The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [9]
His procrastination regarding the introduction had, therefore, nothing to do with pressure of work. Putting the Isbister task in its least idealistic and disinterested light, it would give him a chance to talk about himself, a perfectly legitimate treat he was as a rule unwilling to forgo. Friendship made him a suitable man for the job. Those who enjoy finding landmarks common to different forms of art might even have succeeded in tracing a certain similarity of approach tenuously relating the novels of St. John Clarke with the portrait painting of Isbister. The delay was, indeed, hard to explain.
There had been, however, various rumours recently current regarding changes supposedly taking place in St. John Clarke’s point of view. Lately, he had been seen at parties in Bloomsbury, and elsewhere, surrounded by people who were certainly not readers of his books. This was thought to show the influence of Members, who was said to be altering his employer’s outlook. Indeed, something suggesting a change of front in that quarter had been brought to my own notice in a very personal manner.
St. John Clarke had contributed an article to a New York paper in which he spoke of the younger writers of that moment. Amongst a rather oddly assorted collection of names, he had commented, at least by implication favourably, upon a novel of my own, published a month or two before—the ‘book’ to which Mrs. Erdleigh had referred. Latterly, St. John Clarke had rarely occupied himself with occasional journalism, and in print he had certainly never before shown himself well disposed towards a younger generation. His remarks, brief and relatively guarded though they had been, not unnaturally aroused my interest, especially because any recommendation from that quarter was so entirely unexpected. I found myself looking for excuses to cover what still seemed to me his own shortcomings as a novelist.
As I turned over these things in my mind, on the way to Barnby’s studio, it struck me that Barnby himself might be able to tell me something of St. John Clarke as a person; for, although unlikely that Barnby had read the novels, the two of them might well have met in the widely different circles Barnby frequented. I began to make enquiries soon after my arrival there.
Barnby rubbed his short, stubby hair, worn en brosse, which, with his blue overalls, gave him the look of a sommelier at an expensive French restaurant. By then we had known each other for several years. He had moved house more than once since the days when he had lived above Mr. Deacon’s antique shop, emigrating for a time as far north as Camden Town. Still unmarried, his many adventures with women were a perpetual topic between us. In terms of literature, Barnby might have found a place among Stendhal’s heroes, those power-conscious young men, anxious to achieve success with women without the banal expedient of ‘falling in love’: a state, of course, necessarily implying, on the part of the competitor, a depletion, if not entire abrogation, of ‘the will’. Barnby was, on the whole, more successful than his Stendhalian prototypes, and he was certainly often ‘in love’. All the same, he belonged in that group. Like Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he set store ‘upon what terms’ he possessed a woman, seeking a relationship in which sensuality merged with power, rather than engaging in their habitual conflict.
Like everyone else, at that moment, Barnby was complaining of ‘the slump’, although his own reputation as a painter had been rising steadily during the previous two or three years. The murals designed by him for the Donners-Brebner Building had received, one way and another, a great deal of public attention; the patronage of Sir Magnus Donners himself in this project having even survived Barnby