Temporary Kings (10 page)

Everyone
was pleased with the idea. The party took place in Glober’s sitting-room on one
of the upper floors of the hotel, an old-fashioned establishment (pulled down a
couple of years later) in the Curzon Street neighbourhood. It was a favourite
haunt at that period of the more enlightened sort of American publisher. The
place was just Glober’s mark. When I arrived, he was inspecting the table laid
for dinner.

‘Good
to see you. I’ve asked quite a crowd.’

Mopsy
Pontner, bringing the drawing with her, arrived alone. At the last moment her
husband had been prevented from coming by another engagement, arisen at short
notice, having professional bearing on one of his translations. Pontner rightly
judged his wife fully competent to negotiate the business of the drawing on her
own. There were a dozen or more guests by the time we sat down. The Lilienthals
arrived late, and rather drunk, having had a long session at The Mortimer with
a customer who could not make up his mind whether or not to buy a Conrad
first-edition in their catalogue. Xenia Lilienthal, small, with ginger
corkscrew curls and a beseeching expression, was suffering from a heavy cold in
her nose. Lilienthal, his mind on business, kept fingering the hairs of his
sparse black beard. Glober had roped in another American publisher and wife,
met the previous day in London, both hitherto unknown to him. They were on
their way to the south of France. He wanted them to deliver by hand a present
to a friend they had in common, who was staying at Antibes. A young man with a
lisp and honey-coloured hair, come to the hotel earlier in the evening to sell
Glober a Georgian silver tankard, had been asked to stay for dinner. This young
man told the Lilienthals he had once met them with Mr Deacon, to which they
assented without much warmth. There was a lesbian called ‘Bill’ (apparently
lacking a surname), seen much at parties, who admitted soon after arrival that
she was uncertain as to how firm her invitation had been to this one. Old Mrs
Maliphant was present, who had been on the stage in the ’seventies. She was
alleged to have slept with Irving; some said Tree; possibly both. Glober had
encountered her at the house of one of the several publishers to whom she had
promised her Memoirs. Moreland, to some extent responsible for the whole
assembly, arrived in poorish form, absent in manner, probably weighed down with
a current love affair gone wrong. Other guests, now forgotten, may also have
been entertained. If so, their presence did not affect what happened.

The
years invest the muster-roll of Glober’s dinner-party with a certain specious
picturesqueness, if anything increased by being a shade grotesque. At the time,
at least on the surface of things, the evening turned out heavy going. That was
Glober’s fault only so far as he had been over-reckless in mixing people,
always risky, sometimes fatal. In this particular venture, he had, as an
American, underrated the intractable strain in English social life, even at
this undemanding London level, an easy thing to do for anyone not conversant
with its heterogeneous elements, their likes and dislikes. Food and drink were
both reasonably good. Conversation never got properly under way. Something was
lacking.

Glober
bought the Augustus John drawing on sight. He made no demur about the price, a
fairly steep one in the light of the then market. It was a three-quarter length
of a model called Conchita, a gipsy type Barnby, too,
sometimes employed. Glober’s own demeanour, as when he
had visited the office, was enormously genial, but even he did not appear to
find the going easy with Mopsy Pontner, whom he had placed next to himself at
table. He sat between her and the American publisher’s wife, a statuesque lady
from Baltimore. Mopsy, with dark straggling hair and very red lips, perfectly
civil, was uncommunicative in manner. She made
Glober do all the talking. He probably did not mind that, but had earned the
right to a little more notice than he seemed to be getting. He had also to work
hard with the Baltimore lady, though not because she did not talk. The trouble
was her anxiety about reservations on the Blue Train the following day. She continually
returned to this preoccupation. When Xenia was not snuffling, she and
Lilienthal exchanged secondhand-book chat across the table. The young silver
salesman and ‘Bill’, recognizing no harmony in common, did not communicate with
each other at all. Mrs Maliphant rambled on in a monologue about old Chelsea
days, saying ‘Wilde’ when she meant ‘Whistler’, and ‘Sargent’ for ‘Shannon’.
Moreland left early. I left early too; early that is in the light of the sort
of party intended, and the fact that my flat in Shepherd Market was only a few
yards away. Glober said an effusive goodbye.

