Read Online Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell - Free Book Online Page B

what
you said about Button Gwinnett – was this Gwinnett brought up in a similar
tradition of high descent, I mean in American terms?’
    ‘His grandfather was
a fairly successful lawyer, the father some sort of a bad lot, alcoholic,
spendthrift, deserted Russell’s mother at an early age. He is still alive, I
believe. There were money difficulties about going to college, and so on. But
we will talk more of Russell Gwinnett, and American gothicism, another time.
Now I must go to bed. Fatigue comes on one suddenly here, delayed action after
listening to all those speeches in demotic French about the Obligations of the
Intellectual. I shall bid you goodnight. Tomorrow we meet under the Tiepolo
ceiling.’
    Not long after that I
turned in too. The night had become a trifle cooler. Through the window of my
bedroom the musicians’ refrain was to be heard in the distance. Perhaps the
songs were no longer theirs, cadences wafted now synthetically from the radio.
For a while I tried to read in bed,
The Castle of Fratta
, a
translation brought with me as appropriate. Nievo’s view of Bonaparte’s
invasion of Italy was an antidote to Stendhal’s. The novel might make a good
film in the epic manner. I rather regretted not staying on for the Film
Festival, more since I had never attended a Film Festival than because of
anything very exciting on offer. A German picture about a prostitute who
blackmailed her clients aroused a faint sense of curiosity. Then there was a
British one, much recommended, adaptation of a Thomas Hardy story, in which
Polly Duport was playing the lead.
    I had seen Polly
Duport act quite often, never again met her, since the day when we had
travelled back to the War Office, with her mother and stepfather, Colonel
Flores, in his official car, after the Victory Day Service at St Paul’s. Then
she had seemed charming, well brought up, a beauty too, with that unfledged
look of a young, shy, slender animal. Now she was quite a famous actress. Her
gifts had turned out for the Theatre, rather than everyday life, public rather
than private. Anyone immersed in the English Theatre would undoubtedly put her
among the three or four of her age and sex at the top of the profession. It
was, so it seemed to me, not a very ‘interesting’ talent, though immensely ‘finished’.
She had been married for a time to a well-known actor. They had separated. Far
from given to love affairs, she lived almost as a nun, it was said, devoted to
the stage and its life. This was unlike her mother, whose voice and gestures
Polly Duport sometimes recalled on the stage, without any of the mystery Jean
had once seemed to exhale. Possibly something of her father’s business ability,
in one sense, taste for work, accounted for his daughter’s serious approach to
her profession, lack of interest in private life. The Hardy part was a new line
for her. She was said to excel in it anything she had done before. That
estimate might be consequence of an energetic publicity campaign.
    Musings about the
past shifted to the time when I had stayed in this hotel as a boy, to that
eternal question of what constitutes experience. A close examination of what
happened at any given period in itself provokes an unnatural element, like
looking at a large oil painting under a magnifying glass, the over-all effect
lost. Nievo, for example, was an over-all effect writer, even when he dealt
with childhood. I tried to reconstruct the earlier visit. We had come to Venice
because my father liked spending his ‘leave’ in France or Italy. However much
they might be wanting in other respects, he approved of the Latin approach to
sex and food. That did not mean he was always at ease on the Continent, but
then, in any fundamental sense, he was rarely at ease in his own country. His
temperament, a craft of light tonnage, borne effortlessly into heavy seas no
matter how calm the weather on setting sail, was preordained