He laughed.
‘She’s got a young friend here whom she met somewhere during his holidays, and he invited her to tea. She’s having tea in his room now. I’m waiting for her.’
‘A boy, you mean?’
‘Yes—I suppose you’d call him a boy still.’
‘I meant still at the school?’
‘He was leaving, but stayed on for some reason—to captain some team, I think. Son or nephew of one of the Calthorpes. Do you remember them? Pam thought it would be an amusing jaunt. She insisted I mustn’t spoil the party by coming too. Rather a good joke.’
All the same, he did not look as if he found it specially funny. Blue-grey mist was thickening round us. I had a train to catch. The Widmerpools had come by car. They had no fixed plan about getting back to London. Pamela hated being tied down by too positive arrangements. She was going to pick her husband up hereabouts when the tea-party was over. I thought of what Trapnel had said of her couplings.
‘I must be off.’
‘I don’t believe I ever sent you details about that society I was telling Le Bas about. My secretary will forward them. I received Quiggin & Craggs’s Autumn List recently—their last. There were some interesting titles. Clapham has asked me to continue my association with publishing by joining his board.’
I too had received the list; later heard Quiggin’s comments on it. Sillery’s Garnered at Sunset, unexciting as the selection might be, had been noticed respectfully. Shernmaker, for example, was unexpectedly approving. Sales were not too bad, even if the advance was never recouped. Sillery might be said to have successfully imposed his will in this last fling. So did Ada Leintwardine. I Stopped at a Chemist upset several of the more old-fashioned reviewers who had survived the war, but they admitted a novel-writing career lay ahead of her. Even Evadne Clapham was impressed. In fact, Golden Grime was the last of Evadne Clapham’s books in her former style. Her subsequent manner followed Ada’s. Engine Melody—truncated title of The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers—believed to be not too well translated, was by no means ignored, Nathaniel Sheldon’s mention including the phrase ‘muted beauty’. Vernon Gainsborough’s Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?, with seven other books on similar subjects, was favourably noticed in a Times Literary Supplement ‘front’.
‘It’s a real apologia pro vita sua,’ said Bagshaw. ‘Conversion from Trotskyism expressed in such unqualified terms must have warmed Gypsy’s heart after her reverses.’
The last reference was to Sad Majors. Odo Stevens had dealt effectively with efforts, such as they were, to suppress his book. He had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for knowing about such things. That may have put him at an advantage. As usual, he also had good luck. So far from being inconvenient, the whole matter worked out in his best interests. Having already grasped that he might have done better financially by going to some publisher other than Quiggin & Craggs, he at once recognized that the loss of the two typescripts would give a potent reason for requiring release from his contract. He did not mention the third typescript, which had been all the time in the hands of Rosie Manasch. Rosie had apparently suggested that her former Fleet Street contacts might be useful in exploiting serial possibilities. She was right. Sad Majors was serialized on excellent terms. It was published in book form in the spring.
L. O. Salvidge, rather an achievement in the light of current publishing delays, got out a further volume of essays to follow up Paper Wine. The new one, Secretions, was much reviewed beside Shernmaker’s Miscellaneous Equities. It was a notable score for Salvidge to have produced two books in less than a year. After the unsuccessful prosecution, Kydd’s Sweetskin at first failed to recover from the withdrawal at the time of the injunction, but, given a new wrapper design, Kydd himself alleged that it picked up relatively well. That season also appeared David Penni-stone’s Descartes, Gassendi, and the Atomic Theory of Epicurus, the work of which he used to speak so despairingly when we were in the army together. I busied myself with Burton, even so only just managing to see Borage and Hellebore: a Study in print by the following December.
