Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [63]
‘He seemed to enjoy it a great deal. I had never seen Gwinnett like that before. He became quite talkative afterwards, when we all had supper together.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘A King falls in love with his son’s girlfriend – that’s Celia, played by Polly – while the son himself is away at the wars. When the son returns, his father says the girl is dead. The King has really hidden Celia, and is trying to seduce her. As he has no success, he decides to administer a love potion. Unfortunately the love potion is drunk by the Humorous Lieutenant. In consequence the Lieutenant falls in love with the King, instead of Celia doing so.’
‘Did the Lieutenant’s exaggerated sense of humour cause him to drink the love philtre?’
‘It was accidental. He had been knocked out in a fight, and someone, thinking a bowl of wine was lying handy, gave him the love philtre as a pick-me-up. The incident is quite funny, but really has nothing to do with the play – like so many things that happen to oneself. As a neurotic figure, the Lieutenant is perhaps not altogether unlike Gwinnett.’
‘Possibly Gwinnett too should drink a love philtre?’
‘Gwinnett is going to risk much stronger treatment than that. Do you remember that Lord Widmerpool, after making that speech at the Magnus Donners, asked Gwinnett to come and see him? Widmerpool has returned to the charge, as to a visit, and Gwinnett is going to go.’
‘That sounds a little grisly.’
‘Precisely why Gwinnett is going to do it He wishes to have the experience. Widmerpool’s situation has recently become more than ever extraordinary. From being, in a comparatively quiet way, an encourager of dissidents and dropouts, the recent addition to his community of Scorpio Murtlock, the young man we talked about some little time ago, has greatly developed its potential. Murtlock provides a charismatic element, and apparently Widmerpool thinks there are immense power possibilities in the cult. He’s got enough money to back it, anyway for the moment.’
‘But surely it’s Murtlock’s cult, not Widmerpool’s.’
‘We shall see. Gwinnett thinks that a struggle for power is taking place. That is one of the things that interests him. Gwinnett’s angle on all this is that the cult, with its rites and hierarchies, is all as near as you can get nowadays to the gothicism of which he is himself writing. He has seen something of the semi-mystic dropout groups of his own country, but feels this one offers a more Jacobean setting, through certain of its special characteristics.’
‘Does Gwinnett approve or disapprove? I expect he doesn’t show his hand?’
‘On the contrary, Gwinnett disapproves. He talked quite a lot about his disapproval. As I understand it, one of the tenets of the cult is that Harmony, Power, Death, are all more or less synonymous – not Desire and Death, like Shakespeare. Gwinnett disapproves of Death being, so to speak, removed from the romantic associations of Love – his own approach, with which his book deals – to be prostituted to the vulgar purposes of Power – pseudo-magical power at that. At the same time he wants to examine the processes as closely as possible.’
‘Some might think it insensitive of Gwinnett, in the circumstances, to visit Widmerpool, even in the interests of seventeenth-century scholarship.’
‘On that question Widmerpool himself has made his own standpoint unambiguously clear by going out of his way to invite Gwinnett to come and see him. You said that Gwinnett, when writing about Trapnel, saw himself as Trapnel. Now Gwinnett, writing about gothic Jacobean plays, sees himself as a character in one of them. I regret to say that I shall not be in England when Gwinnett pays his visit to Widmerpool, and therefore won’t hear how things went – that is, if Gwinnett chooses to tell me.’
‘You’re taking a holiday?’
‘Polly and I may be going to get married. We’ve known each other for a long time now. In the light of the way we both earn a living, neither of us liked the idea of being