Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [66]
‘I warned you it wasn’t much good.’
This would mean embarrassment for Quiggin, if Trapnel had been unremittingly scathing. Coming on top of the ‘touch’, unfavourable comment from such a source would make Kydd more resentful than ever. However, that was primarily Quiggin’s worry. So far as I was concerned the juggernaut of critical opinion must be allowed to take its irrefragable course. If too fervent worshippers, like Kydd, were crushed to powder beneath the pitiless wheels of its car, nothing could be done. Only their own adoration of the idol made them so vulnerable. Trapnel was specially contemptuous of Kydd’s attempts at eroticism. To be fair, Sweetskin was in due course the object of prosecution, so presumably someone found the book erotic, but Trapnel became almost frenzied in his expostulations to the contrary. It was then suddenly revealed that Trapnel was in the middle of a row with Quiggin & Craggs.
‘I thought you got on so well with Ada?’
Ada Leintwardine dealt with Trapnel in ordinary contacts with the firm. She did not control disposal of money – there Quiggin was called in – but questions of production, publicity, all such matters passed through her hands. Book production, as it happened, owing to shortage of paper and governmental restrictions of one kind or another, was at the lowest ebb in its history at this period. A subject upon which Trapnel held strong views, this potential area of difference might have led to trouble. Ada always smoothed things over. After the honeymoon following the transfer of Camel Ride to the Tomb, Trapnel and Craggs scarcely bothered to conceal the lack of sympathy they felt for one another. It looked as if Quiggin had now been swept into embroilment by Trapnel’s tendency to get on bad terms with all publishers and editors.
In this connexion, Ada was an example of Trapnel’s exemption from the need to captivate every woman with whom he came in contact. He would not necessarily have captivated Ada had he tried. Nothing was less likely. The point was that he did not try. He always emphasized his amicable relations with her, how much he preferred these to be on a purely business basis. This proved no more than that Ada was not Trapnel’s sort of woman, Trapnel not Ada’s sort of man, but, for someone who liked running other people’s lives so much as Ada, to get on with Trapnel, who liked running his own, was certainly a recommendation for tact in doing business.
‘Ada’s all right. She’s a grand girl. It isn’t Ada who gets me down. She’s always on my side. It’s Craggs who’s impossible. I feel pretty sure of that. He makes trouble in the background.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Influencing JG.’
‘Bin Ends went quite well?’
‘All right. They’ve been looking at the first few chapters of Profiles in String – provisional title. I want some money while I’m writing it. I can’t live on air.’
‘Surely they’ll advance something on what you’ve shown them?’
‘They’ve given me a bit already, but I’ve got to exist while I write the bloody book.’
‘You mean they won’t unbelt any more?’
‘I may have to approach another publisher.’
‘You’re under contract?’
‘They like the new book all right, what there is. Like it very much. If they won’t see reason, I may have to put the matter in the hands of my solicitors.’
Trapnel tapped the skull against the table. Talk about his solicitors always meant a highly nervous state. Even at the time of the monumental entanglement of the conte, it was doubtful whether legal processes had ever been carried further than consultation with old Tim Clipthorpe, one of the seasoned habitués of The Hero, his face covered with crimson blotches, who had been struck off the roll in the year the Titanic went down, as he was always telling any adjacent toper who would listen. In any case, Trapnel gave the impression that, as publishing rows go, this was not a specially serious one. Even if it were, he could hardly have brought a fellow-writer, not a particularly close friend, to shiver in the boreal chills of The Hero’s saloon bar merely to confirm the parsimony of publishers; still less to listen to a critical onslaught against the amateurish pornography and slipshod prose of Alaric Kydd. Even Trapnel