Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  For I return to that. Colourful will seem to many a word debased beyond the possibility of decent application to the mind of a major artist. Yet Mark Lambert’s mind it does indubitably fit. To listen to his talk in that great period was an experience which I lack the skill adequately to convey, but which may yet be roughly approximated to the sensation of seeing some gigantic crystal in perpetual revolution before one’s eyes – the restless object (compelling, hypnotic indeed, and patently in a last analysis impenetrable) inducing, it may be, some perplexity as to whether the myriad-hued flashings to which one is being entertained proceed in the individual instance merely from the glittering surface or authentically from the conjectured depths beyond. On Lambert’s talk – his talk from his earliest Heidelberg and Cambridge days – all are agreed; he was a talker long before he was a writer at all; and he was known to good judges as a great talker almost equally long before his own writing achieved greatness. Yet I remember, equally vividly, his silences. They could be striking. But for my own part I never felt them as uncompanionable – and that even when I had most reason to suspect that they represented his frankly deserting me for better company. Need I be so heavy-footed as to add that I mean the company of his own thronging creation, or speak sententiously of the privilege a man must feel in having tramped the by-ways of Tuscany with one whose intermittent withdrawals were to a communing with Mabel and Martin Alleyne, or with the adorable Edith Saltire?

  One occasion in particular dwells in my memory, and upon it I shall conclude this slight sketch. We had met in the Pitti, where I was accustomed to work at that time, to make a small evening excursion in which we took particular pleasure. It was no more indeed than a suburban stroll – but one following from the Porta Romana the devious course of the Viale dei Colli that leads finally out upon the Piazzale Michelangelo to the viewing – if one has but calculated one’s hour aright – on the one hand of the enchaliced city and its extended plain brimming as far as Pistoia with the generous wine of a Tuscan sunset and on the other the long shadows probing, softening, and yet bringing to their most exquisite definition the outer bastions of the Apennine. Here – after, it might be, penetrating the cypress grove that screens the small church by the presiding genius of the place so charmingly named la sua bella villanella – here we would sit down before the simple restaurant to the uses of which Poggi’s Loggia is so sensibly appropriated; and here we would enjoy a leisured al fresco meal as that incredible gold drained from the sky, to leave in shadow at last alike the cupola of Brunelleschi and Giotto’s supremely graceful tower.

  The outsetting of our expedition as I recall it in the particular instance was by nothing distinguished more than by a positive loquacity on my friend’s part. It is not perhaps unfair to say that a note identifiably hectic at times sounded in that wonderful talk, and we had not gone far on our way before it was, almost to a point of discomfort, unmistakably this that I was hearing. The art of the novel; the innermost recesses and last subtleties of the specialised, the technical mystery; the logistics, as the soldiers say, that should make possible the full deployment of the massed forces of his formidable imagination: these things were, in a fashion seldom long obscured to his intimates, at once the torment and the delight of Mark Lambert’s life. There can be no doubt that he could supremely organise, ruthlessly prune, endlessly refine. Yet it was an earlier phase of the artistic process that was suggested by his talk. When he moved from the grand strategy, the high and generalised principles of his craft, it was to the suggestion indeed of imaginative vistas thronged by a multitudinous creation resistlessly forcing a passage to the light – yet with a mazy motion that for me at least held in it something vertiginous, as if here was a world of dancers still ignorant of their appointed measure. Impetus however was the dominant impression conveyed; and Lambert did on this evening talk with a bold prospectiveness, an urgent forward-feeling sense that had as unconscious correlative a quickening of physical pace on the pronounced acclivity before us somewhat in excess of what my own comfort allowed for.

  It was, I say, wonderful talk. Glancing sideways at the intent and noble profile of the man, I received an impression to be described only as of hunger – the baffled hunger, I am prompted extravagantly to add, of some large carnivorous creature that eyes the possibility of splendid repletion cruelly disposed just beyond the bars. No doubt I was dull in not being able to distinguish, there and then, at what recurrent point of the creative crisis my old companion stood. Perhaps it was this impercipience on my part that presently discouraged him. Certainly by the time we had reached the Piazzale and paused at the balustrade to gaze, in company with the colossal David of Florence’s greatest son, on the multiplicity of small yellow lights now appearing beyond the Arno, Lambert had withdrawn upon a brooding silence. Nor did the substantial pasta to which we presently addressed ourselves, nor even an equally generous application to the harsh Barbera which it was his inexplicable pleasure invariably to drink upon our particular occasion: nor did these things, I say, at first serve to restore him to a conversational mood.