The scattered pages of Profiles in String, with the death’s-head swordstick, floated eternally downstream into the night. It was the beginning of Trapnel’s drift too, irretrievable as they. He went underground for a long time after that night. When at last he emerged, it was to haunt an increasingly gruesome and desolate world. There were odds and ends of film work, stray pieces of journalism, an occasional short story. In the last, possibly some traces reappeared of what had gone into Profiles in String, though in a much diminished form. Something of it may even have emerged on the screen. Another novel never got written. Trapnel himself always insisted that a novel is what its writer is. The definition only opens up a lot more questions. Perhaps he had taken a knock from which he never recovered; perhaps he had used up already what was in him, in the way writers do. In these sunless marshlands of existence, a dwindling reserve of pep-pills, a certain innate inventiveness, capacity for survival, above all the mystique of panache—in short, the Trapnel method—just about made it possible to hang on. That was the best you could say.
I once asked Dicky Umfraville—whose own experiences on the Turf made his knowledge of racing personalities extensive—whether he had ever heard of a jockey called Trapnel, whose professional career had been made largely in Egypt.
‘Heard of him, old boy? When I was in Cairo in the ’twenties, I won a packet on a French horse he rode called Amour Piquant.’
Temporary Kings
For Roland
1
THE SMELL OF VENICE SUFFUSED the night, lacustrine essences richly distilled. Late summer was hot here. A very old man took the floor. Hoarse, tottering, a few residual teeth, arbitrarily assembled and darkly stained, underpinning the buoyancy of his grin, he rendered the song in slower time than ordinary, clawing the air with his hands, stamping the floor with his feet, while he mimed the action of the cable, straining, creaking, climbing, as it hauled upward towards the volcanic crater the capsule encasing himself and his girl, a journey calculated to stir her ungrateful heart.
Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là.
Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là.
Funiculì funiculà, via montiam su là.
A first initiatory visit to Italy, travelling as a boy with my parents, had included a week at this same hotel. It overlooked the Grand Canal. Then small, rather poky even, its waterfront now extended on either side of the terrace, where, by tradition, the musicians’ gondola tied up. Neartourist outfits replaced evening dress antique as the troupe itself, in other respects the pattern remained unaltered, notably this veteran and the ‘business’ of his song. Could he be the same man? A mere forty years—indeed three or four short of that—might well have passed without much perceptible transmutation in a façade already radically weathered by Time when first observed. The gestures were identical. With an operatic out-thrust of the body, he intimated the kingdoms of the earth ranged beneath funicular passengers for their delectation.
Si vede Francia, Procida, la Spagna,
E io veggo te, io veggo te.
The century all but within his grasp, the singer might actually recollect the occasion for which the song had been composed; on that great day, as the words postulated, himself ascended Vesuvius accompanied by his inamorata, snug together in the newly installed spaceship, auspicious with potentialities for seduction. Had a dominating personality, the suggestive rotations of the machinery, Procida’s isle laid out far below, like a girl spreadeagled on her back, all combined to do the trick? The answer was surely affirmative. Even if marriage remained in question—conceivably the librettist’s deference to convention—at least warmer contacts must have been attained.
The stylized movements of the hands were reminiscent of Dicky Umfraville at one of his impersonations. He too should have harnessed his gift, in early life, to an ever renewing art from which there was no retiring age. To exhibit themselves, perform bef
ore a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and ashes. Professional commitment to his own representations might have kept at bay the melancholy—all but chronic, Frederica and his stepchildren complained—now that Umfraville had retired from work as agent at Thrubworth. Sometimes, after a day’s racing, for example, he might return to the old accustomed form. Even then a few misplaced bets would bring the conviction that luck was gone for good, his life over.
‘Christ, what a shambles. Feeling my back too. Trumpeter, what are you sounding now?—Defaulters, old boy, if your name’s Jerry Hat-Trick. You know growing old’s like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.’
‘Which ones haven’t you committed?’ said Frederica. ‘You’ve never grown up, darling. You can’t grow old till you’ve done that.’
Sufferance, as well as affection, was implied, though Frederica had never tired of Umfraville, in spite of being often cross with him.
‘I feel like the man in the ghost story, scrambling over the breakwaters with the Horrible Thing behind him getting closer and closer. There hasn’t been a good laugh since that horse-box backed over Buster Foxe at Lingfield.’
