Read wrote no further novels. With no regular salary and two households to support, he had to take any work he could find. At the suggestion of Roger Fry, he was made editor of The Burlington Magazine, became a reader for Heinemann and finally a director of the publishers Routledge & Kegan Paul. He remained at Routledge for the next 30 years, responsible for publishing writers such as Georges Simenon, Denton Welch, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett and C.G. Jung.
Despite the office job, he continued to write on art and entered into fierce controversies about both art and literature — defending Romanticism against the Classicism of his friend Eliot, and organising a Surrealist exhibition in the Burlington Galleries in 1936 — "the desperate act of men too profoundly convinced of the rottenness of our civilisation to save a shred of respectability". For this J. B. Priestley called him "a nitwit" but as tokens of appreciation the nitwit was given works by Yves Tanguy, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Graham Sutherland, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Alexander Calder which now joined the paintings and sculptures by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo and Henry Moore in my father's ad hoc collection of art. With the approach of World War II, my parents left London to live in a thatched Arts and Craft house near Beaconsfield that my father had built when married to Evelyn and let after moving to Edinburgh. However, like Olivero, the hero of The Green Child, he pined for the rural paradise he remembered for his youth — that "age of unearthly bliss to which all the strands of my subsequent happiness are tied". He wrote a poem, "Exile's Lament".
After ten years, in 1949, this exile came to an end. He sold the Arts and Crafts house and bought a large Queen Anne rectory at Stonegrave, a village a mile or two from the farm where he had been born and spent the first ten years of his life.
I was aged eight when we moved to Yorkshire and had a stimulating if not always happy childhood in the draughty old house with its threadbare carpets, archaic plumbing, mish-mash of modernist and baroque furniture, and exceptional collection of modern art. There were ponies, a donkey, a French poodle, poultry, rabbits, guinea-pigs, a grouchy Yorkshire gardener, a Bavarian cook, a pallid maid-servant, regular visits from artists, writers and musicians, and during the holidays the attics packed with our friends from school.
As a quid pro quo for her agreeing to the move to Yorkshire, my father had agreed with my mother that their four children should be educated at Catholic boarding schools — in the case of his three sons, at nearby Ampleforth College. Even in the holidays, he left our upbringing and the running of the household to her, shutting himself away in a large study in the north wing of the house, emerging only for meals, a sharp constitutional walk after breakfast and a longer one in the afternoon. He was gentle and kind — his face always lit up when I came into the room — but silent and remote. I resented the monks in loco parentis and never became institutionalised at Ampleforth, leaving at the age of 16.
Despite the office job, he continued to write on art and entered into fierce controversies about both art and literature — defending Romanticism against the Classicism of his friend Eliot, and organising a Surrealist exhibition in the Burlington Galleries in 1936 — "the desperate act of men too profoundly convinced of the rottenness of our civilisation to save a shred of respectability". For this J. B. Priestley called him "a nitwit" but as tokens of appreciation the nitwit was given works by Yves Tanguy, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Graham Sutherland, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Alexander Calder which now joined the paintings and sculptures by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo and Henry Moore in my father's ad hoc collection of art. With the approach of World War II, my parents left London to live in a thatched Arts and Craft house near Beaconsfield that my father had built when married to Evelyn and let after moving to Edinburgh. However, like Olivero, the hero of The Green Child, he pined for the rural paradise he remembered for his youth — that "age of unearthly bliss to which all the strands of my subsequent happiness are tied". He wrote a poem, "Exile's Lament".
Here where I labour hour by hour
The folk are mean and the land is sour.
God grant I may return to die
Between the Riccall and the Rye.
After ten years, in 1949, this exile came to an end. He sold the Arts and Crafts house and bought a large Queen Anne rectory at Stonegrave, a village a mile or two from the farm where he had been born and spent the first ten years of his life.
I was aged eight when we moved to Yorkshire and had a stimulating if not always happy childhood in the draughty old house with its threadbare carpets, archaic plumbing, mish-mash of modernist and baroque furniture, and exceptional collection of modern art. There were ponies, a donkey, a French poodle, poultry, rabbits, guinea-pigs, a grouchy Yorkshire gardener, a Bavarian cook, a pallid maid-servant, regular visits from artists, writers and musicians, and during the holidays the attics packed with our friends from school.
As a quid pro quo for her agreeing to the move to Yorkshire, my father had agreed with my mother that their four children should be educated at Catholic boarding schools — in the case of his three sons, at nearby Ampleforth College. Even in the holidays, he left our upbringing and the running of the household to her, shutting himself away in a large study in the north wing of the house, emerging only for meals, a sharp constitutional walk after breakfast and a longer one in the afternoon. He was gentle and kind — his face always lit up when I came into the room — but silent and remote. I resented the monks in loco parentis and never became institutionalised at Ampleforth, leaving at the age of 16.
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