A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [106]
“Of course, if I had a job like that, I should probably say something one day that wouldn’t go down,” he commented, rather bitterly. “I’ve never had the opportunity to learn the way successful people like to be treated.”
“St. J. knows your work,” said Members, with quiet emphasis. “I brought it to his attention.”
He watched Quiggin closely after saying this. Once more I wondered whether there was any truth in Sillery’s story, never verified in detail, to the effect that the two of them lived almost next-door in the same Midland town. In spite of Quiggin’s uncouth, drab appearance, and the new spruceness of Members, there could be no doubt that they had something in common. As Quiggin’s face relaxed at these complimentary words, I could almost have believed that they were cousins. Quiggin did not comment on the subject of this awareness of his own status as a writer now attributed to St. John Clarke, but, in friendly exchange, he began to question Members about his books, in process of being written or already in the press: projected works that appeared to be several in number—at least three, possibly four—consisting of poems, a novel, a critical study, together with something else, more obscure in form, the precise nature of which I have forgotten, as it never appeared.
“And you, J.G.?” asked Members, evidently not wishing to appear grudging.
“I am trying to remain one of the distinguished few who have not written a novel,” said Quiggin, lightly. “The Vox Populi may be doing a fragment of autobiography of mine in the spring. Otherwise I just keep a few notes—odds and ends I judge of interest. I suppose they will find their way into print in due course. Everything does these days.”
“No streams of consciousness, I hope,” said Members, with a touch of malignity. “But the Vox Populi isn’t much of a publishing house, is it? Will they pay a decent advance?”
“I get so sick of all the ‘fine’ typography you see about,” said Quiggin, dismissing the matter of money. “I’ve told Craggs to send it out to a jobbing printer, just as he would one of his pamphlets—print it on lavatory paper, if he likes. At least Craggs has the right political ideas.”
“I question if there is much of the commodity you mention to be found on the premises of the Vox Populi,” said Members, giving his thin, grating laugh. “But no doubt that format would ensure a certain sale. Don’t forget to send me a copy, so that I can try and say something about it somewhere.”
In leaving behind the kind of shell common to all undergraduates, indeed to most young men, they had, in one sense, taken more definite shape by each establishing conspicuously his own individual identity, thereby automatically drawing farther apart from each other. Regarded from another angle, however, Quiggin and Members had come, so it appeared, closer together by their concentration, in spite of differences of approach, upon the same, or at least very similar, aims. They could be thought of, perhaps, as representatives, if not of different cultures, at least of opposed traditions; Quiggin, a kind of abiding prototype of discontent against life, possessing at the same time certain characteristics peculiar to the period: Members, no less dissatisfied than Quiggin, but of more academic derivation, perhaps even sharing some of Mr. Deacon’s intellectual origins.
Although he had already benefited from the tenets of what was possibly a dying doctrine, Members was sharp enough to be speedily jettisoning appurtenances, already deteriorated, of an outmoded aestheticism. Quiggin, with his old clothes and astringent manner, showed a similar sense of what the immediate future intimated.