The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

7

Mr Goodman's book The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight has enjoyed a very good Press. It has been lengthily reviewed in the leading dailies and weeklies. It has been called 'impressive and convincing'. The author has been credited with 'deep insight' into an 'essentially modem' character. Passages have been quoted to demonstrate his efficient handling of nutshells. One critic even went as far as to take his hat off to Mr Goodman – who, let it be added, had used his own merely to talk through it. In a word, Mr Goodman has been patted on the back when he ought to have been rapped on the knuckles.

I, for one, would have ignored that book altogether had it been just another bad book, doomed with the rest of its kind to oblivion by next spring. The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr Goodman's effort. But bad as the book may be, it is something else besides. Owing to the quality of its subject, it is bound to become quite mechanically the satellite of another man's enduring fame. As long as Sebastian Knight's name is remembered, there always will be some learned inquirer conscientiously climbing up a ladder to where The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight keeps half awake between Godfrey Goodman's Fall of Man and Samuel Goodrich's Recollections of a Lifetime. Thus, if I continue to harp on the subject, I do so for Sebastian Knight's sake.

Mr Goodman's method is as simple as his philosophy. His sole object is to show 'poor Knight' as the product and victim of what he calls 'our time' – though why some people are so keen to make others share in their chronometric concepts, has always been a mystery to me. 'Post-war Unrest'. 'Post-war Generation' are to Mr Goodman magic words opening every door. There is, however, a certain kind of 'open sesame' which seems less a charm than a skeleton-key, and this, I am afraid, is Mr Goodman's kind. But he is quite wrong in thinking that he found something once the lock had been forced. Not that I wish to suggest that Mr Goodman thinks. He could not if he tried. His book concerns itself only with such ideas as have been shown (commercially) to attract mediocre minds.

For Mr Goodman, young Sebastian Knight 'freshly emerged from the carved chrysalid of Cambridge' is a youth of acute sensibility in a cruel cold world. In this world, 'outside realities intrude so roughly upon one's most intimate dreams' that a young man's soul is forced into a state of siege before it is finally shattered. 'The War', says Mr Goodman without so much as a blush, 'had changed the face of the universe.' And with much gusto he goes on to describe those special aspects of post-war life which met a young man at 'the troubled dawn of his career': a feeling of some great deception; weariness of the soul and feverish physical excitement (such as the 'vapid lewdness of the foxtrot'); a sense of futility – and its result: gross liberty. Cruelty, too; the reek of blood still in the air; glaring picture palaces; dim couples in dark Hyde Park; the glories of standardization; the cult of machinery; the degradation of Beauty, Love, Honour, Art… and so on. It is really a wonder that Mr Goodman himself who, as far as I know, was Sebastian's coeval, managed to live through those terrific years.

But what Mr Goodman could stand, his Sebastian Knight apparently could not. We are given a picture of Sebastian restlessly pacing the rooms of his London flat in .1923, after a short trip to the Continent, which Continent 'shocked him indescribably by the vulgar glamour of its gambling hells'. Yes, 'pacing up and down… clutching at his temples… in a passion of discontent… angry with the world… alone… eager to do something, but weak, weak….' The dots are not Mr Goodman's tremolos, but denote sentences I have kindly left out. 'No,' Mr Goodman goes on, 'this was not the world for an artist to live in. It was all very well to flaunt a brave countenance, to make a great display of that cynicism which so irritates one in Knight's earlier work and so pains one in his last two volumes… it was all very well to appear contemptuous and ultrasophisticated, but the thorn was there, the sharp, poisonous thorn.' I don't know why, but the presence of this (perfectly mythical) thorn seems to give Mr Goodman a grim satisfaction.

It would be unfair of me if I let it seem that this first chapter of The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight consists exclusively of a thick flow of philosophical treacle. Word-pictures and anecdotes which form the body of the book (that is, when Mr Goodman arrives at the stage of Sebastian's life when he met him personally) appear here too, as rock cakes dotting the syrup. Mr Goodman was no Boswell; still, no doubt, he kept a notebook where he jotted down certain remarks of his employer – and apparently some of these related to his employer's past. In other words, we must imagine that Sebastian in between work would say: Do you know, my dear Goodman, this reminds me of a day in my life, some years ago, when… Here would come the story. Half a dozen of these seem to Mr Goodman sufficient to fill out what is to him a blank – Sebastian's youth in England.

