Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “Oh!” This time it was in indignation that Anthea turned to Sir Charles. “With Garth it’s a regular and abominable technique. I met it in my first half-hour with him – which wasn’t, by the way, so long ago as his talk might lead you to suppose. He makes you furious and then snatches a trick.”

  “I shall be interested to see whether he ever brings that off with me. But did you, Garth, in fact succeed in making your father furious?”

  “Not exactly that – and it’s only Anthea’s notion that I had any such object. But he certainly didn’t like the ivory tower – which for that matter is a counter with a cheap side to it, no doubt. He asked me – for the argument was shifting, as such arguments commonly do – whether the artist’s calling was not overwhelmingly one of contemplation. I said that no great artist – poet or novelist or painter – could afford to get more than intermittently out of touch with vehement real life. He asked if a painter ought to paw his models. It was all very absurd, no doubt: the old wraith-like artist, so sad, so distinguished, so futile, and above all, somehow, so secret, badgered by his unnatural Texan progeny, with the Arno beginning to take on its early evening lustre beneath them, and behind them the clattering street-cars and chattering Vespas and hurrying, timeless city. But if the son was taking in these various picturesque accessories in turn, the father still kept his gaze pretty constantly in one direction. And what it was bent on was not the Porta a San Niccolo, but something higher up – in fact, the Piazzale Michelangelo.”

  “If any of us is likely to ‘do’ something it’s certainly Garth.” Anthea offered this interruption decidedly. “For was ever the novelist’s instinct to keep it up more intolerably exercised? Wendell Dauncey may have begotten him, but I pronounce him to be Mark Lambert’s spiritual son.” She turned to Sir Charles. “By the way, is he like his father?”

  “Physically – and his bodily one?” Sir Charles was amused. “Garth is not wraith-like or sad; and he will forgive me if I assert that there is a certain gulf between being good-looking and being distinguished. Yet I don’t think my memory tricks me when I fancy that I glimpse in him something of his father’s looks.”

  “Or is it rather his father’s air?” Hermione Shaxby was amiably whimsical. “Do I at all see the father in the son? It is a little puzzle in which I have been taking pleasure for some time. Our progress towards the Piazzale has seemed the shorter for it.”

  “We really are almost there now.” Garth paused to glance with some caution at Sir Charles. “My father asked me if I knew how Mark Lambert had whipped up the material of his novels. I can see that the expression strikes you as odd – but odder still was what followed. I replied that I had no notion. ‘Then I’ll tell you,’ my father said. ‘It was by jumping in and splashing around in it.’

  “I don’t think I found the sense of this altogether bewildering. It has, after all, been asserted before now that Mark Lambert built with uncommon immediacy and directness upon the basis of his own experience – say even his own involvements and implications. What puzzled me was the bearing of this upon my father’s general argument. And I tried to get it clear. ‘But doesn’t that,’ I asked, ‘count decidedly against the ivory tower? It goes to show the intimate relationship between life fully lived and life fully realised in a great art.’ But I got no reply to this, and when I looked at him I saw that my father’s thoughts were wandering. It came to me that he was perhaps older even than his years, and that his mental processes had ceased to take any very settled account of logic. I resolved to let up on my attempts to reform him – at least for the time. You’ll congratulate me on having at length arrived at so much modesty. But for the moment it was, in a sense, too late. My father let me have it.”

  “But this is capital.” Sir Charles bore every appearance of being delighted. “Your relationship was coming alive again – even if in a ding-dong fashion.”

  “There wasn’t much more that you could call give and take. He said that jumping in and splashing around might by some miracle lead to a Lucia’s Changeling now and then, but that its more common consequence was to provide doctors and lawyers and civil servants with commonplace wives, or to populate American colleges with solemn young donkeys.”

  “Dear me!” Sir Charles modulated deftly into dismay. “That was too bad. But there is no denying that your father’s is a somewhat erratic temperament. I hope, my dear Garth, that you didn’t feel positively hurt by so odd a pleasantry.”

