Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

‘Why? He must agree it’s a gloomy rank.’

‘God — Nathaniel Sheldon’s helping himself. He must think he’s not being appreciated.’

It was true.Sheldon was routing about under the drink table. Ada hurried off. It was time to go home. I sought out Quiggjn to say goodbye. He was talking with Shernmaker, whose temper seemed to have improved, because he was teasing Quiggin.

‘Gauguin abandoned business for art, JG — you’re like Rimbaud, who abandoned art for business.’

‘Resemblances undoubtedly exist between publishing and the slave trade,’ said Quiggin ‘But it’s not only authors who get sold, Bernard’

Down stairs in the packing department Widmerpool was wandering about looking for something. He no longer retained his earlier geniality, was now despondent.

‘I’ve lost my briefcase. Hid it away somewhere down here. I say, that friend of yours, Trapnel, is an odd fellow, isn’t he?’

‘In appearance?’

‘Among other things.’

‘He’s a good writer.’

‘So I’m told.’

‘I mean should be useful on Fission .’

‘Ah, there’s the briefcase — no, I’ve just been talking to Trapnel, and his behaviour rather surprised me. As a matter of fact he asked me to lend him some money.’

‘Following, no doubt, on your recommendations in the House that interest rates should be reduced.’

‘Your joke is no doubt very amusing. At the same time you will agree Trapnel’s request was unusual on the part of a man whom I had never set eyes on before tonight, when he introduced himself to me?’

‘You know what literary life is like.’

‘I’m beginning to learn.’

‘Did you come across?’

‘I handed over a pound. The man assured me he was completely penniless. However, let us speak no more of that. I merely put it on record. I consider the party for Fission was a success. It will get off to a good start, even though I do not feel so much confidence in Bagshaw as I could wish.’

‘He knows his stuff.’

‘So everyone says. He appeared to me rather drunk by the end of the evening, but I must not stay gossiping. I have to get back to Westminster. Pam had to leave early. She had a dinner engagement.’

We went outside. Trapnel was standing on the pavement. He had just hailed a cab. He must have been waiting there for one to pass for some minutes; in fact since he had taken the pound off Widmerpool.

‘Dearth of taxis round this neighbourhood’s almost as bad as where I’m living. Can I give anyone a lift? I’m heading north.’

We both declined the offer.

In the new year, without further compromise, Dickensian winter set in. Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic trails. Bagshaw sat in his overcoat, the collar turned up round a woollen muffler, from which a small red nose appeared above a gelid moustache. Ada’s protuberant layers of clothing travestied pregnancy. Only Trapnel, in his tropical suit and dyed greatcoat, seemed unaware of the cold. He complained about other things: lack of ideas: emotional setbacks: financial worries. Climate did not affect him. The weather showed no sign of changing. It encouraged staying indoors. I worked away at Burton.

On the whole Bagshaw’s tortuous, bantering strategy, which had seen him through so many tussles with employers and wives (the latest one kept rigorously in the background), was designed to conceal hard-and-fast lines of opinion — assuming Bagshaw still held anything of the sort — so that, in case of sudden showdown, he could without prejudice give support wherever most convenient to himself. Even so, he allowed certain assessments to let fall touching on the fierce internal polemics that raged under the surface at Quiggin & Craggs; by association, at Fission too. Such domestic conflict, common enough in all businesses, took a peculiarly virulent form in this orbit, according to Bagshaw, on account of political undercurrents concerned.

‘There are daily rows about what books are taken on. JG’s not keen on frank propaganda, especially in translation. The current trouble’s about a novel called The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers . JG thinks the title too long, and that it won’t sell anyway. No doubt the party will see there’s no serious deficit, but JG fears that sort of book clogs the wheels — the pistons in this case — of the non-political side of the list. He’s nervous in certain other respects too. He doesn’t mind inconspicuous fraternal writings inculcating the message in quiet ways. He rather likes that. What he doesn’t want is for the firm to get a name for peddling the Party Line.’

‘Craggs takes another view?’

‘Howard’s an old fellow-traveller of long standing. He hardly notices the books are propaganda. It all gives him a nostalgic feeling that he’s young again, running the Vox Populi Press, having the girls from the 1917 Club. All the same, he probably wouldn’t argue with JG so much if he wasn’t being prodded all the time by Gypsy.’

‘And Widmerpool?’

‘All I’m certain about is he wants to winkle me out of the editorship. As I’ve said, he behaves at times like a crypto, but I suspect he’s still waiting to see which way the cat will jump — and of course he doesn’t want to get too far the wrong side of his Labour bosses in the House.’

‘You were uncertain at first.’

‘He’s been repeating pure Communist arguments about the Civil War in Greece. He may simply believe them. I’m never quite sure Gypsy hasn’t a hold on him of some sort. There was a story about them in the old days. That was long before I came on the scene so far as Gypsy was concerned.’

‘How does Rosie Manasch take all this?’

‘She’s only interested in writers and art, all that sort of thing. She doesn’t cause any trouble. She holds those mildly progressive views of the sort that are not at all bothered by the Party Line. Incidentally, she seems to have taken rather a fancy to young Odo Stevens. Trappy’s becoming rather a worry. We’re always shelling out to him. He writes an article or a short story, gets paid on the nail, is back on the doorstep the next afternoon, or one of his stooges is, and he wants some more. I can handle him all right, but I’m not sure they’re doing so well on the other side of the yard.’

Trapnel’s financial embarrassments had become unambiguous enough during the months that transformed him from a mere acquaintance of Bagshaw’s, and professional adjunct of Fission , into a recognized figure in one’s own life. His personality, built up with thought, deserves a word or two on account of certain elements not restricted to himself. He was a fine specimen of a general type, to which he had added flourishes of his own, making him — it was hardly going too far to say — unique in the field. The essential point was that Trapnel always acted a part; not necessarily the same part, but a part of some kind. Insomuch as most people cling to a role in which they particularly fancy themselves, he was no great exception so far as that went. Where he differed from the crowd was in so doggedly sticking to the role — or roles — he had chosen to assume.

Habitual role-sustainers fall, on the whole, into two main groups: those who have gauged to a nicety what shows them off to best advantage: others, more romantic if less fortunate in their fate, who hope to reproduce in themselves arbitrary personalities that have won their respect, met in life, read about in papers and books, or seen in films. These self-appointed players of a part often have little or no aptitude, are even notably ill equipped by appearance or demeanour, to wear the costume or speak the lines of the prototype. Indeed, the very unsuitability of the role is what fascinates. Even in the cases of individuals showing off a genuine pre-eminence — statesmen, millionaires, poets, to name a few types — the artificial personality can become confused with the passage of time, life itself being a confused and confusing process, but, when the choice of part has been extravagantly incongruous, there are no limits to the craziness of the performance staged. Adopted almost certainly for romantic reasons, the role, once put into practice, is subject to all sorts of unavoidable and unforeseen restraints and distortions; not least, in the first place, on account of the essentially rough-and-ready nature of all romantic concepts. Even assuming relative clarity at the outset, the initial principles of the role-sustainer can finally reach a climax in which it is all but impossible to guess what on earth the role itself was originally intended to denote.