Even without Bagshaw’s note of caution, I had come prepared for Trapnel to turn out a bore. Pleasure in a book carries little or no guarantee where the author is concerned, and Camel Ride to the Tomb, whatever its qualities as a novel, had all the marks of having been written by a man who found difficulty in getting on with the rest of the world. That might well be in his favour; on the other hand, it might equally be a source of anyway local and temporary discomfort, even while one hoped for the best.
‘Trapnel’s incredibly keen to write well,’ said Bagshaw. ‘In fact determined. Won’t compromise an inch. I admire that, so far as it goes, but writers of that sort can add to an editor’s work. Our public may have to be educated up to some of the stuff we’re going to offer – I’m thinking of the political articles Kenneth Widmerpool is planning – so Trapnel’s good, light, lively pieces, if we can get them out of him, arc likely to assist the other end of the mag.’
Trapnel’s arrival at that point did not immediately set at rest Bagshaw’s rather ominous typification of him. Indeed, Bagshaw himself seemed to lose his nerve slightly when Trapnel entered the bar, though only for a second, and quickly recovered.
‘Ah, Trappy, here you are. Take a seat. What’s it to be? How are things?’
He introduced us. Trapnel, in a voice both deep and harsh, requested half a pint of bitter, somehow an unexpectedly temperate choice in the light of his appearance and gruffness of manner. He looked about thirty, tall, dark, with a beard. Beards, rarer in those days than they became later, at that period hinted of submarine duty, rather than the arts, social protest or a subsequent fashion simply for much more hair. At the same time, even if the beard, assessed with the clothes and stick he carried, marked him out as an exhibitionist in a reasonably high category, the singularity was more on account of elements within himself than from outward appearance.
Although the spring weather was still decidedly chilly, he was dressed in a pale ochre-coloured tropical suit, almost transparent in texture, on top of which he wore an overcoat, black and belted like Quiggin’s Partisan number, but of cloth, for some reason familiarly official in cut. This heavy garment, rather too short for Trapnel’s height of well over six feet, was at the same time too full, in view of his spare, almost emaciated body. Its weight emphasized the flimsiness of the tussore trousers below. The greatcoat turned out, much later, to have belonged to Bagshaw during his RAF service, disposed of on terms unspecified, possibly donated, to Trapnel, who had caused it to be dyed black. The pride Trapnel obviously took in the coat was certainly not untainted by an implied, though unjustified, aspiration to ex-officer status.
The walking stick struck a completely different note. Its wood unremarkable, but the knob, ivory, more likely bone, crudely carved in the shape of a skull, was rather like old Skerrett’s head at Erridge’s funeral. This stick clearly bulked large in Trapnel equipment. It set the tone far more than the RAF greatcoat or tropical suit. For the rest, he was hatless, wore a dark blue sports shirt frayed at the collar, an emerald green tie patterned with naked women, was shod in grey suede brothel-creepers. These last, then relatively new, were destined to survive a long time, indeed until their rubber soles, worn to the thinness of paper, had become all but detached from fibre-less uppers, sounding a kind of dismal applause as they flapped rhythmically against the weary pavement trodden beneath.
The general effect, chiefly caused by the stick, was of the Eighteen-Nineties, the décadence; putting things at their least eclectic, a contemptuous rejection of currently popular male modes in grey flannel demob suits with pork-pie hats, bowler-crowned British Warms, hooded duffels, or even those varied outfits like Quiggin’s, to be seen here and there, that suggested recent service in the maquis. All such were rejected. One could not help speculating whether an eyeglass would not be produced – Trapnel was reported to have sported one for a brief period, until broken in a pub brawl – insomuch that the figure he recalled, familiar from some advertisement advocating a brand of chocolates or cigarettes, similarly equipped with beard and cane, wore an eye-glass on a broad ribbon, though additionally rigged out in full evening dress, an order round his neck, opera cloak over his shoulder. In Trapnel’s case, the final effect had that touch of surrealism which redeems from complete absurdity, though such redemption was a near thing, only narrowly achieved.
