Anthony Powell

 A Question of Upbringing 

About the house he was more noticeable than in the open air, because his voice was pitched high and he articulated poorly: as if tongue were too big for his mouth. 

This delivery made his words always appear to protest, a manner of speaking almost predictable from his face. In addition to that distinctly noisy manner of utterance, thick rubber reinforcements on soles and heels caused his boot~ he wore boots more often than what Stringham used to call ‘Widmerpool’s good sensible shoes’—to squeal incessantly: their shrill rhythmic bursts of sound, limited in compass like the notes of a barbaric orchestra, giving warning of his approach along the linoleum of distant passages; their sullen whining dirge seeming designed to express in musical terms the mysteries of an existence of toil and abnegation lived apart from the daily life of the tribe. Perhaps he sounds a grotesque and conspicuous figure. In excess, Widmerpool was neither. He had his being, like many others, in obscurity. The gap in age caused most of my knowledge of him to have come second-hand; and, in spite of this abrupt realisation of him as a person that took place on that winter evening, he would have remained a dim outline to me if he had not at an earlier date, and before my own arrival, made himself already memorable, as a new boy, by wearing the wrong kind of overcoat. 

At this distance of time I cannot remember precisely what sort of an overcoat Widmerpool was said to have worn in the first instance. Stories about it had grown into legend: so much so that even five or six years later you might still occasionally hear an obtrusive or inappropriate garment referred to as ‘a Widmerpool’; and Templer, for example, would sometimes say: ‘I am afraid I’m wearing rather Widmerpool socks today’, or, ‘I’ve bought a wonderfully Widmerpool tie to go home in’. My impression is that the overcoat’s initial deviation from normal was slight, depending on the existence or absence of a belt at the back, the fact that the cut was singleor double-breasted, or, again, irregularity may have had something to do with the collar; perhaps the cloth, even, was of the wrong colour or texture. 

As a matter of fact the overcoat was only remarkable in itself as a vehicle for the comment it aroused, insomuch that an element in Widmerpool himself had proved indigestible to the community. An overcoat (which never achieved the smallest notoriety) belonging to a boy called Offord whose parents lived in Madeira, where they had possibly purchase the garment, was indeed once pointed out to me as ‘very lik, Widmerpool’s’. There was on no occasion the slightes question of Widmerpool being bullied, or even seriously ragged about the matter. On the contrary, his deviation seems scarcely to have been mentioned to him, except by cruder spirits: the coat becoming recognised almog immediately as a traditionally ludicrous aspect of every. day life. Years later, if you questioned his contemporaries on the subject, they were vague in their answers, and would only laugh and say that he wore the coat for a couple of terms; and then, by the time winter came round again, he was found to possess an overcoat of a more conventional Sort. . 

This overcoat gave Widmerpool a lasting notoriety which his otherwise unscintillating career at school could never wholly dispel. How fully he was aware of this reputation it was hard to say. His behaviour certainly indicated that he hoped for more substantial credit with other people than to be known solely on account of a few months gives over to out-of-the-way dress. If such was his aim, he was unsuccessful; 

Buyer's Market

Accumulations of unrelated objects brought together for auction acquire, in their haphazard manner, a certain dignity of their own: items not to be tolerated in any inhabited dwelling finding each its own level in these expansive, anonymous caverns, where, making no claim to individual merit, odds and ends harmonise quietly with each other, and with the general sobriety of background. 

Such precincts have something of museums about them, the roving crowd on the whole examining the assembled relics with an expert, unselfconscious intensity, not entirely commercial or acquisitive. 

On these particular premises almost every man-mad thing seemed represented. Comparatively new mowing machines: scabbardless and rusty cavalry sabres: ebony fragments of African fetish: a nineteenth-century type writer, poised uncertainly on metal stilts in the midst of a tea-set in Liverpool ware, the black-and-white landscapes of its design irreparably chipped. Several pillows and bolsters covered with the Union Jack gave a disturbing hint that, somewhere beneath, a corpse awaited burial with military honours. Farther off, high rolls of linoleum, coloured blue, green and pink, were ranged against the wall like pillars, a Minoan colonnade from which wicker arm-chairs and much-used pieces of luggage formed a semicircle. Within this open space, placed rather like an emblem arranged for worship, stood the washstand round which the pictures were grouped. On its marble top rested an empty bird-cage, two men-at-arms in lead, probably German, and a dogeared pile of waltz music. In front of a strip of Axminster carpet, displayed like faded tapestry from the side of a nearby wardrobe in pitch pine, a fourth painting stood upside down. 

