Death of a Literary Widow

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Actually, Hilda was quite co-operative,’ said Greg. ‘She wasn’t any more anxious to spoil things than your mother.’

  ‘What things? The great Machin revival? Well, naturally not. She got her packet out of it too. Not,’ said Hilary, stroking his chin, with a quizzical, self-mocking smile on his face, ‘that I can talk.’ He gestured round the room expansively: ‘I’m cashing in too, in my little way. The committee would never have given me this show if it wasn’t for the Machin revival. Here–have a cup of tea?’

  ‘Love one,’ said Greg, and watched as Hilary went over to a little kettle on a hot-plate in the corner of the room and slopped boiling water over a tea-bag. On the way back with the dirty cup and the milkless liquid Hilary Seymour-Strachey once more looked around at his own exhibition with the expression of frank self-approval Greg had noticed before.

  ‘Yes, as I say, the worthy burghers of Oswaldston would not have asked me to spread the artistic products of my maturity before their admiring gaze if it hadn’t been for the Machin boom. They’d have registered the fact that I work for an advertising agency, and marked me accordingly: “I do think essentially he’s a popular artist, don’t you?” As it is, they’ll go round with a wicked twinkle in their eyes, and say: “I do think he has some of the verve, some of the sparkle of Walter Machin, don’t you, Alfred? Drag out the cheque book, darling.”’ His imitations were good, but in the middle of the last one, something struck him, and he added afterwards: ‘Almost as if he was my father.’

  Greg was uncertain how to respond to this addendum, which did not seem to be addressed to him. Hilary, coming out of his reverie, noticed his discomfiture, and smiled as if it was something of not the slightest importance: ‘The suggestion has been made,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ said Greg. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ said Hilary cheerfully. ‘I’d be the last person to know, wouldn’t I? Actually, I wouldn’t mind at all, because as far as I can make out Walter was an amiable scamp. And my real father–I mean my official, signed and sealed father–struck me the only time I met him as a grandiose old phoney. Still, it wouldn’t do for me to go around claiming the authentic Machin genes. It might bring down on me the wrath of Motherdear.’

  ‘They had known each other for some time before they married, though, hadn’t they?’ ventured Greg.

  ‘Oh yes–years. They met some time in ‘thirty-eight, I gather. Which rather rules out Walter as a father for Desmond, since he was born in ‘thirty-seven. Not that anyone would ever think it, in any case: someone like Horatio Bottomley would be far more likely. Or was he earlier?’

  ‘Do you remember much about Walter–I mean the years when he was your step-father?’

  ‘Not a great deal,’ said Hilary. ‘A bit of a card–that’s my impression of him now, as I say. But then–I thought him marvellous as far as I can remember. I was only five or six, and he was always playing, and building things, and laughing. That’s what I remember. But I also seem to remember rows, and Motherdear going on and on and on–she has that way, you know: she just gets a subject, and worries it to death and beyond, never giving up, like a dog with a dirty old carcass. Anyway, then he got sick–and I don’t remember any more: he was upstairs, and we rarely saw him. But I do remember that when we were growing up, Mother never talked about him the way she does now.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, now it’s all “Walter the great and good”, like Queen Victoria at Frogmore, or “Walter the great writer, the neglected genius”, like Mary Shelley. Then it was “If I hadn’t been dragged to this godforsaken town by that damned no-hoper that I married . . . ” and so on. The tone, you understand, has undergone a subtle change.’

  ‘So it seems,’ said Greg. ‘So you don’t think the marriage was a great success?’

  ‘If you want my opinion,’ said Hilary, ‘and it’s nothing more, I’d say it was a multi-million-dollar fiasco. He never wrote anything after the war, you notice. I expect he found he’d sold his working-class birthright for a mess of Bloomsbury pottage. He probably found that Ma was good in bed, but hell as soon as her feet touched the floor–and after all, even Walter and Ma must have had to spend the larger part of the day vertical, I bet he ached to crawl back to Hilda, but Ma had him neatly encircled. Poor old bugger–he was probably glad when he got sick.’

  ‘You don’t like your mother, then?’ asked Greg. Hilary threw back his head and laughed his great, frank, hearty laugh.

