The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (11 page)

I shall not go into further details of this clever and delightful novel. It is the best known of Sebastian Knight's works, although his three later books surpass it in many ways. As in my demonstration of
The Prismatic Bezel,
my sole object is to show the workings, perhaps detrimentally to the impression of beauty left by the book itself, apart from its artifices. It contains, let me add, a passage so strangely connected with Sebastian's inner life at the time of the completing of the last chapters, that it deserves being quoted in contrast to a series of observations referring rather to the meanders of the author's brain than to the emotional side of his art.

'William [Anne's first queer effeminate fiancé, who afterwards jilted her] saw her home as usual and cuddled her a little in the darkness of the doorway. All of a sudden, she felt that his face was wet. He covered it with his hand and groped for his handkerchief. "Raining in Paradise," he said... "the onion of happiness... poor Willy is willy nilly a willow." He kissed the corner of her mouth and then blew his nose with a faint moist squizzle. "Grown-up men don't cry," said Anne. "But I'm not a grown-up," he replied with a whimper. "That moon is childish, and that wet pavement is childish, and Love is a honey-suckling babe..." "Please stop," she said. "You know I hate when you go on talking like that. It's so silly, so..." "So Willy," he sighed. He kissed her again and they stood like some soft dark statue with two dim heads. A policeman passed leading the night on a leash and then paused to let it sniff at a pillar-box. "I'm as happy as you," she said, "but I don't want to cry in the least or to talk nonsense." "But can't you see," he whispered, "can't you see that happiness at its very best is but the zany of its own mortality?" "Good-night," said Anne. "Tomorrow at eight," he cried as she slipped away. He patted the door gently and presently was strolling down the street. She is warm and she is pretty, he mused, and I love her, and it's all no good, no good, because we are dying. I cannot bear that backward glide into the past. That last kiss is already dead and
The Woman in White
[a film they had been to see that night] is stone dead, and the policeman who passed is dead too, and even the door is as dead as its nail. And that last thought is already a dead thing by now. Coates (the doctor) is right when he says that my heart is too small for my size. And sighs. He wandered on talking to himself, his shadow now pulling a long nose, now dropping a curtsy, as it slipped back round a lamp-post. When he reached his dismal lodgings he was a long time climbing the dark stairs. Before going to bed he knocked at the conjuror's door and found the old man standing in his underwear and inspecting a pair of black trousers. "Well?" said William...."They don't kinda like my accent," he replied, "but I guess I'm going to get that turn all the same." William sat down on the bed and said: "You ought to dye your hair." "I'm more bald than grey," said the conjuror. "I sometimes wonder," said William, "where the things we shed are — because they must go
somewhere,
you know — lost hair, fingernails...." "Been drinking again," suggested the conjuror without much curiosity. He folded his trousers with care and told William to quit the bed, so that he might put them under the mattress. William sat down on a chair and the conjuror went on with his business; the hairs bristled on his calves, his lips were pursed, his soft hands moved tenderly. "I am merely happy," said William. "You don't look it," said the solemn old man. "May I buy you a rabbit?" asked William. "I'll hire one when necessary," the conjuror replied drawing out the "necessary" as if it were an endless ribbon. "A ridiculous profession," said William, "a pick-pocket gone mad, a matter of patter. The pennies in a beggar's cap and the omelette in your top hat. Absurdly the same." "We are used to insult," said the conjuror. He calmly put out the light and William groped his way out. The books on the bed in his room seemed reluctant to move. As he undressed he imagined the forbidden bliss of a sunlit laundry: blue water and scarlet wrists. Might he beg Anne to wash his shirt? Had he really annoyed her again? Did she really believe they would be married some day? The pale little freckles on the glistening skin under her innocent eyes. The right front-tooth that protruded a little. Her soft warm neck. He felt again the pressure of tears. Would she go the way of May, Judy, Juliette, Augusta, and all the rest of his love-embers? He heard the dancing-girl in the next room locking the door, washing, bumping down a jug, wistfully clearing her throat. Something dropped with a tinkle. The conjuror began to snore.'

