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By Root 7468 0

or Germany by some newly devised process. Apart from the fact that the Cubists were still very generally regarded as wild men, if not worse, certainly unwise to encourage, transactions that included overseas production always entailed risks not every publisher was prepared to take. That was where Tokenhouse came in. Tokenhouse did not mind an element of risk. His predisposition for certain forms of rebellion against a humdrum approach to life was one of his unexpected sides. He also derived pleasure from the thought of how much the series would annoy other publishers, not to mention booksellers. Then, at quite an early stage, something went wrong in connexion with the issue of the series. I did not remember exactly what upset the project, but it never went forward. There had been rather a row, money and tempers lost. I was in too subordinate a position at the time to be concerned, or greatly interested, except so far as being well disposed to ‘modern art’. There were other things to think about, better ones, it then seemed, the business aspects forgotten among elements more memorable.

Tokenhouse was still occupied when Glober arrived for his appointment. Negotiations on the matter of St John Clarke’s Introduction to The Art of Horace Isbister had just begun. St John Clarke was still haggling about payment. He was too well known a novelist to be dismissed out of hand, so Glober could not be received. The manager, with whom I shared a not over-luxurious office, was wrangling with a binder in the firm’s waiting-room, a cubicle from its austerity in any case unsuitable for reception of another publisher, especially an American one. Tokenhouse rang through on the house-telephone with instructions to hold Glober in play for the further few minutes required to dislodge St John Clarke. The room where the manager and I passed our days, its walls grimly lined with file copies, was almost as comfortless as the waiting-room, but Glober was shown in. From the moment he entered, there was no need to provide distraction from the frugality of the surroundings. Glober himself took charge. In a matter of seconds we seemed already on the friendliest of terms. That was Glober’s speciality. I made some apology for this delay after an appointment had been made.

‘Don’t worry. It’s great to draw breath. There’s a lot of running round in London. I didn’t get to bed till late last night.’

He sat down in the collapsed armchair, and looked about him.

‘You’ve got a real Dickensian place here.’

‘Bleak House?’

Glober laughed his quiet attractive laugh.

‘The Old Curiosity Shop,’ he said. ‘In the illustration.’

I supposed him thirty, possibly a year or two more, to my own twenty-two or twenty-three, but his self-confidence, maturity of manner, separated us by several decades. Unusually tall, incontrovertibly good-looking, Glober’s features – in the later words of Xenia Lilienthal – were those of a ‘young Byzantine emperor’. One saw what she meant. It showed she had taken in that aspect of him, in spite of her bad cold. His quietly forceful manner suggested a right to command, inexhaustible funds of stored up energy, overwhelming sophistication, limitless financial resource. At that age I did not notice a hard core of melancholy lurking beneath these assets. Perhaps in those days that side of his nature was better concealed. The instinct he so essentially possessed was getting on the right terms with everybody, no matter how transiently encountered. This intuitive impulse caused him to move from illustrating Dickens to pictures in general, the fact that he himself wanted to buy an Augustus John drawing before he left England. The gallery handling John’s work had shown him nothing he fancied. Had I any ideas? I suggested direct approach to the painter himself, all the time feeling there was some quite easy answer, which Glober’s flow of questions had put from my head.

‘John’s out of the country. If I could meet some private person that had a drawing he was willing to trade.’

Then I remembered such an opportunity had been announced the previous week.