Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

By the saloman, in the hartmans,

And scour the queer cramp ring,

And couch till a palliard docked my dell,

So my bousy nab might skew rom-bouse well.

Avast to the pad, let us bing;

Avast to the pad, let us bing.

Not bad, is it?’

‘It all sounds very contemporary. What does it mean?’

‘Roughly, that a quart of good wine in London is better than anything to be stolen in the country, and, as long as wine’s to be drunk, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the stocks, while some heel is stuffing your tart — that’s a palliard docking your dell. Owing to Gwinnett, I came across a good couplet in Tourneur too:

Lust is a spirit, which whosoe’er doth raise,

The next man that encounters boldly, lays.

There seems a foot too many in the first line. They may have elided those relatives in a different way at that period.’

‘How does the thieves’ slang poem come into the Middleton play?’

‘The Roaring Girl sings it herself, with a character called Tearcat. The Roaring Girl dresses like a man, smokes, carries a sword, fights duels. A narcissistic type, rather than specifically lesbian, one would say. At least there are no scenes where she dallies with her own sex.’

Delavacquerie’s good memory, eye for things that were unusual, had certainly been useful to him as a PR-man; for which he also possessed the requisite toughness. What he said next was a side he much less often revealed. It suggested reflections on Fiona.

‘It’s odd how one gets acclimatized to other people’s sexual experiences. At a younger age, they strike one so differently. For instance, during the war I knew a married woman — a captain’s wife — who told me of her first seduction. She was seventeen or eighteen, and on the way to her art-school one morning. Running to catch a bus, she just missed it. Two men, cruising by in a car, laughed at her standing breathless on the pavement. They stopped and offered her a lift. When they dropped her at the art-school door, the one who wasn’t driving asked if she’d dine with him later in the week. She agreed. They went to a road-house outside London. In the course of dinner — establishing his bonafides as homme sérieux — her host remarked that he had lived with one girl for two years. Telling the story to me, she commented that — in those days — she thought love was for ever. Anyway, the chap gave her dinner, they had a good deal to drink — which she wasn’t used to — and, afterwards, went into the garden of the roadhouse where he had her in the shrubbery. When she got home, finding her knickers all over blood, she thought to herself: I’ve been a silly girl. That’s what she told me.’

‘What’s the moral of all that?’

‘There isn’t one, except that the story used to haunt me. I don’t quite know why. It seemed to start so well, and end so badly. Perhaps that’s how well constructed stories ought to terminate.’

‘She never saw the bloke again?’

‘No. I don’t think it really made a ha’p’orth of difference to her. All I say is that for a while the story haunted me.’

‘You were in love with the heroine?’

‘Naturally. In a way that wasn’t the point, which is that, in due course, you find girls are really perfectly well able to look after themselves, most of them. Even allowing for the fact that les chiens sont fidèles, mais pas aux chiennes . To retain the metaphor — bring it up to date — in sexual matters, as in others, the dogs bark, the Caravelle takes off.’

I never knew what Delavacquerie really felt about the Fiona business. Afterwards I wondered whether the heroine of the story he had told was really his dead wife. As Canon Fenneau had observed, we go through life lacking understanding of many things, though I think the Canon inwardly made something of an exception of his own case, where knowledge was concerned. That, at least, was modestly implied in an article I came across later that year, in which he contrasted Chaldean Magic with the worship of Isis and Osiris.

7

BAD WEATHER, OTHER ODD JOBS, mere lack of energy, had all contributed to allowing the unlit bonfire, projected as a few hours’ clearing and burning, to become an untidy pile of miscellaneous debris; laurel (cut down months before), briars, nettles, leaves, unsold rubbish from a jumble sale, on top of it all several quite large branches of oak and copper beech snapped off by the gales. In spite of fog, something calm, peaceful, communicative, about the afternoon suggested the time had come to end this too long survival. A livid sky could mean snow. That dense muffled feeling pervaded the air. The day was not cold for the season, but an autumnal spell of mild weather — short, though notably warm that year — was now over. It had given place to a continuous wind blowing from the west, dropped the night before, after bringing down a lot of leaves and the sizeable boughs. There was a great stillness everywhere, except for a monotonous thud-thud from the quarry; a persistent low rumble, like a faraway train making laborious headway along a rough stretch of track. White vapour, less thick over by Gauntlett’s farm, where a few ghostly trees penetrated its mists, wholly obscured the quarry’s limestone platforms and Assyrian rampart.

For kindling, I shoved twists of newspaper in at the base of the heap. At the moment of ignition, the match flared against capital letters of a headline displayed on the outward surface of one of these scraps of newsprint.

EDWARDIAN SYMBOLIST

SEASCAPE VOTARIES

The enigmatic antithesis topped an article read a week or two before. Even allowing for contemporary changes in art fashions, the critic’s enthusiasm had then seemed surprising. After seeing the pictures, remembering the piece, I vaguely thought of glancing through the notice again, to see if I now felt more agreement with the opinions expressed. By then the newspaper had been thrown away, or disappeared among a heap of others; kept for such uses as lighting fires. A search, likely to be unfruitful, seemed scarcely worth the trouble. Now, inclination to read about what had been said of the exhibition — the two exhibitions — was reanimated. In any case the visit to the gallery had been rather an historic occasion; setting something of a seal on all sorts of past matters.

Lighting another screw of newspaper under the stack, I extracted a handful of crumpled up pages, and straightened them out. On the back of one of these was a paragraph reporting Quentin Shuckerly’s end in New York (battered to death in Greenwich Village), while on a cultural mission of some kind. I tore out Edwardian Symbolist/Seascape Votaries, committing Shuckerly’s obituary lines to their funeral pyre. The paper flared up, dry twigs began to crackle, damp weeds smouldered, smoke rose high into the white mists, merging into grey-blueness. The atmosphere was filled all at once with the heart-searing bonfire smell.

‘… albeit his roots lie in Continental Symbolism, Deacon’s art remains unique in itself. In certain moods he can recall Fernand Khnopff or Max Klinger, the Belgian’s near-photographic technique observable in Deacon’s semi-naturalistic treatment of more than one of his favourite renderings of Greek or Roman legend. In his genre pictures, the academic compliances of the Secession School of Vienna are given strong homosexual bias — even Deacon’s sphinxes and chimaeras possessing solely male attributes — a fearless sexual candour that must have shocked the susceptibilities of his own generation, sadomasochist broodings in paint that grope towards the psychedelic…’

The writer of the critique, a young journalist, with already something of a name in art circles, had been less enthralled by the late Victorian seascapes, also on view at the gallery; though he drew attention to the fact that here too, as with the Deacons, an exciting revival had taken place of a type of painting long out of fashion with yesterday’s art critics. He expressed his welcome of these aesthetic reinstatements; noting the fact that at least a few connoisseurs, undeterred by the narrow tastes of the day, had followed their own preference for straightforward marine subjects, painted in an unaffectedly naturalistic manner. Most of those on view at the gallery had come from a single collection. He praised the ‘virtuosity’ and ‘tightness of finish’ of Gannets Nesting, The Needles: Schooner Aground, Angry Seas off Land’s End , all by different hands.