Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [80]
‘Isbister was beloved of the gods, Mark,’ he had cried aloud, looking up with a haggard face from The Times of New Year’s Day and its list of awards, ‘R.A. before he was forty-five – Gold Medallist of the Paris Salon – Diploma of Honour at the International Exhibition at Amsterdam – Commander of the Papal Order of Pius IX – refused a knighthood. Think of it, Mark, a man the King would have delighted to honour. What recognition have I had compared with these?’
‘Why did Isbister refuse a knighthood?’ Members had asked.
‘To spite his wife.’
‘That was it, was it?’
‘Those photographs the Press resurrected of Morwenna standing beside him looking out to sea,’ said St John Clarke, ‘they were antediluvian – diluvian possibly. It was the Flood they were looking at, I expect. They’d been living apart for years when he died. Of course Isbister himself said he had decided worldly honours were unbefitting an artist. That didn’t prevent him from telling everyone of the offer. Absolutely everyone. He had it both ways.’
In those days Members was still anxious to soothe his employer.
‘Well, you’ve had a lot of enjoyable parties and country house visits to look back on, St J.,’ he said. ‘Rather a different life from Isbister’s, but a richer one in my eyes.’
‘One week-end at Dogdene twenty years ago,’ St John Clarke had answered bitterly. ‘Forced to play croquet with Lord Lonsdale … Two dinners at the Huntercombes’, both times asked the same night as Sir Horrocks Rusby …’
This was certainly inadequate assessment of St John Clarke’s social triumphs, which, for a man of letters, had been less fruitless than at that moment his despair presented them. Members, knowing what was expected of him, brushed away with a smile such melancholy reminiscences.
‘But it will come …’ he said.
‘It will come, Mark. As I sit here, the Nobel Prize will come.’
‘Alas,’ said Members, concluding the story, ‘it never does.’
As things fell out, the two most alert articles to deal with St John Clarke were written, ironically enough, by Members and Quiggin respectively, both of whom spared a few crumbs of praise for their former master, treating him at no great length as a ‘personality’ rather than a writer: Members, in the weekly of which he was assistant literary editor, referring to ‘an ephemeral, if almost painfully sincere, digression into what was for him the wonderland of jauviste painting’; Quiggin, in a similar, rather less eminent publication to which he contributed when hard up, guardedly emphasising the deceased’s ‘underlying, even when patently bewildered, sympathy with the Workers’ Cause’. No other journal took sufficient interest in the later stages of St John Clarke’s career to keep up to date about these conflicting aspects of his final decade. They spoke only of his deep love for the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens and his contributions to Queen Mary’s Gift Book. Appraisal of his work unhesitatingly placed Fields of Amaranth as the peak of his achievement, with E’en the Longest River or The Heart is Highland – opinion varied – as a poor second. The Times Literary Supplement found ‘the romances of Renaissance Italy and the French Revolution smacked of Wardour Street, the scenes from fashionable life in the other novels tempered with artificiality, the delineations of poverty less realistic than Gissing’s’.
I was surprised by an odd feeling of regret that St John Clarke was gone. Even if an indifferent writer, his removal from the literary scene was like the final crumbling of a well-known landmark; unpleasing perhaps, at the same time possessed of a deserved renown for having withstood demolition for so long. The anecdotes Members and Quiggin put round about him had given St John Clarke a certain solidity in my mind; more, in a way, than his own momentary emergence at Lady Warminster’s. This glimpse of him, then total physical removal, brought home, too, the blunt postscript of death. St John Clarke had merely looked ill at Hyde Park Gardens; now, like John Peel, he had gone far, far away, with his pen and his press-cuttings in the morning; become one of those names to which the date of birth and death may be added in parentheses, as their owners speed to oblivion from out of reference books and