Highlights from Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

When I was in London in January I picked up--on the advice of one of the sales reps I work with, who said it was the best book he'd read all year--Artemis Cooper's new biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Forty pages in, I feel I've already been repaid for lugging it o'er the seas in my luggage. Some early highlights:

1 Patrick Leigh Fermor's mother's name was Aeileen, but as a girl "she signed herself 'Avrille' or 'Mixed Pickles' when writing to her parents, while they and her husband most often referred to her as Muriel." Patrick's father, named Lewis, she called Peter. Patrick, meanwhile, was known to all as Paddy, which is much more straightforward.

2 You get the impression that no school could have held Paddy--his person or his attention--but he does seem to have been subjected to a couple that were exemplars of English strangeness and decrepitude. His first, Walsham Hall, was run by Major Faithfull, "a pioneer of the wilder shores of education, . . . with messianic eyes and a shock of grey hair." Cooper describes the curriculum:

Lessons were very haphazard; there was also what Paddy described as "a lot of lying down and doing free association while Major Faithfull took notes. I used to invent all sorts of things for him." Most bewildering of all were the country dancing and eurhythmics, in which both staff and pupils participated in the nude. "Nimbly and gravely, keeping time to a cottage piano and a recorder, we sped through the figures of Gathering Peascods, Sellinger's Round, Picking-up Sticks and Old Mole."

It reminds me of the school in which another young Patrick was once placed, by his Auntie Mame:

"So like your father," she sighed. "By the way, I know the most divine new school that a friend of mine is starting. Coeducational and completely revolutionary. All classes are held in the nude under ultraviolet ray. Not a repression left after the first session."

3 His next stop was King's School, Canterbury, which was founded by Henry VIII and boasted Christopher Marlowe among its graduates. By Fermor's time, it was utterly run down, but it's not clear that even the most up-to-date and resource-rich of schools could have handled the young Fermor. His fellow student Canon Hill

remembered that Paddy's arrival had had an immediate impact on the school. He spoke in elaborate sentences, a mode of speech quite unlike the monosyllabic schoolboy slang of his contemporaries. He would launch into blank verse or Shakespearean dialogue at the drop of a hat, and recited poetry by the yard. Hill remembers once coming back from games and hearing someone singing "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones," an unusual choice from the English Hymnal. Intrigued, he followed the sound and found Fermor dancing about in the showers, stark naked, singing "Alleluia! Alleluia!" at the top of his lungs, all by himself.

I suppose it wouldn't be an English school if there weren't a lot of stories of nudity. Of more interest are the stories Cooper relates of Fermor's daredevilry and recklessness:

The sort of myths that float around schools tended to settle on Paddy. It was said that someone heard Fermor creeping out of the dorm in the middle of the night, and decided to follow him. Lighting his way with a torch and unaware that he was being shadowed, he made his way to the gym, which had a very high ceiling spanned by a great beam, hung with climbing ropes. Hidden in the shadows, the boy watched with mounting alarm as Fermor shinned up one of the ropes, clambered on to the beam and walked from one end to the other. Having completed this feat, he came down the rope and made his way back to the dormitory.

Cooper goes on:

If anyone was caught hanging around the betting shops, smoking cigarettes, clambering over the roof or getting into fights, it was probably Fermor; and his sins were compounded by a fearless swagger and total disregard for punishment.

What an intoxicating combination that must have been for his fellow students, especially when coupled with the charm to which everyone who ever met Fermor attests!

4 He was, unsurprisingly, expelled--though for the relatively pedestrian sin of holding hands with a girl while out on the streets of Canterbury, a dual no-no. He then spent the spring and summer of 1933, when he was eighteen, racketing about London and falling in with the Bright Young People whom Waugh would satirize so mercilessly in Vile Bodies. At one of their haunts, the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, he became a favorite of the proprietress, Rosa Lewis, which leads to this priceless anecdote, apparently related by Fermor directly to Cooper in conversation:

Mrs Lewis thought that Evelyn Waugh's description of her as Mrs Crump in Vile Bodies did not do her justice. "If I get my 'ands on that Mr Woo-aagh," she told Paddy, her false teeth rattling ominously, "I'll cut 'is winkle orff!"

Fair or unfair, it's not hard to see why Lewis would be after Waugh's winkle. To take just one example of many in Vile Bodies, here's Crump at her most obtusely unfeeling:

"We've all been upside down this morning. Such a fuss. Had the police in we have, ever since I don't know what time, drinking up my wine and asking questions and putting their noses where they're not wanted. All because Flossie must needs go and swing on the chandelier. She never had any sense, Flossie. Well, she's learned her lesson now, poor girl. Whoever heard of such a thing--swinging on a chandelier. Poor Judge. What's-his-name is in a terrible state about it. I said to him it's not so much the price of the chandelier, I said. What money can make, money can mend, I said, and that's the truth, isn't it, dear? But what I mind, I said, is having a death in the house and all the fuss. It doesn't do anyone any good having people killing theirselves in a house like Flossie did.

Interestingly, though Cooper points out that through this circle--at another bohemian haunt, the Gargoyle Club--Fermor became friends with Constant Lambert and Cyril Connolly, he seems to not have crossed paths in any memorable way with their mutual friend Anthony Powell. What would Powell have made of him? I suspect that his oddity was, in a way, too foursquare to be the sort that drew Powell as a writer, too well-grounded in confidence: Fermor, it seems clear, did things in order to do them rather than as a means to power, fame, sex, or any of the other phantoms we chase, and whose obsessive pursuit so interested Powell.

5 At the same time that the young Fermor was clubbing it up in London, he was essentially broke, and to alleviate that he took a job selling stockings door to door to suburban London ladies, a job he was good at but hated. Cooper tells a story that Fermor told her:

One evening at the Running Horse [Pub], the boss singled him out as a star salesman and asked him to give the other members of the team a few tips. According to Paddy, he pulled a stocking over his hand and described its properties as if it were a condom--which had the team howling with laughter, and his boss purple in the face with rage. He was sacked immediately.