  ‘Ma? We get on like a house on fire–now we no longer live together. We understand each other. I suppose your loyalties were to Hilda, weren’t they? I wouldn’t blame you. On the human level she was much the nicer of the two. But Ma is an original too. She’s a cunning old thing, crafty as a rattlesnake–but she knows how to enjoy life too. That’s why we understand each other.’

  ‘She certainly seems to be enjoying life now,’ said Greg–and then, realizing this was open to misunderstanding, he added: ‘I don’t mean now that Hilda is dead, of course–I just mean she’s revelling in this revival of interest in Walter Machin.’

  ‘She’s lapping it up. She’s got that unappetizing little Yank in tow, and she’s feeding him the Authorized Version. That’ll be even easier now Hilda’s gone–no fear of the Devil writing a footnote or two. Then as the boom goes on she’ll become the Professional Interviewee, the great literary relict. I’ve already heard her mention Woman’s Hour, and wonder how to make contact. She’ll probably write her memoirs: she always had a yen to be a writer, though her pen dribbles clichés. I can’t imagine her letting the Kronweiser book be the last word.’

  ‘He was an odd choice to write the book, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was the first that came along. I expect she kicks herself for giving him those special facilities now, because it’s sure to be one of those jaw-breaking pieces of unreadability Americans produce. What a jerk! Christ!’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Greg. ‘He seems able to turn a pleasant pub into a speakeasy waiting for a raid. Not your mother’s type at all, I’m afraid. Have you had much contact with him?’

  ‘He was round to me at the office the other day, wondering if I had any letters. Why he imagined Walter would have written to me I can’t think. Perhaps he’d heard the rumours. Anyway, of course I hadn’t any. He went to Rose too, but her mother had given him any there were. Hey–give me that rag there.’

  Hilary Seymour-Strachey grabbed the rag, and went over to a picture. He did something technical on it, and suddenly his attention seemed to revert entirely to his exhibition. Greg, after a perfunctory tour round the makeshift gallery decided he’d better slip off. He stood at the top of the stairs, looking back at Hilary–chunky, lively, absorbed–and at his paintings.

  What had he got from the talk? A view–conjectural but convincing–of the second Machin marriage. The suggestion (impossible to prove) that Hilary was not Gerald’s son but Walter’s. And then, looking back at the pictures–sharp, full of insight, yet somehow slightly flashy–he wondered whether, indirectly, they didn’t give him the best notion he yet had got of Walter Machin himself.

  • • •

  Mr Kronweiser sat on his bed in the little working-class backstreet in Oswaldston where he rented a room, hunched forward and staring ahead. His paunch flapped up and down like jelly in a windy picnic, and his Adam’s apple did a jig in sympathy. Kronweiser was thinking.

  Dwight Kronweiser had been born in nineteen forty-five, and had been named after the victorious Allied Commander in Europe, whom his parents, even then, foresaw as a future President of the United States, a new Ulysses S. Grant. In point of fact little Dwight (a chubby child, the offspring of shopkeepers, who bribed him with trash food every time he seemed to want to divert their attention from the business of making money) turned out to be one of Kennedy’s children–for even in his teens he knew a rising star when he saw one. When that particular shooting star was shot he became an anti-Vietnam war protester, a Chicago convention acti
vist, one of the young people who campaigned vociferously for George McGovern (though, like everyone else, he actually voted for Nixon). He was a hippie when hippiedom was in fashion: he grew his hair long and then (when people began to give up their seats to him on buses, under the impression that he was a pregnant girl) he grew a straggly beard as a declaration of sex. He had experimented with drugs, but in the privacy of his own home, so as to be able to say that he had: after all, you never knew what you might say and do under the influence of drugs.

  He knew, in short, precisely when to take two steps to the right, or one to the left. In academic terms he sensed the changes in the wind so well that he knew exactly when to stop dropping the name Marcuse and start dropping the name Goldmann, when to switch from expressing genuine enthusiasm for Black Studies to expressing genuine enthusiasm for women’s literature. He was a highly sensitized instrument, a finely tuned social and academic barometer. His colleagues and aspiring rivals watched him closely, measuring themselves by him and running breathlessly after in the directions he took.

