The Doubtful Asphodel obtained many reviews, and most of them were long and quite flattering. But here and there the hint kept recurring that the author was a tired author, which seemed another way of saying that he was just an old bore. I even caught a faint suggestion of commiseration, as if they knew certain sad dreary things about the author which were not really in the book, but which permeated their attitude towards it. One critic even went as far as to say that he read it ‘with mingled feelings, because it was a rather unpleasant experience for the reader, to sit beside a deathbed and never be quite sure whether the author was the doctor or the patient’. Nearly all the reviews gave to understand that the book was a little too long, and that many passages were obscure and obscurely aggravating. All praised Sebastian Knight’s ‘sincerity’ – whatever that was. I wondered what Sebastian thought of those reviews.
I lent my copy to a friend who kept it several weeks without reading it, and then lost it in a train. I got another and never lent it to anybody. Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don’t know whether it makes one ‘think’, and I don’t much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners. And sometimes I tell myself that it would not be inordinately hard to translate it into Russian.
19
I have managed to reconstruct more or less the last year of Sebastian’s life: 1935. He died in the very beginning of 1936, and as I look at this figure I cannot help thinking that there is an occult resemblance between a man and the date of his death. Sebastian Knight d. 1936…. This date to me seems the reflection of that name in a pool of rippling water. There is something about the curves of the last three numerals that recalls the sinuous outlines of Sebastian’s personality…. I am trying, as I have often tried in the course of this book, to express an idea that might have appealed to him…. If here and there I have not captured at least the shadow of his thought, or if now and then unconscious cerebration has not led me to take the right turn in his private labyrinth, then my book is a clumsy failure.
The appearance of The Doubtful Asphodel in the spring of 1935 coincided with Sebastian’s last attempt to see Nina. When he was told by one of her sleek-haired young ruffians that she wished to be rid of him for ever, he returned to London and stayed there for a couple of months, making a pitiful effort to deceive solitude by appearing in public as much as he could. A thin, mournful, and silent figure, he would be seen in this place or that, wearing a scarf round his neck even in the warmest dining-room, exasperating hostesses by his absent-mindedness and his gentle refusal to be drawn out, wandering away in the middle of a party, or being discovered in the nursery, engrossed in a jig-saw puzzle. One day, near Charing Cross, Helen Pratt saw Clare into a bookshop, and a few seconds later, as she was continuing her way, she ran into Sebastian. He coloured slightly as he shook hands with Miss Pratt, and then accompanied her to the underground station. She was thankful he had not appeared a minute earlier, and still more thankful when he did not trouble to allude to the past. He told her instead an elaborate story about a couple of men who had attempted to swindle him at a game of poker the night before.
‘Glad to have met you,’ he said as they parted. ‘I think I shall get it here.’
‘Get what?’ asked Miss Pratt.
‘I was on my way to [he named the bookshop], but I see I can get what I want at this stall.’
He went to concerts and plays, and drank hot milk in the middle of the night at coffee stalls with taxi drivers. He is said to have been three times to see the same film – a perfectly insipid one called The Enchanted Garden. A couple of months after his death, and a few days after I had learnt who Madame Lecerf really was, I discovered that film in a French cinema where I sat through the performance, with the sole intent of learning why it had attracted him so. Somewhere in the middle the story shifted to the Riviera, and there was a glimpse of bathers basking in the sun. Was Nina among them? Was it her naked shoulder? I thought that one girl who glanced back at the camera looked rather like her, but sun-oil and sun tan, and an eye-shade are much too good at disguising a passing face. He was very ill for a week in August, but he refused to take to his bed as Doctor Oates prescribed. In September, he went to see some people in the country: he was but very slightly acquainted with them; and they had invited him out of mere politeness, because he happened to have said he had seen the picture of their house in the Prattler. For a whole week he wandered about a coldish house where all the other guests knew one another intimately, and then one morning he walked ten miles to the station and quietly travelled back to town, leaving dinner jacket and sponge bag behind. In the beginning of November, he had lunch with Sheldon at Sheldon’s club and was so taciturn that his friend wondered why he had come at all. Then comes a blank. Apparently he went abroad, but I hardly believe that he had any definite plan about trying to meet Nina again, though perhaps some faint hope of that kind was at the source of his restlessness.
I had spent most of the winter of 1935 in Marseilles, attending to some of my firm’s business. In the middle of\ January 1936, I got a letter from Sebastian. Strangely enough, it was written in Russian.
‘I am, as you see, in Paris, and presumably shall be stuck [zasstrianoo] here for some time. If you can come, come; if you can’t, I shall not be offended; but it might be perhaps better if you came. I am fed up [osskomina] with a number of tortuous things and especially with the patterns of my shed snake-skins [vypolziny] so that now I find a poetic solace in the obvious and the ordinary which for some reason or other I had overlooked in the course of my life. I should like for example to ask you what you have been doing during all these years, and to tell you about myself: I hope you have done better than I. Lately I have been seeing a good deal of old Dr Starov, who treated maman [so Sebastian called my mother]. I met him by chance one night in the street, when I was taking a forced rest on the running-board of somebody’s parked car. He seemed to think that I had been vegetating in Paris since maman’s death, and I have agreed to his version of my йmigrй existence, because [eeboh] any explanation seemed to me far too complicated. Some day you may come upon certain papers; you will burn them at once; true, they have heard voices in [one or two indecipherable words: Dot chetu?], but now they must suffer the stake. I kept them, and gave them night-lodgings [notchleg], because it is safer to let such things sleep, lest, when killed, they haunt us as ghosts. One night, when I felt particularly mortal, I signed their death warrant, and by it you will know them. I had been staying at the same hotel as usual, but now I have moved to a kind of sanatorium out of town, note the address. This letter was begun almost a week ago, and up to the word «life» it had been destined [prednaznachalos] to quite a different person. Then somehow or other it turned towards you, as a shy guest in a strange house will talk at unusual length to the near relative with whom he came to the party. So forgive me if I bore you [dokoochayou], but somehow I don’t much like those bare branches and twigs which I see from my window.’
This letter upset me, of course, but it did not make me as anxious as I should have been, had I known that since 1926 Sebastian had been suffering from an incurable disease, growing steadily worse during the last five years. I must shamefully confess that my natural alarm was somewhat subdued by the thought that Sebastian was very high-strung and nervous and had always been inclined to undue pessimism when his health was impaired. I had, I repeat, not the smallest inkling of his heart trouble, and so I managed to convince myself that he was suffering from overwork. Still, he was ill and begging me to come in a tone that was novel to me. He had never seemed to need my presence, but now he was positively pleading for it. It moved me, and it puzzled me, and
