Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [12]
‘I’d like to ask you about this girl – the castrating one.’
‘Pamela Widmerpool?’
‘I’ve been spun so many yarns about her.’
The stories he had been told were, on the whole, garbled in a manner to make the true circumstances of Trapnel’s life all but unrecognizable. It was in any case a field where accuracy was hard to come by. At the same time, if Gwinnett’s information had percolated through misinformed sources, he himself showed unexpected flashes of insight. Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded. Besides, what could be called unreservedly true when closely examined, especially about Trapnel? The stories told to Gwinnett became notably blurred in their inferences about Pamela Widmerpool. Trapnel’s relationship with her emerged as little more than a love affair that had gone wrong, something that might have happened to anybody. Naturally, in one sense, it was a love affair that had gone wrong, but subtlety was required to express the unusual nature of that love affair, its start, progress, termination. All these had been conveyed with such lack of finesse that no kind of justice was done to the exceptional nature of those concerned: Pamela: Widmerpool: Trapnel himself. For Gwinnett, too, there existed the seldom remittent difficulty of translating the personalities and doings of English material into American terms.
The impression these reports had left with him was of a man’s luck – Trapnel’s luck – having suddenly, meaninglessly, taken a turn for the worse. From being, in his way, a notable writer, a promising career ahead of him, Trapnel had been suddenly, inexorably, struck down by misfortune, although leading much the same sort of life as he had always led, with girls not so wholly different from Pamela, before he had linked himself to her. Sometimes Gwinnett hedged a little, but that main interpretation was the one he was prepared, even if unwillingly, to accept.
‘Trapnel’s crack-up is easy for an American to understand. If you don’t mind my saying so, to find a writer of even your age on his feet, and working, is not all that common with us.’
‘Some of the violent consuming nervous American energy was characteristic of Trapnel too.’
‘He’d no American blood?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘I’d like to think he had.’
‘His father was a jockey in Egypt. If Trapnel had written about that we’d have a completer picture.’
‘Completion was one of the things Trapnel aimed at, you said – the idea of the Complete Man. Did he achieve some of that? I think so.’
‘Vigny says the poet is not a sport of nature, his destiny is the human predicament.’
‘And the concept was challenged by this girl – as it were invalidated.’
Gwinnett thought about that for a moment, almost as if he were hoping to rebut his own conjecture. Then he laughed, and changed his tone.
‘It was the god Hercules deserting Antony.’
‘As a matter of fact the god Hercules returned in Trapnel’s case. There was music in the air again, though only briefly.’
Gwinnett had heard more misleading accounts. The best in existence was probably Malcolm Crowding’s. It was at least first-hand. No doubt Crowding’s story had been a little ornamented with the passage of time, no worse than that. The basic facts were that Trapnel had found himself in possession of a hundred pounds. No one argued about that, a fact in itself sufficiently extraordinary. What was additionally astonishing, almost a miracle, was the sum being in notes. A cheque might have brought quite different consequences. Where opinion chiefly differed was in the provenance of the money. It was usually designated, rather pedestrianly, as payment for forgotten ‘rights’, which had finally borne fruit in some medium functioning in