Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [7]
‘That doesn’t sound very rational.’
‘Marxism isn’t rational, Nicholas. Get that into your head. The more intelligent sort of Marxist tells you so. He stresses the point, as one of its highest merits, that, like religion, Marxism requires faith in the last resort. Besides, my old friend Max Stirner covers Kenneth – “Because I am by nature a man I have equal rights to the enjoyment of all goods, says Babeuf. Must he not also say: because I am ‘by nature’ a first-born prince I have a right to a throne?” That’s just what Kenneth Widmerpool does say – not out aloud, but it’s what he thinks.’
Bagshaw had begun on his favourite political philosopher. I was not in the mood at that moment. To return instead to sorting the Fission books was not to deny there might be some truth in the exposition: that Widmerpool, conventional enough at one level of his life – conventional latterly in his own condemnation of conventionality – might at the same time nurture within himself quite another state of mind to that shown on the surface; not only desire to reshape the world according to some doctrinaire pattern, but also to be revenged on a world that had found himself insufficiently splendid in doing so. Had not General Conyers, years ago, diagnosed a ‘typical intuitive extrovert’; coldblooded, keen on a thing for the moment, never satisfied, always wanting to get on to something else? In one sense, of course, the world, from a material assessment, had treated Widmerpool pretty well, even at the time when Bagshaw was talking. On the other hand, people rarely take the view that they have been rewarded according to their desserts, those most rewarded often the very ones keenest to be revenged. Possibly Ferrand-Sénéschal was just such another.
Whatever Ferrand-Sénéschal’s inner feelings, the meeting with him in Venice was not to be. Not even a glimpse on the platform. His death took place in London only a few days before the Conference opened. He suffered a stroke in his Kensington hotel. The decease of a French author of international standing would in any case have rated a modest headline in the papers. The season of the year a thin one for news, more attention was given to Ferrand-Sénéschal than might have been expected. It was revealed, for example, that he had seen a doctor only a day or two before, who had warned him against excessive strain. Accordingly no inquest took place. Death had come – as Evadne Clapham remarked, ‘like the book’ – in the afternoon. Later that evening, so the papers said, Ferrand-Sénéschal had been invited to ‘look in on’ Lady Donners after dinner – ’not a party, just a few friends’, she had explained to the reporters – where he would have found himself, so it appeared, among an assortment of politicians and writers, including Mr and Mrs Mark Members. Social engagements of this kind, together with a stream of acquaintances and journalists passing in and out of his suite at the hotel, had evidently proved too much for a state of health already impaired.
The London obituaries put Leon-Joseph Ferrand-Sénéschal in his sixtieth year. They mentioned only two or three of his better known books, selected from an enormous miscellany of novels, plays, philosophic and economic studies, political tracts, and (according to Bernard Shernmaker) an early volume, later suppressed by the author, of verse in the manner of Verl?ine. This involuntary withdrawal would make little difference to the Conference. Well known intellectuals were always an uncertain quantity when it came to turning up, even if they did not suddenly succumb. Pritak, Santos, Kotecke, might equally well find something better to do, though not necessarily meet an unlooked-for end. I made up my mind to ask Dr Brightman, when opportunity arose, whether she had ever encountered Ferrand-Sénéschal; if so, what she thought of him.
The youngest and best-looking of the troupe, the one Dr Brightman had called the Soubrette, took a plate round for the collection. The rest burst en masse into Santa Lucia. The programme