  “I just hadn’t time, I’m glad to say, for anything of the sort – and, anyway, the proposition had its unchallengeable aspect of a general truth. For my father continued to develop his thought – at least I suppose it was that, although the transitions were a little hard to follow. He had been told, he said, that assistant professors and other learned persons now had the trick of discoursing largely in quarterly journals upon the sources and channels of artistic creation. But, he asked, did they always take care to provide themselves with an adequate knowledge of the facts? Mark Lambert, he said, had been his most intimate friend – and here was I, who knew no more of the man Lambert than I did of the man Lucretius, prattling innocently of the relationship of his life and art. In this, I hope you’ll agree, my father was being not quite fair; I had really said very little about the man Lambert; and my only motive in prattling was the hope of getting something better in exchange. And I was getting it – although after a decidedly disconcerting fashion. I knew, my father said, about Lambert’s great decade. But did I know how it began? And did I know about the end of it all? And it was then that he pointed – pointed upwards and across the slow, shrunken river to the Piazzale Michelangelo.”

  “This is most extraordinary.” Sir Charles was genuinely perturbed. “I have no conception of what it can lead to.”

  “Some queer emotion had got hold of him, sir, and he was trembling and almost incoherent. ‘You’ve been up there?’ he asked me. ‘You’ve seen the statue?’ Clearly, he meant the David; and I muttered some affirmative reply. ‘It’s the monument,’ he said, ‘to Mark Lambert’s Waterloo.’

  “I was uncommonly troubled for a moment, since it occurred to me, not unnaturally, that my rash talk had in some mysterious way sent my father off his head. And certainly I managed to do no more than repeat his words stupidly. ‘Mark Lambert’s Waterloo?’

  “He gave a queer, passionate nod. ‘Just that,’ he said. ‘There can be one plunge too many, believe me, into what you call vehement real life. An artist must have an inviolate self, my boy – and, if that plunges or topples, the resulting header may be into nothing better than vehement real treacle.’ He paused, banged with his stick on the broad stone balustrade before us, and then raised it to point once more at the Piazzale. ‘And an eleventh-hour Waterloo. Perhaps the finest conception of the lot – and even the mere executing of it nine-tenths achieved. What was required, you may ask? No more than a resolution, an explication; virtually, indeed, a mere epilogue. Succeed in doing that with an expanse of life, succeed in beating painfully upwards on the wings of art to that empyrean from which it can be viewed dispassionately and as a whole: succeed in that, and the last madness, surely, is to flop down and wallow in it.’

  “My father paused again; and I have little doubt that I was staring at him open-mouthed. Of what he could be talking about I hadn’t—at that moment I hadn’t—a ghost of a notion. I remember being glad that I was his son.”

  “Glad that you were his son?” Sir Charles permitted himself to register cautious bewilderment.

  “What I mean is this: that I had a strong sense of my father’s being carried away towards some confidence that it was not really his business to divulge and which he might presently regret, but that our close relationship made it slightly less uncomfortable. Well, however that may have been, there was still a little more to emerge. For my father turned to me with what seemed an obscure appeal. ‘The situation, Garth, must at once have become impossible. It was not merely—was it?—a matter of the right relationship of the several power
s and faculties of an artist to his materials, to his artistically relevant materials. No – there was the whole new tangle of personal relationships as well. Look at it, Garth, as one may, one sees it—does one not?—as quite inevitably the end of the end of it all – and of much else as well.’”

  There was silence. It became quite clear that upon his last odd phrase Garth Dauncey conceived his narrative to have come lucidly to a close. Sir Charles Shaxby, more at a loss than he had yet been, protracted the business of stubbing out a cigarette. His sister, rising from her place by the tea-table, found momentary occupation in drawing a curtain across a window now too generously admitting the late afternoon sun. It was Anthea who first spoke.

  “Quotation marks?”

  Garth nodded. “Sure – or say italics. Your father’s last novel – of which he had written nine-tenths before some disastrous interruption occurred – was to have been called The End of It All.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it!” Sir Charles was actually on his feet. “I see no shred of reliable evidence pointing to the existence of anything of the sort. Even if your father asserted in so many words the fact of such a novel’s existing, I should have to discount it wholly, extremely painful though that would be. He was devoted to Mark; he is, after all, something more than elderly; and the only sound conclusion would be that he is confounding substance and fantasy.”

