Anthony Powell: Temporary Kings

Trapnel may have been annexed by a woman, not much development feasible, minimum financial security about the best to be hoped. That in itself was after all something. Gwinnett agreed the plausible assumption, after the collapse of Trapnel’s hopes, was personal administration taken over by a relatively prudent wage-earning mistress; even a good-hearted landlady, whose commonsense regulated money matters, such as they were, warding off actual destitution. That is, Gwinnett had nothing else to offer. His accord was not enthusiastic. Comparative reluctance to accept that a woman might have kept Trapnel going, made me wonder whether Gwinnett were not homosexual. He might be a homosexual as well as a redeemed drunk; the former state, possibly repressed, seeking outlet in the latter. Then he brought back the subject of women himself.

‘I’d like to ask you about this girl — the castrating one.’

‘Pamela Widmerpool?’

‘I’ve been spun so many yarns about her.’

The stories he had been told were, on the whole, garbled in a manner to make the true circumstances of Trapnel’s life all but unrecognizable. It was in any case a field where accuracy was hard to come by. At the same time, if Gwinnett’s information had percolated through misinformed sources, he himself showed unexpected flashes of insight. Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded. Besides, what could be called unreservedly true when closely examined, especially about Trapnel? The stories told to Gwinnett became notably blurred in their inferences about Pamela Widmerpool. Trapnel’s relationship with her emerged as little more than a love affair that had gone wrong, something that might have happened to anybody. Naturally, in one sense, it was a love affair that had gone wrong, but subtlety was required to express the unusual nature of that love affair, its start, progress, termination. All these had been conveyed with such lack of finesse that no kind of justice was done to the exceptional nature of those concerned: Pamela: Widmerpool: Trapnel himself. For Gwinnett, too, there existed the seldom remittent difficulty of translating the personalities and doings of English material into American terms.

The impression these reports had left with him was of a man’s luck — Trapnel’s luck — having suddenly, meaninglessly, taken a turn for the worse. From being, in his way, a notable writer, a promising career ahead of him, Trapnel had been suddenly, inexorably, struck down by misfortune, although leading much the same sort of life as he had always led, with girls not so wholly different from Pamela, before he had linked himself to her. Sometimes Gwinnett hedged a little, but that main interpretation was the one he was prepared, even if unwillingly, to accept.

‘Trapnel’s crack-up is easy for an American to understand. If you don’t mind my saying so, to find a writer of even your age on his feet, and working, is not all that common with us.’

‘Some of the violent consuming nervous American energy was characteristic of Trapnel too.’

‘He’d no American blood?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘I’d like to think he had.’

‘His father was a jockey in Egypt. If Trapnel had written about that we’d have a completer picture.’

‘Completion was one of the things Trapnel aimed at, you said — the idea of the Complete Man. Did he achieve some of that? I think so.’

‘Vigny says the poet is not a sport of nature, his destiny is the human predicament.’

‘And the concept was challenged by this girl — as it were invalidated.’

Gwinnett thought about that for a moment, almost as if he were hoping to rebut his own conjecture. Then he laughed, and changed his tone.

‘It was the god Hercules deserting Antony.’

‘As a matter of fact the god Hercules returned in Trapnel’s case. There was music in the air again, though only briefly.’

Gwinnett had heard more misleading accounts. The best in existence was probably Malcolm Crowding’s. It was at least first-hand. No doubt Crowding’s story had been a little ornamented with the passage of time, no worse than that. The basic facts were that Trapnel had found himself in possession of a hundred pounds. No one argued about that, a fact in itself sufficiently extraordinary. What was additionally astonishing, almost a miracle, was the sum being in notes. A cheque might have brought quite different consequences. Where opinion chiefly differed was in the provenance of the money. It was usually designated, rather pedestrianly, as payment for forgotten ‘rights’, which had finally borne fruit in some medium functioning in long delayed action, possibly from a foreign country. Alternatively, more picturesquely, the hundred pounds was said to be a legacy left to Trapnel’s father, the celebrated jockey, as one of the items in the eccentric will of a grateful backer of the winning horse, ridden by Trapnel père , at a long forgotten Egyptian race-meeting. By slow but workmanlike processes of the law, the bequest had in due course been deflected to Trapnel himself as heir and successor, the sum delivered to him. If the latter origin were true, the whimsical testator must either have had a long memory, or omitted to overhaul his will for a great many years. In either ease, almost equally surprising, Trapnel was traced, the money handed over in cash. The only colourable explanation was that Trapnel, improbable as that might seem, having found his way personally to the intermediary — lawyer, accountant, publisher, agent — by his old skill induced whoever was in charge to accept a receipt for notes. If so, that final mustering of Trapnel’s long dormant forces proved dramatically, in a sense appropriately, fatal.

Were the hypothesis of the female guardian a correct one (situation reminiscent of Miss Weedon curing Stringham of drink), she would in the normal course of things certainly intercept any money Trapnel might earn, or, more credibly, derive from ‘public assistance’. Even in his less calamitous days, there had been interludes in the past of signing on at ‘the Labour’ — the Labour Exchange — though what trade or vocation Trapnel claimed at such emergencies was never revealed. When, so transcendentally, the hundred pounds in cash materialized into his hands in the manner of a highly proficient conjuror, Trapnel (like Stringham) must have evaded his keeper, reverted to type in the traditional manner, decided, now the money had come his way in this utterly unforeseen manner, to squander it gloriously in The Hero of Acre.

Malcolm Crowding’s account of Trapnel’s apotheosis in The Hero was likely to be the most reliable. He had been there in person. Besides, his own works proclaimed him a writer of little or no imagination. He could never have invented such a story. By that time he had ceased to publish verse, and was lecturing on English literature at a newly-founded provincial university, in fact spending the night in London in connexion with the editing of a textbook. He approached the subject of Trapnel, like his own academic work, in a spirit of the severest literary puritanism. On impulse, a wish to call up old times, he had dropped in that night to The Hero.

‘I expect he hoped to pick up a boy-friend,’ said Evadne Clapham. ‘The Hero was full of queers when I was taken there last. It was much against my will in any case. They were all standing round wide-eyed watching that old wretch Heather Hopkins giving an imitation of John Foster Dulles in his galoshes.’

Whatever Malcolm Crowding’s original intention, Trapnel’s arrival in The Hero offered something worth while; in fact supplied a story to become, ever after, Crowding’s most notable set-piece.