‘Call
me up when you’re next in New York, Mr Jenkins. I’d like to have you meet James
Branch Cabell.’

That
was the last I saw of Glober. His firm fell into liquidation the following
year. Several go-ahead American publishing houses went bust about that time.
The fact was regarded as an amelioration of whatever row had taken place about
the Cubists, indicating our own firm was well out of the commitment.

Glober’s
character was further particularized when, also about a year later, I came to
know Mopsy Pontner better. It appeared that the evening at the hotel, anyway
the latter part of it, had been less prosaic than might have been supposed at
the time. Mopsy herself gave me an account of its consummation; no vague term
in the context. She had, so she related, stayed on after the rest of the party
had gone home. Glober, it seemed, had been more attractive to her, far more
attractive, than outwardly revealed by her demeanour at dinner. In admitting
that, she went so far as to declare that she had greatly approved of him at
sight, as soon as she entered the room where we were to dine. Glober must have
felt the same. The natural ease of his manner concealed such feelings, like
Mopsy’s exterior reserve. Later that night mutual approval took physical
expression.

‘Glober
did me on the table.’

‘Among
the coffee cups?’

‘We
broke a couple of liqueur glasses.’

‘You
obviously found him attractive.’

‘I
believe I’d have run away with him that night, if he’d asked me. I was all
right a day or two later, quite recovered. The affair stopped dead there. In
any case he was sailing the next day. Some men are like that. Isn’t it funny?
One rather odd thing about Glober, he insisted on taking a cutting from my bush
– said he always did that after having anyone for the first time. He produced a
pair of nail-scissors from a small red leather case. He told me he carried them
round with him in case the need arose.’

‘We
all of us have our whims.’

Mopsy
laughed. So far as Glober was concerned, I do not put her conquest unduly high,
though no doubt she was quite a beauty in her way. To exaggerate Glober’s
achievement would be mistaken, lacking in a sense
of proportion, even though Mopsy was capable of
refusal, having turned Barnby down. Barnby made a good story about
his failure to please on that occasion, which was
one way of dealing with the
matter. Such sudden adventures as this one of Glober’s can be misleading,
unless considered in their context, time and place (as Moreland always
insisted) both playing so vital a
part. Nevertheless, this vignette, taken at an early stage of his career,
suggests Glober’s vivacity, liberality, wide interests, capacity for attack;
Mopsy’s footnote adding a small
touch of the unusual, the exotic. These were
no doubt the qualities that had carried him
advantageously through the years of the Depression;
New York to Hollywood, and
back again; lots of other places too; until here he was at Jacky Bragadin’s
Venetian palace. I enquired about Glober’s background. Gwinnett gave a rather
satirical laugh.

‘Why
do the British always ask that?’

‘One
of our foibles.’

‘That’s
not what Americans do.’

‘But
we’re not Americans. You must humour our straying from the norm in that
respect.’

Gwinnett
laughed again.

‘Glober’s
people were first generation Jewish emigrants. They were Russian. They took a
German name to assimilate quicker, or so I’ve heard. Glober was from the Bronx.’

‘What
we’d call the East End?’

‘His
father made a sizeable pile in building. Glober himself didn’t begin on the
breadline.’

‘You
mean there was plenty of money before he started his publishing and film
career?’

‘He
made plenty more. Lost plenty too. Money is no problem to Glober.’

Gwinnett
spoke with conviction. The comment that Glober was a man to whom money-making
was no problem recalled Peter Templer having once spoken the same about Bob
Duport. Duport, of course, had always been on a
smaller scale financially than Glober, also without any claims to newspaper
fame. I felt that side of Glober, the newspaper fame, was not without a certain
fascination for Gwinnett, even if he hesitated to approve of Glober as an
individual. An idea suddenly struck me.

‘Does
he write?’

‘Does
Glober write?’

‘Yes?’

‘Sure
– did he refuse to sign his name to a contract you showed him in London on the
grounds he couldn’t write? I’ll bet it wasn’t true, and he can.’

Gwinnett
was unbending a little.

