The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (13 page)

It was in the beginning of this period that Mr Goodman made his appearance. Little by little, Sebastian handed over to him all his literary affairs, and felt greatly relieved to meet so efficient a secretary. 'I usually found him', writes Mr Goodman, 'lying in bed like a sulky leopard' (which somehow reminds one of the nightcapped wolf in 'Little Red Riding Hood').... 'Never in my life had I seen', he goes on in another passage, 'such a dejected-looking being.... I am told that the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied, also had a great inclination towards a certain listless "interesting" pose....' And further: 'Knight was very thin, with a pale countenance and sensitive hands, which he liked to display with feminine coquetry. He confessed to me once that he liked to pour half a bottle of French perfume into his morning bath, but with all that he looked singularly badly got up.... Knight was extraordinarily vain, like most modernist authors. Once or twice I caught him pasting cuttings, most certainly reviews concerning his books, into a beautiful and expensive album which he kept locked up in his desk, feeling perhaps a little ashamed to let my critical eye consider the fruit of his human weakness.... He often went abroad, twice a year, I daresay, presumably to Gay Paree.... But he was very mysterious about it and made a great show of Byronic languor. I cannot help feeling that trips to the Continent formed part of his artistic programme... he was the perfect "poseur".'

But where Mr Goodman waxes really eloquent is when he starts to discourse upon deeper matters. His idea is to show. and explain the 'fatal split between Knight the artist and the great booming world about him' — (a circular fissure, obviously). 'Knight's uncongeniality was his undoing,' exclaims Goodman and clicks out three dots. 'Aloofness is a cardinal sin in an age when a perplexed humanity eagerly turns to its writers and thinkers, and demands of them attention to, if not the cure of, its woes and wounds.... The "ivory tower" cannot be suffered unless it is transformed into a lighthouse or a broadcasting station.... In such an age... brimming with burning problems when... economic depression... dumped... cheated... the man in the street... the growth of totalitarian... unemployment... the next supergreat war... new aspects of family life... sex... structure of the universe.' Mr Goodman's interests are wide, as we see. 'Now, Knight', he goes on, 'absolutely refused to take any interest whatsoever in contemporary questions.... When asked to join in this or that movement, to take part in; some momentous meeting, or merely to append his signature, among more famous names, to some manifest of undying truth or denunciation of great iniquity... he flatly refused in spite of all my admonishments and even pleadings.... True, in his last (and most obscure) book, he does survey the world... but the angle he chooses and the aspects he notes are totally different from what a serious reader naturally expects from a serious author.... It is as though a conscientious inquirer into the life and machinery of some great enterprise were shown, with elaborate circumlocution, a dead bee on a window sill.... Whenever I called his attention to this or that just published book which had fascinated me because it was of general and vital interest, he childishly replied that it was "claptrap", or made some other completely irrelevant remark.... He confused solitude with altitude and the Latin for sun. He failed to realize that it was merely a dark corner.... However, as he was hypersensitive (I remember how he used to wince when I pulled my fingers to make the joints crack — a bad habit I have when meditating), he could not help feeling that something was wrong... that he was steadily cutting himself away from Life... and that the switch would not function in his solarium. The misery which had begun as an earnest young man's reaction to the rude world into which his temperamental youth had been thrust, and which later continued to be displayed as a fashionable mask in the days of his Success as a writer, now took on a new and hideous reality. The board adorning his breast read no more "I am the lone artist"; invisible fingers had changed it into "I am blind".'

It would be an insult to the reader's acumen were I to comment on Mr Goodman's glibness. If Sebastian was blind, his secretary, in any case, plunged lustily into the part of a barking and pulling .leader. Roy Carswell, who in 1933 was painting Sebastian's portrait, told me he remembered roaring with laughter at Sebastian's accounts of his relations with Mr Goodman. Very possibly he would never have been energetic enough to get rid of that pompous person had the latter not become a shade too enterprising. In 1934 Sebastian wrote to Roy Carswell from Cannes telling him that he had found out by chance (he seldom re-read his own books) that Goodman had changed an epithet in the Swan edition of
The Funny Mountain.
'I have given him the sack,' he added. Mr Goodman modestly refrains from mentioning this minor detail. After exhausting his stock of impressions, and concluding that the real cause of Sebastian's death was the final realization of having been 'a human failure, and therefore an artistic one too', he cheerfully mentions that his work as secretary came to an end owing to his entering another branch of business. I shall not refer any more to Goodman's book. It is abolished.

