The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

9

Their relationship lasted six years. During that period Sebastian produced his two first novels: The Prismatic Bezel and Success. It took him some seven months to compose the first (April-October 1924) and twenty-two months to compose the second (July I925-April 1927). Between autumn 1927 and summer 1929 he wrote the three stories which later (1932) were republished together under the tide The Funny Mountain. In other words, Clare intimately witnessed the first three-fifths of his entire production (I skip the juvenilia – the Cambridge poems for instance – which he himself destroyed); and as in the intervals between the above-mentioned books Sebastian kept twisting and laying aside and re-twisting this or that imaginative scheme it may be safely assumed that during those six years he was continuously occupied. And Clare loved his occupation.

She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there and petted despite their amazing shapes. She had no special intention of being happy or of making Sebastian happy, nor had she the slightest misgivings as to what might come next; it was merely a matter of naturally accepting life with Sebastian because life without him was less imaginable than a tellurian's camping-tent on a mountain in the moon. Most probably, if she had borne him a child they would have slipped into marriage since that would have been the simplest way for all three; but that not being the case it did not enter their heads to submit to those white and wholesome formalities which very possibly both would have enjoyed had they given them necessary thought. There was nothing of your advanced prejudice-be-damned stuff about Sebastian. Well did he know that to flaunt one's contempt for a moral code was but smuggled smugness and prejudice turned inside out. He usually chose the easiest ethical path (just as he chose the thorniest aesthetic one) merely because it happened to be the shortest cut to his chosen object; he was far too lazy in everyday life (just as he was far too hardworking in his artistic life) to be bothered by problems set and solved by others.

Clare was twenty-two when she met Sebastian. She did not remember her father; her mother was dead too, and her stepfather had married again, so that the faint notion of home which that couple presented to her might be compared to the old sophism of changed handle and changed blade, though of course she could hardly expect to find and join the original parts – this side of Eternity at least. She lived alone in London, rather vaguely attending an art school and taking a course in Eastern languages, of all things. People liked her because she was quietly-attractive with her charming dim face and soft husky voice, somehow remaining in one's memory as if she were subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered: she came out well in one's mind, she was mnemogenic. Even her rather large and knuckly hands had a singular charm, and she was a good light silent dancer. But best of all she was one of those rare, very rare women who do not take the world for granted and who see everyday things not merely as familiar mirrors of their own feminity. She had imagination – the muscle of the soul – and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality. She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier. And finally she was blest with a keen sense of humour. No wonder she fitted into his life so well.

Already during the first season of their acquaintance they saw a great deal of each other; in the autumn she went to Paris and he visited her there more than once, I suspect. By then his first book was ready. She had learnt to type and the summer evenings of 1924 had been to her as many pages slipped into the slit and rolled out again alive with black and violet words. I should like to imagine her tapping the glistening keys to the sound of a warm shower rustling in the dark elms beyond the open window, with Sebastian's slow and serious voice (he did not merely dictate, said Miss Pratt – he officiated) coming and going across the room. He used to spend most of the day writing, but so laborious was his progress that there would hardly be more than a couple of fresh pages for her to type in the evening and even these had to be done over again, for Sebastian used to indulge in an orgy of corrections; and sometimes he would do what I daresay no author ever did – recopy the typed sheet in his own slanting un-English hand and then dictate it anew. His struggle with words was unusually painful and this for two reasons. One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He had no use for ready-made phrases because the things he wanted to say were of an exceptional build and he knew moreover that no real idea can be said to exist without the words made to measure. So that (to use a closer simile) the thought which only seemed naked was but pleading for the clothes it wore to become visible, while the words lurking afar were not empty shells as they seemed, but were only waiting for the thought they already concealed to set them aflame and in motion. At times he felt like a child given a farrago of wires and ordered to produce the wonder of light. And he did produce it; and sometimes he would not be conscious at all of the way he succeeded in doing so, and at other times he would be worrying the wires for hours in what seemed the most rational way – and achieve nothing. And Clare, who had not composed a single line of imaginative prose or poetry in her life, understood so well (and that was her private miracle) every detail of Sebastian's struggle, that the words she typed were to her not so much the conveyors of their natural sense, but the curves and gaps and zig-zags showing Sebastian's groping along a certain ideal line of expression.

