Vamp Till Ready, which is the tale of a newly grown-up Fuller acquiring his Marxism, his legal career, his wife, his war and proof that he was indeed a poet, grows most naturally out of Souvenirs, which is the tale of his childhood. The tone continues to be one of laconic eloquence. The flavour of the Thirties, now so familiar to us because of its endless evocations, is given a stranger, more compelling taste because of the economical way in which he handles it. The signposts pointing from slump to call-up indicate the usual old road, but the sights and comments on the way provoke a fresh attention. Again, it has something to do with their descriptive frugality, their never going on and on. 'Poetry is, on the whole, a succinct art,' remarks Fuller, and so in his view is autobiography. The title refers to that extemporary rhythmic strumming, so popular at the time with pianists, which preceded the song.

The style is one of affectionate irony, reticence and bursts of wayward colour having to contend with an amused formality. Although Fuller reminds us that the 'I' of a poem is not necessarily the poet himself, here on every page it is made absolutely plain that the 'I' speaks for his 1930–42 self as exclusively as art and memory can persuade it to. Although the 'I' of Obituary of R. Fuller is decidedly that of the poet at his most self-candid … the 'I' of the autobiographer has been able to speak with more justice. In poetry, says Fuller, a writer can be free with the details of his personal life, can 'give himself away as a lesson, not a confession'. In prose, as we see here, it is quite another telling of the same story. True confessions, nothing less. He rakes them out of his past with wit and civility.

Certainly, it appears to have been a life minus the traditional conflicts. That fundamental one of whether he should become a full-time writer or a lawyer, or a poet and a lawyer, or a lawyer who writes poetry, for example. To be able to recognise 'almost from the start that I should never abandon a "job" in favour of "writing"' is a type of self-knowledge which puts paid to a whole mass of struggles, confusions and hurts from the word go. He treats it simply as a basic fact and then, of course, has to describe how two such apparently opposing strands, that involving the orthodoxies of a successful legal career, and that involving an equally committed role as a poet, began, right from the start, to work in tandem.

There is no apology; that is the essence of it. He has also had to deal with the characteristics which made him conventionally attractive and acceptable, these being obvious and unavoidable. In this volume we see their emergence. Modesty, mercifully, doesn't really come into it; something more obliquely unpretentious allows Fuller to take close stock of what was clearly in most respects a fortunate being with the minimum of self-regard.

The secret seems to be to reveal himself without dwelling on himself. Hence the concise and brief form of each revelation. (p. 20)