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 business matters and once having found an adviser (who incidentally might be a shark or a blockhead — or both) he gave himself up to him entirely with the greatest relief. Had I perchance inquired whether he was perfectly certain that So-and-So now handling his affairs was not a meddlesome old rogue, he would have hurriedly changed the subject, so in dread was he that the discovery of another's mischief might force his own laziness into action. In a word he preferred the worst assistant to no assistant at all, and would convince himself and others that he was perfectly content with his choice. Having said all this I should like to stress .the fact as definitely as possible that none of my words are — from a legal point of view — slanderous, and that the name I am about to mention has not appeared in this particular paragraph.
Now what I wanted from Mr Goodman was not so much an account of Sebastian's last years — that I did not yet need — (for I intended to follow his life stage by stage without overtaking him), but merely to obtain a few suggestions as to what people I ought to see who might know something of Sebastian's post-Cambridge period.
So on 1 March 1936, I called on Mr Goodman at his office in Fleet Street. But before describing our interview I must be allowed a short digression.
Amongst Sebastian's letters I found as already mentioned some correspondence between him and his publisher dealing with a certain novel. It appears that in Sebastian's first book (1925), The Prismatic Bezel, one of the minor characters is an extremely comic and cruel skit upon a certain living author whom Sebastian found necessary to chastise. Naturally the publisher knew it immediately and this fact made him so uncomfortable that he advised Sebastian to modify the whole passage, a thing which Sebastian flatly refused to do, saying finally that he would get the book printed elsewhere — and this he eventually did.
'You seem to wonder', — he wrote in one letter, 'what on earth could make me, a budding author (as you say — but that is a misapplied term, for your authentic budding author remains budding all his life; others, like me, spring into blossom in one bound), you seem to wonder, let me repeat (which does not mean I am apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis), why the hell I should take a nice porcelain blue contemporary (X does remind one, doesn't he, of those cheap china things which tempt one at fairs to an orgy of noisy, destruction) and let him drop from the tower of my prose to the gutter below. You tell me he is widely esteemed; that his sales in Germany are almost as tremendous as his sales here; that an old story of his has just been selected for Modern Masterpieces; that together with Y and Z he is considered one of the leading writers of the "post-war" generation; and that, last but not least, he is dangerous as a critic. You seem to hint that we should all keep the dark secret of his success, which is to travel second-class with a third-class ticket — or if my simile is not sufficiently clear — to pamper the taste of the worst category of the reading public — not those who revel in detective yarns, bless their pure souls — but those who buy the worst banalities because they have been shaken' up in a modem way with a dash of
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 business matters and once having found an adviser (who incidentally might be a shark or a blockhead — or both) he gave himself up to him entirely with the greatest relief. Had I perchance inquired whether he was perfectly certain that So-and-So now handling his affairs was not a meddlesome old rogue, he would have hurriedly changed the subject, so in dread was he that the discovery of another's mischief might force his own laziness into action. In a word he preferred the worst assistant to no assistant at all, and would convince himself and others that he was perfectly content with his choice. Having said all this I should like to stress .the fact as definitely as possible that none of my words are — from a legal point of view — slanderous, and that the name I am about to mention has not appeared in this particular paragraph.
Now what I wanted from Mr Goodman was not so much an account of Sebastian's last years — that I did not yet need — (for I intended to follow his life stage by stage without overtaking him), but merely to obtain a few suggestions as to what people I ought to see who might know something of Sebastian's post-Cambridge period.
So on 1 March 1936, I called on Mr Goodman at his office in Fleet Street. But before describing our interview I must be allowed a short digression.
Amongst Sebastian's letters I found as already mentioned some correspondence between him and his publisher dealing with a certain novel. It appears that in Sebastian's first book (1925), The Prismatic Bezel, one of the minor characters is an extremely comic and cruel skit upon a certain living author whom Sebastian found necessary to chastise. Naturally the publisher knew it immediately and this fact made him so uncomfortable that he advised Sebastian to modify the whole passage, a thing which Sebastian flatly refused to do, saying finally that he would get the book printed elsewhere — and this he eventually did.
'You seem to wonder', — he wrote in one letter, 'what on earth could make me, a budding author (as you say — but that is a misapplied term, for your authentic budding author remains budding all his life; others, like me, spring into blossom in one bound), you seem to wonder, let me repeat (which does not mean I am apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis), why the hell I should take a nice porcelain blue contemporary (X does remind one, doesn't he, of those cheap china things which tempt one at fairs to an orgy of noisy, destruction) and let him drop from the tower of my prose to the gutter below. You tell me he is widely esteemed; that his sales in Germany are almost as tremendous as his sales here; that an old story of his has just been selected for Modern Masterpieces; that together with Y and Z he is considered one of the leading writers of the "post-war" generation; and that, last but not least, he is dangerous as a critic. You seem to hint that we should all keep the dark secret of his success, which is to travel second-class with a third-class ticket — or if my simile is not sufficiently clear — to pamper the taste of the worst category of the reading public — not those who revel in detective yarns, bless their pure souls — but those who buy the worst banalities because they have been shaken' up in a modem way with a dash of
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