Anthony Powell - Temporary Kings

‘You outrun my literary bounds.’

‘But you can at least understand that Russell is at once intensely American, yet allergic to American life. That, in itself, can be paralleled, though not quite in Russell’s terms. To quote Adams again, he is not one of those Americans who can only assert or deny. I did not use the comparison of the two poets recklessly. Russell, too, hoped to be a poet. He was sufficiently self-critical to see that was not to be. He also draws quite well. Almost always portraits of himself. We saw a lot of each other when I was over there. He is a nice young man, cagey in certain moods.’

‘You know he is writing a book about X. Trapnel. That’s why he wants to meet Pamela Widmerpool.’

‘Trapnel is only a name to me. One of my pupils used to rave about his books. If Russell does that, he will do it well. He is industrious, in spite of his singularities, perhaps because of them. Had he been an English undergraduate, his rooms would have been equipped with black candles, skulls, the odour of incense. He likes Death. That atmosphere is not the American tradition. The taste has told against him, notwithstanding the significance of his name. There was also some kind of a tragedy in his early college days. He was friendly with a girl who committed suicide — at least she seems to have committed suicide. Perhaps it was an accident. He was not in the smallest degree to blame.’

‘Why is his name significant?’

‘He is descended — collaterally, I understand — from what is known as a “Signer”, one Button Gwinnett, who set his name to the Declaration of Independence. Both halves of the name are of interest to persons like oneself, “Gwinnett”, of course, “Gwynedd”, meaning North Wales — the Buttons, a South Wales family, probably advenae . A small piece of topographical history neatly established by nomenclature.’

‘I don’t know how these things are looked on in America.’

‘Like so much else, the attitude is ambivalent. In general, anyway in the right circles, to be descended from a Signer can be highly regarded, even if many such have passed into obscurity. Some Americans will, of course, deny any interest whatever in such trivial matters.’

‘Kind hearts are more than Cabots?’

‘And simple faith than Mormon blood. This is something of a paradox in that the transgression — crime perhaps — of America has been to reject Classicism for Romanticism. The national distaste for moderation — to which Henry Adams referred — inevitably leads to such a choice. Russell himself is far from immune, though you might not guess that from outward bearing. Profound Romanticism is bound in due course to dilate towards its gothic extremities. In his particular case, family history may have helped.’

‘It is often pointed out that one form of Romanticism is to be self-consciously Classical, but what you say accords with Gwinnett’s choice of Trapnel as a subject. Let’s hope he treats Trapnel’s own Romanticism in a Classical manner.’

‘Naturally the terms are hopelessly imprecise. That does not make them valueless. Baudelaire and Swinburne have Classical statements to make — more than many people are aware who regard them as pure Romantics — but their gothic side is equally undeniable. Underneath Russell Gwinnett’s staid exterior I suspect traces of an American Byron or Berlioz. I spoke of Poe, the preoccupation with Death. When there was trouble about this girl, it was because he had broken into the place where her body was. Some found it deeply touching… others… well…’

‘Were there a lot of girls?’

‘Apparently none after that. No one seems to know why. Again, some look on that with admiration, others deem it unsatisfactory.’

‘As to Byron — what you said about Button Gwinnett — was this Gwinnett brought up in a similar tradition of high descent, I mean in American terms?’

‘His grandfather was a fairly successful lawyer, the father some sort of a bad lot, alcoholic, spendthrift, deserted Russell’s mother at an early age. He is still alive, I believe. There were money difficulties about going to college, and so on. But we will talk more of Russell Gwinnett, and American gothicism, another time. Now I must go to bed. Fatigue comes on one suddenly here, delayed action after listening to all those speeches in demotic French about the Obligations of the Intellectual. I shall bid you goodnight. Tomorrow we meet under the Tiepolo ceiling.’

Not long after that I turned in too. The night had become a trifle cooler. Through the window of my bedroom the musicians’ refrain was to be heard in the distance. Perhaps the songs were no longer theirs, cadences wafted now synthetically from the radio. For a while I tried to read in bed, The Castle of Fratta , a translation brought with me as appropriate. Nievo’s view of Bonaparte’s invasion of Italy was an antidote to Stendhal’s. The novel might make a good film in the epic manner. I rather regretted not staying on for the Film Festival, more since I had never attended a Film Festival than because of anything very exciting on offer. A German picture about a prostitute who blackmailed her clients aroused a faint sense of curiosity. Then there was a British one, much recommended, adaptation of a Thomas Hardy story, in which Polly Duport was playing the lead.

I had seen Polly Duport act quite often, never again met her, since the day when we had travelled back to the War Office, with her mother and stepfather, Colonel Flores, in his official car, after the Victory Day Service at St Paul’s. Then she had seemed charming, well brought up, a beauty too, with that unfledged look of a young, shy, slender animal. Now she was quite a famous actress. Her gifts had turned out for the Theatre, rather than everyday life, public rather than private. Anyone immersed in the English Theatre would undoubtedly put her among the three or four of her age and sex at the top of the profession. It was, so it seemed to me, not a very ‘interesting’ talent, though immensely ‘finished’. She had been married for a time to a well-known actor. They had separated. Far from given to love affairs, she lived almost as a nun, it was said, devoted to the stage and its life. This was unlike her mother, whose voice and gestures Polly Duport sometimes recalled on the stage, without any of the mystery Jean had once seemed to exhale. Possibly something of her father’s business ability, in one sense, taste for work, accounted for his daughter’s serious approach to her profession, lack of interest in private life. The Hardy part was a new line for her. She was said to excel in it anything she had done before. That estimate might be consequence of an energetic publicity campaign.

Musings about the past shifted to the time when I had stayed in this hotel as a boy, to that eternal question of what constitutes experience. A close examination of what happened at any given period in itself provokes an unnatural element, like looking at a large oil painting under a magnifying glass, the over-all effect lost. Nievo, for example, was an over-all effect writer, even when he dealt with childhood. I tried to reconstruct the earlier visit. We had come to Venice because my father liked spending his ‘leave’ in France or Italy. However much they might be wanting in other respects, he approved of the Latin approach to sex and food. That did not mean he was always at ease on the Continent, but then, in any fundamental sense, he was rarely at ease in his own country. His temperament, a craft of light tonnage, borne effortlessly into heavy seas no matter how calm the weather on setting sail, was preordained to violent ups and downs in foreign waters. Language, currency, timetables, passports, cabmen, waiters, guides, touts, all the paraphernalia and hubbub incidental to travel, were scarcely required for the barometer to register gale force. He was, at the same time, always prepared to undertake any expedition, intricate or arduous, in the interests of sightseeing — or ingenious economy, like sitting up on a station platform for a special train in the small hours — though not necessarily displaying a tolerant spirit while such excursions were in progress. His aesthetic tastes were varied, sometimes comparatively daring, sometimes stolidly conventional, but, once he had taken a fancy to a work of art, monument, building, landscape, that another critic might set a lower value on it than himself was altogether beyond his comprehension. He never stood in front of the Mona Lisa without remarking that, in the eyes of trivial people, the chief interest of Leonardo’s masterpiece was to have once been stolen from the Louvre; thereby — as with much else in life — managing to have his cake and eat it, taste the sweets of banality, while ostensibly decrying their flavour.