Books Do Furnish a Room

Reverting to the university at forty, one immediately recaptured all the crushing melancholy of the
undergraduate condition. As the train drew up at the platform, before the local
climate had time to impair health, academic contacts disturb the spirit, a more
imminent gloom was re-established, its sinewy grip in a flash making one young
again. Depressive symptoms, menacing in all haunts of youth, were in any case
easily aroused at this period, to be accepted as delayed action of the last six
years. The odd thing was how distant the recent past had also become, the army
now as stylized in the mind – to compare another triumphal frieze – as the
legionaries of Trajan’s Column, exercising, sacrificing, sweating at their
antique fatigue, silent files on eternal parade to soundless military music.
Nevertheless, shades from those days still walked abroad. Only a week before,
the peak of a French general’s khaki kepi, breaking rather too abruptly through
the winter haze of Piccadilly, had by conditioned reflex jerked my right hand
from its overcoat pocket in preparation for a no longer consonant salute,
counterfeiting the gesture of a deserter who has all but given himself away. A
residuum of the experience was inevitable.

Meanwhile, traditional textures
of existence were laboriously patched together in an attempt to reaffirm some
sort of personal identity, however blurred. Even if – as some thought – the
let-up were merely temporary, it was no less welcome, though the mood after the
earlier conflict – summarized by a snatch Ted Jeavons liked to hum when in poor
form – was altogether absent:

‘Après la guerre,
There’ll be a good time everywhere.’

That did not hinder looking
forward to engrossment during the next few weeks amongst certain letters and
papers deposited in the libraries here. Solitude would be a luxury after the
congestions of wartime, archaic folios a soothing drug. War left, on the one
hand, a passionate desire to tackle a lot of work: on the other, never to do
any work again. It was a state of mind Robert Burton – about whom I was writing
a book – would have well understood. Irresolution appealed to him as one of the
myriad forms of Melancholy, although he was, of course, concerned in the main
with no mere temporary depression or fidgetiness, but a ‘chronic or continued
disease, a settled humour’. Still, post-war melancholy might have rated a short
sub-section in the great work:

THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

What it is, with all the
Kindes, Causes, Symptomes,
Prognostickes, and severall cures of it. Three Maine
Partitions with their severall Sections, Members and Sub-sections,
Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and cut up by Democritus
Junior. With a Satyricall Preface, conducing to the following Discourse. Anno
Dom. 1621.

The title page showed not only
Burton’s own portrait in ruff and skull cap, but also figures illustrative of
his theme; love-madness; hypochondriasis; religious melancholy. The emblems of
jealousy and solitude were there too, together with those sovereign cures for
melancholy and madness, borage and hellebore. Burton had long been a favourite
of mine. A study of him would be a change from writing novels. The book was to
be called
Borage and Hellebore
.

As the forlorn purlieus of the
railway-station end of the town gave place to colleges, reverie, banal if you
like, though eminently Burtonesque, turned towards the relatively high
proportion of persons known pretty well at an earlier stage of life, both here
and elsewhere, now dead, gone off their rocker, withdrawn into states of existence
they – or I – had no wish to share. The probability was that even without
cosmic upheaval some kind of reshuffle has to take place halfway through life,
a proposition borne out by the autobiographies arriving thick and fast – three
or four at a time at regular intervals – for review in one of the weeklies. At
this very moment my bag was weighed down by several of these volumes, to be
dealt with in time off from the seventeenth century:
Purged Not in Lethe … A
Stockbroker in Sandals … Slow on the Feather … Moss off a Rolling Stone
… chronicles of somebody or other’s individual fate, on the whole unenthralling
enough, except insomuch as every individual’s story has its enthralling aspect,
though the essential pivot was usually omitted or obscured by most
autobiographers.

However, nearly all revealed, if not explicitly in every case, a
similar reorientation towards the sixth climacteric, their narrative
supporting, on the whole, evidence already noticeably piling up, that friends,
if required at all in the manner of the past, must largely be reassembled at
about this milestone. The changeover might improve consistency, even quality,
but certainly lost in intimacy; anyway that peculiar kind of intimacy that is
consoling when you are young, though probably too vulnerable to withstand the
ever increasing self-regard of later years.

Accommodation was in college.
The place looked much the same as ever. Only one porter, his face unfamiliar,
was on duty at the lodge. After studying a list for a long time, he signified a
distant staircase for the rooms allotted. The traditional atmosphere, tenuously
poised between a laxly run boarding-school and seedy residential club, now
leant more emphatically towards the former type of institution. The rooms,
arctic as of old, evidently belonged to a fairly austere young man, whose only
picture was an unframed photograph of a hockey team. It stood curling on the
mantelpiece. In the bookcase, a lot of works on economics terminated with St
John Clarke’s
Dust Thou Art
, rather a recondite one about the French Revolution, which might be pleasurable
to reassess critically. I pushed on into the bedroom. Here a crisis declared
itself. The bed was unmade. Only a sombrely stained blue-grey mattress, folded
in three, lay on the rusty wires of the frame. Back at the porter’s lodge, the
inconceivable difficulties of remedying lack of bedclothes at this hour were
radically discussed. Later, in hall, a few zombie-like figures collected
together to consume a suitably zombie-sustaining repast.

