The Acceptance World

by Anthony Powell

  I glanced at the cardinal next door, notable as the only picture I had ever heard Widmerpool spontaneously praise. Here, too, the reds had been handled with some savagery. Sir Gavin shook his head and moved on to examine two of Isbister’s genre pictures. ‘Clergyman eating an apple’ and ‘The Old Humorists’. I found myself beside Clapham, a director of the firm that published St. John Clarke’s novels. He was talking to Smethyck, a museum official I had known slightly at the university.

  ‘When is your book on Isbister appearing?’ Clapham asked at once. ‘You announced it some time ago. This would have been the moment—with the St. John Clarke introduction.’

  Clapham had spoken accusingly, his voice implying the fretfulness of all publishers that one of their authors should betray them with a colleague, however lightly.

  ‘I went to see St. John Clarke the other day,’ Clapham continued. ‘I was glad to find him making a good recovery after his illness. Found him reading one of the young Communist poets. We had an interesting talk.’

  ‘Does anybody read St. John Clarke himself now?’ asked Smethyck, languidly.

  Like many of his profession, Smethyck was rather proud of his looks, which he had been carefully re-examining in the dark, mirror-like surface of Sir Horrocks Rusby, framed for some unaccountable reason under glass. Clapham was up in arms at once at such superciliousness.

  ‘Of course people read St. John Clarke,’ he said, snappishly. ‘Though perhaps not in your ultra-sophisticated circles, where everything ordinary people understand is sneered at.’

  ‘Personally, I don’t hold any views about St. John Clarke,’ said Smethyck, without looking round. ‘I’ve never read any of them. All I wanted to know was whether people bought his books.’

  He continued to ponder the cut of his suit in this adventitious looking-glass, deciding at last that his hair needed smoothing down on one side.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting to you both,’ said Clapham, moving a step or two closer and speaking rather thickly, ‘that when I finished Fields of Amaranth there were tears in my eyes.’

  Smethyck made no reply to this; nor could I myself think of a suitable rejoinder.

  ‘That was some years ago,’ said Clapham.

  This qualification left open the alternative of whether St. John Clarke still retained the power of exciting such strong feeling in a publisher, or whether Clapham himself had grown more capable of controlling his emotions.

  ‘Why, there’s Sillery,’ said Smethyck, who seemed thoroughly bored by the subject of St. John Clarke. ‘I believe he was to be painted by Isbister, if he had recovered. Let’s go and talk to him.’

  We left Clapham, still muttering about the extent of St. John Clarke’s sales, and the beauty and delicacy of his early style. I had not seen Sillery since Mrs. Andriadis’s party, three or four years before, though I had heard by chance that he had recently returned from America, where, he had held some temporary academical post, or been on a lecture tour. His white hair and dark, Nietzschean moustache remained unchanged, but his clothes looked older than ever. He was carrying an unrolled umbrella in one hand; in the other a large black homburg, thick in grease. He began to grin widely as soon as he saw us.

  ‘Hullo, Sillers,’ said Smethyck, who had been one of Sillery’s favourites among the undergraduates who constituted his salon. ‘I did not know you were interested in art.’

  ‘Not interested in art?’ said Sillery, enjoying this accusation a great deal. ‘What an idea. Still, I am, as it happens, here for semi-professional reasons, as you might say. I expect you are too, Michael. There is some nonsense about the College wanting a pitcher o’ me ole mug. Can’t think why they should need such a thing, but there it is. ‘Course Isbister can’t do it ‘cos ‘e’s tucked ‘is toes in now, but I thought I’d just come an’ take a look at the sorta thing that’s expected.’

  ‘And what do you think, Sillers?’

  ‘Just as well he’s passed away, perhaps,’ sniggered Sillery, suddenly abandoning his character-acting. ‘In any case I always think an artist is rather an embarrassment to his own work. But what Ninetyish things I am beginning to say. It must come from talking to so many Americans.’

  ‘But you can’t want to be painted by anyone even remotely like Isbister,’ said Smethyck. ‘Surely you can get a painter who is a little more modern than that. What about this man Barnby, for example?’

