bonds. Where will it end? He opens a desk drawer by his left elbow, and stares at a new brown legal envelope in which lies a rather grubby document, a Deed of Covenant dated 23 December 1934. Should he have handed it over? He shuts the drawer, and lets it lie there, inert.
Alix Bowen stops her two-finger typing of a draft of a letter to one of old Beaver’s one-time correspondents and looks up to gaze at her snowdrops. They jostle in the wineglass on their thin stems. She lifts the face of one of them, gazes inquiringly into its intricate green and yellow and white, and lets it fall back. With a sigh, the whole wineglassful rearranges itself, with inimitable, once-only grace, to create a new pattern. The flowers shiver and quake into stillness. They cannot fall wrongly. They cannot make themselves into a false shape.
‘If you do happen to have kept any of Howard’s letters,’ Alix types, ‘we would be so grateful for photocopies of them. As I am sure you will appreciate, they would be of great value to any future biographer, and there may be the possibility of a volume of
Collected Letters
at some point in the future.’ She crosses out ‘in the future’ as tautologous, crosses out the ‘future’ in front of ‘biographer’ on the same grounds, and then puts it back in again, as the sentence looks a little too bare, a little too definite, without it. There is no certainty that there will be a biography, no certainty that Beaver’s recent renaissance of reputation will last, although he clearly believes it will. It is Alix’s task to set his papers in order, a task with which Beaver himself co-operates only intermittently. A Herculean task, for the disorder is considerable. But Beaver seems to like Alix, and does not mind her rooting around in his upper rooms.
Alix does not know whether or not she likes Beaver. ‘Liking’ does not seem to be relevant to what she thinks about him, feels for him. Indeed, the word is not wholly applicable to Beaver’s feeling for Alix either. She is useful to him, in more ways than the way in which she is paid to be useful. She is company, she is a welcome irritant, she shops for him sometimes, she sometimes does his washing up.
He is a dreadful mess, is Beaver. An egg-stained, tobacco-stained, shabby, shapeless mess. A
memento mori
. Alix, who does not find the company of old people easy, is frequently disgusted by him. He eats noisily, slopping and slurping his food, and blows his nose violently, and spits in the sink. Coarse, fleshly, decaying.
Grammar-school educated, university educated, the son of a miner, once destined for a life as a schoolmaster, read Classics, waylaid for some years by poetry. A brilliant mind, he must have had, reflects Alix. There is little evidence of that brilliant mind now, for Beaver has engineered and capitalized upon his return to popularity by cultivating a deliberate boorishness, an aggressive provincialism. Alix is the only person to whom he speaks of literary matters, and even with her he sometimes relapses into a gross mockery of the mind, a philistine, snook-cocking, infantile savagery. Alix cannot tell whether it is all a pose, whether he thinks that this is how a working-class northern intellectual ought to behave, or whether he has relapsed into behaving like this because he finds it more comfortable, and no longer cares. Is he copy or archetype? She cannot tell.
His career has been curious, enough to drive anyone into eccentricity. After a year or two of schoolmastering in Wakefield, he had taken off for London and lived the life of a literary hanger-on, working in publishers’ offices, writing reviews when permitted, scrounging review copies, copy-e’diting, borrowing money, publishing the odd poem. He had then vanished to Paris for a couple of years in the late twenties, where he claimed to have got to know the American expatriate literary community and to have worked as assistant editor on
transition
—although Alix finds
Alix Bowen stops her two-finger typing of a draft of a letter to one of old Beaver’s one-time correspondents and looks up to gaze at her snowdrops. They jostle in the wineglass on their thin stems. She lifts the face of one of them, gazes inquiringly into its intricate green and yellow and white, and lets it fall back. With a sigh, the whole wineglassful rearranges itself, with inimitable, once-only grace, to create a new pattern. The flowers shiver and quake into stillness. They cannot fall wrongly. They cannot make themselves into a false shape.
‘If you do happen to have kept any of Howard’s letters,’ Alix types, ‘we would be so grateful for photocopies of them. As I am sure you will appreciate, they would be of great value to any future biographer, and there may be the possibility of a volume of
Collected Letters
at some point in the future.’ She crosses out ‘in the future’ as tautologous, crosses out the ‘future’ in front of ‘biographer’ on the same grounds, and then puts it back in again, as the sentence looks a little too bare, a little too definite, without it. There is no certainty that there will be a biography, no certainty that Beaver’s recent renaissance of reputation will last, although he clearly believes it will. It is Alix’s task to set his papers in order, a task with which Beaver himself co-operates only intermittently. A Herculean task, for the disorder is considerable. But Beaver seems to like Alix, and does not mind her rooting around in his upper rooms.
Alix does not know whether or not she likes Beaver. ‘Liking’ does not seem to be relevant to what she thinks about him, feels for him. Indeed, the word is not wholly applicable to Beaver’s feeling for Alix either. She is useful to him, in more ways than the way in which she is paid to be useful. She is company, she is a welcome irritant, she shops for him sometimes, she sometimes does his washing up.
He is a dreadful mess, is Beaver. An egg-stained, tobacco-stained, shabby, shapeless mess. A
memento mori
. Alix, who does not find the company of old people easy, is frequently disgusted by him. He eats noisily, slopping and slurping his food, and blows his nose violently, and spits in the sink. Coarse, fleshly, decaying.
Grammar-school educated, university educated, the son of a miner, once destined for a life as a schoolmaster, read Classics, waylaid for some years by poetry. A brilliant mind, he must have had, reflects Alix. There is little evidence of that brilliant mind now, for Beaver has engineered and capitalized upon his return to popularity by cultivating a deliberate boorishness, an aggressive provincialism. Alix is the only person to whom he speaks of literary matters, and even with her he sometimes relapses into a gross mockery of the mind, a philistine, snook-cocking, infantile savagery. Alix cannot tell whether it is all a pose, whether he thinks that this is how a working-class northern intellectual ought to behave, or whether he has relapsed into behaving like this because he finds it more comfortable, and no longer cares. Is he copy or archetype? She cannot tell.
His career has been curious, enough to drive anyone into eccentricity. After a year or two of schoolmastering in Wakefield, he had taken off for London and lived the life of a literary hanger-on, working in publishers’ offices, writing reviews when permitted, scrounging review copies, copy-e’diting, borrowing money, publishing the odd poem. He had then vanished to Paris for a couple of years in the late twenties, where he claimed to have got to know the American expatriate literary community and to have worked as assistant editor on
transition
—although Alix finds
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