The whole episode reminds me of Julian Maclaren-Ross, who at a similar period in his life sold vacuum cleaners door to door. He, too, hated it--but without even the consolation of being good at it. In his Memoirs of the Forties, he recounts a conversation with Graham Greene before a lunch that he'd managed to land in order to talk about adapting A Gun for Sale for radio:

"What d'you do meantime? Besides writing radio plays I mean."

"I sell vacuum cleaners," I said.

Greene, almost on the threshold of the pub, halted abruptly and turned to take a good look at me. Unlike the housekeeper, it was clear that he'd not suspected this. "Vacuum cleaners?" he said.

"Yes."

"Are you doing it to get material?"

"No, I'm doing it because I wouldn't have any money otherwise."

"But do you earn much as it is?"

"I don't do bad at the moment. Eight to ten quid a week."

Greene said: "Good for you," plainly surprised. . . . "I thought of signing on myself at one time. To write a book about it afterwards of course. I never knew one could actually sell the damn things."

Despite his protests, Maclaren-Ross did make use of his experience, building his bleakly comic novel Of Love and Hunger around a failing vacuum cleaner salesman. Maclaren-Ross, however, didn't have the luxury of going out with a bang like Fermor: he was sacked by Electrolux for simply failing to sell cleaners, then, after signing on with their rival, Hoover, was sacked by Hoover for selling a second-hand cleaner at the secret behest of his unscrupulous supervisor.

Which just goes to show, yet again, that we can't all be Patrick Leigh Fermor. Alas.

"Been having a filthy time lately," or, a letter from Julian Maclaren-Ross

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I'm so wrapped up in William Boyd's Any Human Heart today that I can't bring myself to put it down and write a proper post. Instead, I'll share a particularly good letter from writer Julian Maclaren-Ross (who doesn't turn up in Boyd's novelized tour of the English literary scene of the twentieth century--though Anthony Powell, who immortalized Maclaren-Ross as the character X. Trapnel in A Dance to the Music of Time, does make several appearances).

Maclaren-Ross's recently published Selected Letters (2008) is bound to be of interest to any fan of his writing, if only because the letters are full of ideas and proposals, many never realized, for stories, adaptations, reviews, treatments--anything that might bring in some money. Maclaren-Ross was such a wastrel and led such an itinerant, hand-to-mouth existence that the vast majority of the letters in the volume involve him attempting to cadge money from someone, either in return for amorphous future work or simply on the grounds of friendship. Petulance and self-righteous anger greet the frequent refusals; as those familiar with his life already know, he could be quite a difficult man to be around.

For sheer directness and goofy pathos, no letter in the batch can top this one to his friend, writer Dan Davin, from the summer of 1955:

My dear Dan,
Thank you for the drink last night.

I'm sorry I was taken queer before the end & had to go; but truth is I haven't had anything solid to eat for some days and have had to stay in and work nonetheless: also my little illness is troubling me a bit.

Until the holiday is over & the editors get back & get to work, I shan't have any money at all--which means Wed. or Thurs. at earliest.

Have you any money?

I do not have any.

I do not have cigarettes either.

Tonight i could go down to Royal Oxford and get tick, but I can't get cigarettes on the bill--or cigars. Then tehre are 2 or 3 days to get over before what's owing to me comes in; and meantime I must do more work. On empty belly & no fags, not easy.

If you have any money please let me have some. I will pay.

I will look in on you at home about 7.15 p.m. (when you've had dinner) and hope for best. Unless you've a moment to look in here sometime before.

Don't want to come over to pub, because crossing road makes me dizzy in this state; also am not fit company just now in big crowd.

This letter written v. simply because I expect you've a hangover; & I can never take anything in, myself, when I have.

Letter from USA enclosed. Good prospect for future?

I want to ask advice about something; but won't while you've guests to attend to.

Will go to sleep now. Nothing else to do.

As ever,
Julian.

I like to think that Davin, hangover or not, at least came across with some cigarettes, if not bundles of cash. For once, I'm with Maclaren-Ross: given his obvious condition at the time of writing, anything less seems insupportable.

"I knew Sweet F. A. about it."

Yesterday's post that featured Oblomov's difficulties in finding the right word in a letter he was writing seems like the perfect lead-in to a post about the difficulties Julian Maclaren-Ross had with the language in what was to become his first published story, "A Bit of a Smash in Madras." A sharp tale of drink, dissipation, and the problems of colonial life, the story establishes its strong narrative voice in the first line:

Absolute fact I knew fuck-all about it.

Horizon, Cyril Connolly's heralded wartime literary magazine, accepted the story, but Stephen Spender, the magazine's uncredited co-editor, began to worry that no printer would be willing to print the volume if they didn't change some of Maclaren-Ross's earthy language. According to Paul Willetts, author of Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, and Soho Raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross (2005), Spender offered the following emendations:

Besides changing the opening sentence from "Absolute fact, I knew fuck-all about it" to "Absolute fact I knew Sweet F. A. about it," Spender suggested a succession of substitute phrases that could be deployed throughout the rest of the story. he listed these 'in the form of a short poem':

Pissed-up
By Christ
Balls
Bugger.

Even from this distance in years, I have trouble imagining that the words Spender was worried about could have been much worse than his preferred replacements.

Regardless, Maclaren-Ross was annoyed, and despite, as an unpublished author, having essentially no leverage, he decided to confront Connolly. True to form, however, he scotched the meeting by displaying such a conspicuous interest in Horizon's captivating administrative assistant Sonia Brownell (later to be Sonia Orwell), "the Euston Road Venus," that Connolly, disconcerted, cut short the meeting. The story went to press in less racy form, and even today, in Dewi Lewis Publishing's Selected Stories (2004), "A Bit of a Smash" opens with less force than Maclaren-Ross intended, his "fuck" replaced with a "damn."

Why I find myself dancing to those same old steps again and again and again

Because I proselytize so relentlessly on behalf of Anthony Powell and A Dance to the Music of Time, I'm always searching for relatively succinct ways in which to explain their virtues. I usually place the novels' attraction in Powell's--and by extension, his narrator Nick Jenkins's--insatiable curiosity about the myriad ways that people choose to live their lives; in the fourth novel, At Lady Molly's (1957), in explaining his decision to attend a country weekend that seems likely to be disastrous, Nick Jenkins accords curiosity its proper, exalted place:

Curiosity, which makes the world go round, brought me in the end to accept Quiggin's invitation.

