The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I have failed, I see, to mention that my father was an impressive person. I should be giving a misleading sketch if I were to let the whisky and the unpromising attire suggest that he was any sort of Gully Jimson. Within a few minutes he was in the presence of the Provost, and informing him that he proposed to commit his younger son Duncan to his charge.

  It was to be a moot point on the staircase whether the Provost, in his early prime, was more handsome than urbane or more urbane than handsome, but there was agreement that a certain masked and even august indecisiveness attended his character. Certainly he didn’t know how to cope effectively with my father. It was a date at which a couple of generations must have passed since even a Duke of Buccleuch could reasonably have walked into the place and announced such a simple disposition of things. The Provost professed an extreme of interest. Told that my particular line lay with Old Mortality and The Advantages and Disadvantages of Civilisation, he may have thought that he saw a gleam of light. The college, he explained, offered a single Open Scholarship for young men proposing to study English Language and Literature, and nothing could be more agreeable to him than that Mr Pattullo’s son should offer himself for the examination − the more so as all other places were unfortunately booked up. My father brought out a pocket diary, and begged to know the date upon which I should present myself for the competition.

  The Provost, as was proper in one in his position, was a respecter of persons. He was also a judge of them, and he was presumably beginning to like his visitor. He amiably suggested that it might assist my candidature were I to be provided with some printed particulars of the test, and on this pretext he got himself out of his library. Perhaps he employed his short absence in consulting the current issue of Who’s Who in his secretary’s room − a volume in which it happened to be recorded that my father was President-Elect of the Royal Scottish Academy. (This was a circumstance which was to produce a dramatic change in the Pattullo domestic economy.) When he returned it was with an invitation to stay to luncheon. It appears that the meal produced some conversation about Albrecht Dürer. My father was thereafter to judge the Provost, as a scholar, a decided improvement on the Dreich.

  Chance had not closed its innings with me. The examination, when I presented myself for it a few weeks later, had every appearance of a shambles, so that I understood the whimsical but kindly regard which my headmaster had cast upon me when I told him it was going to happen. English literature turned out to occupy rather less of the show than I had expected, and the questions about it posited a kind of teaching and sophistication although not, perhaps, an extent of reading − of which I was innocent. The ordeal ended with an essay paper. ‘Intolerance,’ I read, ‘is twin-brother of conviction. Only those who believe in nothing can tolerate absolutely anything. Do you agree?’ Whether or not I agreed was something, I felt sure, about which I could arrive at no decision in two hours flat. So could I ‘discuss’ as a ‘proposition’: ‘No theatre is worth supporting that cannot support itself’? My subsequent fortunes suggest that I ought to have had a go at that one. But what arrested me was the last of the lot. It asked simply: ‘Why do painters paint?’

  I can see now that this was a stupid question, fudged up by a tired examiner. It asked eighteen-year-old boys to produce some sort of coherent thought in the field of aesthetic theory, which is absurd. But I saw it at the time as a very pertinent question indeed; one I was staggered to find had never entered my head, and which I somehow owed it to my father to get clear now. I unscrewed my pen and waded in.

  I was sometimes to wonder, later on, under whose examining eye this last-ditch and fateful effort came. Could it conceivably have been Albert Talbert’s own, reluctantly diverted to the chore from the more responsible task of determining whether Keep the Widow Waking can indeed be a lost play by Dekker, while Charles and Mary played Scrabble on the well-worn carpet at his feet? Whoever read it must have had a good deal of rational opposition to crush among those who had acquainted themselves with the rest of what I had written. But it was as a transformed personage styled John Ruskin Scholar that, in the following October, I again walked into the Great Quadrangle, and then on into Surrey, like a man entering his own house.

  I seem to have been recounting these incidents as exemplifying the reach of the fortuitous in life. Had that portrait commission not come my father’s way, and had his sitter not irritated him by dwelling on a son’s precocious scholastic attainments, my career would have been shaped for me by quite other impulsions, probably as arbitrary as these. And at the time, excited and elated though I was, I certainly owned an occasional alarmed sense of being freakishly shoved around.

  But were my father’s motives quite as he represented them? He was a highly intelligent man, as most good artists are, although like many artists of his time he felt that this was something artists were wise to keep to themselves, since it wasn’t intelligence that clients and patrons felt they were coming forward to buy. Again, inattentive to his children as he commonly appeared, it is probable that he took a hard look at us from time to time, and he may have thought to discern in me some slender talent which would be the better of removal for a time from its home ground. His own training had taken him far afield; at an age when I was still messing around with my bad Greek and worse Latin his eye had been already fixed on Rome. He had a feeling for the larger traditions and the major centres. If I were to write, he may have reflected, it would be in English − and better that, pace Wells and Galsworthy, than in some cranky synthetic Scots, comprehensible to nobody north of Perth or south of the Tweed. And he may have thought, finally, that if I could bring off something rather surprising it might do me a lot of good, and that if I failed I should only be learning what most of life is like. All these rational considerations may have been behind his descent on the Provost, and may have prompted him to sink his − itself rational − distrust of the hideous materialism of mid-twentieth century England. At the same time I don’t doubt that my father genuinely pleased himself with the idea that Wee Dreichie and I were to continue in competition on the larger stage of the University of Oxford. This was sheer fantasy. Ranald McKechnie and I were going up to different colleges, to read different subjects, and there was no conceivable manner in which we could ever be thought of as rivals again.

