Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [15]
‘“No,” he said. “Of course I haven’t got a stick any longer, have I? I sacrificed it. Nor a bloody novel. I haven’t got that either.”
‘Then he heeled over into the gutter. Everybody thought he was drunk.’
At this point in the narrative Crowding would pause, his face apt to twitch so violently that the more sensitive of his listeners had to turn away. He would then slow up the tempo of the narrative for its termination.
‘Drunk? They were sadly in error. I watched Trapnel the whole time we were in the saloon bar together. He consumed exactly one bloody double Three Star in the course of the whole bloody time he was in The Hero.’
After adding this comment as a kind of tailpiece to his chronicle, Crowding always stopped, and glared round like a man expecting contradiction of the most vigorous kind. Contradiction never came. Even Evadne Clapham was silent. Whether that was owed to the force of Crowding’s recital, or because most of the audience usually knew Trapnel had never been a great drinker, was uncertain. The surmise that alcohol in itself played no great part in his final collapse was no doubt correct, though he may have allowed himself that night an unwise admixture of drink and ‘pills’; simply too many pills. Either could have resulted from finding himself unexpectedly in funds. An inner fatigue, utter moral exhaustion, had to be taken into consideration too. He was removed from the street in due course, to a hospital, dying an hour or two later. By the time the ambulance arrived, the near-criminal potential of the traditional Trapnel entourage had extracted from his pockets all remnants, if such there were, of the hundred pounds. He died quite penniless. At that particular juncture, he appeared to be living alone. That probably explained getting his hands on the money. Crowding never mentioned this last fact, but he would change his tone, from pub crony to academic critic, as he drew to an end.
‘I respected the man more than his work. He became a legend in his own lifetime. He often said so himself, and with truth. Sometimes my students ask me to tell them about him – and did you once see Trapnel plain? I reply “I did”, and often stopped and spoke with him. At the same time I am put in a quandary. These young people find the intellectual climate of Camel Ride to the Tomb unsatisfying. I cannot in all fairness blame them. Where, they say, is the social conscience? I have to reply, they look in vain.’
At the time of his death, Trapnel’s oeuvre, so far as I knew, consisted of the Camel; the selection of short stories published as Bin Ends; a fair amount of additional stories, never yet collected, some dating back to his early days as a writer before the war (when he had kept himself alive by all sorts of odd employments); a miscellany of occasional pieces, criticism (some of it quite good), articles, parodies, stuff written for papers like Fission, and never brought together; finally the conte (unpublished in Trapnel’s lifetime on account of some legal battle over ‘rights’) Dogs Have No Uncles. A work in Trapnel’s liveliest manner, almost long enough to be called a novel, its posthumous appearance with Salvidge’s Introduction had done something to prevent Trapnel’s reputation from slumping too severely after his death. All this did not constitute a large aggregate of work, but, together with what was available in other material, should make a respectable critical biography. In any case, Trapnel’s was still an unexplored period. Gwinnett added another item.
‘Did you know he kept a Commonplace Book during his last years?’
‘Where is it?’
‘I have it