The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Not even when they’re supposed to be having a conversation with them,’ said Joanna.

  At this point another couple arrived, having driven over from somewhere in the not-so-distant neighbourhood. Although no audible sirs or ladies or honourables clung about them or their names, both had the sort of accent that might have been calculated to go down badly in large parts of, say, Boston. In other respects, like dress and arrangement of hair on head and face, the new arrivals were ruffianly almost to a fault. The man in particular was rigged out with stained clothes and short-service bristle. Neither he nor his female companion seemed to be called Norah, though it was some time before Gordon was able to establish this for certain.

  He got Louise to himself for a moment while they and the rest of them were trailing along to eat and said to her, in part, ‘Did you hear who Norah really was?’

  ‘Never. Her name came up quite a few times more, too. I got mine across in the end by Louise-ing away like buggery, you know, Louise, my old father used to say to me, Louise, he’d say, Louise girl, your mother and I had a rare old job naming you, Louise, anyway, Louise, I hope you like the name Louise, Louise. After about twenty minutes the message started to reach even that poor senile twelve-year-old brain and thereafter he hardly slipped back into calling me Norah at all.’

  Gordon had halted in the passage at the place where a large picture of an ancestral Dunwich sneered down at them from the wall. The man was in all likelihood not a duke of that locality but marquis, earl or even viscount of it, for as Jimmie had pointed out, the Dunwiches had been made up to dukedom no more than a couple of centuries earlier. No informative plate was attached to the frame of the picture; as Jimmie would doubtless have explained, anybody who mattered would have known all about a thing like that already.

  ‘Did he make a pass at you?’ asked Gordon. ‘The duke, that is.’

  ‘You must mean how did he do it.’

  ‘All right, how did he do it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. We’d better get back to the others before they all go off somewhere by helicopter.’

  ‘I doubt if there’s much danger of that kind of thing here, but I see what you’re getting at.’

  After lunch Gordon said to Louise, It’s later now.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about? Later than what?’

  ‘Later than when you said you’d tell me later how His Grace made a pass at you. Of course, if you’d rather not discuss the –’

  ‘No no, because it’ll only take a moment. He said rather charmingly he was sure an attractive girl like me must have all manner of boy-friends, how he’d worked out I hadn’t got a husband I’ll never know, anyway I said no, not really, more to get his reaction than anything, and he just said, in that case what about him and that was it.’

  ‘M’m. I take your point about it only taking a moment, if you really mean he –’

  ‘No, that was it, but I did notice that it was one of the times he slipped back into calling me Norah, which I thought showed just how sincere he was being.’

  ‘I think I get that too,’ said Gordon.

  ‘I know he looks extraordinary, but actually he’s quite attractive in spite of that sort of burnt look he’s got.’

  ‘Oh, he is, is he?’

  ‘Or even because of it. I realize I can’t expect you to go along with me there.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Give me a kiss, then.’

  Gordon’s first response to this invitation was to back away from its donor, who lay stretched out on the bed but fully clothed. It was their bed standing in their bedroom, the first-floor room at Hungerstream that had been allotted for their use. Also allotted them, as Joanna had said, was a communicating room or dressing-room. As Gordon had himself checked within the first moments of arrival, this contained a thoroughly made-up bed and a usable reading-lamp. Now, without pause, before Louise could spring at him or anything, he started talking at top speed.

  ‘Believe me it’s not that I wouldn’t like to, it’s just that I know as well as you do how one thing leads to another and I won’t bore you with my reasons which I’m not at all clear about myself but I don’t want there to be any question of hanky-panky between you and me on this trip, in fact if I could have done I’d have made it a condition of your coming that you accepted that but I wasn’t in a position to, so now I’ll leave you to it and if it’s of any interest to you I haven’t got a date with Mrs Fane in the summerhouse.’

  He said the last part as he left the bedroom, but before he had reached the middle of his speech Louise had turned on her side away from him. Feeling in no respect whatever like a man who has just done the right thing against odds he hurried downstairs and went into the library. Jimmie was in here, sitting in a high-backed chair with an ancient-looking volume open on his lap. He looked over his glasses at Gordon.