This, however, was not all. I know, I know as definitely as I know we had the same father, I know Sebastian's Russian was better and more natural to him than his English. I quite believe that by not speaking Russian for five years he may have forced himself into thinking he had forgotten it. But a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily dismissed. It should moreover be remembered that five years before his first book – that is, at the time he left Russia – his English was as thin as mine. I have improved mine artificially years later (by dint of hard study abroad); he tried to let his thrive naturally in its own surroundings. It did thrive wonderfully but still I maintain that had he started to write in Russian, those particular linguistic throes would have been spared him. Let me add that I have in my possession a letter written by him not long before his death. And that short letter is couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books.

I know too that as Clare took down the words he disentangled from his manuscript she sometimes would stop tapping and say with a little frown, slightly lifting the outer edge of the imprisoned sheet and re-reading the line: 'No, my dear. You can't say it so in English.' He would stare at her for an instant or two and then resume his prowl, reluctantly pondering on her observation, while she sat with her hands softly folded in her lap quietly waiting. 'There is no other way of expressing it,' he would mutter at last. 'And if for instance,' she would say – and then an exact suggestion would follow.

'Oh, well, if you like,' he would reply.

'I'm not insisting, my dear, just as you wish, if you think bad grammar won't hurt….'

'Oh, go on,' he would cry, 'you are perfectly right, go on….

By November 1924, The Prismatic Bezel was completed. It was published in the following March and fell completely flat. As far as I can find out by looking up newspapers of that period, it was alluded to only once. Five lines and a half in a Sunday paper, between other lines referring to other books. 'The Prismatic Bezel is apparently a first novel and as such ought not to be judged as severely as (So-and-So's book mentioned previously). Its fun seemed to me obscure and its obscurities funny, but possibly there exists a kind of fiction the niceties of which will always elude me. However, for the benefit of readers who like that sort of stuff I may add that Mr Knight is as good at splitting hairs as he is at splitting infinitives.'

That spring was probably the happiest period of Sebastian's existence. He had been delivered of one book and was already feeling the throbs of the next one. He was in excellent health. He had a delightful companion. He suffered' from none of those petty worries which formerly used to assail him at times with the perseverance of a swarm of ants spreading over a hacienda. Clare posted letters for him, and checked laundry returns, and saw that he was well supplied with shaving blades, tobacco, and salted almonds for which he had a special weakness. He enjoyed dining out with her and then going to a play. The play almost invariably made him writhe and groan afterwards, but he derived a morbid pleasure from dissecting platitudes. An expression of greed, of wicked eagerness, would make his nostrils expand while his back teeth ground in a paroxysm of disgust, as he pounced upon some poor triviality. Miss Pratt remembered one particular occasion when her father, who had at one time had some financial interest in the cinema industry, invited Sebastian and Clare to the private view of a very gorgeous and expensive film. The leading actor was a remarkably handsome young man wearing a luxurious turban and the plot was powerfully dramatic. At the highest point of tension, Sebastian, to Mr Pratt's extreme surprise and annoyance, began to shake with laughter, with Clare bubbling too but plucking at his sleeve in a helpless effort to make him stop. They must have had a glorious time together, those two. And it is hard to believe that the warmth, the tenderness, the beauty of it has not been gathered, and is not treasured somewhere, somehow, by some immortal witness of mortal life. They must have been seen wandering in Kew Gardens, or Richmond Park (personally I have never been there but the names attract me), or eating ham and eggs at some pretty inn in their summer rambles in the country, or reading on the vast divan in Sebastian's study with the fire cheerfully burning and an English Christmas already filling the air with faintly spicy smells on a background of lavender and leather. And Sebastian must have been overheard telling her of the extraordinary things he would try to express in his next book Success.

