From the Elephant's Back by Lawrence Durrell Page A

which gave the lie to humbug and sterile pedantry. He occupied, from quite an early age, a well-merited position of importance in English writing and a thoroughly well-earned financial success with work on several fronts at once. All this is forgotten today but will soon be remembered when his books once more come into print.
    At the time when I met him, disaster had overtaken him and financial distress stared him in the face—a serious matter for a man in his sixties, born and bred to literature, and who knew no other trade. He could not cheerfully turn to grave digging or teaching as I could—he had never been forced to do anything but write. His books on T.E. Lawrence and Norman Douglas [1] were responsible for this state of affairs; they had not only damaged him critically but had alienated him from the common reader, from his own public, from the libraries. With the trouble caused by these two volumes the whole of the rest of his admirable life work went out of print and out of public demand—some seventy titles in all! This was, of course, catastrophic for a man living on his books, and he was facing up to it gamely; but the tide had turned against him. Publishers would not reprint him, booksellers would not stock him; but worst of all his public had deserted him. If his last few years were made tolerable and even happy ones it was due to the timely help of a fellow writer who also admired him and who set him on his feet financially.
    He was a difficult, touchy, strange, lonely, shy, aggravating, and utterly delightful man. I was very much honoured to enjoy his friendship and an intimacy which permitted me frequently to disagree with him. Curiously enough he enjoyed this very much. It never affected our firm friendship; and in fact he positively reveled in the title we (my wife [2] and I) bestowed upon him—that of “Top Grumpy.” He sometimes put on special performances of outrageous grumpiness especially for us, for the pleasure of making us laugh. And we tried more than once to coax him into some public field where his truly endearing grumpiness could cause sympathy and not distaste. Aldington would certainly have won both sympathy and attention had he attacked such a public medium. One could not help seeing the heart of gold underneath the surface explosions of temper; the generosity hidden under the snappy tone of voice. None of this, alas, can be done for one by cold print in default of the author’s tone of voice, the connotation, the attitude of mind expressed by feature. Aldington with his striking good looks and gentle address would have been a winner. But he was too shy, and considered it “infra dig to make a mountebank of himself”—so I could only murmur “Touché” and leave it at that.
    I have said he was lonely, and this is true; while he knew and loved Europe, spoke excellent French and Italian, one always thought of him rather as a British exile than as of a European of British souche . He had cut himself off in some indefinable way from the current of British life, and in my view this isolation was harmful to this most British of authors. But here I stumble upon a field of absolute ignorance, for he was also a reticent man. He never spoke about his private life, his marriages, his personal affairs; indeed to this day I do not know anything about him as a human being, only as a writer. He once or twice hinted that his whole interior affective life had come to a stop in the twenties, and that after that epoch “everything seemed finished.” Europe, he said, had committed suicide in 1914. I reminded myself that his first visit to Europe had been around 1905—an epoch which I have great difficulty in visualizing.
    Another factor which came into play due to his isolation was a curious though intermittent faulting of judgement in literary matters; of course he was deeply embittered by the collapse of his career. But he persisted in attributing it