  ‘A couple of mates,’ he said, ‘though I was two, and Buggins a hundred and four. It’s no better when you read it in the original printing, is it? What’s Louise up to? Having a zizz? Same like Joanna. It’s never any different when these women get into the country, snoring their heads off from morning till night. Do you have a nap in the afternoon yourself?’

  Gordon shook his head, ‘I feel so terrible when I wake up.’

  ‘Why, so do I, and so does any man, but I’m not going to let a thing like that stand in my way. That’s when I’m in London. Nothing to keep awake for there. Different in the country, you know. I always think so anyway. Feel like going for a walk?’

  ‘Frankly no.’

  Here Jimmie in turn shook his head, but more slowly and consideringly than Gordon had shaken his. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, and I really hope you don’t, that remark merely goes to show how irremediably, and I doubt if that’s a word you come across or use every day, you thought I was going to say middle-class you are, but you’re wrong. Something much more like hidebound, unimaginative. Always remember that one impulse from a vernal wood can teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can. Sorry about that but it’s fresh in my mind. Very well, I admit I like walking. The one thing I miss in London, not that it’s a small thing, is walking in the sense of going for walks. No point in it there. Every point in not. But in the country, well, you’re not in the country if you don’t walk.’ Mumbling something about barren leaves, Jimmie shut his book with a snap and returned it to its place on a shelf behind a glass door, then turned to Gordon. ‘Coming?’

  Gordon was just opening his mouth to give another and firmer refusal when he caught a sound as of a heavy body falling somewhere upstairs, faint at this distance but no doubt substantial on the spot, not perhaps an unmistakable advertisement of the duke’s presence near at hand but not mistakable enough for Gordon, who forthwith told Jimmie to lead on.

  In less than a minute the two were leaving the house, over-coated, gloved, even scarfed, though the afternoon, for all its pale, bright look, was not really cold. Jimmie took them across to a white gate in an evergreen hedge.

  ‘The shortest way out of the dominion of man,’ he explained. ‘Of one man in particular, let it be said. I’m afraid poor Willie Dunwich isn’t what he was.’

  For his age, Jimmie’s hearing was good: probably he too had heard that overhead crash and been similarly reminded. ‘Could it be the drink?’ suggested Gordon.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Do I think so? I’ve never seen a –’

  ‘It’s not a matter of mere common or garden drunkenness, Willie’s famous for never having drawn a sober breath in living memory, but he’s always known how to control that. I mean I rather fear it’s been getting to him in what I understand is now called, the long term. I remember poor Gervase, Willie’s late brother, you know, I remember Gervase developing that same, that same, I don’t really know what to call it, a look, an air, anyhow imparting a sense of having ceased to bother about what sort of impression …’

  ‘Not so long ago you were telling me that was a gr
eat aristocratic thing, not giving a toss about the impression you made.’

  ‘Not giving a, oh yes, not caring a damn et cetera. No, I mean the impression made not on others but on oneself. I greatly fear Willie’s stopped minding what he thinks of Willie. That’s, that’s a dreadful thought. Ah well, now I feel perhaps we’ve had enough of that particular topic.’

  ‘Just one more thing while it’s fresh in my mind. What’s a puttock-sleigh?’

  ‘A what?’ asked Jimmie irritably.

  ‘I heard it as a puttock-sleigh and what’s he called, Willie Dunwich asked me if I knew much about it or them in the plural. Does the word mean anything to you?’

  ‘Say it slowly.’

  Gordon said it slowly. ‘That’s the best I can do,’ he also said.

  ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’

  ‘No,’ said Gordon. ‘Of course I’m not sure that’s what he said. People aren’t, you don’t, people can’t expect to be sure of what he said any time, can they? Now let’s drop it. I’m sorry I ever brought it up.’

  ‘No, it’s fascinating. Perhaps if I’d heard him say it myself I’d understand. One thing, I’m sure he wanted you to take his meaning. That is, he wasn’t trying to put you at a disadvantage.’

