Books Do Furnish a Room

  ‘It is indeed a privilege to see ordinary folk in their own homes, though I never thought of the professional advantage you put forward. Well, housing conditions need a lot of attention, and I can tell you I am giving them of my best.’

  ‘You should come and try to pull the plug where I am living myself,’ said Trapnel. ‘I won’t enlarge.’

  Widmerpool looked rather uneasy at that. Trapnel, seeing he risked prejudicing the good impression he intended to convey, laughed and shook his head, dismissing the matter of plumbing.

  ‘I just wanted to mention the matter. Nice of you to have listened to it – nice also to have met.’

  ‘Just let me make a note of your bad housing, my friend,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Exact information is always useful.’

  Trapnel had spoken his last words in farewell, but Widmerpool led him aside and took out a notebook. At the same moment Pamela abandoned Gainsborough, whose attractions her husband must have overrated. She came towards us. Widmerpool turned to her. She disregarded him, and addressed herself to me in her slow, hypnotic voice.

  ‘Have you been attending any more funerals?’

  ‘No – have you?’

  ‘Just awaiting my own.’

  ‘Not imminent, I hope?’

  ‘I rather hope it is.’

  ‘How are you enjoying political life?’

  ‘Like any other form of life – sheer hell.’

  She said that in a relatively friendlv tone. Craggs intervened and led Widmerpool away, Trapnel returned. I introduced him to Pamela. It was not a success. In fact it was a disaster. From being in quite a good humour, she switched immediately to an exceedingly bad one. As he came up, her face at once assumed an expression of instant dislike. Trapnel himself could not fail to notice this change in her features. He winced slightly, but did not allow himself to be discouraged sufficiently to abandon all hope of making headway. Obviously he was struck by Pamela’s appearance. For a moment I wondered whether that had been the real reason for making such a point of introducing himself to Widmerpool. Any such guess turned out wide of the mark. On the contrary, he had not seen them come into the room together, nor taken in who she was. His head appeared still full of whatever he had been talking about to Widmerpool, because he did not listen when I told him her name. It turned out later that he was determined in his own mind that Pamela was a writer of some sort. Having decided that point, he wanted to find out what sort of a writer she might be. This was on general grounds of her looks, rather than any very special attraction he himself found for them.

  ‘Are you doing something for Fission?’

  Pamela stared at him as if he had gone off his head.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I just thought you might.’

  ‘Do I look the sort of person who’d write for Fission?’

  ‘It struck me you did rather.’

  She gave him a stare of contempt, but did not answer. Trapnel, seeing he was to be treated with deliberate offensiveness, made no further effort in Pamela’s direction. Instead, he began talking of the set-to on the subject of modern poetry that had just taken place between Shernmaker and Malcolm Crowding. Pamela walked away in the direction of Ada Leintwardine. Trapnel looked after her and laughed.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘I told you – Mrs Widmerpool.’

  ‘Wife of the MP I was chatting with?’

  ‘She’s rather famous.’

  ‘I didn’t get the name. I thought you were saying something about Widmerpool. So that’s who she is? I’d never have thought he’d have a wife like that. Bagshaw was talking about him, so I thought I’d like to make contact. I can’t say I was much taken with Mrs Widmerpool. Is that how she always behaves?’

  ‘Quite often.’

  ‘Girls like that are not in my line. I don’t care how smashing they look. I need a decent standard of manners.’

  At this stage of our acquaintance I did not know much about Trapnel’s girls, beyond his own talk about them, which indicated a fair amount of experience. Some ‘big’ love affair of his had gone wrong not long before our first meeting. Ada came round with the drink jug. Trapnel filled up and moved away.

  ‘Not much danger of intoxication from this brew,’ she said.

  ‘The Editor doesn’t seem to have done too badly.’

  ‘Books had an early go at the actual bottle – before this potion was mixed.’

  Bagshaw, rather red in the face, was in fact little if at all drunker than he had been at the beginning of the party, reaching a saturation point beyond which he never overflowed. He was clutching Evadne Clapham affectionately round the waist, he explained to her – with some supposed reference to her short story in Fission – where Marx differed from Feuerbach in aiming not to interpret the world but to change it; and what was the real significance of Lenin’s April Theses.

  ‘Evadne Clapham’s coiffure always reminds me of that line of Arthur Symons, “And is it seaweed in your hair?”’ said Ada. ‘There’s been some hot negotiation with poor old Sillers, but we’ve come across with quite a big advance in the end. I hope the book will justify that when it appears.’

  ‘What’s Odo$cvens’s work to be called?’

  ‘Sad Majors, an adaption of –

  Let’s have one other gaudy night: call to me

  All my sad captains …

  JG doesn’t care for the title. We’re trying to get Stevens to change it.’

  ‘Why? He must agree it’s a gloomy rank.’

  ‘God – Nathaniel Sheldon’s helping himself. He must think he’s not being appreciated.’

  It was true.Sheldon was routing about under the drink table. Ada hurried off. It was time to go home. I sought out Quiggjn to say goodbye. He was talking with Shernmaker, whose temper seemed to have improved, because he was teasing Quiggin.