  ‘Ah, we are very conservative about art at the older universities,’ said Sillery, grinning delightedly. ‘Wouldn’t say myself that I want an Isbister exactly, though I heard the Warden comparing him with Antonio Moro the other night. ‘Fraid the Warden doesn’t know much about the graphic arts, though. But then I don’t want the wretched picture painted at all. What do members of the College want to look at my old phiz for, I should like to know?’

  We assured him that his portrait would be welcomed by all at the university.

  ‘I don’t know about Brightman,’ said Sillery, showing his teeth for a second. ‘I don’t at all know about Brightman. I don’t think Brightman would want a picture of me. But what have you been doing with yourself, Nicholas? Writing more books, I expect. I am afraid I haven’t read the first one yet. Do you ever see Charles Stringham now?’

  ‘Not for ages.’

  ‘A pity about that divorce,’ said Sillery. ‘You young men will get married. It is so often a mistake. I hear he is drinking just a tiny bit too much nowadays. It was a mistake to leave Donners-Brebner, too.’

  ‘I expect you’ve heard about J. G. Quiggin taking Mark Members’s place with St. John Clarke?’

  ‘Hilarious that, wasn’t it?’ agreed Sillery. ‘That sort of thing always happens when two clever boys come from the same place. They can’t help competing. Poor Mark seems quite upset about it. Can’t think why. After all, there are plenty of other glittering prizes for those with stout hearts and sharp swords, just as Lord Birkenhead remarked. I shall be seeing Quiggin this afternoon, as it happens—a little political affair—Quiggin lives a very mouvementé life these days, it seems.’

  Sillery chuckled to himself. There was evidently some secret he did not intend to reveal. In any case he had by then prolonged the conversation sufficiently for his own satisfaction.

  ‘Saw you chatting to Gavin Walpole-Wilson,’ he said. ‘Ought to go and have a word with him myself about these continuous hostilities between Bolivia and Paraguay. Been going on too long. Want to get in touch with his sister about it. Get one of her organisations to work. Time for liberal-minded people to step in. Can’t have them cutting each other’s throats in this way. Got to be quick, or I shall be late for Quiggin.’

  He shambled off. Smethyck smiled at me and shook his head, at the same time indicating that he had seen enough for one afternoon.

  I strolled on round the gallery. I had noted in the catalogue a picture called ‘The Countess of Ardglass with Faithful Girl’ and, when I arrived before it, I found Lady Ardglass herself inspecting the portrait. She was leaning on the arm of one of the trim grey-haired men who had accompanied her in the Ritz: or perhaps another example of their category, so like as to be indistinguishable. Isbister had painted her in an open shirt and riding breeches, standing beside the mare, her arm slipped through the reins: with much attention to the high polish of the brown boots.

  ‘Pity Jumbo could never raise the money for it,’ Bijou Ardglass was saying. ‘Why don’t you make an offer, Jack, and give it me for my birthday? You’d probably get it dirt cheap.’

  ‘I’m much too broke,’ said the grey-haired man.

  ‘You always say that. If you’d given me the car you promised me I should at least have saved the nine shillings I’ve already spent on taxis this morning.’

  Jean never spoke of her husband, and I knew no details of the episode with Lady Ardglass that had finally separated them. At the same time, now that I saw Bijou, I could not help feeling that she and I were somehow connected by what had happened. I wondered what Duport had in common with me that linked
us through Jean. Men who are close friends tend to like different female types; perhaps the contrary process also operated, and the fact that he had seemed so unsympathetic when we had met years before was due to some innate sense of rivalry. I was to see Jean that afternoon. She had borrowed a friend’s flat for a week or so, while she looked about for somewhere more permanent to live. This had made things easier. Emotional crises always promote the urgent need for executive action, so that the times when we most hope to be free from the practical administration of life are always those when the need to cope with a concrete world is more than ever necessary.

  Owing to domestic arrangements connected with getting a nurse for her child, she would not be at home until late in the afternoon. I wasted some time at the Isbister show, before walking across the park to the place where she was living. I had expected to see Quiggin at the gallery, but Sillery’s remarks indicated that he would not be there. The last time I had met him, soon after the Templer week-end, it had turned out that, in spite of the temporary reappearance of Members at St. John Clarke’s sick bed, Quiggin was still firmly established in his new position. He now seemed scarcely aware that there had ever been a time when he had not acted as the novelist’s secretary, referring to his employer’s foibles with a weary though tolerant familiarity, as if he had done the job for years. He had quickly brushed aside enquiry regarding his journey to London with Mrs. Erdleigh and Jimmy Stripling.

