Temporary Kings

by Anthony Powell

  Gwinnett shook his head.

  ‘I just saw a paragraph about him in the Continental Herald-Tribune. It said the well-known playboy-tycoon Louis Glober was here for the Film Festival, and was staying with Mr Jacky Bragadin.’

  ‘I thought Glober an amusing figure. Since then I’ve never done more than read about him in the paper in his playboy-tycoon capacity. I suppose he’s a typical Jacky Bragadin guest. Did the Herald-Tribune name any others?’

  ‘Just Glober. It seems he’s come on here from the German Grand Prix.’

  ‘Racing?’

  ‘Automobile racing. World Championship.’

  ‘He’s in that game too?’

  ‘Sure.’

  To the eye of a fellow American I saw Glober must present a very different outline to that of my own remembrance. If not exactly the daily meat of the columnist, Louis Glober was a reasonably tasty snack, always available on the back shelf of the larder, where public personalities of a minor sort are stored in case of need. He was neither dished up too often to cause surfeit, nor left too long on ice to become stale. Contradictory features hampered his definition. The Herald-Tribune had termed him playboy-tycoon, this type-casting to cover publisher, film-producer, sportsman, ‘socialite’, a lot of other more or less news-valued labels, most with some basis in fact. The last photograph I had seen of Glober had been driving a vintage car. Gwinnett thought activities like sailing or motor racing had latterly taken the form of promotion, rather than too laboriously personal a role. That did not prevent Glober from still figuring as a noted rider, shot, golfer, yachtsman, or whatever else was required by the context. A taste for amusing himself had not inhibited making money, though again Glober was said to lose fortunes as easily as win them.

  ‘The point I remember about Glober was that he seemed rather intelligent.’

  ‘Ah-ha.’

  The answer was non-committal, possibly disapproving, either because Gwinnett thought such a judgment, even if favourable, impertinent to pass on another human being, or because he was himself reluctant to allow the laurels of intelligence to decorate a brow of Glober’s type. As not seldom when Americans utter that sound, hard to transliterate, I was uncertain. We talked of some of the reputed exploits; the blazing Hollywood restaurant from which Glober had carried shoulder-high down a ladder a famous film star – Dietrich, Hepburn, Harlow – neither of us was certain of the heroine; the methusalem of champagne that burst celebrating the return from Europe of Texas Guinan; the fight (almost won) in some night-club with an ex-middle-weight champion of Australia. A reporter never seemed far away to chronicle these vignettes of Glober as a picturesque or glamorous figure, his own clear-cut sense of the dramatic occasion endearing him to press and public wherever he went. Even in England, where he was not much known, editors instinctively printed the intermittent Glober item, compressed into a couple of lines on the back page. I mentioned that.

  ‘Would they report him today?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Glober must be about washed up.’

  ‘What is he? In his sixties? Just about.’

  Gwinnett gave the impression of not greatly caring for the idea of Glober, at the same time granting some respect to a romantic so unusually successful at giving public expression to his romanticism; showing ability too, even if a fluctuating one, in making a success of financial ventures. My own memory of Glober was far from unsympathetic, even if he now sounded rather different – though not all that different – from the young American first set eyes on. The mere fact that he was staying with Jacky Bragadin for the Film Festival, that he had been car-racing in Germany, argued survival powers of a sort; resilience not always found in characters of his type.

  ‘Who’s he married to now?’

  Glober’s wives had always been beauties. Once, very briefly, he had been husband of a world-famous film star. These unions lasted only a few years before being dissolved; soon renewed in similar fashion to the accompaniment of further widespread exudations of publicity in the appropriate quarters.

  ‘No one, so far as I know. His last wife died quite a long while ago. They’d been wed only a very short time. It was leukemia, I think. Glober was photographed kneeling at her grave. There was a blanket of lilies, and, on a card written large enough to read in a newspaper picture, a message: Farewell, Fleurdelys, farewell, fair one.’

  ‘Fleurdelys was her name?’

  ‘It looked almost as if Glober was lying in the grave.’

