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John Holms, of whom Edwin Muir said: ‘Holms gave me a greater feeling of genius than any other man I have met, and I think he must have been one of the most remarkable men of his time, or indeed of any time.’
    John opened up a whole new world of the senses to me, a world I had never dreamed of. He loved me because to him I was a real woman. At first I refused to listen to him talk, and he was delighted that I loved him as a man.
    Although in the beginning I refused to listen to him talk and fell asleep at night while he was holding forth to me, little by little I opened my ears, and gradually, during the five years that I lived with him, I began to learn everything I know today, with the exception of what I have learnt about modern art. When I first met him I waslike a baby in kindergarten, but by degrees he taught me everything and sowed the seeds in me that sprouted after he was no longer there to guide me.
    I am sure that during the first two years of our life I was purely interested in making love, but when that lost its intensity I began to concentrate on all the other things that John could give me. I could pick at leisure from this great store of wealth. It never occurred to me that it would suddenly come to an end. He held me in the palm of his hand and from the time I once belonged to him to the day he died he directed my every move, my every thought. He always told me that people never got what they expected from a relationship. I certainly never dreamed of what I was to get from him. In fact, I never knew that anyone like John existed in the world. I don’t know what he expected from me, but I don’t think he was disappointed. His chief desire was to remould me, and he felt in me the possibilities that he was later to achieve, although he admitted that he got many other things he did not expect.
    John not only loved women: he understood them. He knew what they felt. He always said, ‘Poor women’, as though he meant they deserved extra pity for being born of the wrong sex. He was so conscious of everybody’s thoughts that it was painful for him to be in a room with discordant elements. Therefore he was supremely careful whom he chose to invite together. He had a wonderful gift of bringing out people’s best qualities. He spent most of his time reading, and his criticism was of a quality that Ihad never before encountered. He was a great help to his writer friends, who accepted his opinions and criticisms without reserve. He never took anything for granted. He saw the underlying meanings of everything. He knew why everybody wrote as they did, made the kind of films they made or painted the kind of pictures they painted. To be in his company was equivalent to living in a sort of undreamed of fifth dimension. It had never occurred to me that the things he thought about existed. He was the only person I have ever met who could give me a satisfactory reply to any question. He never said, ‘I don’t know.’ He always did know. Since no one else shared his extraordinary mental capacity, he was exceedingly bored when talking to most people. As a result, he was very lonely. He knew what gifts he had and felt wicked for not using them. Not being able to write, he was unhappy, which caused him to drink more and more. All the time that I was with him I was shocked by his paralysis of will power. It seemed to grow steadily, and in the end he could hardly force himself to do the simplest things.
    All this ended in 1934, when John died under an anaesthetic for a very minor operation on a broken wrist. When the doctors told me he was dead it was as though I was suddenly released from a prison. I had been John’s slave for five years and I imagined for a moment I wanted to be free, but I didn’t at all. I was absolutely bankrupt. In desperation I went to live with a friend of John’s with whom I had been physically and secretly in love for ayear, but whom I had ceased to see