It was some years since Herbert Humbert had published anything, even an article in a journal. He was beginning to be worried by this. More and more in England – as for long in America – you had to keep in print if you were to hold your place in the academic rat race. A man must ‘contribute to his subject’ in a manner immediately apparent on a library shelf. It was no good being a brilliant lecturer, or a tutor whose talk had fructified whole generations of young minds. It no longer even much help to be known as a nice chap, guaranteed not to rock the boat, and always ready to lend a colleague a hand. Print it had to be, followed by decently respectful even if somewhat astringent notices in periodicals with titles like Modem Language Notes or the Journal of English and Germanic Philology.
Humbert had to think and count for a minute before being sure of when the Review of English Studies had published a paper of his with the challenging title, ‘The Yale Formalist Fallacy’. That had looked like something of a breakthrough at the time. But nobody – or certainly nobody at Yale – had paid any attention to it, and somehow he had failed to follow it up. To follow it up in print, that is to say, for he had done plenty of thinking about the subject, and about the Theory of Literature in general, since then. And indeed literary aesthetics (if the term were still an admissible one) had been his single passion since he was an undergraduate. He had filled scores of notebooks with his enquiries in this supremely fascinating field. But he hadn’t yet, somehow, managed to sort out the complexities, ponder and resolve the contradictions, establish a systematic approach to the grand problems.
Significantly as it was to transpire, this unsatisfactory state of the case was particularly troubling him on the day he ran into Vivian Cardwell. It happened in the London Library, the habitués of which, on the whole, may be said to cough in ink and each to know the man his neighbour knows. An erudite homogeneity is the rule. Yet in this instance you could have told at once that here was an encounter between two scholars inhabiting substantially different worlds. Cardwell, only the more certainly because so unobtrusively, betrayed himself as one who might have stepped out of a club in St James’s round the corner. This was a matter of his bearing rather than of his clothes, although these would have declared themselves – at least to a stray emissary from the Tailor and Cutter – as having started off in life in the same superior quarter of the metropolis. Humbert, in a way, would have been harder to place. His garments, of a marked antiquity, had certainly come from off the peg at Marks and Spencer, and there was something badly wrong with his shoes. But in the London Library there is nothing out-of-the-way about this, since an honourable disregard of sartorial nicety frequently characterises members of the learned classes. Humbert’s singularity lay elsewhere.
It lay partly in his limbs and head, which appeared always to be in tentative movement in a clumsy and uncoordinated way. His features exhibited a similar mobility and, as it were, irresolution – his forehead and mouth and eyebrows, and even his insignificant and rather stubby nose, being inclined to dispose themselves simultaneously under the influence of what could only be read as quite unrelated emotions. His articulation was at times indistinct and halting, as if he were uncertain which of two speeches he had embarked upon, and he had a slight tendency to spit or slobber. People sometimes said impatiently that Herbert Humbert was like a great baby. And then somebody might add, almost resentfully, that he had uncommonly striking eyes. This was certainly true. Mysteriously yet unmistakably, Humbert’s eyes spoke of something a little beyond a common scholar’s capacity.
‘Herbert – God bless me!’ This apostrophe reached Humbert as he had his nose buried in one of the lower drawers of the author catalogue – which meant that he must have been recognised more or less by the cut of his backside. He may have judged this to be the more remarkable when he straightened up and turned round, since here was a man who hadn’t set eyes on him for years – but who now touched him affectionately on the shoulder, nevertheless.
‘Vivian – well, well!’ Humbert’s slight stutter accompanied this. It was almost as if he had said, ‘Sir Vivian – well, well!’—which might have been proper to a person only slightly known to him. In fact, he and Sir Vivian Cardwell had in youth been close associates for two or three years. They had seen one another quite frequently after that – perhaps for two or three years more. Then the relationship had faded out. Since they continued to have common intellectual interests this ought not to have happened. It hadn’t been the intention of either man in particular. Men do drift apart. Awkward train journeys, crowded engagement-books, possessive wives and exacting children, covertly conflicting social assumptions may all be at work. In this particular instance Cardwell had to shoulder the main burden of fault – this even although Humbert was a difficult man and he himself would have been universally described as eminently an easy one. Cardwell was rather wealthy as well as rather grand, and Humbert was a poor devil of a lecturer in an obscure corner of the University of London. So if the present encounter was something that had to be ‘carried off’ it was primarily up to Cardwell so to carry it.