  Our silence however did not continue indefinitely. For among the many charms of the man was a high courtesy – such, I fear, as might appear sufficiently old world today – which would by no means permit him long to treat even a familiar friend with a total absence of the common forms. Over the coffee he talked again, and if it was now in a desultory fashion the desultoriness was yet quickened by a warm response to anything of liveliness or interest that I could myself produce for his diversion. And presently I believed myself to have scored, albeit in an unpretending way, a hit. For in the dusk and on the broad terrace before us a shabby and bearded patriarch had set up nothing less than a small astral telescope, and through this it was his evident intention to permit, in return for a few of those centesimi which have long since, alas, disappeared from the Italian pocket, the inspection of a handsome moon now obligingly disposed in the heavens just above Settignano. Our evening’s walk had, as it happened, conducted us the length of the Viale Galileo; and it was thus no particularly powerful flight that put me presently in command of a fancy which will be immediately obvious to you all. Here before us was the shade of the old astronomer – the Tuscan artist who, in Milton’s happy description, had in this very Valdarno applied his optic glass to the descrying of new lands in the same spotty globe as was now rising before us.

  The terms in which I communicated this whimsy to my companion are no longer within my recollection, but I will strain modesty to the extent of supposing them not without such simple felicitousness as the magic of the hour and the stimulus of Lambert’s society could scarcely fail to elicit. Understandably to my surprise therefore was it that I received in fact no response to my sally; and when I glanced across the table it was to see the great writer once more sunk in what I took to be profound abstraction. This last impression however I had almost instantly to correct. Lambert’s gaze indeed had the fixed quality of one whose vision is for the time upon some wholly inward spectacle. But there was that in the actual focus of his eyes which told another story, and my corrected sense was further borne out by a revealed disposition of feature at once complex and arresting. The complexity I must presently endeavour to elucidate, since in glimpsing it I had, I believe, come very near to the heart of Lambert’s mystery, to the very dynamic of his art. But first let me give an account of what, when I turned my head, I saw.

  At a nearby table sat three persons whose appearance was familiar to me. I had observed them together in the Café Savoia some ten days previously – when I had again, as it happens, been in Lambert’s company. Two were ladies, and distinguishably parent and child. The mother was an American – but one, I judged, who had lived long in Europe and failed to prosper there, a type more familiar on the continent in those days than now. Hard, brittle, grown gradually poor to the point of desperation or degradation, she faced a predatory world with her daughter discernibly as her only remaining asset. A considerable asset, one had at once to admit –
for the girl, who could scarcely have been twenty, was strikingly beautiful, after a fashion that at once suggested an Italian father. For a moment indeed one supposed this second parent on the scene, since the third of the trio was an elderly man – one whom I should have guessed to be of Neapolitan rather than Tuscan lineage. It was quickly apparent however that here was not the father, but a suitor, of the girl. Nor was it only a disparity of years that rendered this a painful discovery. The gentleman owed indeed something like the ruins of a high distinction, but he also bore all too clearly the tokens of dissipation indulged to the point of an odious and premature senility.

  Such had been the displeasing impression made upon me on that earlier occasion. Now, on the Piazzale Michelangelo, it was as if I were watching a subsequent act of this unobtrusive and muted domestic tragedy, with the mother more desperate and more disgraced, the suitor more vile, the girl more sharply confronted with the horror of her plight. But the girl was not the less beautiful for being harder pressed, and for clasping more fiercely to herself in consequence an enigmatical and tragic reserve. And it was above all the girl that my friend was studying – was devouring, indeed, if I may use a franker but necessary word. Lambert’s scrutiny, had it not been an artist’s, might veritably have been stigmatised as impertinent, so clearly did it insist upon due account taken of all that was apparent or to be conjectured of the rarely lovely physical presence before us. Yet it was a scrutiny too – as I instantly felt – immeasurably deeper than that. And here I return to what I have called the complexity of his response to our spectacle. Revelation, assuagement, high excitement: all these were present – but present only as concomitants in an act of sheer contemplation. I wonder if I make myself understood? What I would express is my sense of having been in the presence of a mind and spirit attuned to taking all things on their aesthetic side, as the raw material of a powerful creative art. And yet – and here is the interest of the episode – I glimpsed something else too. There was visible in Lambert’s expression, as at play with all this, what can only be described as simple moral feeling, wholly generous in its order, and urging a decided disposition to act. The grim little scene before us had, as it were, two aspects – one prompting only to meditation, exploration, elaboration deep in the mind of the artist, the other to irruption, intervention, some brusque stroke perhaps of knight errantry. And, even in the instant that I became aware of it, this second impulse appeared for a moment likely to gain control. It may be that some further intensification of the girl’s distress, some word of gesture revealing a deeper outrageousness in the thing to his penetrating glance, prompted the dark flush that mounted to Lambert’s face and the tautening of his frame as if he were about to rise and stride forward. But, almost in a flash, this was over; he had sunk back, profoundly thoughtful, brooding, absorbed – and with a touch of resignation, of acknowledgement of the artist’s fate of mere spectatorship, in which I felt not a little pathos. When I turned round to glance again at the spectacle by which all this had been occasioned, I found it already in part dissolved. The girl had vanished, and her companions were in colloquy so urgent and even agitated that it occurred to me to wonder whether she had in fact taken resolution to rise and flee.