&

 He was a great believer in insisting absolutely upon the minute observance by others of his own wishes.

&

Finally, we were all left standing in the centre of the court beside Monsieur Orn, who had limited himself throughout the commotion almost entirely to monosyllables. He now began to speak in a deep, strident voice, which after a minute or two showed signs of shaking with emotion. At first Widmerpool and I were unable to grasp the root of the trouble, partly because Monsieur Lundquist’s lobbing technique was sufhciently common for none of the rest of us specially to have noticed it that afternoon: partly because at that age I was not yet old enough to be aware of the immense rage that can be secreted in the human heart by cumulative minor irritation.

&

But suddenly as I hung up the receiver—think ing that perhaps I had left Short rather ruthlessly in the lurch so far as his evening was concerned—I found myself wondering whether I was still in love. Barbara’s voice had sounded so peremptory, and it was clear that someone else had failed her at the last moment. In that there was, of course, nothing to be taken reasonably amiss. Obviously I could not expect to sit next to her at dinner every night of our lives—unless I married her; perhaps not even then. And yet my heart seemed a shade lighter. Was the fever passing? I was myself still barely conscious of its declension. I had not at that time met Barnby, nor had opportunity to digest one of his favourite maxims: ‘A woman always overplays her hand.’ 

&

As I have already said of Mrs. Andriadis’s party, such latitudes are entered by a door through which there is rarely if ever a return; and, in rather the same manner, that night at Mr. Deacon’s certain matters seemed to crystallise. Perhaps this crystallisation had something to do with the presence there of Members and Quiggin, though they themselves were in agreement as to the displeasure they both felt in the company assembled. 

‘You must admit,’ said Members, looking round the room, ‘it all looks rather like that picture in the Tate, of the Sea giving up the Dead that were in It. I can’t think why Mona insisted on coming.’ 

Quiggin concurred in finding Mr. Deacon’s guests altogether unacceptable, at the same time paying suitable commendation to the aptness of the pictorial allusion.

&

While I was making some temporising answer to these reassurances on Mrs. Widmerpool’s part regarding her inclination towards literature, Miss Walpole-Wilson was announced, who excused her lateness on the grounds of the chronic irregularity of the bus service from Chelsea, where her flat was situated. She was wearing a mackintosh, of which, for some reason, she had refused to divest herself in the hall; exemplifying in this manner a curious rai common to some persons of wilful nature, whose egotism seems often to make them unwilling, even incapable, of shedding anything of themselves until they can feel that they have safely reached their goal. She now removed this waterproof, folding and establishing it upon a chair—an act watched by her hostess with a fixed smile that might have signihed disapproval—revealing that she, too, was wearing a richly-coloured coat. It was made of orange, black, and gold silk: a mandarin’s coat, so she explained, that Sir Gavin had given her years before. 

The Acceptance World

Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be. 

&

I intend no cheap cynicism,’ Barnby said. ‘It is merely that in print the truth is not credible for those who have not thought deeply of the matter.’ 

‘That is true of almost everything.’ 

‘To some extent. But painting, for example—where women are concerned—is quite different from writing. In painting you can state everything there is to be said on the subject. In other words, the thing is treated purely gsthetically, almost scientifically. Writers always seem to defer to the wishes of the women themselves.’ 

‘So do painters. What about Reynolds or Boucher?’ 

‘Of course, of course,’ said Barnby, whose capacity for disregarding points made against him would have supplied the foundation for a dazzling career at the Bar. ‘But in writing—perhaps, as you say, chiefly writing in this country —there is no equivalent, say, of Renoir’s painting. Renoir did not think that all women’s flesh was Jiterally a material like pink satin. He used that colour and texture as a convention to express in a simple manner certain pictorial ideas of his own about women. In fact he did so in order to get on with the job in other aspects of his picture. I never find anything like that in a novel.’ 