But as I look at the portrait Roy Carswell painted I seem to see a slight twinkle in Sebastian's eyes, for all the sadness of their expression. The painter has wonderfully rendered the moist dark greenish-grey of their iris, with a still darker rim and a suggestion of gold dust constellating round the pupil. The lids are heavy and perhaps a little inflamed, and a vein or two seems to have burst on the glossy eyeball. These eyes and the face itself are painted in such a manner as to convey the impression that they are mirrored Narcissus-like in clear water — with a very slight ripple on the hollow cheek, owing to the presence of a water-spider which has just stopped and is floating backward. A withered leaf has settled on the reflected brow, which is creased as that of a man peering intently. The crumpled dark hair over it is partly suffused by another ripple, but one strand on the temple has caught a glint of humid sunshine. There is a deep furrow between the straight eyebrows, and another down from the nose to the tightly shut dusky lips. There is nothing much more than this head. A dark opalescent shade clouds the neck, as if the upper part of the body were receding. The general background is a mysterious blueness with a delicate trellis of twigs in one corner. Thus Sebastian peers into a pool at himself.

'I wanted to hint at a woman somewhere behind him or over him — the shadow of a hand, perhaps... something.... But then I was afraid of story-telling instead of painting.'

'Well, nobody seems to know anything about her. Not even Sheldon.'

'She smashed his life, that sums her up, doesn't it?'

'No, I want to know more. I want to know all. Otherwise he will remain as incomplete as your picture. Oh, it is very good, the likeness is excellent, and I love that floating spider immensely. Especially its club-footed shadow at the bottom. But the face is only a chance reflection. Any man can look into water.

'But don't you think that he did it particularly well?'

'Yes, I can see your point. But all the same I must find that woman. She is the missing link in his evolution, and I must obtain her — it's a scientific necessity.'

'I'll bet you this picture that you won't find her,' said Roy Carswell.

The first thing was to learn her identity. How should I start upon my quest? What data did I possess? In June 1929, Sebastian had dwelt at the Beaumont Hotel at Blauberg, and there he had met her. She was Russian. No other clue was available.

I have Sebastian's aversion for postal phenomena. It seems easier to me to travel a thousand miles than to write the shortest letter, then find an envelope, find the right address, buy the right stamp, post the letter (and rack my brain trying to remember whether I have signed it). Moreover, in the delicate affair I was about to tackle, correspondence was out of the question. In March 1936, after a month's stay in England, I consulted a tourist office and set out for Blauberg.

So here he has passed, I reflected, as I looked at wet fields with long trails of white mist where upright poplar trees dimly floated. A small red-tiled town crouched at the foot of a soft grey mountain. I left my bag in the cloakroom of a forlorn little station where invisible cattle lowed sadly in some shunted truck, and went up a gentle slope towards a cluster of hotels and sanatoriums beyond a damp-smelling park. There were very few people about, it was not 'the height of the season', and I suddenly realized with a pang that I might find the hotel shut.

But it was not; thus far, luck was with me.

The house seemed fairly pleasant with its well kept garden and budding chestnut trees. It looked as if it could not hold more than some fifty people — and this braced me: I wanted my choice restricted. The hotel manager was a grey-haired man with a trimmed beard and velvet black eyes. I proceeded very carefully.

First I said that my late brother, Sebastian Knight, a celebrated English author, had greatly liked his stay and that I was thinking of staying at the hotel myself in the summer. Perhaps I ought to have taken a room, sliding in, ingratiating myself, so to speak, and postponing my special request until a more favourable moment; but somehow I thought that the matter might be settled on the spot. He said yes, he remembered the Englishman who had stayed in 1929 and had wanted a bath every morning.