  ‘Gauguin abandoned business for art, JG – you’re like Rimbaud, who abandoned art for business.’

  ‘Resemblances undoubtedly exist between publishing and the slave trade,’ said Quiggin ‘But it’s not only authors who get sold, Bernard’

  Down stairs in the packing department Widmerpool was wandering about looking for something. He no longer retained his earlier geniality, was now despondent.

  ‘I’ve lost my briefcase. Hid it away somewhere down here. I say, that friend of yours, Trapnel, is an odd fellow, isn’t he?’

  ‘In appearance?’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘He’s a good writer.’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘I mean should be useful on Fission.’

  ‘Ah, there’s the briefcase – no, I’ve just been talking to Trapnel, and his behaviour rather surprised me. As a matter of fact he asked me to lend him some money.’

  ‘Following, no doubt, on your recommendations in the House that interest rates should be reduced.’

  ‘Your joke is no doubt very amusing. At the same time you will agree Trapnel’s request was unusual on the part of a man whom I had never set eyes on before tonight, when he introduced himself to me?’

  ‘You know what literary life is like.’

  ‘I’m beginning to learn.’

  ‘Did you come across?’

  ‘I handed over a pound. The man assured me he was completely penniless. However, let us speak no more of that. I merely put it on record. I consider the party for Fission was a success. It will get off to a good start, even though I do not feel so much confidence in Bagshaw as I could wish.’

  ‘He knows his stuff.’

  ‘So everyone says. He appeared to me rather drunk by the end of the evening, but I must not stay gossiping. I have to get back to Westminster. Pam had to leave early. She had a dinner engagement.’

  We went outside. Trapnel was standing on the pavement. He had just hailed a cab. He must have been waiting there for one to pass for some minutes; in fact since he had taken the pound off Widmerpool.

  ‘Dearth of taxi
s round this neighbourhood’s almost as bad as where I’m living. Can I give anyone a lift? I’m heading north.’

  We both declined the offer.

  4

  In the new year, without further compromise, Dickensian winter set in. Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic trails. Bagshaw sat in his overcoat, the collar turned up round a woollen muffler, from which a small red nose appeared above a gelid moustache. Ada’s protuberant layers of clothing travestied pregnancy. Only Trapnel, in his tropical suit and dyed greatcoat, seemed unaware of the cold. He complained about other things: lack of ideas: emotional setbacks: financial worries. Climate did not affect him. The weather showed no sign of changing. It encouraged staying indoors. I worked away at Burton.

  On the whole Bagshaw’s tortuous, bantering strategy, which had seen him through so many tussles with employers and wives (the latest one kept rigorously in the background), was designed to conceal hard-and-fast lines of opinion – assuming Bagshaw still held anything of the sort – so that, in case of sudden showdown, he could without prejudice give support wherever most convenient to himself. Even so, he allowed certain assessments to let fall touching on the fierce internal polemics that raged under the surface at Quiggin & Craggs; by association, at Fission too. Such domestic conflict, common enough in all businesses, took a peculiarly virulent form in this orbit, according to Bagshaw, on account of political undercurrents concerned.

  ‘There are daily rows about what books are taken on. JG’s not keen on frank propaganda, especially in translation. The current trouble’s about a novel called The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers. JG thinks the title too long, and that it won’t sell anyway. No doubt the party will see there’s no serious deficit, but JG fears that sort of book clogs the wheels – the pistons in this case – of the non-political side of the list. He’s nervous in certain other respects too. He doesn’t mind inconspicuous fraternal writings inculcating the message in quiet ways. He rather likes that. What he doesn’t want is for the firm to get a name for peddling the Party Line.’

  ‘Craggs takes another view?’

  ‘Howard’s an old fellow-traveller of long standing. He hardly notices the books are propaganda. It all gives him a nostalgic feeling that he’s young again, running the Vox Populi Press, having the girls from the 1917 Club. All the same, he probably wouldn’t argue with JG so much if he wasn’t being prodded all the time by Gypsy.’

  ‘And Widmerpool?’

  ‘All I’m certain about is he wants to winkle me out of the editorship. As I’ve said, he behaves at times like a crypto, but I suspect he’s still waiting to see which way the cat will jump – and of course he doesn’t want to get too far the wrong side of his Labour bosses in the House.’

  ‘You were uncertain at first.’

  ‘He’s been repeating pure Communist arguments about the Civil War in Greece. He may simply believe them. I’m never quite sure Gypsy hasn’t a hold on him of some sort. There was a story about them in the old days. That was long before I came on the scene so far as Gypsy was concerned.’

  ‘How does Rosie Manasch take all this?’

  ‘She’s only interested in writers and art, all that sort of thing. She doesn’t cause any trouble. She holds those mildly progressive views of the sort that are not at all bothered by the Party Line. Incidentally, she seems to have taken rather a fancy to young Odo Stevens. Trappy’s becoming rather a worry. We’re always shelling out to him. He writes an article or a short story, gets paid on the nail, is back on the doorstep the next afternoon, or one of his stooges is, and he wants some more. I can handle him all right, but I’m not sure they’re doing so well on the other side of the yard.’

