Copyright & Information
The Gaudy
First published in 1974
Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1974-2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AU, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
0755130391 9780755130399 Print
0755133188 9780755133185 Kindle
0755133498 9780755133499 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.
In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.
In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.
J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.
I
The staircase had changed in the twenty years and more elapsed since my last view of it. The meniscus curve of the dull grey stone treads was deeper. The walls were in a new colour scheme. I remembered everything to which paint was applicable as tinted and textured to an effect resembling chocolate when it has been disastrously hoarded through a long sea voyage. Now the pervasive note was pastel pinks and blues, and these had naturally grown grubby quickly. Muddy track suits, sweaty jerseys, wet towels had brushed or lounged against the lower surfaces; quite high up the walls were flecked and spotted in a manner perplexing until one thought of violently shaken-out mackintoshes and umbrellas. This, as much as the hollowed stone, was a matter of honest wear and tear. I noticed that the effect was nowhere enhanced by scribbles. It appeared that graffiti were judged improper at least within one’s own preserves. They were for the enlivening of the outer walls of other people’s colleges. I had seen many of these minor portents of change as I was driven from the railway station. We’d never have dreamed − I told myself − of prowling the streets of Oxford with coloured chalks.
The only thing legible here was on a perched-up square of cardboard. Plainly the work of a harassed scout, it said Please wipe your feet. The last word had been struck out by another hand, and nothing substituted. It was this abstention, I believe, that brought home to me how much I was on familiar ground.
For two years the staircase had been my own. The rooms I was briefly to occupy had been my own rooms. I wondered whether this was chance, or whether the domestic bursar, a retired admiral with time on his hands, had amused himself by looking up office records and adding a sentimental grace note to the entertainment to be offered to old members that night. However this may have been, sentiment had its moment now, so much so that I set down my suitcase and stepped back into the quad to take a long breath before the larger scene.
I was making no exhibition of myself. The big lidless Palladian box within which I stood, honey-coloured and sparely ribbed with reticent Ionic pilasters, was deserted. The undergraduates, I supposed, had departed; like migrating birds (but in confidently thumbed cars and camions) had departed for southern climes. If a few lingered it would be in forlorn immurement, on this hot June afternoon, within the Examination Schools. And it looked as if I was the first arrived of the Gaudy guests. I shared Surrey, the second of the larger quadrangles, with the eroded statue of Provost Harbage and a sleeping black cat. It must have been a college cat. The porters would no more admit a strange cat within the walls than they would admit a hawker of oriental rugs or a babe in a perambulator. (At the gate of the college garden a large notice, ancient but preserved in a state of full legibility, recorded the duty of these servitors to exclude persons of improper character or in dirty clothes or − more mysteriously − ‘carrying large burthens’.)
There is nothing mediaeval about Surrey except its name, which had belonged to one among a congeries of halls and inns on the site, humble cradles of Oxford learning long ago. Through centuries these had been conjoined, disparted, extinguished or revived, until all were bulldozed out of existence in the interest of the Augustan decorum on view today. One is sometimes told by those concerned with lauding the ancient universities that their material fabric constitutes in itself an education alike of the senses and the spirit; that fine architecture elevates and refines the nascent mind in much the manner claimed by Wordsworth for the permanent and beautiful forms of nature. I dare say there is something in it. By almost anybody planted amid such surroundings a sense of certain graces and amenities must be at least a little sopped up.
Glancing about me now, I knew it had been my own case. A bleak and murky Doric had frowned upon me both at school and dispersedly elsewhere in my native town, so that I must have found in the facades of Surrey quite as much of clean-cut elegance as they in fact possess; at the same time I had picked up at home − although it was never urged upon me − a certain alertness before the deliverance of art. Had I first arrived at Oxford in the twenties and not the forties, I would have been thinking of myself as an aesth
ete within a week. I was, I suppose, a lively and receptive but quite unintellectual boy, and I had been whisked into a new social situation. Among the resources I rapidly mobilised was that of being something of an authority on matters artistic and architectural. I was even entirely willing to instruct my father in them − and this although I firmly believed him to be (as in fact he was) the best landscape painter in Scotland. How disastrous − I remember telling him − to the great free-standing library which closes Surrey on the south had been certain tinkerings with the design while the building was going up. All because of a clutter of pictures, I said, given to the college by some distinguished curioso at just that time. Space had to be found in which to display them. So the notion of an open lower storey or piazza, such as Wren had created at Cambridge for Trinity College, was abandoned. The result was the massive structure, dominating Surrey like a finer dwarfing a harbour mouth, before which I was inviting my father to adopt a critical stance.
