Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “First Voice. And now, what about the future? It does seem to me that these books – I mean the final books, the ones written during what Cyril has so splendidly called (and I do want to thank him for that) “the golden decade” – are going to live. I don’t think that this is just a vogue, or a flash in the pan. The Cosmopolitans, Gareth’s Folly, An Unwelcome Guest and the others of the group are, quite simply, coming into their own. What do you think, Adrian?

  Second Voice. I do feel, Alan, that you are absolutely right. They are lasting books. Do you remember what their author is recorded as having said, virtually on his death-bed? ‘Landor knew that he would dine late. I shall do no more than sup, and it will be later still.’ He said that, you know, despite the very considerable celebrity that he enjoyed for a time. Don’t you think it rather wonderful? The perfect humility of the great artist. I believe that Mark Lambert’s supper is going to be, well, a pretty splendid affair.

  First Voice. Mark Lambert’s supper! In a sense, you know, we are privileged tonight to bring in the first course. What do you think, Cyril?

  Third Voice. I can only repeat what I said earlier. In the future these books are going to be talked of whenever people discuss the very greatest novels of that era.

  Fourth Voice. Oh, come! That’s a bit extravagant, surely. Lambert’s last books are tremendously good, I agree. But you can’t compare even The Cosmopolitans with The Golden Bowl.

  Third Voice. Not quite in archetectonic power, Denis, perhaps. But think of the almost poetic texture. That, at least, seems to me virtually identical in the two novels.

  First Voice. You mean, Cyril, that this virtual identity of texture argues a kindred underlying sensibility in the two novelists?

  Fourth Voice. If Cyril means that, I agree – absolutely.

  Third Voice. What seems to me so extraordinary about the sensibility revealed in The Cosmopolitans is that it is our sensibility.

  Fourth Voice. A modern sensibility. I think that’s tremendously true.

  First Voice. Yet the book was published in 1905. And what we are doing tonight – it’s really rather astonishing, you know – is celebrating the centenary of Mark Lambert’s birth.

  Second Voice. Lambert could have been blessed in his cradle by the poet Wordsworth.

  Fourth Voice. Oh, come! Lambert was born, my dear Adrian, in Florence, within a few miles of the villa where he died. And all Wordsworth’s last years were spent—

  Second Voice. I’m speaking merely of a chronological possibility.

  Fourth Voice. Then I agree – I agree completely. But what would Wordsworth have made of The Cosmopolitans? Ha-ha!

  First Voice. We know what an equally great writer made of it when Lambert sent it to him. There is that wonderfully subtle and comprehending letter to bear witness to his admiration. May I read it aloud?

  Second Voice. Yes, Alan – do read it.

  Third Voice. Yes, indeed. A wonderful letter.

  Fourth Voice. I agree – decidedly.

  First Voice. ‘My dear Mark Lambert—’”

  At this point our attention is distracted by a movement in the room. The elderly man rises from his chair beside the fire, picks up his embroidery frame, and moves off to deposit it in the apartment’s farther obscurity. His return reveals him as of a tall spare figure, only slightly bent beneath the burden of what we guess to have been long years either of scholarship or of administration, and possessing strongly-marked features which – it is again our guess – are now more strikingly handsome than they have ever been before. He returns to the fireplace and stands before it, frowning in the direction whence the voices proceed. The letter is evidently familiar to him; from time to time his lips move with the words; once he utters an exclamation of sharp impatience as if at a slip or a liberty taken with the text. His companion too appears to know the letter, but to differ from Cyril, Adrian and Denis in having no particular relish for its rehearsal in the present fashion. And now she puts down a sock, catches her brother’s glance, slightly raises eyebrows already finely arched, and speaks.

  “Who are these young men? What is their standing?”

  “I don’t know, Hermione. It is what I asked myself at the time.”

  “Are they a group, a coterie – or what we used to call a movement? They must know each other very well, since they constantly slip into the use of Christian names.”

  “Christian names are fashionable. And the young men are at least not uncouth. I am bound to say that I found them pleasant enough.”

