Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [12]
The cognomen dated back to the old Savoy Hill days of the BBC, though we had not known each other in that very remote period. A year or two older than myself, Bagshaw had been an occasional drinking companion of Moreland’s. They shared a taste for white port. Possibly Bagshaw had even served a brief stint as music critic. The memory persisted – at our first encounter – of Bagshaw involved in an all but disastrous incident on top of a bus, when we were going home after Moreland had been conducting a performance of Pelleas and Melisande. If Bagshaw, at no moment in his past, had ever written music criticism, that must have been the sole form of journalism he had omitted to tackle. We had never seen much of each other, nor met for seven or eight years. Bagshaw’s war turned out to have been waged in the Public Relations branch of the RAF. He had grown the moustache in India. Like a lot of acquaintances encountered at this period, his talk had become noticeably more authoritative in tone, product of the war itself and its demands, or just the ponderous onset of middle age. At the same time he had surrendered none of his old wheedling, self-deprecatory manner, which had procured him a wide variety of jobs, extracted him from equally extensive misadventures. He was in the best of spirits.
‘The subcontinent has its moments, Nicholas. It was a superlative experience, in spite of the Wingco’s foul temper. I had to tell that officer I was not prepared to be the Gunga Din of Royal Air Force Public Relations in India, even at the price of being universally accepted as the better man. There were a lot of rows, but never mind. There was much to amuse too.’
This clearcut vignette of relations with his Wing-Commander defined an important aspect of Bagshaw’s character, one of which he was very proud.
‘You’re a professional rebel, Bagshaw,’ some boss-figure had remarked when sacking him.
That was true in a sense, though not in such an entirely simple sense as might be supposed at first sight. All the same, Bagshaw had obtained more than one subsequent job merely on the strength of repeating that estimate of himself. The label gave potential employers an enjoyable sense of risk. Some of them lived to regret their foolhardiness.
‘After all, I warned him at the start,’ Bagshaw used to say.
The roots of this revolutionary spirit lay a long way back. Did he not boast that on school holidays he had plastered the public lavatories of Cologne with anti-French stickers at the time of the occupation of the Rhineland? There were all sorts of later insurgent activities, ‘chalkings’, marchings, making policemen’s horses shy at May Day celebrations, exertions which led, logically enough, to association with Gypsy Jones. Bagshaw was even reckoned to have been engaged to Gypsy at one time. His own way of life, the fact that she herself was an avowed Party Member, made it likely he too had been ‘CP’ in his day, possibly up to the Spanish Civil War. At that period Quiggin used to talk a lot about him, and had probably learnt a good deal from him Then Bagshaw was employed on some sort of eyewitness reporting assignment in Spain. Things went wrong. No one ever knew quite what happened. There had been one of Bagshaw’s rows. He came back. Some people said he was lucky to get home. Politically speaking, life was never the same again. Bagshaw had lost his old enthusiasms. Afterwards, when drunk, he would attempt to expound his changed standpoint, never with great clarity, though he would go on by the hour together to friends like Moreland, who detested talking politics.
‘There was a chap called Max Stirner … You’ve probably none of you ever heard of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum … You know, The Ego and his Own … Well, I don’t really know German either, but Stirner believed it would be all right if only we could get away from the tyranny of abstract ideas… He taught in a girls’ school. Probably what gave him the notion. Abstract ideas not a bit of use in a girls’ school…’
Whatever Bagshaw thought about abstract ideas when drunk – he never reached a stage when unable to argue