  ‘Even so he made quite a decent job of it. But no, he didn’t strike me as a teasing sort of chap,’ said Gordon, not going on to say aloud that surely most teasing sorts of chap used up a bit of curiosity on whichever sort of chap they happened to be teasing at any one time. What he did say aloud was, ‘In fact altogether he wasn’t what I expected.’

  Jimmie halted dramatically on the verge of the small road they were about to cross. ‘My dear Gordon, you can’t be serious.’

  ‘In some ways he was, of course, but I never got the feeling he was sitting there waiting for me to betray myself by eating peas off my knife, which was what I rather thought he might be banking on. I was completely off beam there.’

  ‘You mean you were afraid he might be like Bobbie, you remember snobby-Bobbie, the old monster who put you through it over luncheon at Gray’s that time.’

  ‘I expect I was.’

  ‘Mind you, a touch of what one might call behavioural caution is something of a prerequisite when a poor commoner like you or I comes into contact with persons of ducal or even baronial rank. I say, do you mind if we pause here briefly? We’ve come quite a long way in a short time and the view from here is quite remarkable.’

  The view before them was certainly unusual in that, to the eye of a town-dweller at least, it contained nothing of the twentieth century, no power lines, no metal fences, no machinery, no advertisement. Gordon could see that what was before them was in general virtuous and might well remind Jimmie of how things had been in his youth, or appeal to him now as what they must, on consideration, have been rather like then. Such things, like all those to do with the passage of time, were to be respected. Nevertheless the scene made no more than a puny appeal to Gordon personally. It was green, brown here and there but mostly green, motionless, silent, unpopulated and asking for the addition of a passage in curlicued italics about man’s quest through the ages. And quite likely Jimmie was feeling and thinking nothing in particular, just getting his breath back.

  For the moment, at any rate, he seemed to have nothing to say. With an abrupt inhalation like someone coming to after a doze, he set off again along the line of the ridge where they had stood. Soon their way took them through a patch of thin woodland, squashy underfoot here and there with the uncleared remains of last year’s leaves. The bare boughs kept off little of the sunshine and it was possible to imagine the coming of spring. Jimmie looked straight ahead or at the ground he was about to traverse. After they had gone some yards he said, still looking to his front, ‘Do people read old Alfred Tennyson these days or has he never really emerged from the Victorian fug?’

  ‘I don’t think they read him unless they have to, which isn’t often,’ said Gordon. ‘We’re constantly being told he’s taken his rightful place among the great English poets and anyway he wasn’t all that keen on what we think of as Victorianism, but I doubt if he’s got anything much to say to the 1990s. After all, he’s been dead over a century now.’

  ‘My God, so he has. Just so. Tell me, Gordon, do you read him yourself, read Tennyson yourself?’

  ‘To be honest, no, not in the sense you mean, not unless I’m after something factual. He …’

  ‘Do go on, dear boy.’

  ‘I was going to say, I can never quite lay my hand on a sufficient reason for sitting down and reading him without an ulterior motive, so to speak.’

  Now Jimmie did look at Gordon, gave him more than a glance. ‘Not even In Memoriam?’

  ‘I must confess I’ve never read more than a couple of pages, kind of thing.’

  ‘I thought at least that was recognized as his masterpiece.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jimmie, I’ve heard that said, but really I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You mustn’t think I’m trying to drive you into some sort of corner,’ said Jimmie, not at all reinforcing the literal sense of his words by again abruptly halting and wheeling round to face Gordon. But then he said gently enough, ‘It’s my favourite poem and has been ever since I first read it sixty-four years ago,’ and he sounded almost apologetic when he added, ‘I thought as my biographer you should know that.’

  ‘I’ll get hold of a copy as soon as I’m back in London.’

  This time they had stopped in a small open space, too small to be considered a clearing, but big enough for somebody to have put together and lighted a fire in it as various blackened and now sodden remnants showed. Jimmie put his gloved hands on his hips and stared about him.

  ‘It’s a pity in a way there’s nowhere to sit down,’ he said, ‘though we’d have to be getting back soon. But I was hoping you wouldn’t object if we stopped here a couple of minutes before we move on.’