  “But all this is so sadly lacking in distinction, in cadence, in style!”

  “That sort of thing, on the other hand, is quite unfashionable. I must repeat that I found these people pleasant enough. They were courteous and deferential in the proper sort of unobtrusive way. So indeed were the officials. They reminded me of some of the junior folk at the Treasury. Is that ambiguous testimonial nearing its sesquipedalian term?”

  The lady whom we now know to be called Hermione – she is only a little younger than her brother, and chiefly distinguished from him by the possession of a perfectly straight back – has early in this brief exchange muted, by a movement behind her chair, the feature from Broadcasting House. She now restores it to its former volume, and we hear Alan concluding his reading.

  “First Voice ‘’. . . or shall I say a ‘reading public’ which might be compared, with an appropriateness a little serving to excuse what of derogatory must lurk in the image, to that answeringly all-extractive object familiar in the lower – if at times to our confessed sense but so slightly lower – region consecrated to the equally unsleeping demand of an even simpler appetite? But in the instance still dazzlingly and still – to reach for the final precision of response – problematically before me, it is as if, to this object of common culinary utility – to the squeezer so bluntly hinted in the preceding constatation – the dear familiar unassuming fruit, already with an obviousness beyond civil dissimulation part-desiccated in the gallant providing of some at least residual sharpness to a long succession of dishes nutritious rather than distinguished, had magically yielded from its hidden, its unsuspected, nay its upon every known premise unpredictable core, the clean clear crisp and pristine flavour that—and to a strangeness!—lingers on my palate as I write. You and I, cher confrére, have long, something to vary the figure, toiled together in the crumbling kitchen alone remaining for temple to the modern Muse. Were I amid such desolation and in the evening of my days to produce a dish standing even to my poor flawed Bowl as does this latest as it must not be last Lambert to much antecedent contrivance of your own I should assuredly then be, even more than in this present situation I am, Your astounded Henry James.’

  Second Voice. A splendid letter. How Lambert must have cherished it.

  Third Voice. I always think it is the loquitive element that is so striking in James’s letters. One hears the living, exploring voice all the time. The man might be in the room talking to us.

  Fourth Voice. I can’t entirely agree there, Cyril. I honestly never heard a man—

  Third Voice. Perhaps I should say the artist might be in the room. The actual voice of an ideal sensibility. You see what I mean?

  Fourth Voice. I see – and in that case I do absolutely agree with you. And I do feel that Adrian is completely right in calling it a splendid letter. No praise of Mark Lambert could be more judicious. It really is final. You take it or leave it.

  First Voice. Our time is almost up, so I’m afraid we must do both.

  Second, Third, and Fourth Voices. Ha-ha!

  First Voice. Or rather we must yield place to this evening’s guest, who – I think we shall all agree – speaks with immeasurably greater authority than ourselves. So far, we have considered only Mark Lambert’s work. But there is a great deal in the work to make us curious about the life of which it was the issue. We can now see two senses in which Lambert was, as he said, to sup late. It has grown clear in our talk that his true fame is coming to him very tardily �
� a full century after his birth, indeed. But it is equally evident that his true power, too, arrived strangely far on in the day. Does some explanation of this lie, perhaps, in the circumstances or conditions of Lambert’s private life? Perhaps Sir Charles Shaxby will be able to tell us. For when Sir Charles was living in Florence, at work upon his monumental history of Tuscan art, he came to know Mark Lambert very well during Lambert’s most magnificently productive years. Tonight Sir Charles, who is keenly interested in the revived reputation of his old friend, has agreed to conclude our discussion with some reminiscences of Lambert and his circle. Sir Charles, as well as being the first authority in Europe on his own subject, is of course the author of a very distinguished volume of biographical sketches, Perspectives. And we are tremendously grateful to Sir Charles for consenting to come along this evening and conclude – I think I should really say crown – this very special occasion in our weekly discussion of books and writers with what I feel may be really new light on Lambert the man. Sir Charles Shaxby.