I am fast approaching the crucial point of Sebastian's sentimental life and as I consider the work already done in the pale light of the task still before me I feel singularly ill at ease. Have I given as fair an idea of Sebastian's life up to now as I had hoped, and as I now hope to do, in regard to its final period? The dreary tussle with a foreign idiom and a complete lack of literary experience do not predispose one to feeling over-confident. But badly as I may have blundered over my task in the course of the preceding chapters I am determined to persevere and in this I am sustained by the secret knowledge that in some unobtrusive way Sebastian's shade is trying to be helpful.

I have received less abstract help too. P. G. Sheldon, the poet, who saw a great deal of Clare and Sebastian between 1927 and 1930 was kindly willing to tell me anything he might know, when I called upon him very soon after my strange half-meeting with Clare. And it is he again who a couple of months later (when I had already begun upon this book) informed me of poor Clare's fate. She had seemed to be such a normal and healthy young woman, how was it that she bled to death next to an empty cradle? He told me of her delight when
Success
lived up to its title. For it
was
a success this time. Why it is so, why this excellent book should flop and that other, as excellent, receive its due, will always remain something of a mystery. As had been the case, too, with his first novel, Sebastian had not moved a finger, not pulled the least string in order to have
Success
brightly heralded and warmly acclaimed. When a press-cutting agency began to pepper him with samples of praise, he refused either to subscribe to the clippings or thank the kindly critics. To express his gratitude to a man who by saying what he thought of a book was merely doing his duty, seemed to Sebastian improper and even insulting as implying a tepidly human side to the frosty serenity of dispassionate judgement. Moreover, once having begun he would have been forced to go on thanking and thanking for every folowing line lest the man should be hurt by a sudden lapse; and finally, such a damp dizzy warmth would develop that, in spite of this or that critic's well-known honesty, the grateful author might never be quite, quite certain that here or there personal sympathy had not tiptoed in.

Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around a deserving book. But whatever it was, Clare meant to enjoy it. She wanted to see people who wanted to see Sebastian, who emphatically did not want to see them. She wanted to hear strangers talk about
Success
but Sebastian said he was no longer interested in that particular book. She wanted Sebastian to join a literary club and mix with other authors. And once or twice Sebastian got into a starched shirt and got out of it again without having uttered one single word at the dinner arranged in his honour. He was not feeling too well. He slept badly. He had dreadful fits of temper — and this was a thing new to Clare. One afternoon as he was working at
The Funny Mountain
in his study and trying to keep to a steep slippery track among the dark crags of neuralgia, Clare entered and in her gentlest voice inquired whether he would not mind seeing a visitor.

'No,' he said, baring his teeth at the word he had just written.

'But you asked him to come at five and...'

'Now you've done it...' cried Sebastian, and dashed his fountain-pen at the shocked white wall. 'Can't you let me work in peace,' he shouted in such a crescendo that P. G. Sheldon who had been playing chess with Clare in the next room got up and closed the door leading to the hall, where a meek little man was waiting.

Now and then, a wild frolicsome mood came over him. One afternoon with Clare and a couple of friends, he devised a beautiful practical joke to be played on a person they were going to meet after dinner. Sheldon curiously enough had forgotten what it was exactly, that scheme. Sebastian laughed and turned on his heel knocking his fists together as he did when genuinely amused. They were all about to start and very eager and all that, and Clare had 'phoned for a taxi and her new silver shoes glittered and she had found her bag, when suddenly Sebastian seemed to lose all interest in the proceedings. He looked bored and yawned almost without opening his mouth in a very annoying manner and presently said he would take the dog out and then go to bed. In those days he had a little black bulldog; eventually it fell ill and had to be destroyed.

