Man of Two Worlds

THE INNOCENT EYE (268 pp.)--Herbert Read--Holt ($3.50).

In his 53 years, Herbert Read has written 20-odd books of poetry, criticism and biography (Wordsworth; In Defense of Shelley) and become Britain's top authority on modern art. He is a not uncommon type of his generation--an intellectual who was born early enough to enjoy the traditional tranquillity of Victorian rural England, but who reached an individualistic maturity during the disordered years between two wars. It is in this respect that his autobiography makes good reading--for Read shuns sensational confessions and concentrates on the varying influences that left their marks on his mind.

All the early marks were of a kind to turn the mind of a boy to romantic poetry --the rare sound of a horse's hoofs clopping past his father's lonely farm at night, the screaming, exotic peacocks at the neighboring manor house, the 1,200-year-old parish church that still bore, on the sundial over its porch, the Saxon inscription: THIS IS DAEGES SOL MERCA AET ILCVMTIDE (This is the day's sun mark at every tide). And when Read was nine years old, a glass jar filled with "black, blind and sinister leeches" was carried upstairs to his dying father's bedroom.

The fatherless family moved to the grimy city of Leeds. Young Read attended a spartan city school whose only romanticism lay in the library's collection of Rider Haggard. At 15, he became a bank clerk (at -L-20 a year) and a "true-blue Tory," at 17 a disciple of Alfred Tennyson and William Blake. At 22, he was swept off to World War I--stopping off long enough in London to hand a publisher his first volume of poems.

"My Dear Young Friend." Read spent 4 1/2 bloody, boring years in the infantry, rising to a captain's rank. He and his friends returned to civil life with high hopes--only to find that "we left the war as we entered it: dazed, indifferent, incapable of any creative action. We had acquired only one new quality: exhaustion."

"My dear young friend," wrote Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who advised all would-be authors to take a steady job and to write in their leisure hours), "suppose yourself established in any honorable occupation. From the manufactory or counting-house . . . you return at evening . . . with the very countenances of your wife and children brightened. . . . Then . . . you retire into your study [where] your writing-desk with its blank paper and . . . other implements will appear as a chain of flowers." So Author Read obediently took a job in the Treasury--and quickly discovered that "dear Coleridge" had been talking through his hat. Nonetheless, every night for years Read fought his tired brain, turned out poems and essays. Finally, he found a more congenial job as a curator of ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Today Author Read, like many of his more thoughtful contemporaries, is a strange but balanced composite-man--an admirer of both Chinese philosophy and surrealism, an atheist with a yen for mystical writing, an advanced thinker who sees his old-fashioned childhood as "an age of unearthly bliss," a romantic "anarchist" who insists that "we must not assume that art and machinery are mutually exclusive, but experiment until we discover a machine art." As art critic and esthetic philosopher, Read is erudite and discerning; as a writer, he is precise and dry, so that his prose shows at its best on subjects that need no embroidery. Example: the World War I chapter named "A Journal of the Retreat of the Fifth Army from St. Quentin," which English critics have justly ranked with the best war writing of the century.

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