What raises Powell's curiosity in Dance to the level of art is that he leavens it with a real openness to difference, from ordinary English eccentricity to unexpected sexual predilections to inexplicable fixed ideas. That mix of curiosity and sympathy allows Powell to find nearly any person of at least some interest; his much-quoted response to charges of snobbery--that if there were a Burke's of Bank Clerks, he'd buy that, too--rings true for any close reader of Dance.

In the third novel,The Acceptance World (1955), Jenkins neatly sums up Powell's approach and highlights the way that it opens up our understanding of our own selves as well:

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

In a 1951 review of the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, Julian MacLaren-Ross (who would later form the basis of one of Powell's most memorable characters) sets a similar assessment of Powell's technique in a broader context:

Mr Powell is, mercifully, a writer without a "message," either philosophical, religious, or political; he is content to examine without comment, and to illustrate through character in action, the changes in human nature brought about by the changing face of the social order in which we live; in other words, he is attempting to fulfill the novelist's only true vocation.

To reveal those changes in character, Powell doesn't rely primarily on particularly dramatic events (though there are some, especially in the war novels); instead, as Terry Teachout puts it,

[T]hings happen--life happens--to Powell's characters, and as we watch them grapple with each successive occurrence, we realize that his interest is not in what they do but in what they want.

And, as Powell demonstrates, what people want so often becomes who they are. If curiosity drives the world, desire--specifically the desire for power--is what risks ruining it. To say that Powell approaches all characters with sympathy doesn't mean that he refuses judgment; though he lets events and actions speak for themselves, we see multiple times the grievous consequences of betrayal, cruelty, and the self-interest that is determined to carry all before it.

Serving as a bulwark against these, concomitant with simple human kindness, is the creative act. As Jenkins reflects in the second volume, A Buyer's Market (1952),

[T]he arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk.

The arts may not be able to defeat the Widmerpools of the world, but they can at least create and sustain a rival way of understanding that world, one that the power-hungry will never begin to comprehend. Tariq Ali, at the inaugural Anthony Powell lecture at the Wallace Collection, located the creative act at the center of the novels:

What, then, is the central theme of the series? Creativity--the act of production. Of literature, of books, of paintings, of music; that is what most of the central characters are engaged in for the whole of their lives. Moreland composes, Barnby paints, X Trapnel writes, Quiggin, Members and Maclintick criticise and the narrator publishes books and then becomes a writer. What excites the novelist is music and painting, literature and criticism. It's this creativity, together with the comedy of everyday life, that sustains the Dance.

Curiosity, sympathy, creativity: three strong pillars on which to rest a novel. Add a baroque, yet balanced, prose style and a fierce eye for comedy, and you've got the music for my very favorite Dance.

Some more on raconteurs

Before I move on, as promised, to Ludwig Bemelmans, I can't resist giving you another taste of Julian Maclaren-Ross's storytelling, one which seems to perfectly place him within my personal definition of the word raconteur. Here, in Memoirs of the Forties, he describes a night out in Guildford Street:

More of the chaps appeared, I hoped some of the girls might show up as well, but the party remained all male and the conversation became a lot less literary. All at once it turned on a woman, evidently much given to experiment and well known to all, who'd been the victim of an accident, perhaps to her leg, on a remote Italian hillside, and had had to have a blood-transfusion on the spot. Since none of the people roundabouts belonged to the proper blood group, the doctor had been compelled to accept as blood donor some mountain animal; here my memory begins to falter, although a goat seems the most probable in such surroundings and comes most readily to mind as the kind of quadruped concerned.

. . . .

I remember that, in an effort to divert my attention, one of the young men pointed wildly into the darkness ahead, shouting, "Look, down there's Doughty Street. Where bloody old Dickens lived," while another leant over some railings to show me an area in which he'd once either had a fight or else been sick, dropping in the process a bottle of pale ale which shattered below.

. . . .

After [the antique dealer] had finished explaining that all worthwhile drama, indeed all art, had originated somewhere in Central Europe, eaten the last piece of salami and made sure that there was no more wine, he climbed with Makins' assistance into a fur-collared overcoat. . . . The antique dealer was however, the only jarring note in the whole evening: the chaps were all nice cheerful intelligent young men and I regret, during all my future nights in Bloomsbury and Soho pubs, that I never came across any of them again; nor did I ever run into the woman who had been transfused with the blood of the goat. Perhaps they were all killed in the war, though I hope not.

I don't tend to think of Anthony Powell as a raconteur, because despite the stories of his contemporaries that fill his autobiography he is best known for his fiction, which while drawing on those stories alters them significantly. But a Powell fan can hear his voice in Maclaren-Ross's studied vagueness--"evidently much given to experiment," "perhaps to her leg," "my memory begins to falter"--which, as in A Dance to the Music of Time, where the most unexpected and unlikely events come to the narrator second- or third-hand, over drinks, lends a wonderful air of verisimilitude to even the most outlandish drunken tales. Some of the best of those tales, of course, concern down-at-heel writer and Soho raconteur X. Trapnel, who was modeled, down to the malacca cane he carried, on Julian Maclaren-Ross.

Now on to Ludwig Bemelmans, whom you probably know best as the writer and illustrator of the Madeleine books. Since my first trip to New York a few years ago, I've also known him as the artist who decorated one of my favorite spots in the city, Bemelmans Bar at the Hotel Carlyle, which is a forties-style bar decorated top to bottom in lovely little paintings of animals, children, parents, and New York scenes, all clearly the work of Madeleine's creator. But I had also heard that Bemelmans had done some writing for adults, and recently Stacey got me a volume put out by Overlook, Hotel Bemelmans (2002), which collects his short pieces about working in New York's grand hotels at their 1920s and '30s height.

Turns out he's quite the raconteur, with a quick wit and an eye for the telling detail. His grandfather owned a brewery, and:

After years of experience [he] could drink thirty-six big stone mugs of beer in one evening. He ate heavy meals besides, hardly any vegetables, only dumplings and potatoes, potatoes and dumplings, and much meat.