The Funny Mountain
was completed, then
Albinos in Black
and then his third and last short story,
The Back of the Moon.
You remember that delightful character in it — the meek little man waiting for a train who helped three miserable travellers in three different ways? This Mr Siller is perhaps the most alive of Sebastian's creatures and is incidentally the final representative of the 'research theme', which I have discussed in conjunction with
The Prismatic Bezel
and
Success.
It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr Siller makes his bow, with every detail of habit and manner, palpable and unique — the bushy eyebrows and the modest moustache, the soft collar and the Adam's apple 'moving like the bulging shape of an arrased eavesdropper', the brown eyes, the wine-red veins on the big strong nose, 'whose form made one wonder whether he had not lost his hump somewhere'; the little black tie and the old umbrella ('a duck in deep mourning); the dark thickets in the nostrils; the beautiful surprise of shiny perfection when he removes his hat. But the better Sebastian's work was the worse he felt — especially in the intervals. Sheldon thinks that the world of the last book he was to write several years later
(The Doubtful Asphodel)
was already casting its shadow on all things surrounding him and that his novels and stories were but bright masks, sly tempters under the pretence of artistic adventure leading him unerringly towards a certain imminent goal. He was presumably as fond of Clare as he had always been, but the acute sense of mortality which had begun to obsess him, made his relations with her appear more brittle than they perhaps were. As for Clare, she had quite inadvertently in her well-meaning innocence dallied at some pleasant sunlit corner of Sebastian's life, where Sebastian himself had not paused; and now she was left behind and did not quite know whether to try and catch up with him or attempt to call him back. She was kept cheerfully busy, what with looking after Sebastian's literary affairs and keeping his life tidy in general, and although she surely felt that something was awry, that it was dangerous to lose touch with his imaginative existence, she probably comforted herself by presuming it to be a passing restlessness, and that 'it would all settle down by-and-by'. Naturally, I cannot touch upon the intimate side of their relationship, firstly, because it would be ridiculous to discuss what no one can definitely assert, and secondly because the very sound of the word 'sex' with its hissing vulgarity and the 'ks, ks' catcall at the end, seems so inane to me that I cannot help doubting whether there
is
any real idea behind the word, Indeed, I believe that granting 'sex' a special situation when tackling a human problem, or worse still, letting the 'sexual idea', if such a thing exists, pervade and 'explain' all the test is a grave error of reasoning. 'The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea, from its moon to its serpent; but a pool in the cup of a rock and the diamond-rippled road to Cathay are both water,'
(The Back of the
Moon.)

'Physical love is but another way of saying the same thing and not a special sexophone note, which once heard is echoed in every other region of the soul,'
(Lost Property,
page 82,) 'All things belong to the same order of things, for such is the oneness of human perception, the oneness of individuality, the oneness of matter, whatever matter may be, The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition,'
(ibid,
page 83.) Had I even known from some reliable source that Clare was not quite up to the standards of Sebastian's love-making I would still never dream of selecting this dissatisfaction as the reason for his general feverishness and nervousness. But being dissatisfied with things in general, he might have been dissatisfied with the colour of his romance too. And mind you, I use the word dissatisfaction very loosely, for Sebastian's mood at that period of his life was something far more complicated than mere Weltschmerz or the blues. It can only be grasped through the medium of his last book
The Doubtful Asphodel.
That book was as yet but a distant haze. Presently it would become the outline of a shore. In 1929, a famous heart-specialist, Dr Oates, advised Sebastian to spend a month at Blauberg, in Alsace, where a certain treatment had proved beneficial in several similar cases. It seems to have been tacitly agreed that he would go alone. Before he left, Miss Pratt, Sheldon, Clare, and Sebastian had tea together at his Hat and he was cheerful and talkative, and teased Clare for having dropped her own crumpled handkerchief among the things she had been packing for him in his fussy presence. Then he made a dart at Sheldon's cuff (he never wore a wristwatch himself), peeped at the time and suddenly began to rush, although there was almost an hour to spare. Clare did not suggest seeing him to the train — she knew he disliked that. He kissed her on the temple and Sheldon helped him carry out his bag (have I already mentioned that, apart from a vague charwoman and the waiter who brought him his meals from a neighbouring restaurant, Sebastian did not employ servants?). When he had gone, the three of them sat in silence for a while.