  Such then was this odd little episode. To what conclusion does it lead? Of Mark Lambert it has sometimes been maintained that his art was constantly trammelled by his life; that he too frequently burst as a man into that human spectacle which he should only have contemplated as a novelist. But here, I maintain, I had caught the creative writer’s abnegation as it were in the act. In one sense indeed I could feel that Lambert had abundantly possessed himself of what chance had offered him. The large carnivorous creature to which I likened him a few minutes ago had stretched out his paw and drawn triumphantly within the cage a morsel of that for which, beneath all his eager restless discourse on the technique of the novel, he had been absolutely hungering: the veritable flesh and blood which the writer must in a sense, Minotaur-like, periodically devour. And this had been done at the cost of an answering abstinence on another plane – a disciplining, so long practised no doubt as to have become instinctive, of a more than commonly strong disposition to project his impulses into action in the immediate world. But if there was conflict here, is there not reconciliation in his books themselves – which are works of art indeed but yet which so often exhibit high moral sensibilities breaking through one or another barrier and declaring themselves triumphantly in splendid, if sometimes tragic, action ?

  This is the thought with which I would leave you – but let me add that it was one at most very dimly realised by me at the time. I was aware simply of Lambert’s suddenly pushing back his chair, draining his abominable Barbera, incontinently leaving me to settle our score, and disappearing into the night. I followed him with what haste I could through a dance of fireflies down to the Porta a San Niccolo – where, after his common disposition of the matter on those occasions, his carriage would be awaiting him. His haste however must have been remarkable, for carriage and writer had alike vanished. The next day I had word from the Villa Pastorelli that Lambert was working. And then I think I did realise how close I had been for a moment to the pulse of the machine. And indeed I acknowledge how perfectly – if I have with any sufficiency evoked it – the incident illustrates the notorious disparity, first surveyed by the poet Coleridge, between fancy and imagination; between my own little flicker of the first as exemplified in my facetiously conjured shade of Galileo, and the clear full beam of the second as I sensed it at play in Mark Lambert’s momentary scrutiny of the small enigmatic situation I have described. We do but ill, I conceive, to interpret the creations of a great writer as a laboured disguising, whether conscious or unconscious, of matters deeply momentous in his own personal history – although this, I well know, is at present the fashionable view. Rather his donne is surely a gift indeed – a gift of fortune offered as he catches, fragmentarily, fleetingly, but in a moment of significant concentration, some actual and external drama of enjoying and suffering human beings. From just such a brief moment of contemplated passion as this of which I have so haltingly given you the history did there grow, I am persuaded, all that full splendour of art bequeathed to us in Lucia’s Changeling, in Gareth’s Folly, and in the incomparable Cosmopolitans itself.

  Sixth Voice. That was Books and Writers, a weekly discussion on topics of literary interest. Those taking part were—”

  The click with which Sir Charles Shaxby dismisses Broadcasting House is promptly succeeded by another, the effect of which is to illuminate for us the whole august apartment of the long-dead Mark Lambert’s artfully-cadenced friend. We see that the paintings, only glimpsed before, are Umbrian primitives; and that the bronzes, which are Etruscan, are supplemented by several superb terracottas of the same origin. We see too that Sir Charles is busying himself, not without some trace of nervousness, before a silver tray offering, among other material recruitments, brandy and soda. There is a pause – for it is not until Miss Shaxby has taken up her darning again that she composedly speaks.

  “Thank you, Charles – thank you, indeed.”

  “How did you feel about it?” Sir Charles’s manner intimates that, from him, there is astringent self-criticism to come,

  “I felt that I should like to know.”

  “To know, Hermione?” Mark Lambert’s late annalist is at a loss.

  “It is most unliterary of me, I don’t doubt. And I do fully realise, dear Charles, that the point of enduring and substantial interest is that which you pursued. Nevertheless I should, you see, like to know what happened to her. The girl, I mean – the girl on the Piazzale.”

  “Dear me!” Sir Charles’s tone is an instant and courteous acknowledgement that here is indeed a point of legitimate human curiosity – but one which nevertheless has taken him by surprise.

  “You never, I suppose, found out?” Miss Shaxby puts down a sock for the purpose of threading her needle.

  “Good heavens, no. Her very na
me was unknown to me.”

  “And to Mark?”

  “Certainly. At least, I have no reason to suppose otherwise.”

  “Of course not, Charles. And your whole contention would be the less effective, would it not, were Mark’s contact with the girl to have extended beyond the moment’s mere spectatorship you described? A little plain soda water, please.”

  Sir Charles squirts in silence, and only as he is in the act of handing the glass does he make to speak. This delayed response, however, is prevented by the ringing of a telephone-bell in some adjoining room.

  “It is a little late for Barker, Charles. Perhaps you had better go.” Miss Shaxby breaks off her darning-wool and deftly threads it. “Congratulations, I don’t doubt.”

  “Congratulations?” Sir Charles pauses, perplexed, in his movement towards the door.

  “On your broadcast address, dear. I have been told that the telephone is considered a suitable channel for that sort of politeness nowadays.”

  “Dear me.” Sir Charles leaves the room with some appearance of finding in this a new and disturbing light on the modern world. But when he returns – and it is not for several minutes that he does so – there is a flush of pleasure on his cheek.

  “I was right, Charles?”