The first of these stories (which Mr Goodman considers to be extremely typical of 'post-war undergraduate life} depicts Sebastian showing a girl friend from London the sights of Cambridge. 'And this is the Dean's window,' he said; then smashing the pane with a stone, he added: 'And this is the Dean.' Needless to say that Sebastian has been pulling Mr Goodman's leg: the story is as old as the University itself.

Let us look at the second one. During a short vacation trip to Germany (1921? 1922?) Sebastian, one night, being annoyed by the caterwauls in the street, started to pelt the offenders with miscellaneous objects including an egg. Presently, a policeman knocked at his door, bringing back all these objects minus the egg.

This is from an old (or, as Mr Goodman would say, pre-war') Jerome K. Jerome book. Leg-pulling again.

Third story: Sebastian speaking of his very first novel (unpublished and destroyed) explained that it was about a fat young student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this uncle, an ear-specialist, had murdered the student's father.

Mr Goodman misses the joke.

Fourth: Sebastian in the summer of 1922 had overworked himself and, suffering from hallucinations, used to see a kind of optical ghost – a black-robed monk moving swiftly towards him from the sky.

This is a little harder: a short story by Chekhov.

Fifth:

But I think we had better stop, or else Mr Goodman might be in danger of becoming a centipede. Let us have him remain quadrupedal. I am sorry for him, but it cannot be helped. And if only he had not padded and commented these 'curious incidents and fancies' so ponderously, with such a rich crop of deductions! Churlish, capricious, mad Sebastian, struggling in a naughty world of Juggernauts, and aeronauts, and naughts, and what-nots…. Well, well, there may be something in all that.

I want to be scientifically precise. I should hate being baulked of the tiniest particle of truth only because at a certain point of my search I was blindly enraged by a trashy concoction…. Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight? His former secretary. Were they ever friends? No – as we shall see later. Is there anything real or possible in the contrast between a frail eager Sebastian and a wicked tired world? Not a thing. Was there perhaps some oilier kind of chasm, breach, fissure? There was.

It is enough to turn to the first thirty pages or so of Lost Property to see how blandly Mr Goodman (who incidentally never quotes anything that may clash with the main idea of his fallacious work) misunderstands Sebastian's inner attitude in regard to the outer world. Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936 – it was always year 1. Newspaper headlines, political theories, fashionable ideas meant to him no more than the loquacious printed notice (in three languages, with mistakes in at least two) on the wrapper of some soap or toothpaste. The lather might be thick and the notice convincing – but that was an end of it. He could perfectly well understand sensitive and intelligent thinkers not being able to sleep because of an earthquake in China; but being what he was, he could not understand why these same people did not feel exactly the same spasm of rebellious grief when thinking of some similar calamity that had happened as many years ago as there were miles to China. Time and space were to him measures of the same eternity, so that the very idea of his reacting in any special 'modem' way to what Mr Goodman calls 'the atmosphere of post-war Europe' is utterly preposterous. He was intermittently happy and uncomfortable in the world into which he came, just as a traveller may be exhilarated by visions of his voyage and be almost simultaneously sea-sick. Whatever age Sebastian might have been born in, he would have been equally amused and unhappy, joyful and apprehensive, as a child at a pantomine now and then thinking of tomorrow's dentist. And the reason of his discomfort was not that he was moral in an immoral age, or immoral in a moral one, neither was it the cramped feeling of his youth not blowing naturally enough in a world which was too rapid a succession of funerals and fireworks; it was simply his becoming aware that the rhythm of his inner being was so much richer than that of other souls. Even then, just at the close of his Cambridge period, and perhaps earlier too, he knew that his slightest thought or sensation had always at least one more dimension than those of his neighbours. He might have boasted of this had there been anything lurid in his nature. As there was not, it only remained for him to feel the awkwardness of being a crystal among glass, a sphere among circles (but all this was nothing when compared to what he experienced as he finally settled down to his literary task).