  Gwinnett spoke with an odd sense of excitement. He stared at me hard. I did not know quite whether he were criticizing Glober, or applauding him, expressing irony or admiration. The thought of what Dr Brightman had said about the dead girl came back.

  ‘He was in a different mood when I met him.’

  That had been towards the end of the nineteen-twenties. Glober had arrived in London as representative of a recently founded New York publishing house. Even before he landed, his name went round among the London publishers as a young American colleague with a head full of bright new ideas; by no means an unqualified recommendation to that particular community. Glober came to call on my own firm. He saw Daniel Tokenhouse. One of the bright ideas was the Cubist series. The suggestion was to produce generously illustrated, cheaply produced studies of these painters, blocks to be made in Holland or Germany by some newly devised process. Apart from the fact that the Cubists were still very generally regarded as wild men, if not worse, certainly unwise to encourage, transactions that included overseas production always entailed risks not every publisher was prepared to take. That was where Tokenhouse came in. Tokenhouse did not mind an element of risk. His predisposition for certain forms of rebellion against a humdrum approach to life was one of his unexpected sides. He also derived pleasure from the thought of how much the series would annoy other publishers, not to mention booksellers. Then, at quite an early stage, something went wrong in connexion with the issue of the series. I did not remember exactly what upset the project, but it never went forward. There had been rather a row, money and tempers lost. I was in too subordinate a position at the time to be concerned, or greatly interested, except so far as being well disposed to ‘modern art’. There were other things to think about, better ones, it then seemed, the business aspects forgotten among elements more memorable.

  Tokenhouse was still occupied when Glober arrived for his appointment. Negotiations on the matter of St John Clarke’s Introduction to The Art of Horace Isbister had just begun. St John Clarke was still haggling about payment. He was too well known a novelist to be dismissed out of hand, so Glober could not be received. The manager, with whom I shared a not over-luxurious office, was wrangling with a binder in the firm’s waiting-room, a cubicle from its austerity in any case unsuitable for reception of another publisher, especially an American one. Tokenhouse rang through on the house-telephone with instructions to hold Glober in play for the further few minutes required to dislodge St John Clarke. The room where the manager and I passed our days, its walls grimly lined with file copies, was almost as comfortless as the waiting-room, but Glober was shown in. From the moment he entered, there was no need to provide distraction from the frugality of the surroundings. Glober himself took charge. In a matter of seconds we seemed already on the friendliest of terms. That was Glober’s speciality. I made some apology for this delay after an appointment had been made.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s great to draw breath. There’s a lot of running round in London. I didn’t get to bed till late last night.’

  He sat down in the collapsed armchair, and looked about him.

  ‘You’ve got a real Dickensian place here.’

  ‘Bleak House?’

  Glober laughed his quiet attractive laugh.

  ‘The Old Curiosity Shop,’ he said. ‘In the illustration.’

  I supposed him thirty, possibly a year or two more, to my own twenty-two or twenty-three, but his self-confidence, maturity of manner, separated us by several decades. Unusually tall, inc
ontrovertibly good-looking, Glober’s features – in the later words of Xenia Lilienthal – were those of a ‘young Byzantine emperor’. One saw what she meant. It showed she had taken in that aspect of him, in spite of her bad cold. His quietly forceful manner suggested a right to command, inexhaustible funds of stored up energy, overwhelming sophistication, limitless financial resource. At that age I did not notice a hard core of melancholy lurking beneath these assets. Perhaps in those days that side of his nature was better concealed. The instinct he so essentially possessed was getting on the right terms with everybody, no matter how transiently encountered. This intuitive impulse caused him to move from illustrating Dickens to pictures in general, the fact that he himself wanted to buy an Augustus John drawing before he left England. The gallery handling John’s work had shown him nothing he fancied. Had I any ideas? I suggested direct approach to the painter himself, all the time feeling there was some quite easy answer, which Glober’s flow of questions had put from my head.

  ‘John’s out of the country. If I could meet some private person that had a drawing he was willing to trade.’

  Then I remembered such an opportunity had been announced the previous week. The Lilienthals were trying to sell a John drawing for Mopsy Pontner. Moreland had mentioned the fact. Moreland had been searching for a secondhand copy of The Atheist’s Tragedy in the Lilienthals’ bookshop, and Xenia Lilienthal had told him that Mopsy Pontner – more correctly, Mopsy Pontner’s husband – had an Augustus John drawing to sell. The Lilienthals were accustomed to take books off Mr Deacon’s hands, when included in miscellaneous ‘lots’ acquired by him at auction to add to his stock of antiques. Mr Deacon was not above marketing the odd volume of curiosa – eroticism preferably confined to the male sex – but did not care to be bothered with the sale of more humdrum literary works. The Lilienthals’ shop was just around the corner. They were familiar with his quirks, like the Pontners, frequenters of The Mortimer, though not regularly.

  Moreland (these were days before marriage to Matilda) always commended Mopsy Pontner’s looks, but was a friend of Pontner, who was musically inclined in a manner Moreland could approve, a qualification by no means common. Moreland tended to keep off his friends’ wives. Pontner, who knew several languages pretty well, earned a living by translating. He also bought paintings and drawings, when he could afford them, partly because he had a taste for pictures too, partly as a speculation. I ought to have thought of that when Glober raised the subject. This must have been a moment when money was required to tide over a financial crisis, take a holiday, or, as likely as either, invest in another work of art, which Pontner considered a better bet for a rise on the market. Pontner was older than his wife. The fact that Moreland found Mopsy attractive, liked talking about her, probably accounted for his passing on the information. At that time I had never met her, though knew she was reputed quite a beauty in her way. Suddenly remembering about this drawing, I told Glober it had been on offer a week or more before.

  ‘Do you think it’s still unsold?’

  ‘Shall I make enquiries?’

  ‘Go ahead. This is great. Mr Jenkins, we just had to meet.’

  Glober was full of enthusiasm. He must have recognized one of his own characteristic situations taking shape before his eyes. His next reaction was that everyone must come to dinner with him to discuss the deal. By now he was certain the drawing remained unsold. Its existence revealed, it was now his by law of nature. Before the matter could be gone into further, Tokenhouse appeared in the doorway, having disembarrassed himself of St John Clarke, who could be heard coughing painfully, in a disgruntled manner, as he made his way down the stairs. Tokenhouse uttered his characteristically rather brusque apologies for the delay. Before they disappeared together Glober took my hand.

  ‘Call me up at the hotel between four and five this evening, Mr Jenkins. Even suppose the drawing is sold, I’d like to have you dine with me.’

  Tokenhouse heard that a shade suspiciously. He was jealous of outside contacts, not least American ones. Glober stayed for about an hour. I did not see him when he left. In the course of the day I made several telephone calls, finding the Augustus John drawing still available, Pontners and Lilienthals delighted to scent a buyer. I informed Glober.

  ‘And they’ll all have dinner with me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Everyone was pleased with the idea. The party took place in Glober’s sitting-room on one of the upper floors of the hotel, an old-fashioned establishment (pulled down a couple of years later) in the Curzon Street neighbourhood. It was a favourite haunt at that period of the more enlightened sort of American publisher. The place was just Glober’s mark. When I arrived, he was inspecting the table laid for dinner.

  ‘Good to see you. I’ve asked quite a crowd.’

  Mopsy Pontner, bringing the drawing with her, arrived alone. At the last moment her husband had been prevented from coming by another engagement, arisen at short notice, having professional bearing on one of his translations. Pontner rightly judged his wife fully competent to negotiate the business of the drawing on her own. There were a dozen or more guests by the time we sat down. The Lilienthals arrived late, and rather drunk, having had a long session at The Mortimer with a customer who could not make up his mind whether or not to buy a Conrad first-edition in their catalogue. Xenia Lilienthal, small, with ginger corkscrew curls and a beseeching expression, was suffering from a heavy cold in her nose. Lilienthal, his mind on business, kept fingering the hairs of his sparse black beard. Glober had roped in another American publisher and wife, met the previous day in London, both hitherto unknown to him. They were on their way to the south of France. He wanted them to deliver by hand a present to a friend they had in common, who was staying at Antibes. A young man with a lisp and honey-coloured hair, come to the hotel earlier in the evening to sell Glober a Georgian silver tankard, had been asked to stay for dinner. This young man told the Lilienthals he had once met them with Mr Deacon, to which they assented without much warmth. There was a lesbian called ‘Bill’ (apparently lacking a surname), seen much at parties, who admitted soon after arrival that she was uncertain as to how firm her invitation had been to this one. Old Mrs Maliphant was present, who had been on the stage in the ’seventies. She was alleged to have slept with Irving; some said Tree; possibly both. Glober had encountered her at the house of one of the several publishers to whom she had promised her Memoirs. Moreland, to some extent responsible for the whole assembly, arrived in poorish form, absent in manner, probably weighed down with a current love affair gone wrong. Other guests, now forgotten, may also have been entertained. If so, their presence did not affect what happened.

  The years invest the muster-roll of Glober’s dinner-party with a certain specious picturesqueness, if anything increased by being a shade grotesque. At the time, at least on the surface of things, the evening turned out heavy going. That was Glober’s fault only so far as he had been over-reckless in mixing people, always risky, sometimes fatal. In this particular venture, he had, as an American, underrated the intractable strain in English social life, even at this undemanding London level, an easy thing to do for anyone not conversant with its heterogeneous elements, their likes and dislikes. Food and drink were both reasonably good. Conversation never got properly under way. Something was lacking.

  Glober bought the Augustus John drawing on sight. He made no demur about the price, a fairly steep one in the light of the then market. It was a three-quarter length of a model called Conchita, a gipsy type Barnby, too, sometimes employed. Glober’s own demeanour, as when he had visited the office, was enormously genial, but even he did not appear to find the going easy with Mopsy Pontner, whom he had placed next to himself at table. He sat between her and the American publisher’s wife, a statuesque lady from Baltimore. Mopsy, with dark straggling hair and very red lips, perfectly civil, was uncommunicative in manner. She made Glober do all the talking. He probably did not mind that, but had earned the right to a little m
ore notice than he seemed to be getting. He had also to work hard with the Baltimore lady, though not because she did not talk. The trouble was her anxiety about reservations on the Blue Train the following day. She continually returned to this preoccupation. When Xenia was not snuffling, she and Lilienthal exchanged secondhand-book chat across the table. The young silver salesman and ‘Bill’, recognizing no harmony in common, did not communicate with each other at all. Mrs Maliphant rambled on in a monologue about old Chelsea days, saying ‘Wilde’ when she meant ‘Whistler’, and ‘Sargent’ for ‘Shannon’. Moreland left early. I left early too; early that is in the light of the sort of party intended, and the fact that my flat in Shepherd Market was only a few yards away. Glober said an effusive goodbye.

  ‘Call me up when you’re next in New York, Mr Jenkins. I’d like to have you meet James Branch Cabell.’

  That was the last I saw of Glober. His firm fell into liquidation the following year. Several go-ahead American publishing houses went bust about that time. The fact was regarded as an amelioration of whatever row had taken place about the Cubists, indicating our own firm was well out of the commitment.

  Glober’s character was further particularized when, also about a year later, I came to know Mopsy Pontner better. It appeared that the evening at the hotel, anyway the latter part of it, had been less prosaic than might have been supposed at the time. Mopsy herself gave me an account of its consummation; no vague term in the context. She had, so she related, stayed on after the rest of the party had gone home. Glober, it seemed, had been more attractive to her, far more attractive, than outwardly revealed by her demeanour at dinner. In admitting that, she went so far as to declare that she had greatly approved of him at sight, as soon as she entered the room where we were to dine. Glober must have felt the same. The natural ease of his manner concealed such feelings, like Mopsy’s exterior reserve. Later that night mutual approval took physical expression.