  “So I should have been inclined to say myself, sir. And that is why it was a bit of a shock to read the Settignano Memorandum Book.”

  ‘The Memorandum Book? I can’t see—”

  “Well, the thing is elusive, I admit. The title comes in with an odd ambiguousness at the point where Mark Lambert’s own end is pretty immediately in question. And there is further that matter of weakness having reduced his writing to a very sketchy and imperfect notation. But that the reference is there I can’t doubt. He was clearing up his papers, anxious to make the best possible disposition of them from a financial point of view – and The End of It All set him a pretty puzzle, as I don’t doubt that it had once, for some unknown reason, done long before. He had an idea that you might be able to help.”

  “You are suggesting that a novel with this title – an unlikely title, as it seems to me – had been all but completed long ago and then for some inexplicable personal reason suppressed?”

  “Just that. There’s another late entry in the Memorandum Book, you may remember, that gives something like additional colour to my supposition. Lambert thinks of a story in which the suppressing of a novel would be a feature; and asks if there would not be what he calls ‘a vivid interest’ for him in the attempt to chronicle emotions attending the foundering of such a thing because of personal complications.”

  Sir Charles’s reaction to this was to surprise his sister, and conceivably himself, by an exclamation more indicative of impatience than was wholly civil. Having thus committed himself, however, he spoke out. “1 cannot take this seriously, Garth. It is like stuff from a roman policier.”

  “But does that quite dismiss the matter?” Miss Shaxby was at once concerned to soften her brother’s asperity. “I have been told that very acute reasoning is sometimes put into books of that sort. And much the same kind of reasoning is doubtless valuable in literary research. We must not hold it against Garth that he is presenting himself somewhat in the character of a Sherlock Holmes. He believes himself to have found certain clues”—Miss Shaxby paused in innocent pleasure at having achieved this technical term—”and it will be proper, Charles, that they should be examined with every care.”

  “My dear Hermione, you are indubitably right.” Sir Charles’s expression would scarcely in itself have suggested the lack of dubiety thus predicated. “Perhaps, Garth, you would like to question me?”

  “No, sir. I’d be very interested, I need hardly say, in any comment you had to make. But it wouldn’t come to me to question you.”

  The high propriety of this, if mollifying, was given little time to take effect, for Anthea spoke at once. “It would – and does – to me. For there is one enormously interesting question that it is clear you can answer. My father has no sooner set down in his notebook this problematical phrase or title than he adds ‘Perhaps Charles will help.’ That, of course, means you – who put us all so much in your debt by coming out to Florence and taking up a great part of the burden during my father’s last illness and after. Well, did you help – in any way, I mean, that could be remotely connected with a nearly completed but eventually for long suppressed novel?”

  “No.” Sir Charles was decisive. “Your father never hinted at the existence of such a thing. This is something, surely, that I need hardly assert. Were it otherwise, my whole attitude in the matter would certainly be different.”

  “In that case, what my father meant was this: that nothing he had met during his life puzzled him so much as the business of taking leave of it. If you were to help there, it was as a sort of spiritual director. Did he make that call upon you?”

  Sir Charles – perhaps as being sorely tempted to stigmatise this forthright question as merely scandalous – took a turn up and down the room. “My dear Anthea, we are here on delicate ground, and ground in part obscured – and that not wholly regrettably – by the effluxion of time.” Sir Charles paused – conceivably to admire these politic generalities – before continuing with equal deliberation. “It is certainly in my memory, however, that your father was troubled in more respects than one. There was the worry about money, for instance. It turned out in the end to be largely unfounded. His books, it is true, had never earned much, and at that time were earning virtually nothing at all. But such investments as he possessed were, in fact, soon to do rather well. He had, therefore, less cause for anxiety here than he supposed. But there were other perplexities. Your mother’s health had for long been delicate, and there were responsibilities which she was – to speak plainly – very little fitted to undertake.”

