Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

L. O. Salvidge, rather an achievement in the light of current publishing delays, got out a further volume of essays to follow up Paper Wine . The new one, Secretions , was much reviewed beside Shernmaker’s Miscellaneous Equities . It was a notable score for Salvidge to have produced two books in less than a year. After the unsuccessful prosecution, Kydd’s Sweetskin at first failed to recover from the withdrawal at the time of the injunction, but, given a new wrapper design, Kydd himself alleged that it picked up relatively well. That season also appeared David Pennistone’s Descartes, Gassendi, and the Atomic Theory of Epicurus , the work of which he used to speak so despairingly when we were in the army together. I busied myself with Burton, even so only just managing to see Borage and Hellebore: a Study in print by the following December.

The scattered pages of Profiles in String , with the death’s-head swordstick, floated eternally downstream into the night. It was the beginning of Trapnel’s drift too, irretrievable as they. He went underground for a long time after that night. When at last he emerged, it was to haunt an increasingly gruesome and desolate world. There were odds and ends of film work, stray pieces of journalism, an occasional short story. In the last, possibly some traces reappeared of what had gone into Profiles in String , though in a much diminished form. Something of it may even have emerged on the screen. Another novel never got written. Trapnel himself always insisted that a novel is what its writer is. The definition only opens up a lot more questions. Perhaps he had taken a knock from which he never recovered; perhaps he had used up already what was in him, in the way writers do. In these sunless marshlands of existence, a dwindling reserve of pep-pills, a certain innate inventiveness, capacity for survival, above all the mystique of panache — in short, the Trapnel method — just about made it possible to hang on. That was the best you could say.

I once asked Dicky Umfraville — whose own experiences on the Turf made his knowledge of racing personalities extensive — whether he had ever heard of a jockey called Trapnel, whose professional career had been made largely in Egypt.

‘Heard of him, old boy? When I was in Cairo in the ’twenties, I won a packet on a French horse he rode called Amour Piquant.’