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
