Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [32]
That was the last I saw of Glober. His firm fell into liquidation the following year. Several go-ahead American publishing houses went bust about that time. The fact was regarded as an amelioration of whatever row had taken place about the Cubists, indicating our own firm was well out of the commitment.
Glober’s character was further particularized when, also about a year later, I came to know Mopsy Pontner better. It appeared that the evening at the hotel, anyway the latter part of it, had been less prosaic than might have been supposed at the time. Mopsy herself gave me an account of its consummation; no vague term in the context. She had, so she related, stayed on after the rest of the party had gone home. Glober, it seemed, had been more attractive to her, far more attractive, than outwardly revealed by her demeanour at dinner. In admitting that, she went so far as to declare that she had greatly approved of him at sight, as soon as she entered the room where we were to dine. Glober must have felt the same. The natural ease of his manner concealed such feelings, like Mopsy’s exterior reserve. Later that night mutual approval took physical expression.
‘Glober did me on the table.’
‘Among the coffee cups?’
‘We broke a couple of liqueur glasses.’
‘You obviously found him attractive.’
‘I believe I’d have run away with him that night, if he’d asked me. I was all right a day or two later, quite recovered. The affair stopped dead there. In any case he was sailing the next day. Some men are like that. Isn’t it funny? One rather odd thing about Glober, he insisted on taking a cutting from my bush – said he always did that after having anyone for the first time. He produced a pair of nail-scissors from a small red leather case. He told me he carried them round with him in case the need arose.’
‘We all of us have our whims.’
Mopsy laughed. So far as Glober was concerned, I do not put her conquest unduly high, though no doubt she was quite a beauty in her way. To exaggerate Glober’s achievement would be mistaken, lacking in a sense of proportion, even though Mopsy was capable of refusal, having turned Barnby down. Barnby made a good story about his failure to please on that occasion, which was one way of dealing with the matter. Such sudden adventures as this one of Glober’s can be misleading, unless considered in their context, time and place (as Moreland always insisted) both playing so vital a part. Nevertheless, this vignette, taken at an early stage of his career, suggests Glober’s vivacity, liberality, wide interests, capacity for attack; Mopsy’s footnote adding a small touch of the unusual, the exotic. These were no doubt the qualities that had carried him advantageously through the years of the Depression; New York to Hollywood, and back again; lots of other places too; until here he was at Jacky Bragadin’s Venetian palace. I enquired about Glober’s background. Gwinnett gave a rather satirical laugh.
‘Why do the British always ask that?’
‘One of our foibles.’
‘That’s not what Americans do.’
‘But we’re not Americans. You must humour our straying from the norm in that respect.’
Gwinnett laughed again.
‘Glober’s people were first generation Jewish emigrants. They were Russian. They took a German name to assimilate quicker, or so I’ve heard. Glober was from the Bronx.’
‘What we’d call the East End?’
‘His father made a sizeable pile in building. Glober himself didn’t begin on the breadline.’
‘You mean there was plenty of money before he started his publishing and film career?’
‘He made plenty more. Lost plenty too. Money is no problem to Glober.’
Gwinnett spoke with conviction. The comment that Glober was a man to whom money-making was no problem recalled Peter Templer having once spoken the same about Bob Duport. Duport, of course, had always been on a smaller scale financially than Glober, also without any claims to newspaper fame. I felt that side of Glober, the newspaper fame, was not without a certain fascination for Gwinnett, even if he hesitated to approve