The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [27]
For a second I wondered whether he were aware that something was afoot; but, when he turned to help Mona with the bottles and glasses, I felt sure from their faces that neither had given a thought to any such thing.
3
EARLY in the morning, snow was still drifting from a darkened sky across the diamond lattices of the window-panes; floating drearily down upon the white lawns and grey muddy paths of a garden flanked by pines and fir trees. Through these coniferous plantations, which arose above thick laurel bushes, appeared at no great distance glimpses of two or three other houses similar in style to the one in which I found myself; the same red brick and gables, the same walls covered with ivy or Virginia creeper.
This was, no doubt, a settlement of prosperous business men; a reservation, like those created for indigenous inhabitants, or wild animal life, in some region invaded by alien elements: a kind of refuge for beings unfitted to battle with modern conditions, where they might live their own lives, undisturbed and unexploited by an aggressive outer world. In these confines the species might be saved from extinction. I felt miles away from everything, lying there in that bedroom: almost as if I were abroad. The weather was still exceedingly cold. I thought over a conversation I had once had with Barnby.
‘Has any writer ever told the truth about women?’ he had asked.
One of Barnby’s affectations was that he had read little or nothing, although, as a matter of fact, he knew rather thoroughly a small, curiously miscellaneous collection of books.
‘Few in this country have tried.’
‘No one would believe it if they did.’
‘Possibly. Nor about men either, if it comes to that.’
‘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 aesthetically, 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 literally 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 or less, which he is doing. Here, every female character has 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, I 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 it. If anything less, homosexual novelists are, I believe, largely responsible for some of the extraordinary ideas that get disseminated about women and their behaviour.’
Barnby’s sententious tone had already indicated to me that he was himself entangled in some new adventure. Those utterances, which Mr. Deacon used to call