  I didn’t suppose that we should become intimates. He had been regularly ahead of me, and we were arriving in Oxford simultaneously only because the John Ruskin business had erupted on me after an improperly brief period in the Classical Sixth. Moreover, Ranald McKechnie was an unobtrusive boy, much taken up with his books. Still, I did now assume we should acknowledge each other, and I was startled when, in my first Oxford week, he scurried straight past me in the street. More than that, he adopted a ducking posture which was unnerving; he was a pallid youth with a tip-tilted nose which he was now directing at the pavement of the Cornmarket much like a maniac deep in some fantasy of being a plough or a bulldozer. I ought to have told myself that the man was extravagantly shy − as I had my father’s word for it that his father was. There was no other reasonable interpretation of the incident. I had never been in a position to insult or bully him, even had I wanted to; indeed, I believe there must have been at least a brief period in which he would have been entitled to thrash me with one of the wooden bats had he been inclined that way. No doubt I had regarded him with the easy contempt that an impatient, facile, and versatile boy feels for anybody he regards as a swot. But then he must have been fairly widely acquainted with the similar opprobrium, rather more vicious in its incidence, visited upon learned children like himself by the merely stupid and oafish always in generous supply in any school.

  What I did upon the occasion of this abortive encounter feel was that the sight of me in Oxford’s Cornmarket disconcerted McKechnie in a way that the similar sight of me in Edinburgh’s Princes Street would not have done. Oxford was his place; it was territorially his by a sort of hereditary right − rather as it was to be Ivo Mumford’s after a
different fashion. I belonged to an alien order. Since the Dreich had probably thought of my father like that, here was a pattern repeating itself in a younger generation. Subsequent experience was to suggest to me that I had not been wholly astray in admitting this persuasion. Scholars and artists often feel a strong mutual attraction, and the history of literature or of painting, as of philosophy, displays processes of cross-fertilisation constantly at work. But antipathies exist as well. Talbert was one day to confide to me that he regarded poets as unreliable and disagreeable people, to whom he would always accord a wide berth; yet Talbert’s fife was wholly devoted to the minutiae of their accomplishment.

  This is almost the whole story of my relationship with Ranald McKechnie during our undergraduate years. No circumstance existed to bring us into contact in default of some specific move by one or other of us. Our schoolfellows at Oxford were sufficiently numerous to hold an occasional dinner or to field an eleven or a fifteen, but McKechnie was not a man for affairs of that sort. As for myself, I was in a phase of regarding my native town as a provincial, snobbish, Philistine place, which my own cleverness had triumphantly thrust behind me. I managed to feel this even although I was in love with an Edinburgh girl, so I must have been more or less drunk not only on Oxford itself, but also on England and the English at large. Today I am inclined to view as a simple ethnographical or topographical truth the proposition that persons and things become steadily more chewed up and rubbishing as one moves down Great Britain from north to south. But this may also be a judgement on the sweeping side.

  And now here I was, standing behind my chair beside Ranald McKechnie while grace was being sung. It was an elaborate affair. The college organist (in the most gorgeous of all Oxford’s robes) conducted a whole squad of choristers and singing men, and between bursts of song the Provost and chaplain antiphonally chanted. Thus edified, we sat down. McKechnie had taken the initiative in murmuring a good evening with a courtesy that told me one thing at once: he was, of course, another of my hosts. By one of those mysteries of the Oxford scene, he had been accorded the sort of promotion, presumably to a Chair, which involved being shunted from one college to another for the purposes of such social life as he cared to enjoy.

  It wasn’t, I felt at once, an enjoyment that came to him easily, and I myself took a glance of misgiving round the immediate set-up. So far, I have in the main been recording contacts with academic persons, or with Lord Marchpayne (who had that day joined the Cabinet), or with Gavin Mogridge (the celebrated writer and traveller) − with this or with glimpses of men yet more distinguished. But the character of the gathering at large was quite different. Here were simply several hundred former members of the college, fairly close to each other not only as an age group but also in social stratification. Most of them had been putting in the last twenty years or so pushing ahead in the financial or industrial or professional life of the community. Their success-quotient was high. They interlocked through marriage relationships and sundry fields of common activity, and they shared a large stock of common assumptions. Individually they weren’t all that remarkable, but collectively they suggested − and not least to themselves − a formidable reservoir of power. Collectively again, one wouldn’t much have identified them with the life of the mind.