This was the opening of a
routine of days in the library, nights collating notes, the monotony anodyne.
One became immediately assimilated with other dim, disembodied, unapproachable
entities, each intent on his own enigmatic preoption, who flit through the cobbled
lanes and gothic archways of a university in vacation. It was what Burton
himself called ‘a silent, sedentary, solitary private life’, and it well suited
me during the middle of the week. For weekends, I returned to London. Once
Killick, a hearty rugby-playing philosophy don of my college, now grunting and
purple, came bustling up the street, a pile of books under his arm, and I
accosted him. There were explanations. Killick issued an abstracted invitation
to dinner. The following week, when I turned up, it was to be told Professor
Killick had gone to Manchester to give two lectures. This oversight hardly came
as a surprise. In a city of shadows, appointments were bound to be kept in a
shadowy fashion.

At the same time something very
different, something perfectly substantial, not shadowy at all, lay ahead as
not to be too long postponed, even if a latent unwillingness to face that fact
might delay taking the plunge. A moral reckoning had to be discharged. As the
days passed, the hypnotic pull to pay a call on Sillery grew increasingly
strong, disinclination – that was, of course, far too strong a word, indeed not
the right word at all – scarcely lessening, so much as the Sillery magnetism
itself gathering force. Pretendedly heedless enquiries revealed that, although
retired for some time from all administrative duties in his own college,
Sillery still retained his old rooms, receiving visitors willingly, even
avidly, it was reported, with so far as possible the traditional elements of
welcome.

To enter Sillery’s sitting-room
after twenty years was to drive a relatively deep fissure through variegated
seams of Time. The faintly laundry-cupboard odour, as one came through the
door, generated in turn the taste of the rock-buns dispensed at those
tea-parties, their gritty indeterminate flavour once more dehydrating the
palate. The props round about designed for Sillery’s nightly performance
remained almost entirely unaltered. Eroded loose-covers of immemorially
springless armchairs still precariously endured; wide perforations frayed long
since in the stretch of carpet before the door, only a trifle more hazardous to
the unwary walker. As might be expected, the framed photographs of jaunty young
men had appreciably increased, several of the new arrivals in uniform, one in a
turban, two or three American.

In this room, against this
background, Sillery’s machinations, such as they were, had taken shape for half
a century. Here a thousand undergraduate attitudes had been penitentially acted
out. Youth, dumb with embarrassment, breathless with exhibitionism, stuttering
with nerves, inarticulate with conceit; the socially flamboyant, the robustly
brawny, the crudely uninstructed, the palely epicene; one and all had
obediently leapt through the hoop at Sillery’s ringmaster behest; one and all
submitted themselves to the testing flame of this burning fiery furnace of
adolescent experience. Such concepts crowded in only after a few minutes spent
in the room. At the moment of entry no more was to be absorbed than the fact
that another guest had already arrived, to whom Sillery, with much miming and
laughter, was narrating an anecdote. Any immediate responses on my own part
were cut short at once, for Sillery, as if ever on his guard against possible
assassination, sprang from his chair and charged forward, ready to come to
grips with any assailant.

‘Timothy?… Mike? … Cedric?… ’

‘Nick—’

‘Carteret-Owen? … Jelf?…
Kniveton? … ’

‘Jenkins – how are you, Sillers?’

‘So you’ve come all the way
from New South Wales, Nick?’

‘I —’

‘No – of course – you were
appointed to that headmastership after all, Nick?’

‘It’s—’

‘I can see you haven’t quite
recovered from that head wound…’

The question of identification
was finally established with the help of the other caller, who turned out to be
Short, a member of Sillery’s college a year senior to myself. Short had been
not only a great supporter of Sillery’s tea-parties, but also vigorously
promulgated Sillery’s reputation as – Short’s own phrase – a ‘power in the land’.
We had known each other as undergraduates, continued to keep up some sort of an
acquaintance in early London days, then drifted into different worlds. I had
last heard his name, though never run across him, during the war when Short had
been working in the Cabinet Office, with which my War Office Section had
occasional dealings. He had probably transferred there temporarily from his own
Ministry, because he had entered another branch of the civil service on leaving
the University.

Short’s demeanour, now a shade
more portentous, more authoritarian, retained, like the sober suit he wore, the
same consciously buttoned-up character. This mild, well-behaved air concealed a
good deal of quiet obstinacy, a reasonable amalgam of malice. Always of high
caste in his profession, now almost a princeling, he stemmed nevertheless from
the same bureaucratic ancestry as a mere tribesman like Blackhead, prototype of
all the race of
fonctionnaires
, and,
anthropologically speaking, might be expected to revert to the same atavistic
obstructionism if roused.

Sillery, moustache a shade more
ragged and yellow, blue bow tie with its white spots, more likely than ever to
fall undone, was not much changed either. Perhaps illusorily, his body and face
had shrunk, physical contraction giving him a more simian look than formerly,
though of no ordinary monkey; Brueghel’s Antwerp apes (admired by Pennistone)
rather than the Douanier’s homely denizens of
Tropiques
, which Soper, the Divisional Catering Officer, had resembled. Even the real
thing, Maisky, defunct pet of the Jeavonses, could not compare with Sillery’s
devastating monkeylike shrewdness. So strong was this impression of
metempsychosis that he seemed about to bound up on to the bookcases, scattering
the photographs of handsome young men, and pile of envelopes (the top one
addressed to the Home Secretary) as he landed back on the table. He looked in
glowing health. No one had ever pronounced with certainty on the subject of
Sillery’s age. Year of birth was omitted in all books of reference. He was probably
still under eighty.