the social environment of his family, did not however make
him feel at ease in the higher circles of society to which it
introduced him. He acquired no ambition to succeed in any
of the professions for which university education is a
qualification, and this further alienated him from his
family by disappointing his father's expectations. The acute
sense of uncertainty and isolation from which he suffered is
described in his autobiography Between Two Worlds: it was
an emotional indisposition which did not much impair his
mental energy and concentration, but neither was it relieved
by his academic successes.

For this there must have been deeper and more individual
causes than the disparity between his nurture and his
education to which he ascribes it. Faced by the need to
choose a profession, or to marry, a painful crisis of irreso-
lution made decision impossible. Even after the necessity
of earning a living at last impelled him to take up journalism
in London, he long continued to be strangely dependent
upon others for any momentous decision, not only in pro-
fessional but in private affairs. Pen in hand, he was never at a
loss for opinions and words to express them; so that to write
was almost his line of least resistance. Yet even for writing
he felt a lack of inward urgency: in his own words, he was
'a victim of his own non-entity' who 'wanted not to write
but to be'. And the exercise of his skill reassured him because,
as he says, 'I was compelled to substitute an intelligence for
an individuality if I was to credit myself with an individuality
at all'.

A man with such a feeling of inadequacy is naturally
inclined to seek in others for the element in which he feels
deficient. He becomes magnetic towards persons who have
a superabundance of independence and spontaneity: and
two men to whom that description would apply became
Murry's friends before 1914, when he was editing the little
avant-garde magazine Rhythm. The first of these was the
brilliant young sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, whose liking for
him soon turned to hatred: the second was the novelist

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