In consequence of this diet, Grandfather had several times a year attacks of very painful gout, which in Bavaria is called Zipperl. Much of the time, one or the other of his legs was wrapped in cotton and elephantine bandages. If people came near it, even Mother, he chased them away with his stick saying: "Ah, ah, ah" in an ecstasy of pain and widening his eyes as if he saw something very beautiful far away. Then he would rise up in his seat, while his voice changed to a whimpering "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." He said he could feel the change in weather in his toes, through the thick bandages. But he did not stop eating or drinking.

His hotel and restaurant stories are the works of a perceptive insider, revealing the knavery and goofiness that go on behind the scenes, familiar in contour if not detail to anyone who's ever worked even the lowest level of food service. In the following passage, he helps a friend break into the hotel icebox to steal cheese for a party:

"Shh," said Mr. Sigsag, and I looked around once more; there was no one outside. He climbed in and reached down, but he was too short to reach the cheeses. I held his knees, then his ankles, and then his shoes; then I had his shoes in my hands and Mr. Sigsag was down with his face in some Camembert. Also there was a noise. I closed the icebox door. It was the night watchman; he looked in and I polished away at some bottles. The man sat down, lit a pipe, and started to talk; it wa a long time before he left again on his rounds.

In the meantime, Mr. Sigsag had been trying to get up; kneeling and standing and sliding and then sitting down again in all kinds of cheese. He first handed out a Pont L'Eveque, hard and solid. "There will be trouble anyway," he said, "we might as well take it along." Then he gave me his cold hands, but for some time I could not lift him out. They were smeared with cheese and slipped out of mine. I gave him a napkin, with which he cleaned his face and hands, and finally I could pull him out, his sleeves and trousers full of cheese. He took a shower downstairs, change his trousers, but he still smelled.

That passage exemplifies what I ask of a raconteur: take me someplace where I by temperament or circumstance am unlikely to go, and tell me about the people you meet there and what they're up to. I suppose it's not all that different from what I ask of any writer, of fiction or non-fiction.

Regardless, as again and again I tuck myself in at an hour long before the monsters, night owls, beats, aberrations, goths, goons, vagabonds, knockabouts, oddities, lunatics, ravers, on-the-makers, and drunk poets have rounded into form, I'll reserve a special place in my heart for the raconteurs and raconteuses, my foreign correspondents from the night.

On Raconteurs

Though I've long loved the word "raconteur," I've recently realized that I have been giving it a sense that it does not, apparently, have. According to Merriam-Webster's, the meaning of raconteur, which dates from 1828, is very straightforward:

A person who excels in telling anecdotes.

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a bit more inclusive to start:

A (usu. skilled) teller of anecdotes

but then circumscribes the word significantly by adding a reference to a word I'd never heard of:

raconteuse A female raconteur.

What surprises me here (aside from raconteuse) is not what is in the definition, but what is left out. Having over the years imagined a definition based on the ways I've heard the word used, I would have defined raconteur as

One who skillfully tells anecdotes, often (if not always) from personal experience, that experience gained often (if not always) while drunk or with drunks.

Am I the only one who thinks of raconteurs this way? I decided to put the question to Google. A search on notable storyteller Garrison Keillor and raconteur returns 518 hits, while a search on notable drunk, actor, and storyteller Peter O'Toole and raconteur yields 567 hits. That may not satisfy science, but the fact that someone best known for his acting and drinking outperforms someone primarily known for his storytelling is enough for me.

[Side note: A search on Garrison Keillor and drunk yields a surprising 67,700 hits--but here's where O'Toole really shines: he draws about 130,000. What a man.]

This is all prelude to an appreciation of raconteurs, especially as I erroneously define them. As someone who mostly stays at home or sees the same old friends, enjoys a single martini and hates hangovers, and is nearly always in bed by midnight, my respect for those who are capable of adventuring until dawn knows almost no bounds. I understand that the rackety life can cause difficulties for the practitioner and his loved ones--but once the tippler has survived his adventures, and especially once he's committed them to the page, he becomes my friend for life, giving me entree to late-night worlds as unexpected and exotic as those of The Arabian Nights.

In recent weeks, I've been spending a lot of time with a couple of literary raconteurs. I'm continuing to plow through Soho dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross's ouvre, which is essentially one long story about being down at heel and looking for money for cigarettes and booze. His Memoirs of the Forties (1965) features cameos from all sorts of well-known and long-forgotten London literary drunks and hustlers, from Dylan Thomas:

"Why don't you take that bloody jacket off?" Dylan said.
"What's wrong with my jacket?"
"Fucking dandy, flourishing that stick. Why don't you try to look more sordid, boy. Sordidness, that's the thing."

to the mostly-forgotten editor of Poetry London, J. Meary Tambimuttu, about whom Maclaren-Ross first learns from a girl named Kitty of Bloomsbury:

When Kitty came down from Oxford and was looking for a job, [Tambi] took her to a bare basement room, containing a half-collapsed camp bed, a kitchen chair and a wooden table on which were a bottle of blue-black ink, a chewed post-office pen holder, and stacks of [his] embossed crested paper.

"This was my office," he said. "Now it is yours. I engage you as my secretary and poetry-reader." Squashing a cockroach on the sweating wall with a rolled-up copy of Poetry London, he waved this at a chaos of accumulated MSS in a corner.

"Poems," he said. "Contributions, you know? I have not time to read them. If they're no good, perhaps they should be returned. They've been here a long time; the rats have eaten some. We have no typewriter yet, but there is ink and paper to write the authors. You will be paid fortnightly. Do you have any money?"

"Yes, thank you, I've got five pounds."

"That is good," Tambimuttu said. "I am a prince in my country and princes don't carry money, you know. Give me the fiver and later the firm will refund you. I am going to lunch with T. S. Eliot. You know who is T. S. Eliot?"

