Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

The promised meeting with X. Trapnel came about the following week. Like almost all persons whose life is largely spun out in saloon bars, Bagshaw acknowledged strong ritualistic responses to given pubs. Each drinking house possessed its special, almost magical endowment to give meaning to whatever was said or done within its individual premises. Indeed Bagshaw himself was so wholeheartedly committed to the mystique of The Pub that no night of his life was complete without a final pint of beer in one of them. Accordingly, withdrawal of Bagshaw’s company — whether or not that were to be regarded as auspicious — could always be relied upon, wherever he might be, however convivial the gathering, ten minutes before closing time. If — an unlikely contingency — the ‘local’ were not already known to him, Bagshaw, when invited to dinner, always took the trouble to ascertain its exact situation for the enaction of this last rite. He must have carried in his head the names and addresses of at least two hundred London pubs — heaven knows how many provincial ones — each measured off in delicate gradations in relation to the others, strictly assessed for every movement in Bagshaw’s tactical game. The licensed premises he chose for the production of Trapnel were in Great Portland Street, dingy, obscure, altogether lacking in outer ‘character’, possibly a haunt familiar for years for stealthy BBC negotiations, after Bagshaw himself had, in principle, abandoned the broadcasting world.

‘I’m sure you’ll like Trapnel,’ he said. ‘I feel none of the reservations about presenting him sometimes experienced during the war. I don’t mean brother officers in the RAF — who could be extraordinarily obtuse in recognizing the good points of a man who happens to be a bit out of the general run — but Trapnel managed to get on the wrong side of several supposedly intelligent people.’

‘Where does he fit into your political panorama?’

Bagshaw laughed.

‘That’s a good question. He has no place there. Doesn’t know what politics are about. I’d define him as a Leftish Social-Democrat, if I had to. Born a Roman Catholic, but doesn’t practise — a lapsed Catholic, rather as I’m a lapsed Marxist. As a matter of fact I came across him in the first instance through a small ILP group in India, but Trapnel didn’t know whether it was arse-holes or Tuesday, so far as all that was concerned. As I say, he’s rather odd-man-out.’

Even without Bagshaw’s note of caution, I had come prepared for Trapnel to turn out a bore. Pleasure in a book carries little or no guarantee where the author is concerned, and Camel Ride to the Tomb , whatever its qualities as a novel, had all the marks of having been written by a man who found difficulty in getting on with the rest of the world. That might well be in his favour; on the other hand, it might equally be a source of anyway local and temporary discomfort, even while one hoped for the best.

‘Trapnel’s incredibly keen to write well,’ said Bagshaw. ‘In fact determined. Won’t compromise an inch. I admire that, so far as it goes, but writers of that sort can add to an editor’s work. Our public may have to be educated up to some of the stuff we’re going to offer — I’m thinking of the political articles Kenneth Widmerpool is planning — so Trapnel’s good, light, lively pieces, if we can get them out of him, arc likely to assist the other end of the mag.’

Trapnel’s arrival at that point did not immediately set at rest Bagshaw’s rather ominous typification of him. Indeed, Bagshaw himself seemed to lose his nerve slightly when Trapnel entered the bar, though only for a second, and quickly recovered.

‘Ah, Trappy, here you are. Take a seat. What’s it to be? How are things?’

He introduced us. Trapnel, in a voice both deep and harsh, requested half a pint of bitter, somehow an unexpectedly temperate choice in the light of his appearance and gruffness of manner. He looked about thirty, tall, dark, with a beard. Beards, rarer in those days than they became later, at that period hinted of submarine duty, rather than the arts, social protest or a subsequent fashion simply for much more hair. At the same time, even if the beard, assessed with the clothes and stick he carried, marked him out as an exhibitionist in a reasonably high category, the singularity was more on account of elements within himself than from outward appearance.

Although the spring weather was still decidedly chilly, he was dressed in a pale ochre-coloured tropical suit, almost transparent in texture, on top of which he wore an overcoat, black and belted like Quiggin’s Partisan number, but of cloth, for some reason familiarly official in cut. This heavy garment, rather too short for Trapnel’s height of well over six feet, was at the same time too full, in view of his spare, almost emaciated body. Its weight emphasized the flimsiness of the tussore trousers below. The greatcoat turned out, much later, to have belonged to Bagshaw during his RAF service, disposed of on terms unspecified, possibly donated, to Trapnel, who had caused it to be dyed black. The pride Trapnel obviously took in the coat was certainly not untainted by an implied, though unjustified, aspiration to ex-officer status.

The walking stick struck a completely different note. Its wood unremarkable, but the knob, ivory, more likely bone, crudely carved in the shape of a skull, was rather like old Skerrett’s head at Erridge’s funeral. This stick clearly bulked large in Trapnel equipment. It set the tone far more than the RAF greatcoat or tropical suit. For the rest, he was hatless, wore a dark blue sports shirt frayed at the collar, an emerald green tie patterned with naked women, was shod in grey suede brothel-creepers. These last, then relatively new, were destined to survive a long time, indeed until their rubber soles, worn to the thinness of paper, had become all but detached from fibre-less uppers, sounding a kind of dismal applause as they flapped rhythmically against the weary pavement trodden beneath.

The general effect, chiefly caused by the stick, was of the Eighteen-Nineties, the décadence ; putting things at their least eclectic, a contemptuous rejection of currently popular male modes in grey flannel demob suits with pork-pie hats, bowler-crowned British Warms, hooded duffels, or even those varied outfits like Quiggin’s, to be seen here and there, that suggested recent service in the maquis . All such were rejected. One could not help speculating whether an eyeglass would not be produced — Trapnel was reported to have sported one for a brief period, until broken in a pub brawl — insomuch that the figure he recalled, familiar from some advertisement advocating a brand of chocolates or cigarettes, similarly equipped with beard and cane, wore an eye-glass on a broad ribbon, though additionally rigged out in full evening dress, an order round his neck, opera cloak over his shoulder. In Trapnel’s case, the final effect had that touch of surrealism which redeems from complete absurdity, though such redemption was a near thing, only narrowly achieved.

Perhaps this description, factually accurate — as so often when facts are accurately reported — is at the same time morally unfair. ‘Facts’ — as Trapnel himself, talking about writing, was later to point out — are after all only on the surface, inevitably selective, prejudiced by subjective presentation. What is below, hidden, much more likely to be important, is easily omitted. The effect Trapnel made might indeed be a little absurd; it was not for that reason unimpressive. In spite of much that was all but ludicrous, a kind of inner dignity still somehow clung to him.

Nevertheless, the impression made on myself was in principle an unfavourable one when he first entered the pub. A personal superstructure on human beings that seems exaggerated and disorganized threatens behaviour to match. That was the immediate response. Almost at once this turned out an incorrect as well as priggish judgment. There were no frills about Trapnel’s conversation. When he began to talk, beard, clothes, stick, all took shape as necessary parts of him, barely esoteric, as soon as you were brought into relatively close touch with the personality. That personality, it was at once to be grasped, was quite tough. The fact that his demeanour stopped just short of being aggressive was no doubt in the main a form of self-protection, because a look of uncertainty, almost of fear, intermittently showed in his eyes, which were dark brown to black. They gave the clue to Trapnel having been through a hard time at some stage of his life, even when one was still unaware how dangerously — anyway how uncomfortably — he was inclined to live. His way of talking, not at all affected or artificial, had a deliberate roughness, its rasp no doubt regulated for pub interchanges at all levels, to avoid any suggestion of intellectual or social pretension.