  ‘Fine with me.’ Gordon tried not to sound as wary as he felt.

  Now Jimmie brought his hands round and clasped them in front of him. With his solemn expression and head slightly bowed, he looked really quite like somebody about to enter on a graveside oration. He avoided Gordon’s eye.

  ‘No doubt you know that Tennyson’s poem memorializes Arthur Hallam, the young man whom he met at Cambridge in the year 1819 and who soon became the closest friend of his life. In fact in view of what later happened to Tennyson, or rather failed to happen, it would not be going too far to say that in Hallam he met the love of his life, whether the feeling was significantly reciprocated or not.’

  Gordon was starting to feel uneasy about where this seemed to be leading. Not, he considered, in the obvious direction. By now he had talked to several people who knew Jimmie, not all of them entirely sober at the time, and had read several books in which he figured, not always to his advantage, and there had been no talk of that side of life in either case. Nevertheless, some sizeable disclosure did seem to be in train.

  ‘If that love manifested itself in anything more substantial than a manly clasp of the hand, I should be very much surprised,’ Jimmie was continuing. ‘A characteristic close friendship in the Victorian style. Which is not in the least my own favoured style. In fact I have to confess …’

  The biographer waited. He hoped very much that no abrupt revision of his estimate of his subject’s proclivities was about to be called for.

  ‘I have to confess to you that close friendships of any sort are not in my line, never have been. I suppose that means that men don’t appeal to me much, certainly not compared with women. And I suppose that makes it faintly surprising that I should feel such a personal attachment to In Memoriam. Now of those two fellows it’s Hallam who interests me more for the moment. It was he who pointed out to Tennyson his real duty as an English poet. Hallam wrote somewhere that unless a poet writes predominantly to create beauty, the result will be false in art. As we see from In Memoriam itself among other works, Tennyson didn’t follow that ad
vice. But I did.’

  Parts of this speech were less easy than others for Gordon to take in. The less easy parts suffered from the distraction provided by a man approaching them, for the moment unseen by Jimmie. The newcomer was wearing a heavy tweed overcoat and a tweed hat of similar but not the same pattern, a hat in a rustic genre seldom worn by rustics. Under it the pale face of its wearer was frowning, and he waved a forefinger at Gordon in admonition before pointing it at Jimmie, whose voice died away as he turned and saw him.

  ‘I recognized you there,’ said the man in tweeds as he came up. He had a rustic voice, ‘I trust you’ll pardon this intrusion, sir. Of names I reck little,’ he went on, ‘nor am I accustomed to pay heed to such things, but the face of a great actor,’ and he gazed at Jimmie’s, ‘I never forget. I thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given me. And thank you too for your attention just now.’

  Jimmie surprised Gordon in more than one way by replying melodiously, it’s I who should thank you, my friend. I can only say I deeply appreciate your kindness.’

  ‘May I shake your hand, sir?’

  ‘Of course. You honour me.’

  They shook hands and the stranger departed.

  ‘It might be interesting to know who he thought I was,’ said Jimmie to Gordon. ‘But I felt in the circumstances I could hardly ask him. Pity. But then I should be feeling glad at having cast some light into his wretched little life. Well, after that intrusion I feel I can hardly go on with what I was saying, whatever it may have been.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you that. You’d just said that Tennyson didn’t follow Hallam’s advice about writing primarily to create beauty, but you did. Follow it.’

  ‘It does sound awfully wet now, I know. But I did try to do that to the best of my ability from the age of twelve. By the time I reached twenty, about the time of the outbreak of war, I could see that my ability was deficient, if indeed there was anything there at all. But I went on trying for another thirty years. During some of those years I tried to write novels, in the hope that it was there that my true gift lay.’ There was no self-mockery in Jimmie’s tone. ‘Same result, unfortunately. No gift, true or not. Saw it sooner, fortunately. On consideration, something I don’t go in for much these days, I should say that the best of me, or the least bad part of me, or the least bad part of what there is of me, or was of me … is in verse form.’