One day in the summer of 1926, as he was feeling parched and fuzzled after battling with a particularly rebellious chapter, he thought he might take a month's holiday abroad. Clare having some business in London said she would join him a week or two later. When she eventually arrived at the German seaside resort which Sebastian had decided upon, she was unexpectedly informed at the hotel that he had left for an unknown destination but would be back in a couple of days. This puzzled Clare, although, as she afterwards told Miss Pratt, she did not feel unduly anxious or distressed. We may picture her, a thin tall figure in a blue mackintosh (the weather was overcast and unfriendly) strolling rather aimlessly on the promenade, the sandy beach, empty except for a few undismayed children, the three-coloured flags flapping mournfully in a dying breeze, and a steely grey sea breaking here and there into crests of foam. Farther down the coast there was a beech wood, deep and dark with no undergrowth except bindwood patching the undulating brown soil; and a strange brown stillness stood waiting among the straight smooth tree-trunks: she thought she might find at any moment a red-capped German gnome peeping bright-eyed at her from among the dead leaves of a hollow. She unpacked her bathing things and passed a pleasant though somewhat listless day lying on the soft white sand. Next morning was rainy again and she stayed in her room until lunch time, reading Donne, who for ever after remained to her associated with the pale grey light of that damp and hazy day and the whine of a child wanting to play in the corridor. And presently Sebastian arrived. He was certainly glad to see her but there was something not quite natural in his demeanour. He seemed nervous and troubled, and averted his face whenever she tried to meet his look. He said he had come across a man he had known ages ago, in Russia, and they had gone in the man's car to – he named a place on the coast some miles away. 'But what is the matter, my dear?' she asked peering into his sulky face.

'Oh, nothing, nothing,' he cried peevishly, 'I can't sit and do nothing, I want my work,' he added and looked away.

'I wonder if you are telling me the truth,' she said.

He shrugged his shoulders and slid the edge of his palm along the groove of the hat he was holding.

'Come along,' he said. 'Let's have lunch and then go back to London.'

But there was no convenient train before evening. As the weather had cleared they went out for a stroll. Sebastian tried once or twice to be as bright with her as he usually was, but it somehow fizzled out and they were both silent. They reached the beech wood. There was the same mysterious and dull suspense about it, and he said, though she had not told him she had been there before: 'What a funny quiet place. Eerie, isn't it? One half-expects to see a brownie among those dead leaves and convolvulus.'

'Look here, Sebastian,' she suddenly exclaimed, putting her hands on his shoulders. 'I want to know what's the matter. Perhaps you've stopped loving me. Is it that?'

'Oh my darling, what nonsense,' said he with perfect sincerity. 'But… if you must know… you see… I'm not good at deceiving, and well, I'd rather you knew. The fact is I felt a confounded pain in my chest and arm, so I thought I'd better dash to Berlin and see a doctor. He packed me off to bed there…. Serious?… No, I hope not. We discussed coronary arteries and blood supply and sinuses of Salva and he generally seemed to be a very knowing old beggar. I'll see another man in London and get a second opinion, though I feel fit as a fiddle today….'

I suppose Sebastian already knew from what exact heart-disease he was suffering. His mother had died of the same complaint, a rather rare variety of angina pectoris, called by some doctors 'Lehmann's disease'. It appears, however, that after the first attack he had at least a year's respite, though now and then he did experience a queer twinge as of inner itch in his left arm.

He sat down to his task again and worked steadily through the autumn, spring, and winter. The composing of Success turned out to be even more arduous than that of his first novel and took him much longer, although both books were about the same length. By a stroke of luck I have a direct picture of the day Success was finished. This I owe to someone I met later – and indeed many of the impressions I have offered in this chapter have been formed by corroborating the statements of Miss Pratt with those of another friend of Sebastian's, though the spark which had kindled it all belongs in some mysterious manner to that glimpse I had of Clare Bishop walking heavily down a London street.

The door opens. Sebastian Knight is disclosed lying spread-eagled on the floor of his study. Clare is making a neat bundle of the typed sheets on the desk. The person who entered stops short.

'No, Leslie,' says Sebastian from the floor, 'I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest.'