The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [67]
By the time these disturbing thoughts had descended on me, I had begun to near the bottom of the Gladstone bag. There was another layer of correspondence, this time in a green cardboard file, on the subject of a taxi-cab’s collision with a lorry, an accident with regard to which Uncle Giles had been subpoenaed as witness. It went into the waste-paper-basket, a case – as Moreland would have said – in which there was ‘nothing of the spirit’. That brought an end to the contents, except for a book. This was bound in grubby vellum, the letterpress of mauve ink, like that used by Albert in his correspondence. I glanced at the highly decorated capitals of the title page:
The Perfumed Garden
of the Sheik Nefzaoui
or
The Arab Art of Love
I had often heard of this work, never, as it happened, come across a copy. Uncle Giles was an unexpected vehicle to bring it to hand. The present edition –’Cosmopoli: 1886’ – was stated to be published ‘For Private Circulation Only’, the English translation from a French version of the sixteenth-century Arabic manuscript made by a ‘Staff Officer in the French Army in Algeria’.
I pictured this French Staff Officer sitting at his desk. The sun was streaming into the room through green latticed windows of Moorish design, an oil sketch by Fromentin or J. F. Lewis. Dressed in a light-blue frogged coatee and scarlet peg-topped trousers buttoning under the boot, he wore a pointed moustache and imperial. Beside him on the table stood his shako, high and narrowing to the plume, the white puggaree falling across the scabbard of his discarded sabre. He was absolutely detached, a man who had tasted the sensual pleasures of the Second Empire and Third Republic to their dregs, indeed, come to North Africa to escape such insistent banalities. Now, he was examining their qualities and defects in absolute calm. Here, with the parched wind blowing in from the desert, he had found a kindred spirit in the Sheik Nefzaoui, to whose sixteenth-century Arabic he was determined to do justice in the language of Racine and Voltaire. Perhaps that picture was totally wide of the mark: the reality quite another one. The Staff Officer was a family man, snatching a few minutes at his beloved translation between the endearments of his wife, the rompings of a dozen children… Rimbaud’s father, perhaps, who had served in North Africa, made translations from the Arabic… The ‘Rules and Discipline of War’ must in some degree have been relaxed to allow spare time for these literary labours. Possibly he worked only on leave. I turned the pages idly. The Sheik’s tone was authoritative, absolutely self-assured – for that reason, a trifle forbidding – the chapter headings enigmatic:
‘… Concerning Praiseworthy Men … Concerning Women who deserve to be Praised … Of Matters Injurious to the Act of Generation … On the Deceits and Treacheries of Women… Concerning Sundry Observations useful to Know for Men and Women …’
On the Deceits and Treacheries of Women? The whole subject was obviously very fully covered. Sincere and scholarly, there was also something more than a little oppressive about the investigation, moments when the author seemed to labour the point, to induce a feeling of surfeit in the reader. All the same, I felt rather ashamed of my own lack of appreciation, because I could see that much of the advice was good. Disinclination to continue reading I recognised as a basic unwillingness to face facts, rather than any innate fastidiousness to be regarded as a matter for self-congratulation. I felt greatly inferior to the French Staff Officer, whatever his personal condition, who saw this severely technical sociological study, by its nature aseptic, even chilling in deliberate avoidance of false sentiment and specious charm, as a refreshing antidote to Parisian canons of sensuality.