As a rule Umfraville disliked mention of death, but the legend of Buster Foxe’s immolation under the wheels of a kind of Houyhnhnm juggernaut, travelling in reverse gear, was the exception. It had resolutely passed into Umfraville myth. Captain Foxe’s end (he had been promoted during the war) was less dramatic, though certainly brought about by some fatal accident near the course, terminating for ever risk of seeing an old enemy at future race-meetings. It would be worth asking Umfraville if he had his own version of Funiculì-Funiculà, an accomplishment by no means out of the question.
The present vocalist to some extent controverted Frederica’s argument, supporting more St John Clarke’s observation that ‘growing old consists abundantly of growing young’. The aged singer looked as if thoughts of death, melancholy in any form, were unknown to him. He could be conceived as suffering from rage, desire, misery, anguish, despair; not melancholy. That was clear; additionally so after the round of applause following his number. The clapping was reasonably hearty considering the heat, almost as oppressive as throughout the day just passed. Dr Emily Brightman and I joined in. Acknowledgment of his talent delighted the performer. He bowed again and again, repeatedly baring blackened sporadic stumps, while he mopped away streams of sweat that coursed down channels of dry loose skin ridging either side of his mouth. Longevity had brought not the smallest sense of repletion where public recognition was in question. That was on the whole sympathetic. One found oneself taking more interest than formerly in the habits and lineaments of old age.
In spite of the singer’s own nonchalance, the susceptive tunes of the musicians, the gorgeous dropscene, the second carafe of wine, infected the mind not disagreeably with thoughts of the evanescence of things. At the beginning of the century, Marinetti and the Futurists had wanted to make a fresh start—whatever that might mean—advocating, among other projects, filling up the Venetian canals with the rubble of the Venetian palaces. Now, the Futurists, with their sentimentality about the future, primitive machinery, vintage motor-cars, seemed as antiquely picturesque as the Doge in the Bucentaur, wedding his bride the Sea, almost as distant in time; though true that a desire to destroy, a hatred and fear of the past, remained a constant in human behaviour.
‘Do you think the soubrette is his mistress, or his great-granddaughter?’ asked Dr Brightman. ‘They seem on very close terms. Perhaps both.’
From our first meeting, at the opening session of the Conference (when friendly contacts had been achieved by mutual familiarity with Borage and Hellebore, my book about Burton, and her own more famous work on The Triads), Dr Brightman had made clear a determination to repudiate the faintest suspicion of spinsterish prudery that might, very mistakenly, be supposed to attach to her circumstances. Discreetly fashionable clothes emphasized this total severance from anything to be thought of as academic stuffiness, a manner of dress quietly but insistently smart. One of her pupils at the university (our niece Caroline Lovell’s best friend) alleged a reputation of severity as a tutor, effortless ability to reduce to tears, if necessary, the most bumptious female student. Dr Brightman, it was true, was undoubtedly a little formidable at first impact. We touched on the Dark Ages. She spoke of her present engagement on Boethius, in a form likely to prove controversial. The male don of her name, known to me when myself an undergraduate, appeared to be only a distant relation.
‘You mean Harold Brightman, who played some part in organizing a dinner to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of that old rascal Sillery? He’s a cousin of some sort. There are scores of them engaged in the learned professions. We all stem from the Revd Salathiel Brightman, named in The Dunciad in connexion with some long forgotten squabble about a piece of Augustan pedantry. He composed Attick and Roman Reckonings of Capacity for Things Liquid and Things Dry reduced to the Common English Mensuration for Wine and Corn. I believe the great Lemprière acknowledges indebtedness in preparation of his own tables of proportion at the end of the Bibliotheca Classica. Salathiel is said to have revolutionized the view held in his own day of the cochlearion and oxybaphon, though for myself I haven’t the smallest notion of how many of either went to an amphora. Speaking of things liquid and things dry, shall we have a drink? Tell me, Mr Jenkins, did Mark Members persuade you to come to this Conference?’
