Chapter 4
Wanderings and Home
Peregrinations
According to White, the next four to five years of his life consisted of a peripatetic pursuit of what he believed were Tolstoyan principles, although nowhere does he attempt to articulate what these were except to acknowledge that vegetarianism and celibacy were ideals that he singularly failed to put into practise. He eventually came to the conclusion that Tolstoy’s notion that it was humankind’s lot to live by the sweat of its brow was something at which he was particularly inept. Working for a farmer, White overheard him one day to remark that
he ‘couldn’t turn Mr White out because he was such a perfect gentleman’. This was about as nasty a knock as I could receive. I was training as a farm labourer to become a peasant in the approved Tolstoyan fashion.1
On another occasion he and Dollie set up a chicken farm, and when he carried out a costing exercise discovered that each egg cost eight pence to produce. ‘Luckily we didn’t produce many’, he said.2
During these wanderings he encountered a number of people whom, with a sardonic but affectionate eye, he fashioned into a set of picturesque characters. While teaching English in Bohemia he met Prince Raoul de Rohan, an exotic refugee, ‘a bit of flotsam’, as White would have it, from the French Revolution.3 The prince was a devout Catholic who had married a Mary Agnes Rock in Dalkey in 1888.4 The couple told White he could stay as long as he liked after he had been sacked from his teaching job, but this friendship was abruptly ended after an argument about religion in which Tolstoy was attacked by the prince with ‘that peculiar self-satisfied assurance that the spoon-fed mind uses to the first-hand seeker’.5
In answering an advertisement for the ‘goodwill’ of a school for sale, White met A.M. Cogswell, whom he delicately refers to as C–. His description of Cogswell, though scathing, is not unsympathetic and is worth quoting for its literary content alone. He had, White wrote:
no presence or training for anything but the lower walks of intellectual slavery, with a genius for morbid self-torture, he was handicapped by birth, by nature, and by circumstance, 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