The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (2 page)

The duel was fought in a snow-storm on the bank of a frozen brook. Two shots were exchanged before my father fell face downwards on a blue-grey army cloak spread on the snow. Palchin, his hands trembling, lit a cigarette. Captain Belov hailed the coachmen who were humbly waiting some distance away on the snow-swept road. The whole beastly affair had lasted three minutes.

In
Lost Property
Sebastian gives his own impressions of that lugubrious January day. 'Neither my stepmother', he writes, 'nor anyone of the household knew of the pending affair. On the eve, at dinner, my father threw bread-pellets at me across the table: I had been sulking all day because of some fiendish woollies which the doctor had insisted upon my wearing, and he was trying to cheer me up; but I frowned and blushed and turned away. After dinner we sat in his study, he sipping his coffee and listening to my stepmother's account of the noxious way Mademoiselle had of giving my small half-brother sweets after putting him to bed; and I, at the far end of the room, on the sofa, turning the pages of
Chums:
"Look out for the next instalment of this rattling yarn." Jokes at the bottom of the large thin pages. "The guest of honour had been shown over the School: What struck you most? — A pea from a pea-shooter." Express-trains roaring through the night. The cricket Blue who fielded the knife thrown by a vicious Malay at the cricketer's friend.... That "uproarious" serial featuring three boys, one of whom was a contortionist who could make his nose spin, the second a conjurer, the third a ventriloquist.... A horseman leaping over a racing car....

'Next morning at school, I made a bad mess of the geometrical problem which in our slang we termed "Pythagoras' Pants". The morning was so dark that the lights were turned on in the classroom and this always gave me a nasty buzzing in the head. I came home about half past three in the afternoon with that sticky sense of uncleanliness which I always brought back from school and which was now enhanced by ticklish underclothes. My father's orderly was sobbing in the hall.'

In his slapdash and very misleading book, Mr Goodman paints in a few ill-chosen sentences a ridiculously wrong picture of Sebastian Knight's childhood. It is one thing to be an author's secretary, it is quite another to set down an author's life; and if such a task is prompted by the desire to get one's book into the market while the flowers on a fresh grave may still be watered with profit, it is still another matter to try to combine commercial haste with exhaustive research, fairness and wisdom. I am not out to damage anybody's reputation. There is no libel in asserting that alone the impetus of a clicking typewriter could enable Mr Goodman to remark that 'a Russian education was forced upon a small boy always conscious of the rich English strain in his blood'. This foreign influence, Mr Goodman goes on, 'brought acute suffering to the child, so that in his riper years it was with a shudder that he recalled the bearded moujiks, the ikons, the drone of balalaikas, all of which displaced a healthy English upbringing'.

It is hardly worth while pointing out that Mr Goodman's concept of Russian surroundings is no truer to nature than, say, a Kalmuk's notion of England as a dark place where small boys are flogged to death by red-whiskered schoolmasters. What should be really stressed is the fact that Sebastian was brought up in an atmosphere of intellectual refinement, blending the spiritual grace of a Russian household with the very best treasures of European culture, and that whatever Sebastian's own reaction to his Russian memories, its complex and special nature never sank to the vulgar level suggested by his biographer.

I remember Sebastian as a boy, six years my senior, gloriously messing about with water-colours in the homely aura of a stately kerosene lamp whose pink silk shade seems painted by his own very wet brush, now that it glows in my memory. I see myself, a child of four or five, on tiptoe, straining and fidgeting, trying to get a better glimpse of the paint-box beyond my half-brother's moving elbow; sticky reds and blues, so well-licked and worn that the enamel gleams in their cavities. There is a slight clatter every time Sebastian mixes his colours on the inside of the tin lid, and the water in the glass before him is clouded with magic hues. His dark hair, closely cropped, renders a small birthmark visible above his rose-red diaphanous ear — I have clambered on to a chair by now — but he continues to pay no attention to me, until with a precarious lunge, I try to dab the bluest cake in the box, and then, with a shove of his shoulder he pushes me away, still not turning, still as silent and distant, as always in regard to me. I remember peering over the banisters and seeing him come up the stairs, after school, dressed in the black regulation uniform with that leather belt I secretly coveted, mounting slowly, slouchingly, lugging his piebald satchel behind him, patting the banisters and now and then pulling himself up over two or three steps at a time. My lips pursed, I squeeze out a white spittal which falls down and down, always missing Sebastian; and this I do, not because I want to annoy him, but merely as a wistful and vain attempt to make him notice my existence. I have a vivid recollection, too, of his riding a bicycle with very low handlebars along a sun-dappled path in the park of our countryplace, spinning on slowly, the pedals motionless, and I trotting behind, trotting a little faster as his sandalled foot presses down the pedal; I am doing my best to keep pace with his tick-tick-sizzling backwheel, but he heeds me not and soon leaves me hopelessly behind, very out of breath and still trotting.

