Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

‘You remember, a long time ago, the name came up at one of these meetings of the novelist, X. Trapnel, author of Camel Ride to the Tomb, Dogs Have No Uncles , and other works? He died in the nineteen-fifties. You knew him quite well, I think, Nick?’

Members broke in.

‘I knew Trapnel well too. We all knew him. Did he leave a posthumous biography of somebody, which has just been discovered?’

‘I never knew Trapnel,’ said Emily Brightman. ‘Not personally, that is. I’m always promising myself to read his books, but this must be — ’

‘Please,’ said Delavacquerie.

Smiling, he held Emily Brightman in check.

‘I’m sorry, Gibson, but I’m sure I know more about this subject than you do.’

Delavacquerie, still smiling, shook his head. He continued. In relation to Trapnel he was determined to clarify his own position before anything else was said.

‘I met Trapnel himself only once, and that not for long, more than twenty years ago, but I believe him to be a good writer. We have a life of Trapnel here. His career was not altogether uneventful. This book is by an American professor, a doctoral dissertation, none the worse for that. I have read the book. I think you will like it.’

Emily Brightman was not to be held in any longer. She raised a fork threateningly, as if about to stab Delavacquerie, tf he did not come quickly to the point. Members, too, was showing signs of wanting to ventilate his own Trapnel experiences, before things went much further. I myself felt the same impelling urge.

‘Gibson, this book must be written by Russell Gwinnett.’

Delavacquerie, who, reasonably enough, had forgotten that Emily Brightman once announced herself an old friend of Gwinnett’s, looked a little surprised that she should know the name of the biographer.

‘Have the publishers sent your proof copy already, Emily?’

‘Not yet, but I knew Russell Gwinnett was writing a life of Trapnel. So did Nicholas. We could have told you at once, Gibson, had we been allowed to speak. Russell is an old friend of mine. Nicholas, too, met him when we were in Venice. We talked of it at the first meeting of this committee. You could not have been attending, Gibson. You see you sometimes underrate our capabilities.’

Delavacquerie laughed. Before he could defend himself, Members pegged out his own claim.

‘I don’t know Gwinnett, but I knew Trapnel. You count as knowing a man reasonably well after he’s borrowed five pounds off you. Is that incident mentioned? I hope so.’

If Delavacquerie considered Gwinnett’s book good, the judgment was likely to be sound. I was less surprised to hear that Gwinnett’s biography of Trapnel was well done, than that it had ever been completed at all. If the work was accomplished, Gwinnett was likely to have brought to it the powers he certainly possessed. Personally, I had doubted that the study would ever see light. Emily Brightman must have thought the same. She was greatly excited by the news. When they had both been teaching at the same women’s college in America, in a sense Gwinnett had been a protégé of hers. She had always supported a belief in his abilities as a writer. How much she was prepared to face another, more enigmatic, even more sinister, side of his character, was less easy to assess.

‘I told you Russell was an industrious young man, Nicholas. A capable one too. I suppose he can’t be spoken of as young any longer. He must be well into his forties. At last it looks as if we’ve found someone for the Prize. There is no writer to whom I would rather award it than Russell. It’s just what he needs to give him self-assurance, and what the Prize itself needs, to lift it out of the rut of the commonplace. Show me the proof at once, Gibson.’

Delavacquerie continued to withhold the proof copy.

‘Not yet, Emily.’

‘Gibson, you are intolerable. Don’t be absurd. Hand it over immediately.’

‘I’m prepared to be magnanimous about the fiver,’ said Members. ‘I could ill afford forfeiture of five pounds at the time, but we were all penniless writers together, and bygones shall be bygones. The point is whether the book is good.’

‘The merits of Gwinnett’s book are not so much the issue,’ said Delavacquerie. ‘The difficulty is quite another matter.’

‘I know what you’re going to put forward,’ said Emily Brightman. ‘Libel. Am I right? I can see a book of that sort might be libellous, but that is surely the publisher’s affair. We shall have given the Prize before the row starts.’

‘That is not exactly the problem. At least the publishers are not worried in a general way on that ground. They think the possibility of anything of the sort very remote. The libel, if any, would be in connexion with Trapnel’s love affair with Pamela Widmerpool. As you know, she destroyed the manuscript of his last novel. That business was largely responsible for Trapnel’s final débâcle.’

‘An interesting legal point,’ said Members. ‘Is it libellous to write that someone’s deceased wife was unfaithful to him? I always understood, in days when I myself worked in a publisher’s office, that you can’t libel the dead. That was one of the firmest foundations of the publishing profession. On the other hand, I suppose the surviving partner might consider himself libelled, as being put on record as a trompé’d husband. At the time I was speaking of, my ancient publishing days, there also existed the element Emily brought up, rather severely, at one of our meetings — good taste — but fortunately we don’t have to bother about that now — even if it does platonically exist, as Emily assures us. Don’t say it’s good taste that makes you waver, Gibson. I believe you’re frightened of Emily’s disapproval.’

Members and Delavacquerie, outwardly well disposed towards each other, anyway conversationally, were not much in sympathy at base. Delavacquerie, formal as always, may all the same have revealed on some occasion his own sense of mutual disharmony. If so, Members was now getting his own back. Delavacquerie, recognizing that, smiled.

‘You may be right, Mark. At the same time you will agree, I think, when I state the problem, that it is a rather special one. Meanwhile, let me release these proofs.’

He handed the bundle to Emily Brightman, who almost snatched it from his hands. She turned at once to the title page. I read the layout over her arm.

DEATH’S-HEAD SWORDSMAN

The Life and Works of X. TRAPNEL

by

RUSSELL GWINNETT

In due course the proofs came my way. Gwinnett’s academic appointment, named at the beginning of the book, was held at an American college to be judged of fairly obscure status, though lately in the news, owing to exceptionally severe student troubles on its campus. On the page where a dedication might have stood, an epigraph was set.

My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,

Once the bright face of my betrothed lady.

The Revenger’s Tragedy.

For those who knew anything of Gwinnett, or of Trapnel for that matter, the quotation was, to say the least, ambiguous. The longer the lines were considered, the more profuse in private meaning they seemed to become. Moreland, too, had been keen on the plays of Cyril Tourneur. He used often to quote a favourite image from one of them: ‘… and how quaintly he died, like a politician, in hugger-mugger, made no man acquainted with it…’

Tourneur, as Gwinnett himself, was obsessed with Death. The skull, carried by the actor, his ‘study’s ornament’, was no doubt, in one sense, intended to strike the opening note of Gwinnett’s book, his own ‘study’. The couplet drew attention also to the melodramatic title (referring presumably to the death’s-head, mentioned by Delavacquerie, on the top of Trapnel’s sword-stick); but had it deeper meaning as well? If so, who was intended? The lines could be regarded as, say, dedication to the memory of Gwinnett’s earlier girlfriend (at whose death he had been involved in some sort of scandal); alternatively, as allusion to Pamela Widmerpool herself. If the latter, were the words conceived as spoken by Trapnel, by Gwinnett, by both — or, indeed, by all Pamela’s lovers? Even if ironical, they were appropriate enough. At least they defined the tone of the book. Then another thought came. Not only was the quotation about a skull, the title of Tourneur’s play had also to be considered. It was called The Revenger’s Tragedy . Did revenge play some part in writing the book? If so, Gwinnett’s revenge on whom? Trapnel? Pamela? Widmerpool? There were too many “questions to sort out at that moment. Delavacquerie allowed everyone to examine the proofs as long as they wished, before he brought out the information he was holding in reserve.