The chronicle of Warlock's early twenties, with their large promise, false starts, bellicosity, elated revelations, subsequent disappointments, and continual voluminous baring of the soul makes distressing reading. Amid this morass, which included a brief—and acidulously abandoned—friendship with D.H. Lawrence, a failed marriage, flight to Ireland to avoid conscription, schemes for an arts review magazine, and for a season of opera (for which Bernard van Dieren was commissioned to compose his comic masterpiece, The Tailor), the two constants were his friendships with Delius and van Dieren. While Delius fulfilled the role of father figure and mentor, and despite Warlock's love for his music, as a composer Delius was too idiosyncratic to point new directions through the burgeoning Modernism of the First World War years and beyond. The latest radical works of Modernism were seized upon and read as runes, with contempt (e.g., Scriabin and Stravinsky), puzzlement (Schönberg), or enthusiastic approbation, as with the music of Bartók, whom Warlock traveled to Budapest to meet and befriend, though none seemed to hold the key to a comprehensive certainty of style. It is telling that, as his acquaintance with musical Modernism widened, his private but stringent reservations about Delius blossomed. Thus, it is curious that van Dieren loomed, from their first meeting in June 1916, as the chosen guide through the stylistic wilderness. "Your music —" Warlock wrote on June 8, 1916, "(those fragments of the Shakespeare Sonnets and the Symphony you played to-day) is nothing short of a revelation to me. I have been groping about aimlessly in the dark for so long, with ever-growing exasperation—and at last you have shown a light, alone among composers whom I have met; for neither Delius nor any other has ever so much as suggested a practical solution of the initial difficulties of musical composition." What he found in van Dieren's music is difficult to pinpoint as it has faded entirely into obscurity—the Chinese Symphony, referred to, may have been heard at most three times in the 20th century—though such things as van Dieren's Dream Pedlary and Take, O Take Those Lips Away heard with Warlock's two settings of the latter, or The Cloths of Heaven, composed in July 1916 to a poem by W.B. Yeats, suggest a similarly distracted air of wonderstruck diffidence as the area of appeal. Originally intended for The Curlew, the music of The Cloths of Heaven was adapted in 1925 to Arthur Symons' The Sick Heart.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi