Hindsight

by Peter Dickinson

  When he had settled into his chair he leant forward and stared at me.

  ‘I will not have my wife pestered,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘She never knew Isidore. Never set eyes on him.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘You will give me an undertaking on this, on behalf of Dobbs.’

  ‘Oh, I think so.’

  ‘Not good enough.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘Of course Dobbs is an extremely responsible biographer …’ I began.

  ‘I have read all his books, I believe. Well?’

  Suddenly I thought I saw what he was bothered about. Suppose Dobbs made him into a nine-day wonder, Steen’s last lover, still alive, still bearing metaphorically the stigmata of the embraces of genius, then journalists might start ringing the bell—‘How exactly does it feel, Mrs Smith …’ I knew this had happened in the case of one of Lytton Strachey’s young men after Holroyd’s biography had appeared.

  ‘I will undertake that neither Dobbs nor anyone connected with the book will approach your wife without, your express permission,’ I said.

  ‘That will have to do.’

  It wouldn’t keep the journalists at bay, I thought, but it was rather touching. How strange, in view of what I had just decided about Smith preferring his sensations pungent, that he should have so mild and bland a wife, and apparently get on so well with her. I made a mental clearing of my throat, preparatory to explaining my anomalous position, but he spoke again.

  ‘I see there is to be a film of Isidore’s life,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, there was something in one of the Sundays a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘The company in question have purchased the film rights to Mr Dobbs’s biography.’

  ‘So I gather. Steen’s books must be out of copyright.’

  ‘In 1977. I wish to be employed as technical adviser to this film.’

  ‘Oh …’

  ‘Those are my terms for co-operating with Mr Dobbs.’

  ‘I’m in no position …’

  ‘I am aware of that. Let me tell you, Mr Rogers, that Mr Dobbs cannot complete his book, nor can this film be made, without my help. I know major facts, which I believe no one else has had access to. For two years after the war I knew Isidore better than anybody else. I was his catamite, but I was also his confidant. I see that they have taken it into their heads to hire a major American star to play the part of Mary Benison. Nobody apart from myself knows the truth about Isidore’s relationship with her. And he did not only talk with me about the present; To take another example, I am in a position to rebut Baston’s thesis about the inaccuracy of To Live like the Jackal. That is to say Isidore told me which parts of the story were true, and which fudged.’

  ‘Good lord! Why …’

  ‘Because I chose. I may tell you that I saw Mr Dobbs’s advertisements for me in The Times, and ignored them. Later I changed my mind. What I do is no one’s business but my own. Well?’

  ‘May I think for a moment, sir? This is a bit unexpected.’

  It seemed natural to call him ‘sir’. His authority had remained formidable. I did not find myself mentally reverting to the status of school-child in his presence—in fact I knew myself to have in many ways the advantage of him, being aware for instance that the post he was after in connection with the film was likely neither to be in Dobbs’s gift nor as lucrative as Smith evidently imagined—but I certainly realised the need to be careful.

  ‘There is a preliminary difficulty,’ I said at last. ‘As I told you in my letter, Simon Dobbs has been ill—extremely ill, as a matter of fact—and though he is said to be now on the mend it will be some weeks before he is in a position to come and see you, or even to conduct serious negotiations about what you want. Presumably he would have to mediate between you and the film company. What you’re asking for may or may not turn out to be straightforward, but from my own experience I know that film deals are peculiarly troublesome to tie down. You cannot count on anything until you have a signed contract in your hand. So I don’t think that even if Dobbs were here in my place he would be in a position to agree to your suggestion. The line I think he would take is this. He would need positive evidence that what you have to offer is worth it. For instance, what you say about To Live like the Jackal is interesting, but I happen to know that Dobbs has already come to conclusions which sound fairly like what you would confirm.’

  ‘He is guessing. I know.’

  ‘I’m not saying he wouldn’t be glad of confirmation, only that it mightn’t be a sufficient inducement to him to do what you want, let alone to persuade the film company that your services are indispensable. But suppose you were able to throw some light on Steen’s dramatic shift from optimism to pessimism after he had finished The Fanatics, that might be of considerable use to Dobbs. Or, from the point of view of the film people, there is the whole mystery of the nature of Steen’s relationship with Mary Benison—was it a full-blown love affair? How far did it go? Why did it end? According to the newspaper cutting I saw, the script-writers are still very much in the dark about all that. Do you follow me?’

  ‘I know the answers. That is why I replied to Mr Dobbs’s advertisement.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m afraid it’s no use your just telling me that, or even telling Dobbs. You won’t get anywhere with the film people unless you produce specific facts to prove your value. They watch their budgets these days, however many noughts there are on the final figure. You don’t see hangers-on around the sets, the way you did in the Sixties.’

  Smith gazed at me without moving. He really had changed extraordinarily little; it was with precisely the same look that he had stared down at me from the staircase when I had come panting in with the news of finding Mr Wither’s body. It slightly unnerved me, making me feel that he knew a great deal more about me and my motives than he possibly could.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will answer your second point, but before I do so I must have your signature to a document acknowledging that what I am about to tell you is my copyright. As soon as you are gone I will write out an account of the episode and take steps to formalise my rights in it. If the film is made or the book written making use of this scene without my permission I shall sue. Moreover, I shall if possible make you, Mr Rogers, a party to the action.’

  I shrugged inwardly. I didn’t think an action against me would stick provided I made the position clear to Dobbs. And anyway, what the hell? I wanted to know.

  ‘All right,’ I said, and wrote a couple of lines on my notepad, signed and passed him the sheet. He held it at a distance to read but did not need spectacles.

  ‘Vile writing,’ he said. ‘That will do. Now, listen with care as I do not propose to repeat myself. I understand that you know something of Mary Benison, but you probably will not have heard of a woman called Désirée O’Connell.’

  ‘She lived with Mary Benison, was remarkably ugly, and wrote French prose-poems signed D.D.’

  This was clearly no moment to let on that I knew anything about Molly and her entourage at first hand, but it seemed a good chance to imply that I myself had some status in the world of Steen-research. Smith gave no sign of being impressed.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Isidore Steen, as you no doubt know, was for most of his life obsessed with life itself. He felt himself to be an expression of the energies of life, of what Shaw in his crude way used to call the Life Force. The élan vital was very current in Isidore’s youth, but in his case it was much more than a fashionable notion. It was a genuine expression of his inward being. He believed that life expressed itself in all human activity, but reached its twin peaks, mental and physical, in two processes which he held to be more than merely analogous, to wit artistic creation and sexual creation. Fools wrote him down as an indiscriminate womaniser, who did not care whom he bedded provided it happened
often enough. This is entirely mistaken. I saw him reject apparently attractive women who had made it clear that they were accessible to his attentions. He was also capable of long periods of abstinence. He was never, I think, in love with any woman in the banal sense, but was perfectly prepared to pretend to passion if he thought it would help. He enjoyed play-acting, and did not like success to be too easy. Once an affair was under way he would be very demanding and do his best to get the woman pregnant. He told me that a girl had once come to him to ask him to pay for an abortion and instead he had paid her to have the baby, though she had asked a considerable sum and he had had to borrow. The relationship you would call love was reserved for young men like myself. I do not wish to give the impression that it involved a high degree of passion, but he was a considerate and agreeable lover. You follow me thus far?’

  ‘I think Dobbs is taking much that line.’

  ‘He is a competent biographer. An appreciation of Isidore’s approach to women is crucial to understanding what happened between him and Mary Benison. Désirée O’Connell introduced them in 1919. The women had been doing some kind of phoney war-work together. O’Connell was a difficult woman, impossible to like. She drank and she was promiscuous, with a penchant for maimed soldiers, of whom there were a fair number on the Left Bank in those days. She was, as you have heard, so ill-favoured as to be an offence to the eye. She wrote well enough. I myself thought her work interesting and original, though it mined a perverse and narrow seam. Isidore acknowledged that she had talent, but detested both her and her work, to such an extent that I came to believe that there might be an element of fear in his dislike. He celebrated life and she celebrated death, and though he was an infinitely greater artist than she was yet in the end life yields to death. I am trying to present the matter as it might have appeared to Isidore, who saw the world in symbolic terms of that large and simple nature. I cannot tell you categorically that this was how he felt about O’Connell, as he refused to discuss her with me. I used to tease him, pretending to be fascinated by her ugliness. His revulsion was if anything aggravated by her becoming passionately in love with him.

  ‘Of course, you will say, he could have avoided her. That was not, in his eyes, the case, because on meeting Mary Benison he had immediately decided to make her the object of his pursuit. At first the matter appeared straightforward, as the woman was beautiful, far from prudish, and emanated an exultation in life which Isidore felt matched his own. She seemed to respond, and both Isidore and I assumed it would be only a matter of days before he got her to bed, but this turned out not to be the case. She was prepared to go in for any amount of what is now called fore-play, but she would not let him screw her. At first I was amused. I egged Isidore on. I thought it did him good to be shown the door occasionally. Then as the weeks and months went by I began to be bored with the affair. He talked and thought about it a great deal too much. It became an obsession. I have sometimes wondered since whether Isidore may not have been subconsciously aware that a major illness was about to afflict him. Certainly he often spoke as though Mary Benison represented, in some sense, a last chance. I have implied that he was incapable of passionate personal love, but his pursuit of Benison became in the end a passion. That it was love, I doubt.

  ‘For myself, after a while I took a dislike to Benison because of the effect she was having on Isidore and his work. With very few exceptions I have found the human species a despicable lot. Isidore was one of those exceptions and I, being then nineteen, did not like to see him behaving as though that were not the case.

  ‘The pursuit lasted over two years. I have an excellent memory and will describe, provided Mr Dobbs makes suitable arrangements, a number of incidents worth recording, not merely as examples of the humiliation of genius. It was during this period that Isidore was writing The Fanatics, and I typed it out for him, page by page, as it came from his pad. I was aware almost from the beginning that it was a dead birth, the failure of a novel potentially comparable with Crime and Punishment. After a while I came to believe, as I do to this day, that Benison was somehow responsible for this failure. The woman had it in her to undo and destroy the creative process. En ton désastre ira ma destinée; Pour abuser les poètes je suis née. She and O’Connell were two sides of a coin. It is necessary to understand this if you are to appreciate how the affair ended.

  ‘Throughout 1921 Isidore and I shared an apartment in the old Palais Royal, and Benison and O’Connell a studio in the rue de l’Université. The Fanatics was published in the spring of 1922 and the women held a party to celebrate. You will remember that Joyce’s Ulysses had just appeared, published by an American woman, Sylvia Beach, who ran a small bookshop, because nobody else would risk it. Benison had taken it into her head that she wanted to do the same for The Fanatics and Isidore had almost consented to this, despite his London and New York publishers being perfectly prepared to take the book. I persuaded him otherwise, though with some difficulty. In the end it had meant my taking the manuscript over to London myself, to make certain Benison did not contrive to wheedle it off him. In consequence Benison appeared to go out of her way to see that I did not enjoy the party, and I left early. Before I left a good deal had been drunk, and O’Connell, as was her habit, had become obstreperous and then violent. Benison dealt with her ruthlessly, giving her a tumbler of brandy which caused her to pass out in the kitchen.

  ‘Benison herself had been in extremely high spirits and paying a lot of attention to Isidore, not in the sense of making up to him, but constantly pushing in to any conversation he might be having. He regarded talk as a serious activity, essential for the refining of ideas—that was why he refused to live in London. Benison would interrupt, break the flow, send his interlocutor on some errand, and then dash away herself. It is, of course, always impossible to tell with such a person how calculated, any pattern of action may be. I assumed that she was teasing Isidore for not having let her publish the book. I was, at any rate, happy to leave.

  ‘I was asleep when Isidore came into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. There was a perfectly good bed in the other room which he would normally have used on such an occasion; indeed I had seen that it was ready for him.

  ‘“Finished,” he said.

  ‘I swore at him and turned over, but he dragged me up with a violence he had never used on me before. For a small man he was remarkably strong. As soon as I was well awake I saw that he was agitated. He at once began to tell me what had happened after I had left the party.

  ‘First, Benison had extended her conversation-disrupting activities by making everybody play children’s games. This was a habit of hers, but not one likely to be appreciated in French literary circles. Guests began to leave, but when Isidore made a move she asked him to stay to help put O’Connell to bed. She said she also wanted to talk to him. She then literally turned everybody else out, and in half an hour they had the studio to themselves. They picked O’Connell up and carried her into the bedroom. Mary gathered some cushions into a pile, sat down and told Isidore to sit beside her. She asked him what he proposed to write next. He thought that she was trying to persuade him to produce something that she could publish, and started to tell her about a short satiric animal fable he had in mind, which might have been suitable. He had already discussed it with me. Almost at once Mary broke off and went and fetched two huge glasses of brandy.

  ‘Isidore was not a great drinker. I have seen him become boisterous on his share of one bottle of Vosne Romance. He tried to refuse, but Benison told him that she was going to need it and asked him to help her. At this point he guessed what might be coming, though he had in the past tried the effect of getting her drunk, without success. There is a strong psychological element here; I have mentioned Isidore’s belief in a link between artistic creation and sexual activity; he felt he had had an exhausting struggle in writing The Fanatics, and the same could be said of his pursuit of Benison. Moreover, there was an explicit relation between
the two, as the opening sequence of the novel is based on Benison’s own account of her childhood, and he thought it was this that had released him to write the whole book. In his eyes, she was the muse of The Fanatics. I, as you know, think the contrary, but for him the writing and the pursuit were interwoven activities. He had brought off the former, and now he was going to achieve the latter. Benison of course knew of her role in the book. He had done her his utmost honour in so immortalising her, and now she was going to reward him. She needed the brandy to overcome her inhibitions.

  ‘These are my own speculations. Isidore told me merely the order of events as they had occurred.

  ‘They talked a little about the fable. They drank. They kissed. They fondled. They undressed each other. When they were both naked Benison stood and pulled him to his feet and turned him round. She had been wearing black silk stockings and with these she bandaged his eyes. He was aware of being rather drunk, but convinced that his hour had come.

  ‘“Blind man’s buff,” she said. “When you catch me you can have me.”

  ‘He noticed that she said “when”, not “if”.

  ‘He groped around the studio. She did not run away and hide but circled close, darting in to touch him here and there and giggling all the while. At first she was wary, but then she seemed to become bolder, lingering closer, stimulating him, touching his genitals …

  ‘And then he had her by the elbow. She barely struggled before she flung her arms round him and pulled him down on to the cushions. He was on her, in her, astonished by her greed for him …