘free union’ with Shaw.19 White said Sedlak claimed to be ‘married but not legally, my wife objecting to chattel slavery’.20 Shaw was described as an ‘anarchist-feminist seamstress from Penge’, who, along with a number of other young women, was attracted to Tolstoy’s advocacy of ‘non-violent anarchism, the rejection of the state and of private property in favour of a simple and ascetic life lived on the soil. The aim was freedom for the individual’.21 Nellie Shaw saw
the founding of the Tolstoyan community at Purleigh in Essex in 1896 and visited it frequently. Aylmer Maude, translator of Tolstoy and a friend of Russian exiles, was living near Purleigh at Great Baddow and, under his influence, the colony provided a home for members of the Doukhobor sect and other Russians. Nellie Shaw and other young women found Tolstoy’s ideas compelling enough to abandon their lives in London and pursue the ideal of commune life. In 1899 Shaw, however, rejected Purleigh and, along with a few others, took part in the founding of Whiteway.22
According to White, Aylmer Maude ‘had apparently interpreted the master’s negative attitude to sex too severely. The more vital spirits had kicked, and there had been an exodus of the more amorously inclined to Whiteway’.23 This was probably a very personal interpretation; Tolstoy’s proscriptions on sexuality appeared to have caused White the greatest difficulty. Shaw herself maintained that in search of ‘something warmer, more vital, more appealing to the idealistic side of our natures than mere economics’, and feeling that Purleigh ‘was affected by class prejudice, and disagreeing with its anti-sex (and anti-woman) ideas’, she left with some others and formed Whiteway.24 Although White wrote in detail about Sedlak and his adventures, finding a common outlook with him in his perspective on authority and the army in particular, the colony itself seems to have been a genuine attempt to come to terms with the ideals of an anarchist society and must have left an impression on White. Sedlak wrote a book with the remarkably unsellable title, A Holiday with a Hegelian, ‘which no one on earth but himself could understand. I as little as any; but I could understand that Francis understood. He had entered a world of pure thought’, said White.25 More importantly, Sedlak had been to visit Tolstoy who had advised him to go to Purleigh, which is probably where he met Nellie Shaw for the first time. White was amused and felt that the impracticalities of the master’s diktats were illustrated when Sedlak was asked how he intended to return to England from Iasnia Poliana, Tolstoy’s estate. On replying that he would walk, Tolstoy asked him had he any money. Sedlak said, ‘“No, have you?” “No” said Tolstoy [and] eventually three roubles were borrowed from the master’s cook, and Francis set out to walk to Purley [sic]’.26
Living by the sweat of his brow had proved to be beyond White, and, in a phrase as elegant as it is eloquent, he said that as regards ‘free love’ anyone ‘not by birth an aristocrat or gypsy lack[ed] the right balance of confidence or nonchalance’.27 (It was not to be his only deliberation on free love; there is a report of a lady turning down his offer in the twenties to stay in a republican free love commune. Her response was that she had no objection to the latter, but felt that the former meant living in Ireland, something she could not accept.) He concluded:
I had tried out Tolstoy. Doing so had convinced me that if Tolstoy had tried himself out as a younger man, instead of breaking away to his tragic death at the last, he’d have seen the snag he left people like Sedlak and me to find out for him. He sent his mind out on adventures and left his body with his wife and that convenient cook.28
‘From this Tolstoyan anarchist colony of Whiteway’ White turned from a pursuit of inner peace for his turbulent mind to a searching outside for social justice, which, as he said, took him into the ‘thick of the fight in Ireland’.29
White emerges from this time as someone who is desperately seeking some personal form of fulfilment but also with an awareness of himself that insists he must have a role to play