  Fifth Voice. May I begin with an anecdote the bearing of which upon what I have been asked to do will presently become apparent? It was, I think, during the late summer of 1913 that a spell of extreme heat in Florence had the effect of sending both Mark Lambert and myself, simultaneously but by no concerted arrangement, to seek refuge in the cooler air of Vallombrosa. John Milton, I am sure you will remember, is reputed to have visited the monastery there in 1638, and on its guest-house has accordingly been placed an inscription commemorating the occasion and recording the English poet’s love of Italy. When you remember, too, that the surrounding Protomagno through which it was our delight to stroll is magnificently recalled in the Etrurian shades of Paradise Lost, you will not be surprised that our conversation turned much upon literary themes, and passed in review many of the technical problems of the writer. One of these, as it chanced, was the employment of metaphor – a device of which Lambert himself, in my view, is one of the greatest masters. The more struck therefore was I when he came to a sudden halt, to declare with earnestness: ‘The metaphor, the image – they are essential to all but a very few writers, exceptionally circumstanced and endowed. But, my dear boy’—and I can see him, for greater emphasis, stab with his cane the aromatic, soft and silent carpet of pine needles beneath our feet—’a hazard is always there. Admit a metaphor and you admit strange company to the charmed circle you would create. It holds a lurking power to embarrass and disrupt. A circumspect prose-writer will blackball two-thirds of even the most attractive metaphors that present themselves.

  First Voice. I think that is tremendously interesting. Cyril, what do you think?

  Third Voice. I quite agree. And I do greatly hope that Sir Charles—”

  Whether or not we share the enthusiasm of Alan and Cyril for this preamble, we must at least be grateful to it for tiding us over a moment of mild confusion, since the voice that has so smoothly been getting under way we have already heard in this very room. The explanation when it comes is simple. We are in fact simultaneously in the presence of Sir Charles Shaxby’s recorded accent as it is spirited to us from Broadcasting House and of Sir Charles Shaxby himself as he stands before his own fireplace listening with what would appear to be a mingling of misgiving and complacency. And now his sister lays down her darning and turns the volume control clockwise. It is clear that she cannot easily have too much of her distinguished brother.

  “Fifth Voice. It was to be my point, you will remember, that this anecdote has some relevance to the present occasion. One metaphor of Lambert’s has been cited this evening, with a suggestion that the words were the last he ever spoke. He was, of course, adapting the aphorism of one whose former villa he and I have visited often enough during our Florentine excursions: Walter Savage Landor’s. ‘Landor knew that he would dine late. I shall do no more than sup, and it will be later still.’ Now, this image is intended to express no more than the expectation of a limited, and purely literary, posthumous fame. But does it not subtly invite misconception? A supper suggests personal intimacies, and a supper long postponed carries the connotation of such intimacies revived. Imperceptibly our mind is carried by it to the field of private life. But I am sure Lambert was not thinking of his supper in this sense; I am sure that he had no thought of meeting us there upon any ground of intimate personal revelation. Before we came into this studio one of the speakers was good enough to ask me whether I might not, now that Lambert’s fame seems secure, attempt a memoir of the man, or at least incorporate something about him in the little volume of sketches to which reference – over-kind, I fear – was made a few moments ago. As it happens, I have a good reason for doing neither of these things. Whether Lambert actually spoke those words about his supper I do not know. Certainly they were not his last words.

  Fourth Voice. Oh, I say! Can you be sure?

  Fifth Voice. I can be sure, sir, for this very sufficient cause: that Mark Lambert’s last words were spoken to me. They were the expression of a wish that none of his friends should attempt a biography of him. And for that he had his own very good reason.

  Fourth Voice. Lambert had a good reason for not wanting his life written?

