Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell Read Free Book Online

that either.”
    ‘Then he heeled over
into the gutter. Everybody thought he was drunk.’
    At this point in the
narrative Crowding would pause, his face apt to twitch so violently that the
more sensitive of his listeners had to turn away. He would then slow up the
tempo of the narrative for its termination.
    ‘Drunk? They were
sadly in error. I watched Trapnel the whole time we were in the saloon bar
together. He consumed exactly one bloody double Three Star in the course of the
whole bloody time he was in The Hero.’
    After adding this
comment as a kind of tailpiece to his chronicle, Crowding always stopped, and
glared round like a man expecting contradiction of the most vigorous kind.
Contradiction never came. Even Evadne Clapham was silent. Whether that was owed
to the force of Crowding’s recital, or because most of the audience usually
knew Trapnel had never been a great drinker, was uncertain. The surmise that
alcohol in itself played no great part in his final collapse was no doubt
correct, though he may have allowed himself that night an unwise admixture of
drink and ‘pills’; simply too many pills. Either could have resulted from
finding himself unexpectedly in funds. An inner fatigue, utter moral
exhaustion, had to be taken into consideration too. He was removed from the
street in due course, to a hospital, dying an hour or two later. By the time
the ambulance arrived, the near-criminal potential of the traditional Trapnel
entourage had extracted from his pockets all remnants, if such there were, of
the hundred pounds. He died quite penniless. At that particular juncture, he
appeared to be living alone. That probably explained getting his hands on the
money. Crowding never mentioned this last fact, but he would change his tone,
from pub crony to academic critic, as he drew to an end.
    ‘I respected the man
more than his work. He became a legend in his own lifetime. He often said so
himself, and with truth. Sometimes my students ask me to tell them about him – and
did you once see Trapnel plain? I reply “I did”, and often stopped and spoke
with him. At the same time I am put in a quandary. These young people find the
intellectual climate of
Camel Ride to the Tomb
unsatisfying. I
cannot in all fairness blame them. Where, they say, is the social conscience? I
have to reply, they look in vain.’
    At the time of his
death, Trapnel’s
oeuvre
, so far as I knew, consisted of the
Camel
; the selection of short stories published as
Bin Ends
;
a fair amount of additional stories, never yet collected, some dating back to
his early days as a writer before the war (when he had kept himself alive by
all sorts of odd employments); a miscellany of occasional pieces, criticism
(some of it quite good), articles, parodies, stuff written for papers like
Fission
,
and never brought together; finally the
conte
(unpublished in
Trapnel’s lifetime on account of some legal battle over ‘rights’)
Dogs Have
No Uncles
. A work in Trapnel’s liveliest manner, almost long
enough to be called a novel, its posthumous appearance with Salvidge’s
Introduction had done something to prevent Trapnel’s reputation from slumping
too severely after his death. All this did not constitute a large aggregate of
work, but, together with what was available in other material, should make a
respectable critical biography. In any case, Trapnel’s was still an unexplored
period. Gwinnett added another item.
    ‘Did you know he kept
a Commonplace Book during his last years?’
    ‘Where is it?’
    ‘I have it myself.’
    Gwinnett seemed for a
moment uncertain as to what he was prepared to say on the subject. Then, after
this hesitation, described how the librarian of his university, knowing about
Gwinnett’s interest in Trapnel, had drawn attention to an English bookseller’s
catalogue, which listed, among other manuscripts offered for sale, certain
papers of Trapnel’s come on the market.