He did this with no appearance of effort at all, making a merely whimsical business of those disregarding years. Nor did Humbert fuss over them. Long ago he had regretted that Vivian owned a country house and a substantial estate – and some sort of hereditary position in a merchant bank into the bargain. He had regretted this, foreseeing that the various cares and responsibilities involved would be likely to distract his friend from the pursuit of those purely intellectual interests for which, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had shown himself to be so exceptionally well-endowed. Humbert felt this loss to scholarship and learning more strongly, perhaps, than he did the severance of a personal relationship. He was a bachelor, who had taught himself to get along fairly well without much in the way of friendship or the domestic affections; in fact it might have been said that other people scarcely came into his head at all except as having made some contribution – inevitably quite small, more often than not – to the sum of human knowledge. This temperamental slant had ensured his accepting without resentment Vivian’s having drifted out of contact with him for so long, and he envied him nothing except, conceivably, the elegance rather than the power of his mind – that and his ability to do without effort what he also did well. For Humbert, although a dedicated scholar, was not without a streak of personal ambition. He would have liked fame. He would even have liked – he would very much have liked – the mere academic advancement that had failed to come to him.
‘I don’t often run up to town nowadays,’ Cardwell said. ‘They’ve turned me out of that weekly meeting at the bank, you see – telling me to look to my acres. The Funds are all very well. But a score of good ewes may be worth ten pounds at Stamford Fair.’
‘I’m sure they may, Vivian.’ Humbert dimly remembered how Vivian and he had played some sort of primitive quoting game out of Shakespeare. ‘But it must give you more time for Concrete Universals in Literature.’
‘In what? Oh, yes! I do remember. But I don’t think I’d call the book that now. It’s not much of an affair, and I wouldn’t want to weigh it down with an ink-horn term on the title page.’
‘It exists? It’s finished?’ Humbert’s features lit up – nearly all over. ‘What splendid news!’
‘Yes, it is finished – so there’s no question of now having more time for it. Although I do take it out of the drawer and glance over it now and then.’
‘You don’t mean you’re not going to publish it?’ Humbert asked. His tone indicated bewilderment and dismay. ‘Why, Vivian, it’s bound to be a masterpiece!’
‘Come, come, my dear chap.’ Cardwell’s answering tone was designed to be whimsically tolerant, but a note of something like irritation sounded through it. ‘Masterpieces don’t occur in that line of business. Books about books are all a matter either of graceful gesture or clever concoction. Don’t you think?’
At this juncture something slightly untoward happened in the London Library. A young man had paused hoveringly beside these two elderly ones, with a momentary air of feeling entitled to listen to their conversation and even perhaps to join in it. He was an unnoticeable young man, so pale and pinched and bespectacled that he looked very like an ink-horn term himself. Humbert and Cardwell had, in fact, both failed – again for the moment – to notice him, perhaps because they were more concerned than they realised to sound out the revived relationship between them. And it so happened that Cardwell’s last remark to his friend, which had been an appeal for concurrence in a mildly humorous view of things, had the appearance, through a casual turn of the head, of having been directed challengingly to this newcomer on the scene. The newcomer’s reception of the small infelicity was scarcely urbane. He scowled contemptuously, muttered something to Cardwell that sounded distinctly rude, and marched quickly off into the nearest book-stack.
‘Do you know that young man?’ Cardwell asked.
‘Oh, yes – very well. And he seemed upset.’ Humbert gazed in perplexity in the direction in which this uncivil person had vanished. ‘I wonder why? His name is Bernard Hinkstone, and he was one of the best pupils I’ve had in years. We don’t often talk about “pupils”, as a matter of fact. We just say “students”, as if nobody in particular was responsible for them. It’s not as in Cambridge, you see.’ Humbert said this a shade wistfully. ‘Hinkstone came to us from Christ’s Hospital – the Blue-coat School, you know and I’ve tried to help him along. He has rather a dreary job in a polytechnic now. But his real interests are close to mine – and yours.’
‘I see.’ Cardwell didn’t feel very drawn to the unmannerly young Hinkstone. And he was aware that it was now up to him to do something definite about this encounter with one who brought a strong claim in the way of former friendship along with him. ‘Herbert, do you by any chance have time to lunch with me?’
‘Certainly I have.’ Humbert sounded as surprised as if luncheon were something hitherto unheard of, which Cardwell had now invented on the spot.
‘That’s capital! We have all sorts of things to talk about, wouldn’t you say? If we want to be quiet, we can go to—’ Cardwell had been about to say ‘my club’, but a glance at Humbert’s outward man made him change his mind. ‘We can go to that little Italian place, just round the corner in Duke of York Street. I dare say you drop in there yourself from time to time. It’s not half bad.’
