Books Do Furnish a Room (19 page)

‘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, somewhat
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.

Although ultimate
anti-climaxes, anyway in their most disastrous form, were still kept at bay at
this period, portents were already threatening in the eyes of those – L. O.
Salvidge, for example, one of the first to praise the
Camel
– who
took a gloomy view. Others – Evadne Clapham led this school of thought – dismissed
such brooding with execrations against priggishness, assurances that Trapnel
would ‘grow up’. When Evadne Clapham expressed the latter presumption, Mark
Members observed that he could think of no instance of an individual who,
having missed that desirable attainment at the normal stage of human
development, successfully achieved it in later life. It was hard to disagree.
The fact is that a certain kind of gifted irresponsibility, combined with
physical stamina and a fair degree of luck – in some respects Trapnel was
incredibly lucky – always holds out an attractive hope that its possessor will
prove immune to the ordinary vengeances of life; that at least one human being,
in this case X. Trapnel, will beat the book, romp home a winner at a million to
one.

Trapnel said he preferred women
to have tolerable manners. The taste was borne out by the behaviour of such
girls as he produced in public. When things were going reasonably well, he
would be living with a rather unusually pretty one, who was also to all
appearances bright, good tempered and unambitious. At least that was the
impression they gave when on view at The Hero of Acre, or another of Trapnel’s
chosen haunts. The fairly rapid turnover suggested they might be less amenable
when alone with Trapnel, not on their best behaviour; but that, after all, was
just as much potential criticism of Trapnel as of the girl. She usually kept
herself by typing or secretarial work (employed in concerns other than those
coming under the heading of publishing and journalism), her financial
contribution tiding over the ménage more or less – on the whole less rather
than more – during lean stretches of their life together.

The pair of them, when Trapnel
allowed his whereabouts to be known, were likely to be camped out in a bleak
hotel in Bloomsbury or Paddington, enduring intermittent persecution from the
management for delayed action in payment of the bill. The Ufford, as it used to
be in Uncle Giles’s day, would have struck too luxurious, too bourgeois a note,
but, after wartime accommodation of a semi-secret branch of the Polish army in
exile, the Ufford, come down in the world like many such Bayswater or Notting
Hill establishments, might well have housed Trapnel and his mistress of the
moment; their laundry impounded from time to time, until satisfactory
settlement of the weekly account.

Alternatively, during brief
periods of relative affluence, Trapnel and his girl might shelter for a few
weeks in a ‘furnished flat’. This was likely to be a stark unswept apartment in
the back streets of Holland Park or Camden Town. The flat might belong to an
acquaintance from The Hero of Acre, for example, possibly borrowed, while a
holiday was taken, custodians needed to look after the place; if Trapnel and
his girl could be so regarded.

When, on the other hand, things
were going badly, the girl would have walked out – this happened sooner or
later with fair regularity – and, if the season were summer, the situation
might not exclude a night or two spent on the Embankment The Embankment would,
of course, represent a very low ebb indeed, though
certainly experienced during an unprosperous interlude immediately preceding
the outbreak of war. After such disasters Trapnel always somehow righted himself, in a sense seeming to justify the optimism of
Evadne Clapham and those of her opinion. Work would once more be established on
a passable footing, a new short story produced, contacts revived. The eventual replacement of
the previous girl invariably kept up the traditionally high standard of looks.

Like many men rather ‘successful’
with women, Trapnel always gave the impression of being glad to get away from
them from time to time. Not at all a Don Juan – using the label in a technical
sense – he was quite happy to remain with a given mistress, once established,
until the next upheaval. The question of pursuing every woman he met did not
arise. Unlike, say, Odo Stevens, Trapnel was content to be in a room with three
or four women without necessarily suffering the obligation to impose his
personality on each one of them in turn.

All the same, if they could
feel safe with him in that sphere, Trapnel’s girls, even apart from shortage of
money, had to ‘put up with what was in many respects a hard life, one regulated
by social routines often un tempting to feminine taste. A gruelling example was
duty at The Hero of Acre. They would be expected to sit there for hours while
Trapnel held forth on
Portrait of the Artist
, or
The
Birth of a Nation
. Incidentally, The Hero of Acre
was to be avoided if absolute freedom from parasites was to be assured, even
though Trapnel could drastically rebuff them, if they intervened when a more
important assignation was in progress. Dismissal might take a minute or two,
should they be drunk, and in any case their mere presence in the saloon bar
could be inhibiting.