Tambimuttu, whose incorrigibility is perhaps only matched by his general enthusiasm for anything not involving paying out money, becomes a regular drinking companion of Maclaren-Ross. One night, says Maclaren-Ross,

We were with two suburban young women, new to Fitzrovia, whom he'd picked up in the Wheatsheaf and who were both uninteresting and interested only in being bought a meal in some newly opened restaurant which they'd heard was good but which was off our usual beat. Tambi was becoming increasingly worried as we stumbled over cobble-stones further and further from the territory that he had made his own; he glanced longingly at strips of light visible through the blackouts of pubs where the girls refused to stop.

"Nearly ten o'clock," he muttered. "In an hour they'll be closing and this restaurant perhaps has no license," and suddenly he caught up with the girls who were walking ahead arm-in-arm, giggling and whispering together, convinced that they'd achieved their objective in finding a pair of suckers who would foot the bill.

"Listen you must tell us please, my friend and I wish to know, do you do it or not?"

"Do it?" they chorused. "Do what?"

"You know. Sex."

There was a pause for shock to register, then outraged gasps of "How dare you," came in unison.

"You mean you don't?"

"Certainly not. The idea!"

"Then be off!" Tambi shouted, banishing them with a gesture into the blackout: "You are wasting our valuable drinking time," and we retraced our steps to Rathbone Place.

I said: "I could have told you those girls were NBG."

"How did you know?"

"Well they were nurses or something weren't they?"

"Don't nurses do sex?"

"Yes but only with doctors whom they hope to marry after."

"Only doctors? Is that all?" Tambi was silent for a moment then asked: "Only medical doctors? A doctor of literature would not be any good?"

"Are you a doctor of literature?"

"Not yet, but I could have a degree conferred. Honorary you know. From Oxford. I know many professors there, and then I could fuck with all these nurses. What do you think?"

Again and again, Maclaren-Ross recounts tales that could only happen in the wee hours, when the participants are burning with a low blue flame--exactly the hours I spend in bed, and exactly what I want from my raconteurs. Similarly, many of the people he tells of would be absolutely intolerable in real life--especially if one or both of you were sober--which leads me to expand on my definition of raconteur:

One who skillfully tells anecdotes, often (if not always) from personal experience, that experience gained often (if not always) while drunk or with drunks--frequently drunks who are best heard of at second-hand.

This rambling post is getting long, and I haven't even gotten to the second of my recent raconteur companions, Ludwig Bemelmans. For that, you'll have to wait until tomorrow. Until then, I'm going back to my martini.

Faces

Looking up at me from the covers of the three books on the table next to my reading chair in the front room are the faces of Julian MacLaren-Ross, Thomas Hardy, and Patricia Highsmith.

Julian MacLaren-Ross, who had a pathological hatred of being photographed, apparently decided to camp it up for the photo that was chosen for Paul Wiletts's biography. He's barely in focus, leaning forward a bit and keeping a long cigarette holder in place with his left hand; his look is coy and over-the-top mysterious. He's clearly playing a role, but since so much of his life seemed to be playing one part or another, I suppose it's possible that this is no more campy or false than any other moment for him. Who knows how seriously he was taking this photo shoot? Regardless, the impression is one of goofy insouciance with just an dollop of true mysteriousness and reserve, utterly appropriate to MacLaren-Ross. [Aside to Spider-Man fans: he has Harry Osborn hair.]

Thomas Hardy, meanwhile, is pictured on the jacket of Claire Tomalin's biography staring into space, wearing a dark homburg, a high-collared shirt and tie, and a tweed jacket and waistcoat. He is an old man and his bristly moustache looks a bit formidable--which is what a fan of his novels might expect him to be--but his light eyes and the gentle lines of his face belie that. When he was a young man, he sported a long, full beard like Dickens, which had the effect of making him look a bit stuffy. Hardy's older face, on the other hand, gives a sense that he is a kindly, caring, generous man troubled by what he has seen in a long life. The workings of fate can be so cruel in his novels that the gentle face surprises me a bit--though perhaps it shouldn't, since the sympathy in his novels lies always with the sufferers. Presumably Tomalin's biography will tell me whether I'm reading this photo correctly.

On the cover of her Selected Stories Patricia Highsmith gazes off to the side with a deeply suspicious look, one thick eyebrow arched, as if she's about to interrupt the photo shoot to ask, one last time, why exactly you need to take her picture. She wears a black frock coat, buttoned over a scarf against the cold, hands jammed in her pockets; you ought to be able to see her breath. Behind her and out of focus, light comes through an arched doorway. The middle-aged Highsmith in this photo reveals hints of the striking beauty she possessed when she was young, evidenced by luminous photos of her in her twenties and thirties. What she fully retains from her youth is a sense of danger--muted by the years, but still potent. She did not, it seems, have a happy life, and the misanthropy that comes through in her writing seems to have been deeply rooted; the face in this photo isn't likely to make one reconsider that assessment. [Aside for Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica fans: Highsmith bears more than a passing resemblance to Michelle Forbes.]

Photos, of course, don't really tell us anything definite about writers, let alone their books. But, like biography itself, they're a satisfying addition to what the writers make available on the page. I think Javier Marias pinpoints the appeal of knowing the faces of authors in the passage below, which opens a brief section of his wonderful Written Lives (2005) that treats photos of authors that he has spent a lifetime reading:

No one knows waht Cervantes looked like, and no one knows for certain what Shakespeare looked like either, and so Don Quixote and Macbeth are both texts unaccompanied by a personal expression, a definitive face or gaze which, over time, the eyes of other men have been able to freeze and make their own. Or perhaps only those that posterity has felt the need to bestow on them, with a great deal of hesitation, bad conscience, and unease--an expression, gaze, and face that were undoubtedly not those of Shakespeare or of Cervantes.

It is as if the books we still read felt more alien and incomprehensible without some image of the heads that composed them; it is as if our age, in which everything has its corresponding image, felt uncomfortable with something whose authorship cannot be attributed to a face; it is almost as if a writer's features formed part of his or her work. perhaps the authors of the last two centuries anticipated this and so left behind them numerous portraits, in paintings and in photographs. . . . It would be naive to try and extract from them lessons or laws, or even common characteristics. The only thing that leaps out at one is that all the subjects are writers and now, at last, when they are all dead, all of them are perfect artists.

