Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

‘Smart cane, Trappy,’ said Bagshaw. ‘Who’s the type on the knob? Dr Goebbels? Yagoda? There’s a look of both of them.’

‘I’d like to think it’s Boris Karloff in a horror rôle,’ said Trapnel. ‘As you know, I’m a great Karloff fan. I found it yesterday in a shop off the Portobello Road, and took charge on the strength of the Quiggin & Craggs advance on the short stories. Not exactly cheap, but I had to possess it. My last stick, Shakespeare’s head, was pinched. It wasn’t in any case as good as this one — look.’

He twisted the knob, which turned out to be the pommel of a sword-stick, the blade released by a spring at the back of the skull. Bagshaw restrained him from drawing it further, seizing Trapnel’s arm in feigned terror.

‘Don’t fix bayonets, I beseech you, Trappy, or we’ll be asked to leave this joint. Keep your steel bright for the Social Revolution.’

Trapnel laughed. He clicked the sword back into the shaft of the stick.

‘You never know when you may have trouble,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded using it on my last publisher. Quiggin & Craggs are going to take over his stock of the Camel . They’ll do a reprint, if they can get the paper.’

I told him I had enjoyed the book. That was well received. The novel’s title referred to an incident in Trapnel’s childhood there described; one, so he insisted, that had prefigured to him what life — anyway his own life — was to be. In the narrative this episode had taken place in some warm foreign land, the name forgotten, but a good deal of sand, the faint impression of a pyramid, offering a strong presumption that the locale was Egyptian. The words that made such an impression on the young Trapnel — in many subsequent reminiscences always disposed to represent himself as an impressionable little boy — were intoned by an old man whose beard, turban, nightshirt, all the same shade of off-white, manifested the outer habiliments of a prophet; just as the stony ground from which he delivered his tidings to the Trapnel family party seemed the right sort of platform from which to prophesy.

‘Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb …’

Trapnel, according to himself, immediately recognized these words, monotonously repeated over and over again, as a revelation.

‘I grasped at once that’s what life was. How could the description be bettered? Juddering through the wilderness, on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t properly control, along a rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely, yet truly, stated.’

If Trapnel were really so young as represented by himself at the time of the incident, the story was not entirely credible, though none the worse for that. None the worse, I mean, insomuch as the words had undoubtedly haunted his mind at some stage, even if a later one. The greybeard’s unremitting recommendation of his beast as means of local archaeological transport had probably become embedded in the memory as such phrases will, only later earmarked for advantageous literary use: post hoc, propter hoc , to invoke a tag hard worked by Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson in post-retirement letters to The Times .

The earlier Trapnel myth, as propagated in the Camel , was located in an area roughly speaking between Beirut and Port Said, with occasional forays further afield from that axis. His family, for some professional reason, seemed to have roamed that part of the world nomadically. This fact — if it were a fact — to some extent attested the compatibility of a pleasure trip taken in Egypt, a holiday resort, in the light of other details given in the book, otherwise implying an unwarrantably prosperous interlude in a background of many apparent ups and downs, not to say disasters. Egypt cropped up more than once, perhaps — like the RAF officer’s greatcoat — adding a potentially restorative tone. The occupation of Trapnel’s father was never precisely defined; obscure, even faintly shady, commercial undertakings hinted. His social life appeared marginally official in style, if not of a very exalted order; possibly tenuous connexions with consular duties, not necessarily our own. One speculated about the Secret Service. Once — much later than this first meeting — a reference slipped out to relations in Smyrna. Trapnel’s physical appearance did not exclude the possibility of a grandmother, even a mother, indigenous to Asia Minor. He was, it appeared, an only child.

‘I always wondered what your initial stood for?’

Trapnel was pleased by the question.

‘I was christened Francis Xavier. Watching an old western starring Francis X. Bushman in a cowboy part, it struck me we’d both been called after the same saint, and, if he could suppress the second name, I could the first.’

‘You might do a novel about being a lapsed Catholic,’ said Bagshaw. ‘It’s worth considering. I know JG would like you to tackle something more engagé next time. When I think of the things I’d write about if I had your talent. I did write a novel once. Nobody would publish it. They said it was libellous.’

‘People like JG are always giving good advice about one’s books,’ said Trapnel. ‘In fact I hardly know anyone who doesn’t. “If only I could write like you, etc. etc.” They usually outline some utterly banal human situation, or moral issue, ventilated every other day on the Woman’s Page.’

‘Don’t breathe a word against the Woman’s Page, Trappy. Many a time I’ve proffered advice on it myself under a female pseudonym.’

‘Still, there’s a difference between a novel and a newspaper article. At least there ought to be. A novelist writes what he is. That’s equally true of mediaeval romances or journeys to the moon. If he put down on paper the considerations usually suggested, he wouldn’t be a novelist — or rather he’d be one of the fifty-thousand tenth-rate ones who crawl the literary scene.’

Trapnel had suddenly become quite excited. This business of being a ‘writer’ — that is, the status, moral and actual, of a writer — was a matter on which he was inordinately keen. This was one of the facets of Trapnel to emerge later. His outburst gave an early premonition.

‘Reviewers like political or moral problems,’ said Bagshaw. ‘Something they can get their teeth into. You can’t blame them. Being committed’s all the go now. I was myself until a few years ago, and still enjoy reading about it.’

Trapnel was not at all appeased. In fact he became more heated than ever, striking his stick on the floor.

‘How one envies the rich quality of a reviewer’s life. All the things to which those Fleet Street Jesuses feel superior. Their universal knowledge, exquisite taste, idyllic loves, happy married life, optimism, scholarship, knowledge of the true meaning of life, freedom from sexual temptation, simplicity of heart, sympathy with the masses, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity — particularly the last, in welcoming with open arms every phoney who appears on the horizon. It’s not surprising that in the eyes of most reviewers a mere writer’s experiences seem so often trivial, sordid, lacking in meaning.’

Trapnel was thoroughly worked up. It was an odd spectacle. Bagshaw spoke soothingly.

‘I know some of the critics are pretty awful, Trappy, but Nicholas wanted to talk to you about reviewing an occasional book yourself for Fission . If you agree to do so, you’ll at least have the opportunity of showing how it ought to be done.’

Trapnel saw that he had been caught on the wrong foot, and took this very well, laughing loudly. He may in any case have decided some apology was required for all this vehemence. All the earlier tension disappeared at once.