Perhaps this description, factually accurate – as so often when facts are accurately reported – is at the same time morally unfair. ‘Facts’ – as Trapnel himself, talking about writing, was later to point out – are after all only on the surface, inevitably selective, prejudiced by subjective presentation. What is below, hidden, much more likely to be important, is easily omitted. The effect Trapnel made might indeed be a little absurd; it was not for that reason unimpressive. In spite of much that was all but ludicrous, a kind of inner dignity still somehow clung to him.
Nevertheless, the impression made on myself was in principle an unfavourable one when he first entered the pub. A personal superstructure on human beings that seems exaggerated and disorganized threatens behaviour to match. That was the immediate response. Almost at once this turned out an incorrect as well as priggish judgment. There were no frills about Trapnel’s conversation. When he began to talk, beard, clothes, stick, all took shape as necessary parts of him, barely esoteric, as soon as you were brought into relatively close touch with the personality. That personality, it was at once to be grasped, was quite tough. The fact that his demeanour stopped just short of being aggressive was no doubt in the main a form of self-protection, because a look of uncertainty, almost of fear, intermittently showed in his eyes, which were dark brown to black. They gave the clue to Trapnel having been through a hard time at some stage of his life, even when one was still unaware how dangerously – anyway how uncomfortably – he was inclined to live. His way of talking, not at all affected or artificial, had a deliberate roughness, its rasp no doubt regulated for pub interchanges at all levels, to avoid any suggestion of intellectual or social pretension.
‘Smart cane, Trappy,’ said Bagshaw. ‘Who’s the type on the knob? Dr Goebbels? Yagoda? There’s a look of both of them.’
‘I’d like to think it’s Boris Karloff in a horror rôle,’ said Trapnel. ‘As you know, I’m a great Karloff fan. I found it yesterday in a shop off the Portobello Road, and took charge on the strength of the Quiggin & Craggs advance on the short stories. Not exactly cheap, but I had to possess it. My last stick, Shakespeare’s head, was pinched. It wasn’t in any case as good as this one – look.’
He twisted the knob, which turned out to be the pommel of a sword-stick, the blade released by a spring at the back of the skull. Bagshaw restrained him from drawing it further, seizing Trapnel’s arm in feigned terror.
‘Don’t fix bayonets, I beseech you, Trappy, or we’ll be asked to leave this joint. Keep your steel bright for the Social Revolution.’
Trapnel laughed. He clicked the sword back into the shaft of the stick.
‘You never know when you may have trouble,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded using it on my last publisher. Quiggin & Craggs are going to take over his stock of the Camel. They’ll do a reprint, if they can get the paper.’
I told him I had enjoyed the book. That was well received. The novel’s title referred to an incident in Trapnel’s childhood there described; one, so he insisted, that had prefigured to him what life – anyway his own life – was to be. In the narrative this episode had taken place in some warm foreign land, the name forgotten, but a good deal of sand, the faint impression of a pyramid, offering a strong presumption that the locale was Egyptian. The words that made such an impression on the young Trapnel – in many subsequent reminiscences always disposed to represent himself as an impressionable little boy – were intoned by an old man whose beard, turban, nightshirt, all the same shade of off-white, manifested the outer habiliments of a prophet; just as the stony ground from which he delivered his tidings to the Trapnel family party seemed the right sort of p
latform from which to prophesy.
‘Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb …’
Trapnel, according to himself, immediately recognized these words, monotonously repeated over and over again, as a revelation.
‘I grasped at once that’s what life was. How could the description be bettered? Juddering through the wilderness, on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t properly control, along a rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely, yet truly, stated.’
If Trapnel were really so young as represented by himself at the time of the incident, the story was not entirely credible, though none the worse for that. None the worse, I mean, insomuch as the words had undoubtedly haunted his mind at some stage, even if a later one. The greybeard’s unremitting recommendation of his beast as means of local archaeological transport had probably become embedded in the memory as such phrases will, only later earmarked for advantageous literary use: post hoc, propter hoc, to invoke a tag hard worked by Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson in post-retirement letters to The Times.