‘You, too?’
‘Not without resistance on my own part. I had planned a lot of work this long vac. Mark positively nagged me into it. He can be very tyrannical.’
‘I resisted too, but was in difficulties about a book. It seemed a way out.’
To say that was to make the best of things, let oneself down gently. Writing may not be enjoyable, its discontinuance can be worse, though Members himself must by then have been safely beyond any such gnawings of guilt. By now he was a hardened frequenter of international gatherings for ‘intellectuals’ of every sort. He had been at the game for years. The activity suited him. It brought out hitherto dormant capabilities for organization and oratory, neither given a fair chance in the course of an author’s routine dealings with publishers and editors; nor for that matter—Members having tried reversing the rôles—trafficking with authors as editor or publisher. The then everwidening field of cultural congresses pleased and stimulated his temperament. At one of them he had even found a wife, an American lady, author and journalist, a few years older than himself, excellently preserved, not without name and useful connexions in her own country. She was also, as Members himself boasted, ‘inured to writers and their inconsequent ways’. That was probably true, as Members was her fourth husband. The marriage still remained in a reasonably flourishing condition, in spite of hints (from the critic; Bernard Shernmaker, chiefly) that Members had dropped out of the Venetian rendezvous because another, smaller conference was to include a female novelist in whom he was interested. A reason for supposing that particular imputation unjust was that several other literary figures had thought the rival conference more tempting. These differed in this from Members only insomuch as he had played some part in organization of the Venetian gathering at the London end. That was why, to avoid becoming vulnerable in his own apostasy, he had to find, at short notice, one or two substitutes like Dr Brightman and myself. He brushed aside pretexts that I never took part in such activities.
‘All the more reason to go, Nicholas, see what such meetings of true minds have to offer. I should not be at all surprised if you did not succumb to the drug. It’s quite a potent one, as I’ve found to my cost. Besides, even at our age, there’s a certain sense of adventure at such jamborees. You meet interesting people—if writers and suchlike can be called interesting, something you and I must often have doubted in the course of our via dolorosa towards literary crucifixion. At worst it makes a change, provides a virtually free holiday, or something
not far removed. Come along, Nicholas, bestir yourself. Say yes. Don’t be apathetic.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!
It’s not sepulture, and a tall mountain, this time, but the Piazza San Marco—my patron saint, please remember—and a lot of parties, not only crowded with culture, but excellent food and drink thrown in. There’s the Biennale, and the Film Festival the following week, if you feel like staying for it. Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn? Take a chance on it. You’ll live like a king once you get there.’
‘One of those temporary kings in The Golden Bough, everything at their disposal for a year or a month or a day—then execution? Death in Venice?’
‘Only ritual execution in more enlightened times—the image of a declining virility. A Mann’s a man for a’ that. Being the temporary king is what matters. The retribution of congress kings only takes the form, severe enough in its way, I admit, of having to return to everyday life. Even that, my dear Nicholas, you’ll do with renewed energy. Like the new king, in fact.
Here upon earth, we’re kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
That’s what the Venice Conference will amount to. I shall put your name down.’
‘Who else is going?’
‘Quentin Shuckerly, Ada Leintwardine. They’re certain. Not Alaric Kydd, which is just as well. The new Shuckerly, Athlete’s Footman, is the best queer novel since Sea Urchins. You ought to have a look at it, if you’ve got time. You won’t regret the decision to go to Venice. I’m désolé at not being able to attend myself. Unfortunately one can’t be in two places at once, and I have a duty to make myself available elsewhere. There will be a lot of international figures there, some of them quite distinguished, Ferrand-Sénéschal, Kotecke, Santos, Pritak. With any luck you’ll find a very talented crowd. I’d hoped to hear Ferrand-Sénéschal on the subject of Pasternak and the Nobel Prize. His objections—he will certainly demur at the possibility—will be worth listening to.’