When I first met John Holms I was impressed by his elastic quality. Physically, he seemed barely to be knit together. You felt as if he might fall apart anywhere. When you danced with him it was even more apparent, because he could move every muscle of his body without its being noticeable and without the usual jerks one suffers in such cases. He was very tall, over six feet in height. He hail a magnificent physique, enormous broad shoulders and small hips and a fine chest. He wore a small red beard and looked very much like Jesus Christ. His hair was wavy, thick and auburn red. His skin was white, but from the southern sun it had turned pink. His eyes were deep brown and he wore glasses; he had a classical straight nose. His mouth was small and sensuous and seemed to be pursed up under his moustache...

He rarely saw his family, who were living in retirement at Cheltenham. He found all contact with them difficult because he belonged to a different world. He knew much too much about theirs, and they knew much too little about his. His father had wanted him to enter the diplomatic service, but when the war broke out he was a student at Sandhurst Military College and joined up at the age of seventeen. At that time, he was as strong as a bull and had killed four Germans by hammering them on the head when he had surprised them breakfasting under a tree. For this, to his great shame, he was given the Military Cross. After six months of war on the Somme in the light infantry, he had been taken prisoner in a night patrol, and had spent the rest of the war (two years) in a German prison camp. In prison he met Hugh Kingsmill, who became a lifelong friend. His other great friend was Edwin Muir.

In the prison, because he was an officer, he had been pretty well treated and was unfortunately allowed to have all the liquor he wanted to buy. This undoubtedly had done him much harm, for his capacity for drink was greater than anyone's I have ever known. He drank about five drinks to other people's one and yet he never seemed to be affected by it until about three in the morning when he looked peculiar, with his eyes half shutting. However, he never behaved badly in any way. Drink made him talk, and he talked like Socrates. All his varied education and knowledge of people and life, which should have been expressed in writing, came out in conversation. lie held people spellbound for hours. He seemed to have everything at his fingertips, as though he had been in contact with everything, had seen everything and thought about everything. He was like a very old soul that nothing could surprise. This gave him a detached quality and I was greatly astonished much later when I discovered what passion lurked under this indifferent exterior. I always thought of him as a ghost. He was definitely a frustrated writer, although at one period in his life he had had a great success in London writing criticism, and he still received letters begging him to write articles. He could not get himself to write at all any more. And though he needed money very badly because he received only a meager allowance from his father, he preferred to live in the greatest simplicity at St. Tropez rather than go back to England.

John Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met. His mind had a majestic clarity and order... Though his sole ambition was to be a writer, the mere act of writing was another enormous obstacle to him: it was as if the technique of action were beyond his grasp, a simple, banal, but incomprehensible mystery. He knew his weakness, and it filled him with the fear that, in spite of the gifts which he knew he had, he would never be able to express them; the knowledge and the fear finally reached a stationary condition and reduced him to impotence.

Physical descriptions of John Holms vary as well. He had a short pointed beard; to Alec Waugh's eyes, he "looked like a Spanish grandee," and Waugh added, "People stared at him when he came into a room." Peggy noted his "elastic quality" and his resemblance to images of Jesus Christ, something other observers mentioned too. Muir described him as "tall and lean, with a fine Elizabethan brow and auburn, curly hair, brown eyes with an animal sadness in them, a large, somewhat sensual mouth, and a little pointed beard which he twirled when he was searching for a word." Muir noted that his friend was known as a fine athlete at Rugby, but commented on his somewhat odd physical presence: "In his movements he was like a powerful cat; he loved... trees or anything that could be climbed, and he had all sorts of odd accomplishments: he could scuttle along on all fours at a great speed without bending his knees; walking, on the other hand, bored him. He had the immobility of a cat too, and could sit for long stretches without stirring." Several observers noted a generally unkempt Holms; Waugh said that by 1919 he "was wearing pre-war shabby clothes," noting also, however, "he wore them with an air." When Holms visited William Gerhardie in London in the thirties, he arrived in a Rolls-Royce, but he wore "a very old soiled mackintosh." Gerhardie, who would directly portray Peggy and John in his 1936 novel Of Mortal Love, continued, "We went for a long drive together, and the immaculate chauffeur took his peremptory orders from his red-bearded, dilapidated, shabby master with faint distaste." Peggy, however, notes in her memoirs that she converted him to dressing well, sending him to London tailors.

Women did not always see John Holms in a charitable light. Edwin Muir's wife, Willa, in her memoirs, recalls a man who ignored her presence and talked only to her husband, and who questioned her housekeeping; she complains about "Holms's monopolizing personality." Eventually she told her husband she would "rather die than sit at the same table with (Holms) again."

When I first met John, not only was I ignorant of all human motives, but, worst of all, completely ignorant of myself. I lived in a repressed, unconscious world. In five years he taught me what life was all about. He interpreted my dreams and analyzed me and made me realize that I was good and evil, and made me overcome the evil.

John not only loved women: he understood them. lie 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 I had 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 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.