The earlier Trapnel myth, as propagated in the Camel, was located in an area roughly speaking between Beirut and Port Said, with occasional forays further afield from that axis. His family, for some professional reason, seemed to have roamed that part of the world nomadically. This fact – if it were a fact – to some extent attested the compatibility of a pleasure trip taken in Egypt, a holiday resort, in the light of other details given in the book, otherwise implying an unwarrantably prosperous interlude in a background of many apparent ups and downs, not to say disasters. Egypt cropped up more than once, perhaps – like the RAF officer’s greatcoat – adding a potentially restorative tone. The occupation of Trapnel’s father was never precisely defined; obscure, even faintly shady, commercial undertakings hinted. His social life appeared marginally official in style, if not of a very exalted order; possibly tenuous connexions with consular duties, not necessarily our own. One speculated about the Secret Service. Once – much later than this first meeting – a reference slipped out to relations in Smyrna. Trapnel’s physical appearance did not exclude the possibility of a grandmother, even a mother, indigenous to Asia Minor. He was, it appeared, an only child.
‘I always wondered what your initial stood for?’
Trapnel was pleased by the question.
‘I was christened Francis Xavier. Watching an old western starring Francis X. Bushman in a cowboy part, it struck me we’d both been called after the same saint, and, if he could suppress the second name, I could the first.’
‘You might do a novel about being a lapsed Catholic,’ said Bagshaw. ‘It’s worth considering. I know JG would like you to tackle something more engagé next time. When I think of the things I’d write about if I had your talent. I did write a novel once. Nobody would publish it. They said it was libellous.’
‘People like JG are always giving good advice about one’s books,’ said Trapnel. ‘In fact I hardly know anyone who doesn’t. “If only I could write like you, etc. etc.” They usually outline some utterly banal human situation, or moral issue, ventilated every other day on the Woman’s Page.’
‘Don’t breathe a word against the Woman’s Page, Trappy. Many a time I’ve proffered advice on it myself under a female pseudonym.’
‘Still, there’s a difference between a novel and a newspaper article. At least there ought to be. A novelist writes what he is. That’s equally true of mediaeval romances or journeys to the moon. If he put down on paper the considerations usually suggested, he wouldn’t be a novelist – or rather he’d be one of the fifty-thousand tenth-rate ones who crawl the literary scene.’
Trapnel had suddenly become quite excited. This business of being a ‘writer’ – that is, the status, moral and actual, of a writer – was a matter on which he was inordinately keen. This was one of the facets of Trapnel to emerge later. His outburst gave an early premonition.
‘Reviewers like political or moral problems,’ said Bagshaw. ‘Something they can get their teeth into. You can’t blame them. Being committed’s all the go now. I was myself until a few years ago, and still enjoy reading about it.’
Trapnel was not at all appeased. In fact he became more heated than ever, striking his stick on the floor.
‘How one envies the rich quality of a reviewer’s life. All the things to which those Fleet Street Jesuses feel superior. Their universal knowledge, exquisite taste, idyllic loves, happy married life, optimism, scholarship, knowledge of the true meaning of life, freedom from sexual temptation, simplicity of heart, sympathy with the masses, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity – particularly the last, in welcoming with open arms every phoney who appears on the horizon. It’s not surprising that in the eyes of most reviewers a mere writer’s experiences seem so often trivial, sordid, lacking in meaning.’
Trapnel was thoroughly worked up. It was an odd spectacle. Bagshaw spoke soothingly.
‘I know some of the critics are pretty awful, Trappy, but Nicholas wanted to talk to you about reviewing an occasional book yourself for Fission. If you agree to do so, you’ll at least have the opportunity of showing how it ought to be done.’