Then later on, when he was sixteen and I ten, he would sometimes help me with my lessons, explaining things in such a rapid impatient way, that nothing ever came of his assistance and after a while he would pocket his pencil and stalk out of the room. At that period he was tall and sallow-complexioned with a dark shadow above his upper lip. His hair was now glossily parted, and he wrote verse in a black copybook which he kept locked up in his drawer.

I once discovered where he kept the key (in a chink of the wall near the white Dutch stove in his room) and I opened that drawer. There was the copybook; also the photograph of a sister of one of his schoolmates; some gold coins; and a small muslin bag of violet sweets. The poems were written in English. We had had English lessons at home not long before my father's death, and although I never could learn to speak the language fluently, I read and wrote it with comparative ease. I dimly recollect the verse was very romantic, full of dark roses and stars and the call of the sea; but one detail stands out perfectly plain in my memory: the signature under each poem was a little black chess-knight drawn in ink.

I have endeavoured to form a coherent picture of what I saw of my half-brother in those childhood days of mine, between say 1910 (my first year of consciousness) and 1919 (the year he left for England). But the task eludes me. Sebastian's image does not appear as part of my boyhood, thus subject to endless selection and development, nor does it appear as a succession of familiar visions, but it comes to me in a few bright patches, as if he were not a constant member of our family, but some erratic visitor passing across a lighted room and then for a long interval fading into the night. I explain this not so much by the fact that my own childish interests precluded any conscious relation with one who was not young enough to be my companion and not old enough to be my guide, but by Sebastian's constant aloofness, which, although I loved him dearly, never allowed my affection either recognition or food. I could perhaps describe the way he walked, or laughed or sneezed, but all this would be no more than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors and having nothing in common with the essential drama. And drama there was. Sebastian could never forget his mother, nor could he forget that his father had died for her. That her name was never mentioned in our home added morbid glamour to the remembered charm which suffused his impressionable soul. I do not know whether he could recall with any clarity the time when she was his father's wife; probably he could in a way, as a soft radiance in the background of his life. Nor can I tell what he felt at seeing his mother again when a boy of nine. My mother says he was listless and tongue-tied, afterwards never mentioning that short and pathetically incomplete meeting. In
Lost Property
Sebastian hints at a vaguely bitter feeling towards his happily remarried father, a feeling which changed into one of ecstatic worship when he learnt the reason of his father's fatal duel

'My discovery of England', writes Sebastian
(Lost Property),
'puts new life into my most intimate memories.... After Cambridge I took a trip to the Continent and spent a quiet fortnight at Monte Carlo. I think there is some Casino place there, where people gamble, but if so, I missed it, as most of my time was taken up by the composition of my first novel — a very pretentious affair which I am glad to say was turned down by almost as many publishers as my next book had readers. One day I went for a long walk and found a place called Roquebrune. It was at Roquebrune that my mother had died thirteen years before. I well remember the day my father told me of her death and the name of the pension where it occurred. The name was "Les Violettes". I asked a chauffeur whether he knew of such a house, but he did not. Then I asked a fruit-seller and he showed me the way. I came at last to a pinkish villa roofed with the typical Provence round red tiles, and I noticed a bunch of violets clumsily painted on the gate. So this was the house. I crossed the garden and spoke to the landlady. She said she had only lately taken over the pension from the former owner and knew nothing of the past. I asked her permission to sit awhile in the garden. An old man, naked as far down as I could see, peered at me from a balcony, but otherwise there was no one about. I sat down on a blue bench under a great eucalyptus, its bark half stripped away, as seems to be always the case with this sort of tree. Then I tried to see the pink house and the tree and the whole complexion of the place as my mother had seen it. I regretted not knowing the exact window of her room. Judging by the villa's name, I felt sure that there had been before her eyes that same bed of purple pansies. Gradually I worked myself into such a state that for a moment the pink and green seemed to shimmer and float as if seen through a veil of mist. My mother, a dim slight figure in a large hat, went slowly up the steps which seemed to dissolve into water. A terrific thump made me regain consciousness. An orange had rolled down out of the paper bag on my lap. I picked it up and left the garden. Some months later in London I happened to meet a cousin of hers. A turn of the conversation led me to mention that I had visited the place where she had died. "Oh," he said, "but it was the other Roquebrune, the one in the Var."'