My father didn’t comply, perhaps seeing more of Michelangelo in the building than I saw, or affected to see, of Baalbek. He would in any case have considered adverse comment discourteous, since, if only in a formal sense, the library was in part the property of his son − lately become a scholar on the foundation of the college largely through, as will later appear, a somewhat eccentric action on his, my father’s, own part. Now he simply remarked that he looked forward to viewing these fatal canvases, wherever they chanced in these days to hang.
The door of the library opened, and my solitude was ended. The man who had emerged struck me for a moment as merely roughed in upon the scene, and also as too small to be true; he might have been one of those subtly diminished strollers or standers-by that architects insert in the foreground of a sketch in order to render an enhanced impression of the consequence of a projected building. But here the building had consequence already. The door, that it might appear in some sort of scale with the march of gigantic Corinthian pillars on either hand, was in its mere valvular part ten feet high, so that a Hobbit-like semblance was necessarily taken on by anybody passing in or out. But this was no Hobbit. It was Albert Talbert. The realisation came to me as quite a shock. Perhaps I had carelessly supposed him dead.
Although we were separated by the entire length of Surrey it was apparent that, just as I had recognised Talbert, so had Talbert recognised me. His was the more remarkable feat. Talbert had been my tutor, and of one’s tutor one is likely to preserve an image adequate for the purpose of identification many years on. I, on the other hand, had simply been Talbert’s pupil − and of pupils half a dozen to a dozen fresh specimens come within a college tutor’s purview every year. Talbert seemed to be considering what to do. He wasn’t a man to shout, and as his arms were full of books it would have been impracticable for him to wave. Or would it? Always of a sedentary habit, Talbert now seemed to reveal himself as owning the corpulence of a man who isn’t wearing well. I told myself that the resulting paunch, dropped so as to suggest a woman immediately before childbirth, presented an almost shelf-like structure upon which the pile of books might have been let balance of themselves during a moment of at least cautious gesticulation. Talbert, however, remained immobile, and I therefore advanced upon him myself with a show of alacrity which wasn’t altogether a matter of civil pretence. I was curious about him. Indeed, but for discovering in myself some revived curiosity as to the college and its present inhabitants in general, I should not, it was to be supposed, have accepted the invitation to the forthcoming feast.
My cordial haste took me straight across the grass of Surrey, and I found myself wondering whether this might not be a breach of etiquette. Wasn’t it only the dons who were let walk on the grass, and must I not consider myself present more in the character of a perpetual undergraduate than of any sort of authentic senior member? On the other hand the turf was warm and dry underfoot; I wasn’t going to injure it, nor it to incommode me; the taking, in these conditions, of a circuitous route to the waiting Talbert would have been absurd, and might even have suggested a discourteously leisured disposition on my part.
Later on, I was to recollect this dubiety to have been meaningless, reflecting merely one of those confusions which steal upon us with the passage of time. Only in the Great Quadrangle is the grass a preserve of the elderly; that in Surrey and elsewhere had in my own day, as now, been freely scamperable upon by the most junior among us. I might have remembered this at once rather than tardily had not another occasion of perplexity presented itself. Was the waiting man Talbert?
From eighty yards off there hadn’t been a doubt of it; identification had been immediate and, as I have said, apparently mutual. Now − the distance between us having been halved − the state of the case was different. The appearance I had distinguished in front of the library door had said ‘Talbert’ to me at once, and must therefore have corresponded to a picture of my former tutor that I carried about for intermittent consultation in my head. But, as I approached, the visual phenomenon before me drew away from this. Its coincidence with the Talbert image had become disturbingly blurred, rather in the manner of two figures within an imperfectly manipulated stereoscopic toy. I found myself believing that I had fallen into some embarrassing mistake.