If I think the hint of malevolence in Highsmith's photo is off-putting, I quickly change my mind as I move it aside and reveal, beneath it, the cover of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), on which an army of grotesque vampires surges forward, teeth bared. While the photos of the authors on the other books may tell me something about them and their books, the vampires, I think, tell me everything I needed to know before opening I Am Legend.

At the very least, the vampires would be sufficient to prevent me from opening the book late some winter night when Stacey is out and I'm all alone in the house . . .

Book to book to book

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably have a sense of the oblique routes I take from one book or subject to another. Today’s post is a brief glimpse into that process.

Last week, I read Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936) because in Julian MacLaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties, which I read earlier this month, he describes meeting Greene to discuss the possibility of MacLaren-Ross’s adapting the novel for the BBC. It turned out to be the right time of year to read the book, because I always like to read some Christmas book or other in December, and the events of A Gun for Sale take place right around the holiday. It’s a Graham Greene Christmas, however, so (even though this was before his Catholic novels) it’s a Christmas that serves mostly as a shabby attempt to tart up a fallen, grubby world. Raven, an utterly amoral professional gunman, finds himself hunted by the police in the town of Nottwich, and he soon discovers that, rare as aid and comfort are, goodness itself is even less common, in the upper classes or the lower. Raven is an outsider in a world of outsiders, which renders a holiday like Christmas mostly a cruel joke and life a painful struggle to the death:

Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.

A Gun for Sale reminded me of the existence of James Jones’s The Pistol (1958), a tightly written novella about Richard Mast, a U.S. Army private in Hawaii who takes advantage of the confusion immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor to hold onto a pistol that he had been temporarily issued. Over the next few weeks, as the Army fortifies the beaches and roads of Hawaii in anticipation of a Japanese amphibious invasion, the pistol becomes a talisman, the tangible form of his hope for survival. With the pistol, he half-reasons, half-feels, he’ll have just enough advantage, just enough edge to make it through what’s ahead.

Word of his illicit firearm makes its way rapidly through the company, and Mast’s fellow soldiers fixate on taking it for themselves, by force if necessary. Most of them deliver variations on the same argument: “I need the pistol more than you because . . .” The repeated arguments and the symbolic role of the pistol could easily push the novella too far into allegory, but Jones pays such close attention to the details of life and work that the story doesn't ever come unmoored from reality. It’s a quick read and, if you’ve been interested in Jones but unwilling to commit the time to From Here to Eternity or The Thin Red Line, it would be a good starting point, giving a glimpse of his understanding of human motivations and of how men behave under pressure.

Logic would have led me from The Pistol to Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear (1940), which was sitting on my table and would have kept up some of the tone and subject of the Greene and the Jones, concerning as it does an English armaments engineer who finds himself caught up in World War II intrigue. But that will have to wait, because Christmas intervened, and for Christmas Stacey got me Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map (2006). It tells the story of the London cholera epidemic of 1854 and Dr. John Snow’s discovery that cholera is transmitted through contaminated water. In recent weeks I'd discussed the book with friends who, like me, knew some of the story from Edward Tufte’s discussion in Visual Explanation of the map of mortality that Snow drew up as part of his evidence. But whereas Tufte was primarily interested in the successful information design of Snow’s map, Johnson tells, in gripping fashion, the larger story of the epidemic and what Snow’s discovery reveals about history, innovation, science, intuition, and human thought in general.

Johnson presents Snow (and the mostly forgotten Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose work, both independently and with Snow, contributed greatly to the ultimate vindication of Snow’s theory) as a consilient thinker, someone who, by being interested in all fields and—more important—willing to apply insights from one field of study to a problem in another—was able to see connections and draw conclusions that other scientists and medical professionals of the era, blinded by received wisdom, were simply unable to see. As Johnson presents the evidence, it is extremely hard to understand how anyone could fail to accept Snow’s conclusions. Yet many extremely smart and educated people refused to surrender their adherence to the longstanding theory that disease was caused by “miasma” emanating from the slums.

As Johnson explores that blindness, the book becomes more than just good popular history. Johnson is fascinated by the question of how ideas come together and how various factors, from individual temperaments to religion to social thought to urban planning (or lack thereof) aid or hinder the furthering of knowledge and the acceptance of ideas. As he explains,

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

By the conclusion of the book, a Jane Jacobs-driven paean to urban living, The Ghost Map has become as much a book about ideas and knowledge in general as about the 1854 cholera epidemic itself. It's a success in both regards.

And, finally, where will The Ghost Map lead me? Well, one reason I had been discussing it earlier in the month with my friend Maggie is that she was reading Robinson Crusoe, which led to us talking about Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which led to The Ghost Map. And I've never read A Journal of the Plague Year. . .

And now you understand why I’ll never get everything on my shelves read.

Graham Greene

A busy week of work and the death of our laptop's monitor conspired to make last week a light blogging week. So this week might be a bit disjointed, like a whole week of notes rather than separate entries.

And tonight's topic is Graham Greene. It seems like anywhere Greene the man turns up, he's interesting or entertaining. Julian MacLaren-Ross, in Memoirs of the Forties (1965), tells of meeting Greene for the first time at Greene's apartment. Late in the evening, they are taken into the nursery by Vivien Greene to say goodnight to the children. On returning to the parlor:

"Lovely children," I said, "charming," in the hearty voice used by my father when he'd survived a social ordeal, and I was further relieved to see Greene had a brandy bottle in his hand.

He said: "Who was it complained that not enough children get murdered in detective stories?"

Evelyn Waugh tells a good story in a letter to Nancy Mitford, dated October 4, 1948 and collected in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996):

So my friend Graham Greene whose books you won't read was sitting in a New York hotel feeling quite well when he felt very wet & sticking in the lap & hurried to the lavatory & found that his penis was pouring with blood. So he fainted & and was taken to a hospital and the doctors said "It may be caused by five diseases two of which are not immediately fatal, the others are." Then they chloroformed him & he woke up two days later & they said: "Well, we can't find anything wrong at all. What have you been up to? Too much womanizing?" "No, not for weeks since I left my home in England." "Ah" they said "That's it." What a terrible warning. No wonder his books are sad.

