‘At last, about three or four in the afternoon, he would put on his dressing-gown and shuffle into the sitting-room where, in disgust, I would leave him, huddled up by the fire and scratching his head. And next day, as I sat working in my digs, I would suddenly hear a great stamping up the stairs, and Sebastian would bounce into the room, clean, fresh, and excited, with the poem he had just finished.’
All this, I trust, is very true to type, and one little detail strikes me as especially pathetic. It appears that Sebastian’s English, though fluent and idiomatic, was decidedly that of a foreigner. His r’s when beginning a word, rolled and rasped, he made queer mistakes, saying, for instance, ‘I have seized a cold’ or ‘that fellow is sympathetic’ – merely meaning that he was a nice Chap. He misplaced the accent in such words as ‘interesting’ or ‘laboratory’. He mispronounced names like ‘Socrates’ or ‘Desdemona’. Once corrected, he would never repeat the mistake, but the very fact of his not being quite sure about certain words distressed him enormously and he used to blush a bright pink when, owing to a chance verbal flaw, some utterance of his would not be quite understood by an obtuse listener. In those days, he wrote far better than he spoke, but still there was something vaguely un-English about his poems. None of them have reached me. True, his friend thought that perhaps one or two….
He put down the cat and rummaged awhile among some papers in a drawer,’ but he could not lay his hand on anything. ‘Perhaps, in some trunk at my sister’s place,’ he said vaguely, ‘but I’m not even sure…. Little things like that are the darlings of oblivion, and moreover I know Sebastian would have applauded their loss.’
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘the past you recall seems dismally wet meteorologically speaking – as dismal, in fact, as today’s weather [it was a bleak day in February]. Tell me, was it never warm and sunny? Does not Sebastian himself refer somewhere to the «pink candlesticks of great chestnut trees» along the bank of some beautiful little river?’
Yes, I was right, spring and summer did happen in Cambridge almost every year (that mysterious ‘almost’ was singularly pleasing). Yes, Sebastian quite liked to loll in a punt on the Cam. But what he liked above all was to cycle in the dusk along a certain path skirting meadows. There, he would sit on a fence looking at the wispy salmon-pink clouds turning to a dull copper in the pale evening sky and think about things. What things? That cockney girl with her soft hair still in plaits whom he once followed across the common, and accosted and kissed, and never saw again? The form of a particular cloud? Some misty sunset beyond a black Russian fir-wood (oh, how much I would give for such a memory coming to him!)? The inner meaning of grass blade and star? The unknown language of silence? The terrific weight of a dew-drop? The heartbreaking beauty of a pebble among millions and millions of pebbles, all making sense, but what sense? The old, old question of Who are you? to one’s own self grown strangely evasive in the gloaming, and to God’s world around to which one has never been really introduced. Or perhaps, we shall be nearer the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life, and that his destiny lay beyond that ghostly battlefield which he would cross in due time.
‘Did I like his books? Oh, enormously. I didn’t see much of him after he left Cambridge, and he never sent me any of his works. Authors, you know, are forgetful. But one day I got three of them at the library and read them in as many nights. I was always sure he would produce something fine, but I never expected it would be as fine as that. In his last year here – I don’t know what’s the matter with this cat, she does not seem to know milk all of a sudden.’
In his last Cambridge year Sebastian worked a good deal; his subject – English literature – was a vast and complicated one; but this same period was marked by his sudden trips to London, generally without the authorities’ leave. His tutor, the late Mr Jefferson, had been, I learnt, a mighty dull old gentleman, but a fine linguist, who insisted upon considering Sebastian as a Russian. In other words, he drove Sebastian to the limit of exasperation by telling him all the Russian words he knew – a nice bagful collected on a journey to Moscow years ago – and asking him to teach him some more. One day, at last, Sebastian blurted out that there was some mistake – he had not been born in Russia really, but in Sofia. Upon which, the delighted old man at once started to speak Bulgarian. Sebastian lamely answered that it was not the special dialect he knew, and when challenged to furnish a sample, invented a new idiom on the spur of the moment, which greatly puzzled the old linguist until it dawned upon him that Sebastian —
‘Well, I think you have drained me now,’ said my informant with a smile. ‘My reminiscences are getting shallower and sillier – and I hardly think it worth while to add that Sebastian got a first and that we had our picture taken in full glory – I shall try and find it some day and send it to you if you like. Must you really leave now? Would you not like to see the Backs? Come along and visit the crocuses, Sebastian used to call them «the poet’s mushrooms», if you see what he meant.’
But it was raining too hard. We stood for a minute or two under the porch, and then I said I thought I’d better be going.
‘Oh, look here,’ called Sebastian’s friend after me, as I was already picking my way among the puddles. ‘I quite forgot to tell you. The Master told me the other day that somebody wrote to him asking whether Sebastian Knight had really been a Trinity man. Now, what was the fellow’s name? Oh, bother…. My memory has shrunk in the washing. Well, we did give it a good rinsing, didn’t we? Anyway, I gathered that somebody was collecting data for a book on Sebastian Knight. Funny, you don’t seem to have – ‘
‘Sebastian Knight?’ – said a sudden voice in the mist. ‘Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight?’
6
The stranger who uttered these words now approached – Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel! How comfortable it would have been had the voice belonged to some cheery old don with long downy ear-lobes and that puckering about the eyes which stands for wisdom and humour…. A handy character, a welcome passer-by who had also known my hero, but from a different angle. ‘And now,’ he would say, ‘I am going to tell you the real story of Sebastian Knight’s college years.’ And then and there He would have launched on that story. But alas, nothing of the kind really happened. That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale. Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight? repeats that voice in my conscience. Who indeed? His best friend and his half-brother. A gentle scholar, remote from life, and an embarrassed traveller visiting a distant land. And where is the third party? Rotting peacefully in the cemetery of St Damier. Laughingly alive in five volumes. Peering unseen over my shoulder as I write this (although I dare say he mistrusted too strongly the commonplace of eternity to believe even now in his own ghost).
Anyway, here was I with the booty that friendship could yield. To this I added a few casual facts occurring in Sebastian’s very short letters belonging to that period and the chance references to University life found scattered amongst his books. I then returned to London where I had neatly planned my next move.
At our last meeting Sebastian had happened to mention a kind of secretary whom he had employed from time to time between 1930 and 1934. Like many authors in the past, and as very few in the present (or perhaps we are simply unaware of those who fail to manage their affairs in a sound pushing manner), Sebastian was ridiculously helpless in