  Trapnel’s financial embarrassments had become unambiguous enough during the months that transformed him from a mere acquaintance of Bagshaw’s, and professional adjunct of Fission, into a recognized figure in one’s own life. His personality, built up with thought, deserves a word or two on account of certain elements not restricted to himself. He was a fine specimen of a general type, to which he had added flourishes of his own, making him – it was hardly going too far to say – unique in the field. The essential point was that Trapnel always acted a part; not necessarily the same part, but a part of some kind. Insomuch as most people cling to a role in which they particularly fancy themselves, he was no great exception so far as that went. Where he differed from the crowd was in so doggedly sticking to the role – or roles – he had chosen to assume.

  Habitual role-sustainers fall, on the whole, into two main groups: those who have gauged to a nicety what shows them off to best advantage: others, more romantic if less fortunate in their fate, who hope to reproduce in themselves arbitrary personalities that have won their respect, met in life, read about in papers and books, or seen in films. These self-appointed players of a part often have little or no aptitude, are even notably ill equipped by appearance or demeanour, to wear the costume or speak the lines of the prototype. Indeed, the very unsuitability of the role is what fascinates. Even in the cases of individuals showing off a genuine pre-eminence – statesmen, millionaires, poets, to name a few types – the artificial personality can become confused with the passage of time, life itself being a confused and confusing process, but, when the choice of part has been extravagantly incongruous, there are no limits to the craziness of the performance staged. Adopted almost certainly for romantic reasons, the role, once put into practice, is subject to all sorts of unavoidable and unforeseen restraints and distortions; not least, in the first place, on account of the essentially rough-and-ready nature of all romantic concepts. Even assuming relative clarity at the outset, the initial principles of the role-sustainer can finally reach a climax in which it is all but impossible to guess what on earth the role itself was originally intended to denote.

  So it was with Trapnel. Aiming at many roles, he was always playing one or other of them for all he was worth. To do justice to their number requires – in the manner of Burton – an interminable catalogue of types. No brief definition is adequate. Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to (lie young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor – the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery – and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.

  ‘I do so agree with Gissing,’ she said. ‘When he used to ask of a writer – has he starved?’

  The tribute was disinterested, as Evadne Clapham did not in the least look as if she had ever starved herself. The remark ruffled Trapnel.

  ‘Gissing was more of an authority on starvation than on writing.’

  ‘You don’t think hunger teaches things?’

  ‘I know as much about starvation as Gissing, probably more.’

  ‘Then you prove his point – though after all it’s dedication that counts in the end.’

  ‘Dedication’s often the hallmark of inferior performance.’

  Trapnel was in a severe mood on that occasion. He was annoyed at Evadne Clapham being brought to his favourite pub The Hero of Acre. The conversation was reproduced in due course, somew
hat more elaborately phrased, with the heroine getting the whip-hand, when Evadne Clapham’s next novel appeared. However, that is by the way. To return to Trapnel’s ambitions, they were – poverty apart – not only hard to achieve individually, but, even in rotation, impossible to combine. That was over and above Trapnel’s particular temperament, no great help. Infeasibility did not prevent him from behaving, where ambitions were concerned, like an alpinist who tackles the sheerest, least accessible rock face of the peak he has sworn to ascend.

  The role of ‘writer’ was on the whole the one least damaged when the strain became too severe, a heavy weight of mortal cargo jettisoned. There were times when even that role suffered violent stress. All writing demands a fair amount of self-organization, some of the ‘worst’ writers being among the most highly organized. To be a ‘good’ writer needs organization too, even if those most capable of organizing their books may be among the least competent at projecting the same skill into their lives. These commonplaces, trite enough in themselves, are restated only because they have bearing on the complexity of Trapnel’s existence. There was a growing body of opinion, including, as time went on, Craggs, Quiggin, even Bagshaw himself – though unwillingly – which took the view that Trapnel’s shiftlessness was in danger of threatening his status as a ‘serious’ writer. His books might be what the critics called ‘well put together’ – Trapnel was rather a master of technical problems – his life most certainly was the reverse. Nevertheless, people have to do things their own way, and the troubles that beset Trapnel were for the most part in what Pennistone used to call ‘a higher unity’. So far as coping with down-to-earth emergencies, often seemingly unanswerable ones, Trapnel could show surprising agility.

  One point should be cleared up right away. If comparison of his own life with a camel ride to the tomb makes Trapnel sound addicted to self-pity, a wrong impression has been created. Self-pity was a trait from which, for a writer – let alone a novelist – he was unusually free. On the other hand, it would be mistaken to conclude from that fact that he had a keen grasp of objectivity where his own goings-on were concerned. That judgment would be equally wide of the mark. This lack of objectivity made him enemies; that of self-pity limited sales. Whatever Trapnel’s essence, the fire that generated him had to see him through difficult days. At the same time he managed to retain in a reasonably flourishing state – flourishing, that is, in his own eyes – what General Conyers would have called his ‘personal myth’, that imaginary state of being already touched on in Trapnel’s case. The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.