And from a October 19, 1954 letter:

Graham Green prefers spirits to wine and was not happy. As we started [a trip to Reims] he saw the name [Alan] Pryce-Jones (a harmless gentle Welsh journalist) on the list and said: "I can't go. I won't meet Pryce-Jones. He's too negative." Well, he came. That evening we all went to bed at about midnight--Lord Long haranguing the night porter--"Don't tell me all brothels are closed. I'll wake them up"--Next morning we met again at ten Graham looking ghastly. "I didn't get to bed until after four." "What were you doing?" "Drinking marc." "Who with?" "Pryce-Jones."

Then there's this, from Anthony Powell, who got along well enough with Greene but didn't like his books. In his journal (available in Journals: 1990-1992 (1997)), Powell wrote, on April 3, 1991, the day of Greene's death:

There was always an element of deviousness, indeed humbug, about all Graham's public utterances and behaviour. I think he was completely cynical, really only liking sex and money and his own particular form of publicity. I always go on pretty well with him, chiefly just before the war. We had the only colossal row after the war when he was my publisher. He would go white with rage on such occasions, admitting that he had to have rows from time to time for his health.

The occasion for the white-with-rage row was that Greene, who was at the time the managing director of Eyre & Spottiswode, was delaying the publication of Powell's book on John Aubrey, during which argument he let slip that he found the book "bloody boring."

Then there's Barbara Pym, in a letter to Philip Larkin of July 14, 1974, taking inspiration from Greene:

The sun is coming out again and I will turn to my novel. They say Graham Greene writes only 250 words a day, so I should be able to manage that!

I don't think those 250 words included the writing he did in his two journals, one real and one false, of which I learned from reviews of Norman Sherry's enormous, three-volume biography. That fact alone may force me to read the whole biography someday after all.

An odd English boyhood

As I’ve mentioned before, I started reading Julian MacLaren-Ross only because he is considered to be the model for X. Trapnel, a louche young writer who figures prominently in the final three novels of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Trapnel is a striking figure; tall, thin, and bearded, he carries a sword cane surmounted by a tiny skull. “The final effect had that touch of surrealism that redeems from complete absurdity, though such redemption was a near thing, only narrowly achieved.” A peerless raconteur, and utterly feckless, he always needs to be stood drinks and fronted cab fare. (The reason he takes cabs everywhere? “Taxis provided a security, denied to the man on foot, against bailiffs serving writs for debt.”) Narrator Nicholas Jenkins, recently moved to a quiet country house, spends many a late night in Trapnel’s company—to some extent reliving his own youth in the bubbly 1920s. Though he enjoys Trapnel’s rackety eccentricity, he can foresee the inevitable dissolution.

According to everything I’ve read, the differences between MacLaren-Ross and Trapnel were minor. Somehow, however, in the midst of a short life spent rambling around the pubs of Fitzrovia at all hours, MacLaren-Ross managed to write a couple of volumes of autobiography and a bunch of short stories. I just finished his memoir of his boyhood, The Weeping and the Laughter, which, in its convoluted, Latinate sentence structure bears a bit of a resemblance to Powell’s writing. Thought it’s out of print in the United States, it’s great fun and has value well beyond the Powell connection.

The opening will give you a sense of MacLaren-Ross’s intentionally overblown sense of drama:

Soon after my birth, which took place at midnight and during a thunderstorm , war broke out, and one of my earliest memories is of being snatched from my cot and carried out in my father’s arms on to the lawn of our house at Ramsgate, just in time to see a German Zeppelin cast its shadow on the rooftop from the vast moonlit menace of the sky.

“Vast moonlit menace of the sky”—that’s the tone in which MacLaren-Ross describes the whole world of his youth; everything is seen through the credulous eyes of young Julian, who has been conditioned by a steady diet of movie thrillers to see lurking mystery everywhere.

His father is obstinate and particular, turning every disagreement into a carefully nurtured feud. When MacLaren-Ross’s sister, Carol, reveals that she is eloping, things do not go well:

When my father wished someone to leave the house, their departure was not long delayed. Carol was no exception to the rule. . . . “We’d neither one of us ever accept a penny of yours,” Carol told him, “but if you must know, we are going to Canada.” . . . “Perhaps your husband imagines the Klondike gold-rush is still in progress? I can assure you that it has been over for many years: your Uncle Reggie was frozen to death there in 1896. Stiff as a board, I remember, was the way they put it at the time.”

Those were the last words he ever spoke to his daughter.

But the other odd relatives bear a share of the blame for the elder MacLaren-Ross’s vexed relationships:

It was owing to the mutual antipathy between Father and Grandma Emily, as she was always called, that they visited us so rarely, to the regret of my mother ,who not unnaturally did not share her husband’s dislike of her parent. Every time they met, my father would make a heroic effort to overcome this, as on the present occasion: the strain of which was reflected in the fixed brightness of his smile while his voice, pitched a tone louder than usual, held [a] spurious and rather ferocious geniality. . . . But Grandma Emily was not deluded, nor did she make any reciprocal attempt to disguise her own feelings: her opening remark, as I recall, prefaced with the eerie cackle that had been in her youth a gay ironical laugh, was: Why, Lambden, you’re looking old.

Uncles (like Uncle Max, who becomes convinced that his business partner is a swindling murderer) and aunts (like Aunt Edith, about whom MacLaren-Ross’s father says, “That woman’s a stormy petrel if I’ve ever seen one.”) shimmer in and out, sometimes living with the family, at other times convincing them to enter into ill-advised financial ventures. Carrying Julian’s naivete throughout the narrative allows MacLaren-Ross to imbue even fairly ordinary details of life with an element of wonder. Disembarking from the Calais ferry, his

first sight of France was of a cloaked man holding an enormous key. . . . He was the subject of [a poster] and advertised not as I thought some super-serial but, as Mother told me . . . a detective agency: even more satisfactory, since I had not imagined such concerns existed outside film or books.

Later, he is enthralled by a French puppet show:

The Judge arrived to try the case, in white wig and black gown. He condemned Guignol to death on the spot. There was no jury, and soon the guillotine was dragged on to the stage, en bloc, by the Gendarme and the Executioner. It seemed Guignol was for it this time, but no: his stick appeared by magic in his arms and he proceeded to murder all the representatives of the law, guillotining personally the Judge and the Executioner after he had stunned them with his stick.