  Mr Kronweiser had just had a letter from his departmental head, a man whose word made or marred men’s careers, a man almost as sensitive to fashionable currents as roly-poly Dwight himself. His letter was hearty, breezy, man-to-man: let it never be thought, it seemed to say, that I am the man who can put your academic career on the chopping block by a couple of words in the right places–but don’t you forget it! It was a letter that was meant to be scrutinized carefully for whispers of concealed meanings.

  You sure seem to be on to a good thing with this Walter Machin [the letter said]. Trust you, Dwight, to pick a winner, and pick him before the rest of us have heard of him! I see Scribners is bringing out both the novels, and has a sizeable publicity campaign on the stocks. And I hear on the grapevine Trumphauser at Cornell is giving him a chapter to himself in his book on British working-class literature. If you can get your book out in reasonable time I can see it being a real winner, and position-wise it won’t do you any harm, that’s for sure. I know the Faculty as a whole appreciates your stature as pioneer in this particular area of the field, Dwight, and if you can consolidate your position as the Machin man, you should be a cinch for tenure. Best you be around, though, just to make sure people register you, because things sure are tight these days, as you know, and new people spring up all the time like goddam mushrooms.

  In a PS the man wrote: ‘Too bad about the fire. I was going to suggest the library might make a bid for the MSS. Still, it was great that you had the transcripts done.’

  Dwight Kronweiser too shook his head at the thought: if only there could have been a Machin Archive at the University of East Louisiana. But that was impossible. The important thing now was to decide what to do. The writing of the book was hardly more than half-way done, but did it need to be done here, ferchrissake? He’d soaked up atmosphere, as he had intended–my God he had. He’d soaked up all the motherfucking atmosphere he wanted, thank you very much. He’d tried all the local beers, piss-poor imitations in his opinion; he’d eaten tripe, and faggots, and dry pork pies in pubs. He’d walked up and down those shitawful streets, absorbing the sights and sounds and smells of the real Machinian Oswaldston, and he had tentatively rendered them in his mind in Brobdingnagian words. Wasn’t that enough? The works were transcribed, the Walter Machin canon was established, the publicity machine was in motion, and would roll without him.

  At home were hamburgers, and popcorn, Colonel Sanders’s Kentucky chicken, Arby’s roast-beef sandwiches, drive-in movies, seventeen television channels, all-night TV movies, and (last and least) his wife Jean. There was every reason to take off for home, and nothing he could see to stop him. And there was that last phrase in the letter–that one about new people popping up: he grabbed the letter and re-read that sentence, his eyes bulging with suspicion and fear.

  It made up his mind for him. There was nothing to keep him here that could outweigh the thought of the possible conspiracies going on behind his back back home. No sir–the road led South, to Skytrain. He would settle accounts with his landlady, who hated his guts as much as he hated hers, then he would pack, then he would go home. He would leave this lousy dump. He was (if none of the mushroom men got in ahead of him) a man with a future in the University of East Louisiana. Nay–he was a man with a future in the U.S. academic world. He was the acknowledged High Priest of the Walter Machin cult.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE WALTER MACHIN ARCHIVE

  GREG HOCKING had not been looking forward to ringing Jackson’s the publishers about the Walter Machin papers. It wasn’t his line of country at all. He had concocted all sorts of elaborate stories about why he wanted access, but things proved rather easier than he had expected. The telephonist at the other end was cheery and casual, and he was put through in no time to someone called Cyril Causeley, who, the girl said, was editor for the Walter Machin books.

  ‘Oh, you’re speaking from Oswaldston, eh?’ said the very Southern, minor public-school voice. ‘Fascinating! I keep telling myself I ought to go–with all this publicity that’s blown up, and all that. But when it comes down to it, Oswaldston isn’t the sort of place one visits, is it? what?’

  Suppressing the divine ire of the Northerner at Southern superciliousness, which would hardly serve his turn at this juncture, Greg said: ‘The point is, I’ve been commissioned by the local rag to write a pamphlet on Walter Machin and his World–’

  ‘Oh, jolly good show,’ burbled Mr Causeley.