‘I
meant books. It’s always a temptation (or a publisher to have a go at writing a
book. After all, they think, if authors can do that, anybody can.’

‘Glober’s
withstood the temptation so far.’

‘What
I was leading up to is Glober having something of Trapnel about him – a Trapnel
who brought off being a Complete Man. Of course if Glober can’t write, the
comparison ceases to be valid, unless you accept as alternative Glober’s
experience as entrepreneur in the arts. That might to some extent represent
Trapnel’s literary sensibility.’

Gwinnett
seemed unprepared for a comparison of that kind.

‘I
just can’t imagine Trapnel without his writing,’ he said.

‘Certainly
in his own eyes that would be a contradiction in terms. But all the beautiful
girls, all the publishing and movie triumphs of one sort or another, all the
publicity – yet the implied failure too. Experience of the other side of
fortune. Losses, as well as gains, in money. Sadness in love, implicit in the
changes of wives. In business, changes of interests. Nothing fails like
success. Surely all that’s part of being complete in Trapnel’s eyes? Why
shouldn’t Glober be Trapnel’s Complete Man at sixty?’

Gwinnett
thought for a moment, but did not answer. The concept, even if it possessed a
shred of interest, did not please him. He smiled a little grimly. There was no
point in pressing the analogy. In any case, we had now reached the campo, along
one side of which stood the palace to be visited; a Renaissance structure of
moderate size, its exterior, as Gwinnett had explained on the way, severely
restored in the eighteenth century. In the Venetian manner, the more splendid
approach was by water, but it had been found more convenient to admit members
of the Conference through the pillared entrance opening on to the square.

We
passed between massively sententious caryatids towards a staircase carpeted in
crimson. Dr Brightman drew level.

‘This
Palazzo is not even mentioned in most guide-books,’ she said. ‘I’ve ascertained
the whereabouts of the Tiepolo, and will lead you to it. Follow me, after we’ve
made our bow.

At
the top of the stairs, supported by a retinue of the Conference’s Executive
Committee, and civic officials, Jacky Bragadin was receiving the guests. The
municipality had helped to promote the Conference, in conjunction with the
Biennale Exhibition, which fell that year, as well as the Film Festival. A
small nervous man, in his fifties, Jacky Bragadin’s mixed blood had not wholly
divested him of that Venetian physiognomy, noticeable as much in the
contemporary city as in the canvases of its painters; somewhat as if most
Venetians wore Commedia dell’Arte masks fashioned in the Orient, only a guess
made at what Europeans look like. Into such features Jacky Bragadin had fused
those of his American ancestry. He did not appear greatly at ease, fidgeting a
good deal, a scarcely discernible American accent overlaying effects of English
schooldays. The more consequential members of the Conference, after shaking
hands, paused to have a word, or chat with the entourage, standing about on a
landing ornamented with baroque busts of Roman emperors. The rest moved forward
into a frescoed gallery beyond.

‘Come
along,’ said Dr Brightman. ‘The ceiling is in an ante-room further on, not at
all an obvious place. These Luca Giordanos will keep most of them quiet for the
time being. We shall have a minute or two to inspect the Tiepolo in peace.’

Gwinnett,
preferring to go over the Palazzo at his own speed, strolled away to examine
the Roman emperors on their plinths. He may also have had an interest in Luca
Giordano. I followed Dr Brightman through the doors leading into the gallery of
frescoes. We passed on through further rooms, Dr Brightman expressing hurried
comments.

‘These
tapestries must be Florentine – look,
The Drunkenness of
Lot
. The daughter on the left greatly resembles a
pupil of mine, but we must not tarry, or the mob will be upon us again.’

She
also disallowed for inspection a rococo ball-room, white walls, festooned with
gold foliage and rams’ heads, making a background for Longhi caricatures,
savants and punchinellos with huge spectacles and bulbous noses.

‘How
much they resemble our fellow members of the Conference. The ante-room should
be at the far end here.’

We
entered a small almost square apartment, high ceilinged, with tall windows set
in embrasures.

‘Here
we are.’

She
pointed upward. Miraculous volumes of colour billowed, gleamed, vibrated, above
us. Dr Brightman clasped her hands.