  ‘What a couple,’ he commented.

  I had to admit they were extraordinary enough. Quiggin had resumed his account of St. John Clarke, his state of health and his eccentricities, the last of which were represented by his new secretary in a decidedly different light from that in which they had been displayed by Members. St. John Clarke’s every action was now expressed in Marxist terms, as if some political Circe had overnight turned the novelist into an entirely Left Wing animal. No doubt Quiggin judged it necessary to handle his new situation firmly on account of the widespread gossip regarding St. John Clarke’s change of secretary; for in circles frequented by Members and Quiggin ceaseless argument had taken place as to which of them had ‘behaved badly’.

  Thinking it best from my firm’s point of view to open diplomatic relations, as it were, with the new government, I had asked if there was any hope of our receiving the Isbister introduction in the near future. Quiggin’s answer to this had been to make an affirmative gesture with his hands. I had seen Members employ the same movement, perhaps derived by both of them from St. John Clarke himself.

  ‘That was exactly what I wanted to discuss when I came to the Ritz,’ Quiggin had said. ‘But you insisted on going out with your wealthy friends.’

  ‘You must admit that I arranged for you to meet my wealthy friends, as you call them, at the first opportunity—within twenty-four hours, as a matter of fact.’

  Quiggin smiled and inclined his head, as if assenting to my claim that some amends had been attempted.

  ‘As I have tried to explain,’ he said, ‘St. J.’s views have changed a good deal lately. Indeed, he has entirely come round to my own opinion—that the present situation cannot last much longer. We will not tolerate it. All thinking men are agreed about that. St. J. wants to do the introduction when his health gets a bit better—and he has time to spare from his political interests—but he has decided to write the Isbister foreword from a Marxist point of view.’

  ‘You ought to have obtained some first-hand information for him when Marx came through on Planchette.’

  Quiggin frowned at this levity.

  ‘What rot that was,’ he said. ‘I suppose Mark and his psychoanalyst gang would explain it by one of their dissertations on the subconscious. Perhaps in that particular respect they would be right. No doubt they would add a lot of irrelevant stuff about Surrealism. But to return to Isbister’s pictures, I think they would not make a bad subject treated in that particular manner.’

  ‘You could preach a whole Marxist sermon on the portrait of Peter Templer’s father alone.’

  ‘You could, indeed,’ said Quiggin, who seemed not absolutely sure that the matter in hand was being negotiated with sufficient seriousness. ‘But what a charming person Mrs. Templer is. She has changed a lot since her days as a model, or mannequin, or whatever she was. It is a great pity she never seems to see any intelligent people now. I can’t think how she can stand that stockbroker husband of hers. How rich is he?’

  ‘He took a bit of a knock in the slump.’

  ‘How do they get on together?’

  ‘All right, so far as I know.’

  ‘St. J. always says there is “nothing sadder than a happy marriage”.’

  ‘Is that why he doesn’t risk it himself?’

  ‘I should think Mona will go off with somebody,’ said Quiggin, decisively.

  I considered this comment impertinent, though there was certainly no reason why Quiggin and Templer should be expected to like one another. Perhaps Quiggin’s instinct was correct, I thought, however unwilling I might be to agree openly with him. There could be no doubt that the Templers’ marriage was not going very well. At the same time, I did not intend to discuss them with Quiggin, to whom, in any case, there seemed no point in explaining Templer’s merits. Quiggin would not appreciate these even if they were brought to his notice; while, if it suited him, he would always be ready to reverse his opinion about Templer or anyone else.

  By then I had become sceptical of seeing the Isbister introduction, Marxist or otherwise. In itself, this latest suggestion did not strike me as specially surprising. Taking into account the fact that St. John Clarke had made the plunge into ‘modernism’, the project seemed neither more nor less extraordinary than tackling Isbister’s pictures from the point of view of Psychoanalysis, Surrealism, Roman Catholicism, Social Credit, or any other specialised approach. In fact some such doctrinal method of attack was then becoming very much the mode; taking the place of the highly coloured critical flights of an earlier generation that still persisted in some quarters, or the severely technical criticism of the aesthetic puritans who had ruled the roost since the war.