  “Raymond?”

  “Raymond, certainly – and in a sense yourself. We discussed these and similar matters as effectively as your father’s growing weakness permitted. Of graver things you will realise that it is less easy for me to speak without some risk of falsifying the picture. It was long ago; the circumstances were painful; and if my memories lack confidence and definition, I believe this to be a reflection of a certain bewilderment in which I had to acknowledge myself as standing at the time.”

  “You mean that you were puzzled?”

  “Perhaps I merely felt inadequate. Your father knew that he was dying, and his capacious intellect was naturally preoccupied with pondering the deepest issues of life. It may be that he expected from me – so much younger and so much smaller a man – insights and a support that it was not mine to give. I ought to say that my own religious convictions, unhappily, were then unformed. Your father, certainly, had none.”

  “But you talked about—well, about that sort of thing?”

  Sir Charles frowned – whether in disapproval or in an effort of recollection was not clear. “In your father, as in many great artists, a strain of egotism has to be admitted. If he was disposed to canvass the riddle of the universe, it was as miniatured in his own complex personality and remarkable career. I think he was inwardly engaged in holding what might be termed an inquest into both. Is it not natural, perhaps inevitable, that a profoundly serious man, to whom great talents had been given, should be prompted, when dying, into just such an anxious inquisition into his stewardship? Certainly he was profoundly troubled. But if the manner and evident depth of this baffled me – left me helpless, even – at the time, I believe that later I came to an understanding of it. Your father, although his achievement came late and thus lies comparatively freshly behind us, belonged essentially with an older generation – the first generation of English, or English-speaking, novelists to assert the high seriousness and elevation of their calling.”

  “That’s very true.” Garth Dauncey, who had been silent for some time, appeared stirr
ed by professional interest. “And they learnt it, I suppose you would say, from an uncommonly serious and elevated lady.”

  “Precisely. But there was for long, you know, a doubt. For George Eliot the novel was substantially an instrument. There were other models – continental models – in which the novel was an end, a sheerly artistic achievement, carrying its own justification. Mark Lambert’s retrospective perplexities, I came to conclude, lay here. What troubled him was an ethical issue: the too much or too little of moral accent, moral intention, in his writing. But even to this we never came explicitly in those last talks. In sum, Lambert appears to me to have carried his artist’s travail with him to the grave; and it would be untrue to say that he died at peace with himself. But I am very sure that this was not any consequence of an inability to decide what to do with an unpublished work. In one aspect, Garth’s supposition appears to me to be altogether in excess of anything the facts warrant. In another, it is inadequate to them. Poor Mark’s last hours, I fear, were spent in rather deeper waters.”

  Sir Charles as he finished speaking made a gesture. It was no more than to indicate his invaluable cigarette box, but nevertheless conveyed his sense that a subject had been closed. The ensuing silence was in process of passing from the meditative to the awkward, and Miss Shaxby might have been divined as hesitating between the rival claims of Covent Garden, the Royal Family and the weather, when Anthea reached for her gloves and spoke in a manner altogether matter of fact. “Allow, for the moment, that there are two possible interpretations of the facts we have been considering; and that the existence of an important manuscript is an open question. What is the first thing that Garth and I had better do?”

  “I think I can answer that.” Sir Charles, however he judged of the alliance thus definitively propounded, spoke indeed with gravity but without irritation. “Consult your colleague Miss Bave – whom I recall that you have already mentioned. She has more experience than Garth can yet have of the sort of research you have in mind – a sort, remember, possibly involving the actions and reputations of persons still alive, or only recently dead. I do not personally believe that an important and undisclosed manuscript by Mark Lambert exists. But if you do so believe, it is perhaps right that you should pursue the matter. Indeed, Anthea, I may say that both Hermione and I rejoice to see you thus concerning yourself with the furthering of your father’s reputation – although it may occur to us, indeed, to speculate obscurely upon what has occasioned such a change of disposition.” Sir Charles paused to glance from Anthea to Garth, and it was apparent that he had endeavoured to lighten his admonitions with a sally of humour. “But are you really resolved to go out to Florence?”