  Fifth Voice. It is not my intention to assert that he had anything that could be called a personal reason. Perhaps what I have in mind may be best phrased as a theoretical reason. My friend subscribed to the doctrine of the essential anonymity of all great art. It has its source, he believed, not in anything that may usefully be conceived of as the individuality of the artist, but in a beyond; in some large, impersonal fount of inspiration for which the artist – and the artist, mark you, rather than the diurnal man – acts simply as a channel. I well remember his pointing one day to the beautiful old olive-wood table at which he worked – there was some reason to believe that it had belonged to Macchiavelli – and saying: ‘My dear fellow, it is not I who sit there through these long, quiet mornings. It is century upon century of the mind of Europe!’

  Second Voice. Wonderful! It is an instance of what I spoke about earlier: the perfect humility of the great artist. And as for the biography – one understands, of course, that Sir Charles had to respect his friend’s wish. But does it prevent you, sir, from speculating on that very interesting point raised by one of us earlier: the quite unusually late flowering of Mark Lambert’s full genius?

  Fifth Voice. I don’t think that prevents me. But something else does. I mean simply ignorance – pure ignorance.

  First, Second, Third, and Fourth Voices. Ha-ha!

  Fifth Voice. For how, after all, can one think to account for anything so essentially enigmatical as the visitation of the Muse? Rather surely must one—”

  At this point Sir Charles Shaxby’s voice fades abruptly from the air, and we see that it is Sir Charles’s own hand that has effected the dismissal; His sister, although she placidly takes up her darning again, looks at him with some reproach.

  “But, Charles, I should like so much to hear the rest of your contribution.”

  “Spare me, Hermione. I never expected to hear myself talking such nonsense. Indeed, I never expected to hear myself talking at all. The sensation is most disagreeable. Think of it – to have one’s voice floating free about the ether, and giving utterance in the most palpably outmoded prose to bosh about the visitation of the Muse.”

  “I judged it very deft. You were evading, in a light but decisive manner, a rather impertinent expression of curiosity about Mark’s private life. And in that I am sure you were abundantly right. There are no recognised sanctities now among those who would peer into such things.”

  ‘True enough, Hermione. One can’t open a biography today with any expectation of innocent pleasure, let alone of the edification that our generation was taught to look for. A pervasively bad influence has been exercised on the art by that unpleasant fellow who wrote on the old Queen. It would be deplorable—wouldn’t it?—if the renewed reputation Mark’s work is beginning to gain should lead to a vulgar inquisition into his personal
history by anyone of the sort. Not that Mark had so much to hide, poor fellow – not more, as the saying is, than another man. But one ought to discourage gossip-hunters.”

  “Yes, Charles – I do agree, indeed. But that is no reason for my not hearing at least the end of your sketch. Please turn the machine on again.”

  At this Sir Charles Shaxby bows, for this brother and sister indulge themselves, among other antique accommodations, in a domesticity rigorously mitigated by the preservation of formal manners. Obediently he depresses the switch and his voice – which we now more clearly distinguish as a rather special public voice – returns to the room, increasing smoothly from a murmur to the firm resonance of a man inwardly convinced that he is doing an unfamiliar job well.

  FOUR

  ‘And Lambert and I had a bond too in our common love of Italian gardens. Too often nowadays it is with something of disparagement that persons even of very substantial cultivation will speak of the giardini tagliati. To these high severities of order and symmetry they prefer a species of horticulture, surely municipal rather than aristocratic in association, putting all its money—and a great deal of money it must often be!—on a blossomy profusion cheerful enough in the booth of the florist, but surely inappropriate as setting for a villa in the great Florentine or Sienese taste. And if by chance on such an exploration as we loved to make, whether it were no further than to the lovely Font’allerta or a tour of some days’ sweep, sequacious of the retired villas of the Brianza, or of that supremely beautiful La Gazzada the painting of which by Canaletto in the Brera is too little known; if on such expeditions I was myself in any danger of feeling an over-narrow palette brought to the composing of those tranquil harmonies of sombre greens, shadowed waters, and vistas sparely closed by the mellow gleam of ancient marble, it was always open to me to reflect that all of colourful that the most romantic temperament might yearn for was assuredly present and ambulant at my side!