‘It needn’t be even that, Vivian, so far as I’m concerned.’ Humbert spoke with a sudden warmth, and those remarkable eyes flashed as if the mind behind them had abruptly dredged up from memory days of golden association long ago. ‘If we can really talk, pulse and tap-water would do.’
‘So it would!’ Sir Vivian Cardwell rose manfully to the pitch of this. ‘But we can have a bottle of tolerable Chianti, all the same.’
They had come together as freshmen at Trinity, in the first place simply as having rooms on the same staircase. Trinity was Vivian Cardwell’s natural college from the moment it had been decided that he was not to follow his father to Christ Church at the other university. For Herbert Humbert, contrastingly, it was as is the non-watery world to a fish – or it was this in every regard that didn’t directly concern gaining in a Tripos the hall-mark of a first-class mind. Neither of the young men had any athletic interests, so they weren’t going to meet in a boat on the Cam. Cardwell belonged to a kind of secret college society so intellectually distinguished that it held even the most brilliant examination performances in slight regard; Humbert had possibly not so much as heard of this elite coterie. For some weeks they had just failed of physical collision on emerging simultaneously from their sets, or while respectively dashing upstairs and down. Then there had actually been a bump, in consequence of which Cardwell had let fall a recently published book called Seven Types of Ambiguity. Within minutes this treatise (which they were quite soon ungratefully to regard as mere chicken-feed) had revealed them each to each as kindred spirits. Or perhaps not quite that. It might have been more accurate to speak of similarly orientated intelligences. They sat up with one another regularly until far past midnight, planning a radical reform of the principles of literary criticism. Humbert proposed to write an epoch-making book to be called The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science, and was discouraged upon discovering that somebody had incubated the same idea in New York. Cardwell was the first into print, with a contribution to a high-brow undergraduate journal which he entitled ‘A Critical Exposition of Croce’s La Teoria dell’arte come pura visibilità’. Locally in Cambridge, all the running in criticism was being made by F. R. Leavis, an English don at Downing, who took a rather pulpit-thumping view of his function. But more esoteric matter poured in from elsewhere in sufficient abundance to keep both budding scholars in an almost febrile condition. Humbert, in particular, could get almost drunk on the discovery of an essay with some such title as ‘Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle’. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.
Vacations separated them, since it never occurred to them either to try travelling together or to visit one another at home. They corresponded copiously, as undergraduates often do, but it was almost entirely without any approach to personal intimacy; indeed without any substantial exchange of information on personal matters. Humbert believed that Cardwell had been at Eton whereas he had really been at Rugby; Cardwell would have conjectured – vaguely if quite accurately – that Humbert’s earlier education had been at ‘one of those rather good grammar schools they go in for in the Midlands’. Neither knew whether the other had brothers or sisters, and such problems as those of sexual initiation (upon which young males are commonly at least obliquely informative with their closer companions) were never perpended between them. There was something old-fashioned, almost Victorian, about their relationship, which contrasted oddly with their addiction to the newest of New Criticism. Here were two serious reading men, not caring to be curious about one another’s social background, but bound together by a common commanding interest in a severe branch of literary study.
It was on this level that their association continued until their final undergraduate year. Then it happened that Cardwell’s mother, recently widowed and as a consequence increasingly vigilant in her son’s affairs, decided that a presumably respectable young man whose letters on learned matters arrived so punctually at Chantries whenever Vivian was at home ought at least to be invited to turn up in his own person. The new baronet (who was continuing to do what his mother told him while looking round at leisure for a wife) agreed at once, and the visit took place. Lady Cardwell (the parent from whom Vivian inherited his brains) found no difficulty in liking Herbert Humbert. Naturally he couldn’t know some of the ropes, but the fact didn’t tiresomely embarrass him; and it was creditable that Vivian, whom she thought of as preparing himself for a distinguished career in politics, should have thus all in his stride attached to himself the interest and respect of a patently impressive if uncouth young scholar. Nevertheless Humbert’s week at Chantries, superficially at least, was no great success. Intelligent though he was, he had never given time to reflecting that in Vivian there must certainly harbour Cardwells unknown to him. These were only the more apparent now because his host, out of consideration for his guest, tried to tuck them away a little. It wasn’t really possible. Girls turned up and Vivian got meekly into flannels and played tennis with them – betraying evident enjoyment in an activity which, at Cambridge, he classed with rugger and rowing as sweaty futilities. Men came and paced up and down the terrace, smoking cigars and talking about the constituency: one thing, they would decide, might be chattered about at the local Conservative Association but another must be arranged quietly through the Central Office; what was important was that the seat should be safe as houses when young Cardwell came along to collect it. It appeared that young Cardwell was showing signs of being very decent about the Hunt, although everybody knew that his own interest was entirely in shooting and fishing.