It is curious to note that Mr Goodman, quoting the same passage, is content to comment that 'Sebastian Knight was so enamoured of the burlesque side of things and so incapable of caring for their serious core that he managed, without being by nature either callous or cynical, to make fun of intimate emotions, rightly held sacred by the rest of humanity'. No wonder this solemn biographer is out of tune with his hero at every point of the story.

For reasons already mentioned I shall not attempt to describe Sebastian's boyhood with anything like the methodical continuity which I would have normally achieved had Sebastian been a character of fiction. Had it been thus I could have hoped to keep the reader instructed and entertained by picturing my hero's smooth development from infancy to youth. But if I should try this with Sebastian the result would be one of those 'biographies romancées' which are by far the worst kind of literature yet invented. So let the door be closed leaving but a thin line of taut light underneath, let that lamp go out too in the neighbouring room where Sebastian has gone to bed; let the beautiful olivaceous house on the Nova embankment fade out gradually in the grey-blue frosty night, with gently falling snowflakes lingering in the moon-white blaze of the tall street lamp and powdering the mighty limbs of the two bearded corbel: figures which support with an Atlas-like effort the oriel of my father's room. My father is dead, Sebastian is asleep, or at least mouse-quiet, in the next room — and I am lying in bed, wide awake, staring into the darkness.

Some twenty years later, I undertook a journey to Lausanne in order to find the old Swiss lady who had been first Sebastian's governess, then mine. She must have been about fifty when she left us in 1914; correspondence between us had long ceased, so I was not at all sure of finding her still alive, in 1936. But I did. There existed, as I discovered, a union of old Swiss women who had been governesses in Russia before the Revolution. They 'lived in their past', as the very kind gentleman who guided me there explained; spending their last years — and most of these ladies were decrepit and dotty — comparing notes, having petty feuds with one another and reviling the state of affairs in the Switzerland they had discovered after their many years of life in Russia. Their tragedy lay in the fact that during all those years spent in a foreign country they had kept absolutely immune to its influence (even to the extent of not learning the simplest Russian words); somewhat hostile to their surroundings — how often have I heard Mademoiselle bemoan her exile, complain of being slighted and misunderstood, and yearn for her fair native land; but when these poor wandering souls came home, they found themselves complete strangers in a changed country, so that by a queer trick of sentiment — Russia (which to them had really been an unknown abyss, remotely rumbling beyond a lamplit comer of a stuffy back room with family photographs in mother-of-pearl frames and a water-colour view of Chillon castle), unknown Russia now took on the aspect of a lost paradise, a vast, vague but retrospectively friendly place, peopled with wistful fancies. I found Mademoiselle very deaf and grey, but as voluble as ever, and after the first effusive embraces she started to recall little facts of my childhood which were either hopelessly distorted, or so foreign to my memory that I doubted their past reality. She knew nothing of my mother's death; nor did she know of Sebastian's having died three months ago. Incidentally, she was also ignorant of his having been a great writer. She was very tearful and her tears were very sincere, but it seemed to annoy her somehow that I did not join in the crying. 'You were always so self-controlled,' she said. I told her I was writing a book about Sebastian and asked her to talk about his childhood. She had come to our house soon after my father's second marriage, but the past in her mind was so blurred and displaced that she talked of my father's first wife ('cette horrible Anglaise') as if she had known her as well as she had my mother ('cette femme admirable'). 'My poor little Sebastian,' she wailed, 'so tender to me, so noble. Ah, how I remember the way he had of flinging his little arms round my neck and saying, "I hate everybody except you, Zelle, you alone understand my soul." And that day when I gently smacked his hand — une toute petite tape — for being rude to your mother — the expression of his eyes — it made me want to cry — and his voice when he said: "I am grateful to you, Zelle. It shall never happen again...."'