Trapnel saw that he had been caught on the wrong foot, and took this very well, laughing loudly. He may in any case have decided some apology was required for all this vehemence. All the earlier tension disappeared at once.
‘For Christ’s sake don’t let’s discuss reviews and reviewers. They’re the most boring subject on earth. I expect I’ll be writing just the same sort of crap myself after a week or two. It’s only they get me down sometimes. Look, I brought a short story with me. Could you let me know about it tomorrow, if I call you up, or send somebody along?’
Trapnel’s personality began to take clearer shape after another round of drinks. He was a talker of quite unusual persistence. Bagshaw, notoriously able to hold his own in that field, failed miserably when once or twice he attempted to shout Trapnel down. Even so, the absolutely unstemmable quality of the Trapnel monologue, the impossibility of persuading him, as night wore on, to stop talking and go home, was a menace still to be learnt. He gave a few rather cursory imitations of his favourite film stars, was delighted to hear I had only a few days before met a man who resembled Valentino. Trapnel’s mimicry was quite different from Dicky Umfraville’s – he belonged, of course, to a younger generation – but showed the same tendency towards stylization of delivery. It turned out in due course that Trapnel impersonations of Boris Karloff were to be taken as a signal that a late evening must be brought remorselessly to a close.
A favourite myth of Trapnel’s, worth recording at this early stage because it illustrated his basic view of himself, was how a down-at-heel appearance had at one time or another excited disdain in an outer office, restaurant or bar, this attitude changing to respect when he turned out to be a ‘writer’. It might well be thought that most people, if they considered a man unreasonably dirty or otherwise objectionable, would regard the culpability aggravated rather than absolved by the fact that he had published a book, but possibly some such incident had really taken place in Trapnel’s experience, simply because private fantasies so often seem to come into being at their owner’s behest. This particular notion – that respect should be accorded to a man of letters – again suggested foreign rather than home affiliations.
When I left the pub, where it looked as if Bagshaw contemplated spending the evening, Trapnel stood up rather formally and extended his hand. I asked if he had a telephone number. He at once brushed aside any question of the onus of getting in touch again being allowed to rest with myself, explaining why that should be so.
‘People can’t very well reach me. I’m always moving about. I hate staying in the same place for long. It has a damaging effect on work. I’ll ring you up or send a note. I rather enjoy the old-fashioned method of missive by hand of bearer.’
That sounded another piece of pure fantasy, bu
t increased familiarity with Trapnel, and the way he conducted his life, modified this view. He really did send notes; the habit by no means one of his oddest. That became clear during the next few months, when we met quite often, while preparations went forward for the publication of the first number of Fission, which was due at the end of the summer or beginning of autumn. Usually we had a drink together in one of his favourite pubs – as with Bagshaw, these were elaborately graded – and once he dined with us at home, staying till three in the morning, talking about himself, his girls and his writing. That was the first occasion when the Boris Karloff imitation went on record as indication that the best of the evening was over, the curtain should fall.
A passionate interest in writing, or merely his taste for discussing it, set Trapnel aside from many if not most authors, on the whole unwilling to risk disclosure of trade secrets, or regarding such talk as desecration of sacred mysteries. Trapnel’s attitude was nearer that of a businessman or scientist, never tired of discussing his job from a professional angle. That inevitably included difficulties with editors and publishers. Many writers find such relationships delicate, even aggravating. Trapnel was particularly prone to discord in that field. He had, for example, managed to get himself caught up in a legal tangle with the publication of a conte, before the appearance of the Camel. This long short story, to be published on its own by some small press, had not yet seen light owing to a contractual row. The story was left, as it were, in baulk; unproductive, unproduced, unread. There had apparently been trouble enough for Quiggin & Craggs to take over the rights of the Camel.
‘The next thing’s the volume of short stories,’ said Trapnel. ‘Then the novel I’m already working on. That’s really where my hopes are based. It’s going to be bigger stuff than the Camel. The question is whether Quiggin & Craggs have the sales organization to handle it properly.’
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