  The foreword would now, no doubt, speak of Isbister ‘laughing up his sleeve’ at the rich men and public notabilities he had painted; though Members, who, with St. John Clarke, had once visited Isbister’s studio in St. John’s Wood for some kind of a reception held there, had declared that nothing could have exceeded the painter’s obsequiousness to his richer patrons. Members was not always reliable in such matters, but it was certainly true that Isbister’s portraits seemed to combine as a rule an effort to flatter his client with apparent attempts to make some comment to be easily understood by the public. Perhaps it was this inward struggle that imparted to his pictures that peculiar fascination to which I have already referred. However, so far as my firm was concerned, the goal was merely to get the introduction written and the book published.

  ‘What is Mark doing now?’ I asked.

  Quiggin looked surprised at the question; as if everyone must know by now that Members was doing very well for himself.

  ‘With Boggis & Stone—you know they used to be the Vox Populi Press—we got him the job.’

  ‘Who were “we”?’

  ‘St. J. and myself. St. J. arranged most of it through Howard Craggs. As you know, Craggs used to be the managing director of the Vox Populi.’

  ‘But I thought Mark wasn’t much interested in politics. Aren’t all Boggis & Stone’s books about Lenin and Trotsky and Litvinov and the Days of October and all that?’

  Quiggin agreed, with an air of rather forced gaiety.

  ‘Well, haven’t most of us been living in a fool’s paradise far too long now?’ he said, speaking as if to make an appeal to my better side. ‘Isn’t it time that Mark—and others too—took some notice of what is happening in the world?’

  ‘Does he get a living wage at Boggis & Stone’s?’

  ‘With his journalism he can make do. A small firm like that can’t afford to pay a very munific
ent salary, it’s true. He still gets a retainer from St. J. for sorting out the books once a month.’

  I did pot imagine this last arrangement was very popular with Quiggin from the way he spoke of it.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I persuaded St. J. to arrange for Mark to have some sort of a footing in a more politically alive world before he got rid of him. That is where the future lies for all of us.’

  ‘Did Gypsy Jones transfer from the Vox Populi to Boggis & Stone?’

  Quiggin laughed now with real amusement.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I forgot you knew her. She left quite a time before the amalgamation took place. She has something better to do now.’

  He paused and moistened his lips; adding rather mysteriously :

  ‘They say Gypsy is well looked on by the Party.’

  This remark did not convey much to me in those days. I was more interested to see how carefully Quiggin’s plans must have been laid to have prepared a place for Members even before he had been ejected from his job. That certainly showed forethought.

  ‘Are you writing another book?’ said Quiggin.

  ‘Trying to—and you?’

  ‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.

  He conveyed by these words a note of warning that, in spite of his modified approval, things must not go too far where books were concerned.

  ‘Personally, I am not too keen to rush into print,’ he said.

  ‘I am still collecting material for my survey, Unburnt Boats’

  I did not meet Members to hear his side of the story until much later, in fact on that same afternoon of the Isbister Memorial Exhibition. I ran into him on my way through Hyde Park, not far from the Achilles Statue. (As it happened, it was close to the spot where I had come on Barbara Goring and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, the day we had visited the Albert Memorial together.)

  The weather had turned colder again, and the park was dank, with a kind of sea mist veiling the trees. Members looked shabbier than was usual for him: shabby and rather worried. In our undergraduate days he had been a tall, willowy, gesticulating figure, freckled and beady-eyed; hurrying through the lanes and byways of the university, abstractedly alone, like the Scholar-Gypsy, or straggling along the shopfronts of the town in the company of acquaintances, seemingly chosen for their peculiar resemblance to himself. Now he had grown into a terse, emaciated, rather determined young man, with a neat profile and chilly manner: a person people were beginning to know by name. In fact the critics, as a whole, had spoken so highly of his latest volume of verse—the one through which an undercurrent of psychoanalytical phraseology had intermittently run—that even Quiggin (usually as sparing of praise as Uncle Giles himself) had, in one of his more unbending moments at a sherry party, gone so far as to admit publicly: