Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [14]
All this suggests Bagshaw had a brilliant journalistic career ahead of him, when, as he described it, he set out ‘with the heart of a boy so whole and free’. Somehow it never came off. A long heritage of awkward incidents accounted for much of the furtiveness of Bagshaw’s manner. There had been every sort of tribulation. Jobs changed; wives (two at least) came and went; once DT was near at hand; from time to time there were periods ‘on the waggon’; all the while legend accumulating round this weaker side, which Bagshaw’s nickname celebrated. Its origin was lost in the mists of the past, but the legend emphasized aspects of Bagshaw that could make him a liability.
There were two main elucidations. One asserted that, the worse for drink, trying to abstract a copy of The GoldenTreasury from a large glass-fronted bookcase in order to verify a quotation required for a radio programme, Bagshaw overturned on himself this massive piece of furniture. As volume after volume descended on him, it was asserted he made the comment: ‘Books do furnish a room.’
Others had a different story. They would have it that Bagshaw, stark naked, had spoken the words conversationally as he approached the sofa on which lay, presumably in the same state, the wife of a well-known dramatic critic (on duty at the theatre that night appraising the First Night of The Apple Cart), a clandestine meeting having reached emotional climax in her husband’s book-lined study. Bagshaw was alleged to have spoken the words, scarcely more than muttered them – a revolutionary’s tribute to bourgeois values – as he rapidly advanced towards his prey: ‘ Books do furnish a room.’
The lady, it could have been none other, was believed later to have complained to a third party of lack of sensibility on Bagshaw’s part in making such an observation at such a juncture. Whichever story were true – probably neither, the second had all the flavour of having been worked over, if not invented, by Moreland – the nickname stuck.
‘There’ll be a stampede of dons’ wives,’ said Bagshaw, as we watched the train come in ‘Let’s be careful. We don’t want to be injured for life.’
We found a compartment, crowded enough, but no impediment to Bagshaw’s flow of conversation.
‘You know, Nicholas, whenever I come away from this place, I’m always rather glad I skipped a novitiate at a university. My university has been life. Many a time I’ve put that in an article. Tell me, have you read a novel called Camel Ride to the Tomb?’
‘I thought it good – who is X. Trapnel? Somebody else mentioned him.’
‘The best first novel since before the war,’ said Bagshaw.
‘Not that that’s in itself particularly high praise. Trapnel was a clerk in one of our New Delhi outfits – the people who used to hand out those pamphlets about Civics and The Soviet Achievement, all that sort of thing. I was always rapt in admiration at the way the Party arranged to have its propaganda handled at an official level. As a matter of fact Trapnel himself wasn’t at all interested in politics, but he was always in trouble with the authorities, and I managed to help him one way and another.’
Although not in the front rank of literary critics – there might have been difficulty in squeezing him into an already overcrowded and grimacing back row – Bagshaw had reason in proclaiming Trapnel’s one of the few promising talents thrown up by the war; in contrast with the previous one, followed by no marked luxuriance in the arts.
‘Then he got a poisoned foot. Trapnel was a low medical category anyway, that’s why he was doing the job at his age. He got shipped back to England. By the end of the war he’d winkled himself into a film unit.