All this had surprised and disturbed Humbert, but at an obscure level it pleased him as well. Yet this very sense of pleasure disturbed him too, intimating as it did possibilities of personal relationship which he had taught himself to regard as a distraction from the life of the mind. He was glad to get away from Chantries. Yet he was to look back to it with what he knew was a hint of affection. He would always now be to some extent Vivian Cardwell’s man. At a pinch he would even do whatever Vivian told him. Which was only to say – what he knew very well – that, unlike Vivian, he packed a good deal more intellect than will.
Cardwell on his part was quite glad when Humbert took his leave of Chantries. The visit had made him realise the extent to which his college friend was (in the words of a contemporary poet) not a bus but a tram. For poor old Herbert life would be all a matter of determinate grooves. It was impossible to think of him getting married – or even getting drunk. He was going to be hopelessly unpractical. It was hard to imagine him holding down a job – unless, of course, he was lucky enough to land a Fellowship at one of the obscurer colleges. Perhaps it would be possible to do something for him. Cardwell wasn’t certain that he didn’t actually have a duty that way.
In the succeeding few years, when they were still seeing something of each other, Cardwell did nothing of this sort. He had a wholesome feeling that it would be impertinent to patronise Herbert – in addition to which Herbert had landed himself quite a decent teaching appointment after all. Moreover he had published several interesting papers, so something like The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science might be expected sooner or later. Such was Sir Vivian Cardwell’s feeling in the matter when he eventually lost sight of Herbert Humbert altogether. He had the excuse of being much occupied. Alike as a landowner, a banker, and a member of parliament he was endlessly busy. In addition to which he still found time for his interests in literature and scholarship, and his name had become well known in the learned as well as the political world. He had never, it was true, produced anything which could quite be called a major work, although the slow maturing of such a thing on his writing-table was sometimes rumoured. But he wrote with wide authority and great charm on a variety of topics, so that knowledgeable people would say ‘That must be by Vivian Cardwell’, when they ran across a particularly graceful and scintillating major review in the anonymous columns (as they still were) of the Times Literary Supplement. Humbert’s name in such a context would have come into nobody’s head.
The two men hadn’t been long in the Italian restaurant in Duke of York Street before Cardwell was recalling two facts about Humbert: one with the effect of recovering something quite forgotten, and the other as the kind of thing one doesn’t really ever forget. Humbert was that sort of person, unrewarding to entertain, who is totally unconscious of what he either eats or drinks. It was the more irritating now because, on a mere freakish impulse, he devoted to the actual choosing of his meal the concentrated attention, and the dialectal elaboration in colloquy with the waiter, of a Frenchman at the most solemn moment of the day. But then he had at once appeared to forget that he was at table at all. And although food did disappear down his throat it was impossible to understand how it could have done so. For Humbert never stopped talking. This was the unforgotten, the unforgettable thing. Yet one has to be precise. Only a tape-recorder could have caught, and stored up for analysis and eventual comprehension, the actual burden of his discourse. Without such an aid, one could follow him from clause to clause, even from sentence to sentence – and this to an effect of constant illumination of the most recondite recesses of literature and art. But what might be called the discursive whole was more elusive, was evanescent, faded like Burns’s snowflakes in the river. It was possible to believe that in this quarter of the intellectual field Herbert Humbert could have given a fair run for his money to Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself.
And then – quite suddenly – Humbert was stammering and mumbling again. He had been saying something about a formalist fallacy, and it had appeared to upset him. It was a moment before Cardwell caught up with this, although he ought to have remembered at once. ‘The Yale Formalist Fallacy’ was something that Herbert had printed somewhere some years before. He must be talking about that.
‘You gave it to those chaps good and hard,’ Cardwell said at a venture.
‘Of course I did.’ Humbert had no doubts on this point. ‘But nobody paid any attention to it. More and more, you see, it’s a matter of status. People won’t listen to a lecturer.’
‘It was a lecture?’ Cardwell was puzzled. ‘I thought—’
‘No, no! I’m saying that if you’ve donkeyed away for years without getting to the top of one of their silly academic trees you’re treated as a harmless drudge who’s not worth attending to.’