'I was', writes Sebastian in Lost Property, 'so shy that I always managed somehow to commit the fault I was most anxious to avoid. In my disastrous attempt to match the colour of my surroundings I could only be compared to a colour-blind chameleon. My shyness would have been easier to bear – for me and for others – had it been of the normal dammy-and-pimply kind: many a young fellow passes through this stage and nobody really minds. But with me it assumed a morbid secret form which had nothing to do with the throes of puberty. Among the most hackneyed inventions of the torture house there is one consisting of denying the prisoner sleep. Most people live through the day with this or that part of their mind in a happy state of somnolence: a hungry man eating a steak is interested in his food and not, say, in the memory of a dream about angels wearing top-hats which he happened to see seven years ago; but in my case all the shutters and lids and doors of the mind would be open at once at all times of the-day. Most brains have their Sundays, mine was even refused a half-holiday. This state of constant wakefulness was extremely painful not only in itself, but in its direct results. Every ordinary act which, as a matter of course, I had to perform, took on such a complicated appearance, provoked such a multitude of associative ideas in my mind, and these associations were so tricky and obscure, so utterly useless for practical application, that I would either shirk the business at hand or else make a mess of it out of sheer nervousness. When one morning I went to see the editor of a review who, I thought, might print some of my Cambridge poems, a particular stammer he had, blending with a certain combination of angles in the pattern of roofs and chimneys, all slightly distorted owing to a flaw in the glass of the window-pane – this and a queer musty smell in the room (of roses rotting in the waste-paper basket?) sent my thoughts on such long and intricate errands that, instead of saying what I had meant to say, I suddenly started telling this man whom I was seeing for the first time, about the literary plans of a mutual friend, who, I remembered too late, had asked me to keep them secret….

"…Knowing, as I did, the dangerous vagrancies of my consciousness I was afraid of meeting people, of hurting their feelings or making myself ridiculous in their eyes. But this same quality or defect which tormented me so, when confronted with what is called the practical side of life (though, between you and me, bookkeeping or bookselling looks singularly unreal in the starlight), became an instrument of exquisite pleasure whenever I yielded to my loneliness. I was deeply in love with the country which was my home (as far .as my nature could afford the notion of home); I had my Kipling moods, and my Rupert Brooke moods, and my Housman moods. The blind man's dog near Harrods or a pavement-artist's coloured Chalks; brown leaves in a New Forest ride or a tin bath hanging outside on the black brick wall of a slum; a picture in Punch or a purple passage in Hamlet, all went to form a definite harmony, where I, too, had the shadow of a place. My memory of the London of my youth is the memory of endless vague wanderings, of a sun-dazzled window suddenly piercing the blue morning mist or of beautiful black wires with suspended raindrops running along them. I seem to pass with intangible steps across ghostly lawns and through dancing-halls full of the whine of Hawaiian music and down dear drab little streets with pretty names, until I come to a certain warm hollow where something very like the selfest of my own self sits huddled up in the darkness….'

It is a pity Mr Goodman had not the leisure to peruse this passage, though it is doubtful whether he would have grasped its inner meaning.

He was kind enough to send me a copy of his work. In the letter accompanying it he explained in heavily bantering tones, with what was epistolarily meant to be a good-natured wink, that if he had not mentioned the book in the course of our interview, it was because he wanted it to be a splendid surprise. His tone, his guffaws, his pompous wit – all this suggested an old gruff friend of the family turning up with a precious gift for the youngest. But Mr Goodman is not a very good actor. Not for a moment did he really think that I would be delighted either with the book he wrote or with the mere fact that he had gone out of his way to advertise the name of a member of my family. He knew all along that his book was rubbish, and he knew that neither its binding, nor its jacket, nor the blurb on the jacket, nor indeed any of the reviews and notices in the Press would deceive me. Why he had considered it wiser to keep me in the dark is not quite evident. Perhaps he thought I might wickedly sit down and dash off my own volume, just in time to have it collide with his.

But he not only sent me his book. He also produced the account he had promised me. This is not the place to discuss these matters. I have handed them over to my solicitor who has already acquainted me with his conclusions. Here I may only say that Sebastian's candour in practical affairs was taken advantage of in the coarsest fashion. Mr Goodman has never been a regular literary agent. He has only bet on books. He does not rightfully belong to that intelligent, honest and hard-working profession. We will leave it at that; but I have not yet done with The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight or rather – The Farce of Mr Goodman.