Kingsley Amis - The Biographer’s Moustache

‘An excellent place, let it be said.’ Jimmie spoke strongly, as if contesting disparagement. ‘Excellent, what I had was first-rate.’

‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’

‘You did get my note thanking you for the occasion?’

‘I must have done.’

‘Oh dear, these days I’m quite capable of having forgotten to post it. I’m afraid I’ve always been scatterbrained in such regards and of course in recent years I’ve deteriorated even from what I was. Which is not to say I make no sense any longer. On the contrary, let me remind you that we were talking of pedantry in pronunciation and I was saying I come across it whenever I switch on any broadcasting device. Any moment now I expect to hear somebody talking about when ever or how- ever . The traditional way of saying such words is I should have thought quite sufficiently comprehensible, don’t you agree?’

‘Yes,’ said Gordon. He did agree. More than that, if Jimmie wanted to talk about ways of saying words it would have been impolitic and almost certainly useless to try and prevent him. On the other hand, something seemed to be needed to shift them from the kind of padded pews that, still in the hall, they had settled companionably down on. At that moment he caught sight of a youngish man, doubtless heir to a fortune or a marquisate or both, who had evidently come to peer at them. More to the point, he held a drink in his hand, a reasonably powerful-looking one, and it was not every day that Gordon felt he could do with a drink, but today was such a day. He swallowed furtively.

Jimmie had been going on, ‘I take as part of the same undesirable phenomenon that it’s becoming fashionable in ordinary speech, not just in song to give unstressed vowels their full value, not only Man chester and ob server but, well, cara mel and con dom and no doubt plenty of others. I say, would you fancy a drink perhaps?’

‘Yes, I rather would.’ Gordon tried to sound unequivocal without seeming to have no room for any other thought. ‘What a good idea.’

‘Oh. I’m terribly sorry, my dear fellow,’ cried Jimmie, ‘I do so clearly see that on a day like today you would be feeling in particular need of a wee tassie.’

Since the day was neither particularly cold nor rainy nor windy, in fact rather clement for the time of year, nor yet the notorious anniversary of the battle of Flodden, say, Gordon could not fully understand what was meant. He made a vague noise designed to show that there was no ill feeling on his side at least.

‘How very thoughtless of me. We must repair that discreditable oversight with all speed.’ Jimmie looked at his wrist-watch, a piece that displayed its merit by being large rather than small. ‘However it might be easier if I just rounded off this point while it’s fresh in my mind. Fowler remarks somewhere that when reciting a sentence like, for instance, Hunt has hurt his head – m’m? – it’s as important not to pronounce the initial H in has and his as it is to pronounce it in Hunt, hurt and head. Yet we hear trained actors bleating of their inamorata that they love h er and villains growling that they must kill h im. Years ago, much farther back than they remember, their ancestors decided to proclaim that they knew how to speak proper …’

As a conscientious but exhausted watchman might strive to keep awake, so Gordon fought to go on taking in what Jimmie was saying, and failed. He was beset by longing less for a drink than simply to be elsewhere, not necessarily far away, the next room would do, even at a pinch some unoccupied corner of this one, but it was not to be. What was to be took place quite soon after all.

‘… not a very momentous sound-shift, but I think it is starting to happen,’ said Jimmie. ‘And now we simply must have that drink. You’d have got it earlier if you hadn’t been so patient with me when I was going full tilt on my hobby-horse, or one of them. Ridiculous of me. Anyway, what will you have?’

They stood now in the bar, which was rather more like an immensely spacious and well-appointed cupboard than anything Gordon understood by a bar. He mentioned gin. Two elderly men had hurried out as they arrived; two others in dark suits studied them from some feet away. Or rather they seemed to be studying him, Gordon; in some puzzlement, as he thought. None the less, with his drink in his hand he felt bold enough to bring up tissue again.

‘What? I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.’

‘Tissue,’ said Gordon, pronouncing the word now in Jimmie’s preferred style.

‘Of course, of course.’

‘We never quite got to what I was going to ask you just now.’

‘Fire away when you’re ready, then.’

‘You remember my saying when you rang up that I pronounced the word to rhyme with miss-you? Well –’

‘Oh yes, Johnnie Wessex had had the barefaced cheek to say he didn’t believe any English person, anybody born in England pronounced T,I,S,S,U,E in any other way than the way he and I pronounced it. So then …’

‘So then,’ said Gordon, ‘you thought of me as someone sufficiently far gone in creeping pedantry to pronounce the wretched word in what we’ll call my way, and that was enough to enable you to win your argument with Johnnie Wessex.’

Gordon would have said he had pitched the foregoing at a tolerably low level, though would have had to admit that his tone when uttering the name Johnnie Wessex had not carried a favourable view of that nobleman. It seemed at least that he had spoken nevertheless loudly or warmly enough to cause the nearby elderly men to look sharply at him and then at each other before doing a fast shuffle out of the room. The barman glanced up from a list he was checking through, but only for a moment. Jimmie seemed a little troubled or vexed, though in no way conscience-stricken. He said,

‘I suppose all of us speak much as those around us do, or used to early in our lives. But I suggest that’s enough on the subject. Well, Gordon, have you made a start on your book about me? Good God, how pompous that sounds.’

‘I’ve been reading through your works and making notes which I’ll be using later. In the meantime I’ll be asking you the odd question about your earlier life, as something occurs to me if that’s all right. I don’t want to subject you to long interrogation sessions like a –’

‘My dear boy, you may ask me any question you think proper at any time within reason and I’ll answer it. I’ve thought about it and I can see no virtue in my making things difficult for you. If I find I’ve told you too much and want you to take out something I don’t want made public, I’ll tell you when I come to it in your manuscript. Oh, and I’m making some notes of my own which I’ll pass on to you in due course, as they say.’

‘Very good; fine; agreed. Here’s a question to be going on with. When you met –’

‘I think if you don’t mind we’ll finish these and proceed to luncheon. They turn somewhat reproachful if one arrives at what they consider to be an inopportune hour. In fact I’d have suggested to you that we should go straight in to where one eats if it didn’t sound such a dismal notion, and a mean one. Sounds a mean idea? Nay, it is. Are you ready?’

They mounted a single turn of the fine staircase and went through a sort of outer dining-room into a sort of inner dining-room beyond it. Both were full of men in suits vigorously talking, eating and drinking. Several of them looked up at Gordon as he went by, making him feel like a spy in an old-fashioned film. Jimmie led the way to a vacant table laid for four near the back of the room. They had hardly settled into their chairs before two additional men in suits came out of the middle distance and took the spare seats at the table. Jimmie introduced them as Bobbie something and Tommie something else, both these surnames denoting some county or other portion of the land area of the British Isles. Gordon was unsure at the time, and was never able to establish afterwards, whether these two arrivals had been invited or had invited themselves. They treated Jimmie as their host throughout, but what with one thing and another there was no certain indication there.