One would have expected this drama of greed and mass murder to conclude, somehow, on a moral note; instead it concluded, oddly, with a paean in praise of drink.

MacLaren-Ross also brings that air of non-judgmental wonder to images and scenes that would otherwise be grotesque, horrible, or affecting, like the beggars Julian finds in Marseilles:

There was a dwarf with a hump on his back and a hare-lip, who apparently lived in the Cathedral de Notre Dame and used to pounce on passers-by from its doorway, pursuing them for some way down the street with curses if he failed to receive a donation. Farther along, a blind woman was stationed, holding a child, also blind, in her arms. The dwarf always stopped short when he reached her territory; so you were safe from him if you got as far as that. . . . After her there was a fairly beggarless stretch of pavement; then came two men in rags, both legless, between the Dames de France and the Galeries de Lafayette. One sat in a sort of box on wheels, exposing the stump of a shoulder like yellow wax, where his arm had seemingly been hacked off with a hatchet. The second man had no box but was propped up on the sidewalk itself and had only sores to exhibit, less interesting than the stump and more repulsive to look at.

And, oh, does MacLaren-Ross love the grotesque. He tells of “a female shark, harpooned off the quay, [that] gave birth to little sharks in her death-agony on the quay.” And of his Uncle Bertie’s pet leech,

which had been employed by a French doctor for cupping my grandmother during a grave illness, Uncle Bertie had become fond of it during the time it was applied to her, and since it had played a large part in saving her life, he felt it should be preserved. Now it lived in a bottle, raw meat was provided daily to supply the blood needed for its sustenance, and he described how, when the meat was sucked dry, it would let go and fall gorged to the bottom of the bottle, where it lay until no longer replete and ready for the next meal: otherwise, to make it loose hold when once anchored to a prey, the best method was to sprinkle salt on it, as with ticks on dogs.

The overall effect is like a mixture of Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, in which siblings form an intense, near-mystical bond in the wake of their father’s self-destructive profligacy, and Flora Thompson’s loving memoirs of growing up in an English country village, Lark Rise to Candleford. Or as if Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, and Jean Shepherd had combined to write a memoir of boyhood.

Ultimately, in The Weeping and the Laughter MacLaren-Ross has recaptured that mistaken sense kids possess that the world is explicable, and that the only reason it doesn’t quite make sense is that they’re not yet adults. By doing so, he simultaneously domesticates the disturbing and renders strange the ordinary, weaving both into an engaging, memorable chronicle of a long-gone world.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 2 of 8

To be fair to Julian MacLaren-Ross, the reason I started reading him in the first place was because he is said to be the model for the rackety writer X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. So Powell bears responsibility for this topic, too—which is fair, because he, too, had an eye for clothes. Mostly, however, his interest was in how they reflected social convention or position and how, when divorced from their social value, they were often, essentially, absurd.

Like tattoos.

From Marco Polo's The Travels of Marco Polo (1298-99)

[In Kanigu province,] both men and women have their bodies marked with the needle all over, in figures of beasts and birds; and there are among them practitioners whose sole employment it is to execute these ornaments upon the hands, the legs, and the breast. When a black colouring stuff has been rubbed over these punctures, it is impossible either by water or otherwise, to efface the marks. The man or woman who exhibits the greatest profusion of these figures, is esteemed the most handsome.

From Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951)

“But my dear Peter,” [said Stringham], “Why do you always go about dressed as if you were going to dance up and down a row of naked ladies singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man,’ or something equally lyrical? You get more like an advertisement for gents’ tailoring every day.”

From Céleste Alberet’s Monsieur Proust (1973)

As well as tails and dinner jacket, he had several jackets which he wore with striped trousers, and to these he added a black jacket with piping. Everything was of course made to measure.

He had a collection of waistcoats, handsome but plain. I remember he had one made because he particularly liked the material. It was red silk with a white silk lining. He tried it on and showed me. I can see him now turning this way and that in front of the mirror, then saying:

“Definitely not. It would be all right for a dandy like Bonii de Castellane, but I don’t want to look ridiculous.”

And he never wore it. I put it away in the cupboard.

From Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972)

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. . . . So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 1 of 8

If this series of entries is anyone’s fault, it’s Julian MacLaren-Ross’s. It was he, talking about World War I uniforms, as worn by his ne’er-do-well brother, who got me thinking about the many appearances of fashion and clothing in things I’ve been reading. A few hours later, when I happened across Barbara Pym’s note about the fashions at Oxford in her youth, suddenly I was off to consult Samuel Johnson. The rest was inevitable.

From Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755)

Fashionist: A follower of the mode; a fop; a coxcomb.

From a letter by Barbara Pym to Philip Larkin, collected in A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters (1984)

I suppose when you were at Oxford nobody came into The George wearing a silver lamé shirt or went around with a lizard on their shoulder or carried a toy kangaroo—that was the early thirties when I was up. But surely there must have been girls, even in the austere, one-bottle-of-wine a term forties (shoulder-length pageboy hair, square shoulders and short skirts?).

From Edward Lear’s The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense

There was an Old Man of Blackheath,
Whose head was adorned with a wreath
Of lobsters and spice, pickled onions and mice,
That uncommon Old Man of Blackheath.

From Julian Maclaren-Ross’s The Weeping and the Laughter (1953), in Collected Memoirs

My brother, pardonably bitter, turned his back on the church, and for a time went about getting drunk in a black cloak lined with crimson silk—but somehow he was not really cut out for a roisterer.

From P. G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves Takes Charge,” collected in Carry on, Jeeves (1925)

“Oh, Jeeves,” I said. “About that check suit.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Is it really a frost?”

“A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.’

“But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.”

“Doubtless in order to avoid him sir.”

“He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.”

“I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.”

. . . .

“All right, Jeeves,” I said. ‘You know! Give the bally thing away to somebody.”

He looked down at me like a father gazing tenderly at the wayward child.

“Thank you, sir. I gave it to the under-gardener last night. A little more tea, sir?”