Of course Talbert now would be much older than Talbert then; but I somehow knew that it wasn’t a factor of this sort that could account for my perplexity. The perplexity increased when I got nearer still, since I now seemed to discern in it a state of mind which I shared with the person who must in another moment become my interlocutor. Was he, too, confronting embarrassment and the need for apology? It did look as if each of us had misidentified the other.
But this supposition survived (at least as to its reciprocal nature) only for a moment. I then saw Talbert as incontrovertibly in front of me and my confusion as something of common enough occurrence. As with scraps of verse, or natural scenes, or episodes of personal drama, the features of people once familiarly known seldom return to the memory untransformed. Each time we call them up imagination asserts its claim to retouch the picture − perhaps radically almost from the start, perhaps gradually and as with a stealthy artistic intention. Hence our frequent surprise that a person (like, it may be, a coast or city or painting revisited) is not at all as we remember him. Yet the first and veridical image seems to survive beneath its later variants in some limbo of the mind. On this occasion it had stirred at my first glimpse of the man across the quad, so that Talbert’s name had come to me instantly. Then some more recent, and delusive, Talbert image had fought back, to a resultant moment of confusion. Finally here I was − my mind having come full-circle − acknowledging myself in the presence of the authentic Talbert after all, the Ur-Talbert upon whom through a long period of years my unconscious fancy had been plastically at play.
It was now that I noticed, too, how I had been under a further deception: one which might have interested my father more than it did me. Contrary to my impression of moments before, Talbert had by no means notably deteriorated as to the physical man. His possessing a paunch had been an illusion created by some play of light and shade, perhaps even some quiver of the warm air, within those massive Corinthian shafts − as in a Mannerist painting, I reflected, the Madonna, although with her Child already in her arms, may appear gravid still only because we fail to read correctly some freak of chiaroscuro which has pleased the artist’s fancy. As for Talbert’s books, they were few in number, and lightly carried under his left arm; his right hand was free and now confidently extended to me. Yet he was not himself wholly confident. The doubt which I had detected in him had not, as had my own, dissipated itself.
‘Ah − Dalrymple!’ Talbert said. ‘We are very pleased that you have been able to come to our dinner.’ His voice held all its old unbelievable degree of huskiness − and its old effect, too, of a gravitas quite beyond the reach of a common scholar’s capacity. He might have been announcing something of the deepest import arrived at that morning in an arcane divan, a hortus conclusus
dedicated to the just privacy of the councils of princes, and now by him responsibly divulged to some person of desert and discretion among the outer profane. ‘Our trifling foolish banquet,’ Talbert added. Amazingly, but in a manner instantly approved by memory, silent yet powerful laughter was convulsing his frame. His eyes lit up with a remote elfin glee wholly unexpected in one so evidently of the sober sort. He brought his hands together − this at hazard of letting his little cache of learning tumble to the ground − and rubbed them joyously each on each. ‘Our trifling foolish banquet,’ he repeated as if relishing a rare stroke of wit. ‘Eh, Dalrymple?’
‘Thank you very much.’ I knew I ought now to come out with something from Shakespeare myself − capping, as it were, old Capulet. But (as frequently, long ago) my resources failed me. ‘Only,’ I said, ‘I’m not Dalrymple. My name is Duncan Pattullo, and I was a pupil of yours − a sadly unrewarding one, I fear − rather a long time ago.’
‘Pattullo?’ Talbert frowned. No learned man cares to be indicted of inaccuracy, and in particular of a misattribution. I could see that he was tempted to dispute with me the legitimacy of my claim. Instead of which, however, he asked, ‘Do you still write plays?’
It was said by Dr Johnson (who had reason to know) that the manners of men of learning are commonly unpolished, and I believe it to have been by the learned that this particular question has most frequently been fired at me. To a refined sensibility it might occur that, if a man does happen still to write plays, he will fondly suppose the fact to be known to all cultivated persons. In the present instance, since a comedy of mine was then running in a London theatre, it might have been my reasonable hope that Talbert, the college’s English don, would own some semi-professional awareness of it. Not that I was offended by my old tutor’s ignorance. It was true to his form, as was his surprising instant memory that I had ever written plays at all.
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