Sebastian returned to London in the beginning of 1930 and took to his bed after a very bad heart attack. Somehow or other he managed to go on with the writing of Lost Property: his easiest book, I think. Now, it ought to be understood in connexion with what follows that Clare had been solely responsible for the managing of his literary affairs. After her departure, these soon became wildly entangled. In many cases Sebastian had not the vaguest idea how things stood and what his exact relations with this or that publisher were. He was so muddled, so utterly incompetent, so hopelessly incapable of remembering a single name or address, or the place where he put things, that now he got into the most absurd predicaments. Curiously enough, Clare’s girlish forgetfulness had been replaced by a perfect clarity and steadiness of purpose when handling Sebastian’s affairs; but now it all went amuck. He had never learnt to use a typewriter and was much too nervous to begin now. The Funny Mountain was published simultaneously in two American magazines, and Sebastian was at a loss to remember how he had managed to sell it to two different people. Then there was a complicated affair with a man who wanted to make a film of Success and who had paid Sebastian in advance (without his noticing it, so absent-mindedly did he read letters) for a shortened and ‘intensified’ version, which Sebastian never even dreamt of making. The Prismatic Bezel was in the market again, but Sebastian hardly knew of it. Invitations were not even answered; Telephone numbers proved delusions, and the harassing search for the envelope where he had scrawled this or that number exhausted him more than the writing of a chapter. And then – his mind was elsewhere, following in the tracks of an absent mistress, waiting for her call – and presently the call would come, or he himself could stand the suspense no longer, and there he would be as Roy Carswell had once seen him: a gaunt man in a greatcoat and bedroom slippers getting into a Pullman car.
It was in the beginning of this period that Mr Goodman made his appearance. Little by little, Sebastian handed over to him all his literary affairs, and felt greatly relieved to meet so efficient a secretary. ‘I usually found him’, writes Mr Goodman, ‘lying in bed like a sulky leopard’ (which somehow reminds one of the nightcapped wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’)…. ‘Never in my life had I seen’, he goes on in another passage, ‘such a dejected-looking being…. I am told that the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied, also had a great inclination towards a certain listless «interesting» pose….’ And further: ‘Knight was very thin, with a pale countenance and sensitive hands, which he liked to display with feminine coquetry. He confessed to me once that he liked to pour half a bottle of French perfume into his morning bath, but with all that he looked singularly badly got up…. Knight was extraordinarily vain, like most modernist authors. Once or twice I caught him pasting cuttings, most certainly reviews concerning his books, into a beautiful and expensive album which he kept locked up in his desk, feeling perhaps a little ashamed to let my critical eye consider the fruit of his human weakness…. He often went abroad, twice a year, I daresay, presumably to Gay Paree…. But he was very mysterious about it and made a great show of Byronic languor. I cannot help feeling that trips to the Continent formed part of his artistic programme… he was the perfect «poseur».’
But where Mr Goodman waxes really eloquent is when he starts to discourse upon deeper matters. His idea is to show. and explain the ‘fatal split between Knight the artist and the great booming world about him’ – (a circular fissure, obviously). ‘Knight’s uncongeniality was his undoing,’ exclaims Goodman and clicks out three dots. ‘Aloofness is a cardinal sin in an age when a perplexed humanity eagerly turns to its writers and thinkers, and demands of them attention to, if not the cure of, its woes and wounds…. The «ivory tower» cannot be suffered unless it is transformed into a lighthouse or a broadcasting station…. In such an age… brimming with burning problems when… economic depression… dumped… cheated… the man in the street… the growth of totalitarian… unemployment… the next supergreat war… new aspects of family life… sex… structure of the universe.’ Mr Goodman’s interests are wide, as we see. ‘Now, Knight’, he goes on, ‘absolutely refused to take any interest whatsoever in contemporary questions…. When asked to join in this or that movement, to take part in; some momentous meeting, or merely to append his signature, among more famous names, to some manifest of undying truth or denunciation of great iniquity… he flatly refused in spite of all my admonishments and even pleadings…. True, in his last (and most obscure) book, he does survey the world… but the angle he chooses and the aspects he notes are totally different from what a serious reader naturally expects from a serious author…. It is as though a conscientious inquirer into the life and machinery of some great enterprise were shown, with elaborate circumlocution, a dead bee on a window sill…. Whenever I called his attention to this or that just published book which had fascinated me because it was of general and vital interest, he childishly replied that it was «claptrap», or made some other completely irrelevant remark…. He confused solitude with altitude and the Latin for sun. He failed to realize that it was merely a dark corner…. However, as he was hypersensitive (I remember how he used to wince when I pulled my fingers to make the joints crack – a bad habit I have when meditating), he could not help feeling that something was wrong… that he was steadily cutting himself away from Life… and that the switch would not function in his solarium. The misery which had begun as an earnest young man’s reaction to the rude world into which his temperamental youth had been thrust, and which later continued to be displayed as a fashionable mask in the days of his Success as a writer, now took on a new and hideous reality. The board adorning his breast read no more «I am the lone artist»; invisible fingers had changed it into «I am blind».’
It would be an insult to the reader’s acumen were I to comment on Mr Goodman’s glibness. If Sebastian was blind, his secretary, in any case, plunged lustily into the part of a barking and pulling .leader. Roy Carswell, who in 1933 was painting Sebastian’s portrait, told me he remembered roaring with laughter at Sebastian’s accounts of his relations with Mr Goodman. Very possibly he would never have been energetic enough to get rid of that pompous person had the latter not become a shade too enterprising. In 1934 Sebastian wrote to Roy Carswell from Cannes telling him that he had found out by chance (he seldom re-read his own books) that Goodman had changed an epithet in the Swan edition of The Funny Mountain. ‘I have given him the sack,’ he added. Mr Goodman modestly refrains from mentioning this minor detail. After exhausting his stock of impressions, and concluding that the real cause of Sebastian’s death was the final realization of having been ‘a human failure, and therefore an artistic one too’, he cheerfully mentions that his work as secretary came to an end owing to his entering another branch of business. I shall not refer any more to Goodman’s book. It is abolished.
But as I look at the portrait Roy Carswell painted I seem to see a slight twinkle in Sebastian’s eyes, for all the sadness of their expression. The painter has wonderfully rendered the moist dark greenish-grey of their iris, with a still darker rim and a suggestion of gold dust constellating round the pupil. The lids are heavy and perhaps a little inflamed, and a vein or two seems to have burst on the glossy eyeball. These eyes and the face itself are painted in such a manner as to convey the impression that they are mirrored Narcissus-like in clear water – with a very slight ripple on the hollow cheek, owing to the presence of a water-spider which has just stopped and is floating backward. A withered leaf has settled on the reflected brow, which is creased as that of a man peering intently. The crumpled dark hair over it is partly suffused by another ripple, but one strand on the temple has caught a glint of humid sunshine. There is a deep furrow between the straight eyebrows, and