  I took a quick glance at McKechnie’s other neighbour. He was a brick-faced man, and wore a monocle; he would certainly be, among other things, a rider to fox-hounds. Beyond him was another brick-faced man, wearing what his friends would call the right sort of gongs, meaning the DSO and MC. On my own other hand sat a bearded person in clerical dress. The dining-list named him, not too informatively, as the Prebendary of Tullytumble. I recognised him as the man glimpsed by Tony and myself in P. P. Killiecrankie’s old rooms, holding up a jacket and then composing himself for a pre-party snooze. Beyond him was another cleric, in attire running to much purple and lace.

  It wasn’t, I told myself, too good a look-out. Whoever had arranged the placement for this small corner of the feast had thought in terms of two ecclesiastics chumming up, two brick-faced men doing the same, and between them McKechnie and myself as a couple of happy schoolfellows. And like that it would have to be. I mightn’t for my own part have all that difficulty when turning to the Hibernian clergyman. But I doubted whether Ranald McKechnie had any future worth speaking of with the fox-hunting man.

  ‘I hope that your play is enjoying considerable success?’

  McKechnie asked this as we settled down, and I am afraid I received the inquiry without pleasure. It was even more depressing, somehow, than ‘Do you still write plays?’ Since an eternity of fame − I took it to imply − was unlikely to attend my effort, or even the approbation of the judicious either, it was reasonable to hope that I was getting out of it the modest monetary reward with which it was alone apposite to associate such a concoction.

  ‘It’s doing well enough,’ I replied, not the less shortly because I was perfectly aware that my reaction was absurd. ‘One writes these things, and rather yearns that they may make somebody a moment merry. I hope this Gaudy is going to make you just that.’

  ‘Oh!’ McKechnie looked at me in a startled way, as he well might upon such a graceless performance. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I know hardly anybody here. I expect you know nearly everybody. I’ve only recently become attached to the college, and begun to get the hang of common room. I try to dine three or four times a term.’ McKechnie spoke as if of facing up to the dentist or some other species of possibly painful therapy.

  ‘Yes, of course. And, Ranald, it’s a great pleasure to congratulate you, even belatedly, on your appointment. I’ve forgotten whether it’s what is called a Regius Chair?’

  ‘Yes—yes, it is.’ ‘Ranald’ had made McKechnie blink, as it well might. He had waived any words of self-introduction, but not otherwise acknowledged our previous association; and certainly we had never been on Christian-name terms in youth. I saw him take a quick glance at his list of diners: it did record the fact that I was Mr Duncan Pattullo. ‘And thank you very much, Duncan.’ He paused. ‘I suppose we never knew each other very well. Although I think we might find we actually came up to Oxford in the same year.’

  ‘I think so, too.’ I judged this presumably genuine vagueness impressive. ‘Of course, I went down immediately after taking Schools. And I haven’t always lived in England, which is something which curtails one’s acquaintance a good deal.’

  ‘Yes.’ McKechnie appeared to weigh the sufficiency of this reply. ‘Obviously so,’ he amplified, rather as Mogridge might have done.

  ‘Do you have to do a lot of lecturing?’ I inquired. My tone must have been that in which one asks an elderly gentlewoman to whom one has been introduced at some rural occasion whether there is a good vicar in the parish.

  ‘A certain amount. And, of course, there is examining every few years. But none of it is sufficiently burdensome to interfere with one’s work.’

  A quick vision of Talbert absorbed in his folios enabled me to understand this remark, which a stranger to the place might have found perplexing enough. I wondered whether McKechnie and I could be said to be doing well. It wasn’t difficult to feel a terminus to our small-talk as looming uncomfortably close ahead. And more than an hour must elapse before the important people ranged at high table began delivering themselves of their speeches, so that we could sit back and listen. It was clear that my schoolfellow and I must either open up some joint area of boyhood reminiscence, or find a topic of current interest as a basis for conversation. What I tried was, roughly, in the first of these categories.

  ‘Do you still keep up your violin?’ I asked.

  It seemed a harmless question, although its phrasing was perhaps unfortunate. It echoed, after all, a form of words I didn’t judge too happy when addressed to myself, and moreover it faintly invoked an image of McKechnie with the instrument tucked under his chin. But this was no reason for McKechnie to greet it, as he did, with a surprised and even offended glance. I realise
d that at school we had probably known nothing about his violin-playing; that it had been − as it now possibly remained − an activity cherished in privacy; and that I owed my knowledge of it to an occasion between our fathers which I couldn’t with any discretion refer to.

  But McKechnie’s discomposure, although momentary, told me something beyond this. As I moved up the school, and gained a certain confidence militating against the clinging sense of inferiority suffered by Ninian and myself as a consequence of our permanently scruffy tenue, I had come to exercise myself a good deal in the character of a wit. It hadn’t, of course, been wit, but merely juvenile mockery, prompted by a quite wholesome sense of fun and an awakening eye for the absurd. And at this moment, as a result, Ranald McKechnie was recalling me as one whose proper image was that of thorns crackling under a pot.

  So, at least, I now thought. Perhaps I was confused by the two-tier time-shift or double regress in which I was involved. Almost everybody round about me, everybody I had encountered since Tony had turned up in his son’s room, belonged to my undergraduate years. And now here in the person of Ranald McKechnie were my schooldays as well.