‘You find plenty of women with flesh like that sitting in the Ritz.’ 

‘Maybe. And I can paint them. But can you write about them ?? 

No real tradition of how women behave exists in English Writing. In France there is at least a good rough and ready Convention, perhaps not always correct—riddled with every form of romanticism—but at least a pattern to which a Writer can work. A French novelist may conform with the convention, or depart from it. His readers know, more of less, which he is doing. Here, every female character ha to be treated empirically.’ 

‘Well, after all, so does every woman,’ said Barnby another of whose dialectical habits was suddenly to switch round and argue against himself. ‘One of the troubles, | think, is that there are too many novelists like St. John Clarke,’ 

‘But novelists of the first rank have not always been attracted to women physically.’ 

If of the first rank,’ said Barnby, ‘they may rise above tt If anything less, abnormal novelists are, I believe, largel responsible for some of the extraordinary ideas that get disseminated about women and their behaviour. 

&

The meal passed off, therefore, with more success than might have been expected from such oddly assorted company. I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary. This party’s singular composition was undoubtedly enhanced by the commonplace nature of its surroundings. At the same time it was evident that the Templers themselves saw nothing in the least out-of-the-way about the guests collected round their table for Sunday luncheon 

&

But now everything is “bourgeois ~ Liberalism, I have no doubt, most of all. As a matter of fact, his politics were the only liberal thing about him.’ 

‘And it began as soon as he met Quiggin?’ 

I first noticed the change when he persuaded me to join in what he called “collective action on the part of writers and artists’*—going to meetings to protest against Manchuria and so on. I agreed, first of all, simply to humour him. It was just as well I did, as a matter of fact, because it led indirectly to another job when he turned his back on me. You know, what St. J. really wants is a son. He wants to be a father without having a wife.’ 

‘I thought everyone always tried to avoid that.’ 

‘In the Freudian sense,’ said Members, impatiently, ‘his nature requires a father-son relationship. Unfortunately, the situation becomes a little too life-like, and one is faced with a kind of artificially constructed Oedipus situation.’ 

‘Can’t you re-convert him from Marxism to psychoanalysis?’ 

Members looked at me fixedly. 

‘St. J. has always pooh-poohed the subconscious,’ he said. 

&

When you are in love with someone, their life, past, “ present and future, becomes in a curious way part of your life; and yet, at the same time, since two separate human entities in fact remain, you merely carry your own prejudices into another person’s imagined existence; not even into their ‘real’ existence, because only they themselves can estimate what their ‘real’ existence has been. Indeed, the situation might be compared with that to be experienced in due course in the army where an officer is responsible for the conduct of troops stationed at a post too distant from him for the exercise of any effective control. 

&

‘But not in the future,’ he said, breathing inward hard. ‘{’m changing my trade. 

‘<j heard rumours.’ 

‘Of what?’ 

‘That you were joining the Acceptance World.’ 

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ 

Widmerpool sniggered. 

‘And you?’ he asked. 

‘Nothing much.’ 

‘Still producing your art books? It was art books, wasn’t ? 

. ‘Yes—and I wrote a book myself.’ 

‘Indeed, Nicholas. What sort of a book?’ 

‘A novel, Kenneth.’ 

‘Has it been published?’ 

‘A few months ago.’ 

‘Oh.’ 

His ignorance of novels and what happened about them was evidently profound. That was, after all, reasonable enough. Perhaps it was just lack of interest on his part. Whatever the reason, he looked not altogether approving, and did not enquire the name of the book. However, probably feeling a moment later that his reply may have sounded a shade flat, he added: ‘Good ... good, rather in the manner of Le Bas himself, when faced with an activity of which he was uninformed and suspicious, though at the same time unjustified in categorically forbidding. 

‘As a matter of fact I am making some notes for a book myself,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Quite a different sort of book from yours, of course. So we may be authors together. Do you always come to these dinners?