  ‘Of course I realize the papers are confidential–’

  ‘Well, of course the new books are. We couldn’t let you see them–’

  ‘But I gather you have some of the correspondence–’

  ‘That’s right, and that’s not really any of our business. They’re just duplicates deposited with us by this American chappie–’

  ‘Kronweiser.’

  ‘Something like that. I gather Mrs Viola Machin suggested they be left with us for safety, and for completeness’ sake. I don’t see why you shouldn’t have access to those.’

  ‘I’d be most grateful–’

  ‘Of course the transcriber–this Yank–wanted it to be all very hush-hush and MI5, but I rang Mrs Machin myself, and checked up, and she said with all this new interest she thought the material ought to be available to any scholar who wanted to look at it. I think she’d rather gone off this Yank.’

  ‘One would.’

  ‘Anyway, I take it you come under the heading of scholar, eh? what? So if you want to have a look, just pop along. Ask for me, will you? Nice to see a real Oswaldstonian–is that what you call yourselves? eh?’

  Greg did not enlighten him about his real origins. If he was writing a bogus pamphlet, he might as well be a bogus native of Oswaldston to boot.

  • • •

  Two days later Greg was forced to attend the funeral of a dear aunt. His Principal looked at him suspiciously when he asked for the day off, and he stuttered, ‘She brought me up, you know.’ Consent was given in measured tones redolent of suspicion. I’m going to have to get better at lying, thought Greg.

  He took the early train up to London. He was fortunate enough to have secured the nineteen forty volume of short stories from his local library. The Factory Whistle he had already read, in the handsome new edition personally inscribed to him by Viola Machin (’To Gregory Hocking–a very good friend to both Walter’s widows–from Viola Machin’). The novel had interested him, but left him unsatisfied. There was grimness–dirt, undernourishment, deprivation–but no humour. Some of the descriptions of working-class life had been so strange, so remote from the Oswaldston that Greg had come to know, as to seem to belong to a foreign land, in a remote period of history. The fact was, he had not felt in the book the impress of Walter Machin’s personality, as he had come to know it–or to think that he knew it.

  He cast his eye down the contents page of Cotton Town and turned to the story that Gerald Seymour-Strachey had recommended; there it was,
in the centre of the collection: ‘Lydia Horton and the Vile Seducers’. The opening of the story leapt off the page with a vividness very different from that of The Factory Whistle.

  ‘Pregnant!’ said Lydia Horton, her face as horror-struck as if she were watching a Boris Karloff film. ‘Ee, Doctor, I can’t be.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said the doctor, ‘that’s what you are.’

  ‘But I can’t be. It’s only happened once. Well, twice.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid the result is, you’re pregnant.’

  ‘But it’s not right,’ said Lydia Horton, looking around the dreary little back-street surgery in the least attractive part of Oswaldston as if it were part of her grievance. ‘There’s married people, they go for months and months without getting pregnant.’

  ‘Well, you seem to have managed it in one. Or two,’ said the doctor.

  The piece went on to tell how Lydia, a sharp little eighteen-year-old mill-worker, who had fallen only twice, but unfortunately with two different blokes, finally got her man to the altar. Initially they both showed signs of running a mile and denying all knowledge, but by cunningly playing on their male pride, their desire to believe they were ‘a better man’ than their rival, she made each one mad with jealousy of the other, and finally had her pick of which she preferred, leading him up the aisle of the Methodist Chapel well before the bulge began to show.

  It was a lively, salty story, vigorously told–a tap-room narrative, but with a tang of the real Oswaldston. Greg flicked back to the contents list. All the stories in the book were centred on people: ‘Mrs Nussey and the Pawnbroker’; ‘Jem Larkin and the Pools Win’; ‘Peter Fairclough at Closing-Time’. It promised to be a microcosm of Lancashire life in the depressed ‘thirties. He closed the book to look at the scenery of his native Cheshire hurtling by, but there was an expression of pleasurable anticipation on his face.

  ‘It’s nice to see a new generation reading Walter Machin,’ said a voice from the opposite seat. Greg looked up to see an elderly man, with rimless glasses, droopy moustaches and a slight air of remoteness and authority.