All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times,
do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some
tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines
of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble comfortable
Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this day I ask myself
will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shape
into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and
ultimate diagnosis?...

Moreover, together with this hypertrophy there is an immigration of
elements that have never understood and never will understand the great
tradition, wedges of foreign settlement embedded in the heart of this
yeasty English expansion. One day I remember wandering eastward out
of pure curiosity--it must have been in my early student days--and
discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying
Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities and a concourse of
bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish
between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with
the devious, vicious, dirtily-pleasant eroticism of Soho. I found those
crowded streets a vast relief from the dull grey exterior of Brompton
where I lodged and lived my daily life. In Soho, indeed, I got my first
inkling of the factor of replacement that is so important in both the
English and the American process.

Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall, Ewart
was presently to remind me the face of the old aristocratic dignity was
fairer than its substance; here were actors and actresses, here money
lenders and Jews, here bold financial adventurers, and I thought of my
uncle's frayed cuff as he pointed out this house in Park Lane and
that. That was so and so's who made a corner in borax, and that palace
belonged to that hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who used
to be an I.D.B.,--an illicit diamond buyer that is to say. A city of
Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much shaken
and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied, insidiously
replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible elements; and with
a ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous empire of a quarter of this
daedal earth complex laws, intricate social necessities, disturbing
insatiable suggestions, followed from this. Such was the world into
which I had come, into which I had in some way to thr