'He did not make friends readily, did he?' I asked with sham casualness. 'He was always alone?'

'Oh, I think he was here with his father,' said the hotel manager vaguely.

We wrestled for some time disentangling the three or four Englishmen who had happened to have stayed at Hotel Beaumont during the last ten years. I saw that he did not remember Sebastian any too clearly.

'Let me be frank,' I said off-handedly, 'I am trying to find the address of a lady, my brother's friend, who had stayed here at the same time as he.'

The hotel manager lifted his eyebrows slightly, and I had the uneasy feeling that I had committed some blunder.

'Why?' he said. ('Ought I to bribe him?' I thought quickly.)

'Well,' I said, 'I'm ready to pay you for the trouble of finding the information I want.'

'What information?' he asked. (He was a stupid and suspicious old party — may he never read these lines.)

'I was wondering,' I went on patiently, 'whether you would be so very, very kind as to help me to find the address of a lady who stayed here at the same time as Mr Knight, that is in June 1929?'

'What lady?' he asked in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar.

'I'm not sure of her name,' I said nervously.

'Then how do you expect me to find her?' he said with a shrug.

'She was Russian,' I said. 'Perhaps you remember a Russian lady — a
young
lady — and well... good looking?'

'Nous avons eu beaucoup de jolies dames,'
he replied getting more and more distant. 'How should I remember?'

'Well,' said I, 'the simplest way would be to have a look at your books and sort out the Russian names for June 1929.'

'There are sure to be several,' he said. 'How will you pick out the one you need, if you do not know it?'

'Give me the names and addresses,' I said desperately, 'and leave the rest to me.'

He sighed deeply and shook his head.

'No,' he said.

'Do you mean to say you don't keep books?' I asked trying to speak quietly.

'Oh, I keep them all right,' he said. 'My business requires great order in these matters. Oh, yes, I have got the names all right....'

He wandered away to the back of the room and produced a large black volume.

'Here,' he said. 'First week of July 1935.... Professor Ott with wife, Colonel Samain....'

'Look here,' I said, 'I'm not interested in July 1935. What I want....' He shut his book and carried it away.

'I only wanted to show you,' he said with his back turned to me — 'to show you [a lock clicked] that I keep my books in good order.'

He came back to his desk and folded a letter that was lying on the blotting-pad.

'Summer 1929,' I pleaded. 'Why don't you want to show me the pages I want?'

'Well,' he said, 'the thing is not done. Firstly, because I don't want a person who is a complete stranger to me to bother people who were and will be my clients. Secondly, because I cannot understand why you should be so eager to find a woman whom you do not want to name. And thirdly — I do not want to get into any kind of trouble. I have enough troubles as it is. In the hotel round the corner a Swiss couple committed suicide in 1929,' he added rather irrelevantly.

'Is that your last word?' I asked.

He nodded and looked at his watch. I turned on my heel and slammed the door after me — at least, I tried to slam it — it was one of those confounded pneumatic doors which resist.

Slowly, I went back to the station. The park. Perhaps Sebastian recalled that particular stone bench under that cedar tree at the time he was dying. The outline of that mountain yonder may have been the paraph of a certain unforgettable evening. The whole place seemed to me a huge refuse heap where I knew a dark jewel had been lost. My failure was absurd, horrible, excruciating. The leaden sluggishness of dream-endeavour. Hopeless gropings among dissolving things. Why was the past so rebellious?

'And what shall I do now?' The stream of the biography on which I longed so to start, was, at one of its last bends, enshrouded in pale mist; like the valley I was contemplating. Could I leave it thus and write the book all the same? A book with a blind spot. An unfinished picture — uncoloured limbs of the martyr with the arrows in his side.

I had the feeling that I was lost, that I had nowhere to go. I had pondered long enough the means to find Sebastian's last love to know that there was practically no other way of finding her name. Her name! I felt I should recognize it at once if I got at those greasy black folios. Ought I to give it , up and turn to the collection of a few other minor details concerning Sebastian which I still needed and which I knew where to obtain?