‘Oh, but surely not!’ There had been something disconcerting about Humbert’s thus suddenly plummeting from the most abstract (and elevating) level of literary discourse to this disconsolate personal note. Yet at once it came back to Cardwell as characteristic of his friend. Herbert was at times a distinctly chip-on-the-shoulder type, and when in that mood not easy to deal with. Cardwell doubted whether what he had just said was true. Although no academic himself, he dined from time to time at high tables, and he had gained the impression that on the whole it was professors who were regarded as harmless drudges, while the real advances in knowledge were achieved by bright young men. But then although Herbert wasn’t a professor he certainly wasn’t a bright young man either.
‘Well, that’s how I see it.’ Herbert was looking sullen – or at least bits and pieces of his face could be read that way. ‘All because I haven’t produced a great tombstone of a critical edition of Mark Akenside or Thomas Shadwell or somebody.’
‘Very well.’ Cardwell decided to speak robustly. ‘You’ll have to produce a book, Herbert. Not a thing like that, of course, but a real book. A regular blockbuster. You must have masses of material.’
‘That’s what Bernard says.’
‘Bernard?’ Cardwell was at sea.
‘Bernard Hinkstone – who ran into us there in the London Library. He’s always on at me about it too.’
‘Is he, indeed?’ It didn’t greatly please Sir Vivian Cardwell thus to be lumped together with that briefly-glimpsed unmannerly young man. ‘I hope he doesn’t bully you, Herbert. But from the point of view of professional advancement he’s probably quite right.’
‘I distrust books. There’s something too final about them.’ Delivering this odd verdict, Humbert drained his glass – which Cardwell hospitably filled again. ‘And it looks as if you feel the same way, Vivian. Where’s your big book? Put away in a drawer, it seems – and just occasionally taken a timid peep at.’ Humbert took another big gulp of Chianti. ‘You’re a bloody great pot, old boy, calling the kettle black.’
It was at this point that the dangerous notion of a rescue-operation came into Cardwell’s head. He didn’t at all see how it was to be achieved, but he felt strongly that he would like to achieve it. He was himself a temperate, although by no means a drearily abstemious, man and there was something about the speed with which Herbert had raised that glass which alerted him for the first time to a disturbing possibility. He didn’t actually see himself in a custodial role: a Theodore Watts-Dunton, say, devoted to keeping a Swinburne off the bottle. There was something ridiculous in that image, and Cardwell was a man very sensitive to ridicule. Moreover he had only the most slender ground for suspecting that drink was an important factor in the situation. What seemed certain was that Herbert was in a state of impaired confidence as to his own powers and prospects. Could means be taken, for a start, merely to boost his morale? In what way could a very old friend address himself to being a bracing influence?
‘But Herbert,’ Cardwell said, ‘I haven’t got a big book – put away in a drawer or anywhere else. Occasional pieces, yes. Beyond that, I simply have nothing that I could honestly call my own.’
‘Just what do you mean by that?’
‘Come, come, Herbert! No need to be modest.’ Cardwell was inwardly delighted at the adroitness, as he conceived it, of the manoeuvre he had hit upon. ‘Remember what our relationship was, back in that wonderful time. You gave me pretty well every idea I ever had. And what have I done since? Elaborate one or two of them, and doll them up a bit. II migliorfabbro, old chap – that’s you.’
As he produced this version of things (which, of course, he didn’t believe in a bit), Cardwell wished that at the start he hadn’t so stiffly played down the quality of his unpublished book. What he had then said didn’t quite square with this sudden assertion that he had produced something which somehow enshrined the fine essence of Herbert Humbert’s thought. But Humbert himself appeared unconscious of this point. He had flushed with pleasure and confusion, like a schoolboy who has unexpectedly been commended in extravagant terms for work which he had supposed would earn him a wigging. Or was it quite like that? Although Humbert at once exploded into a stammered ‘Vivian, what utter nonsense!’ was there a flicker of something else apparent, which his friend might have remarked had he not been congratulating himself on his successful employment of what somebody has called the psychotherapy of warm praise? It is possible that what Cardwell had produced as a novel and just possibly persuasive fiction already lurked in Humbert’s mind as the all-too-probable fact of the matter.
However this may have been, the meal ended pleasantly enough, and with a distinct implication that the revived relationship between the two men was to continue. The will to this was perhaps more Cardwell’s than Humbert’s. At last, and after all those years, Cardwell had set about ‘doing something’ for his friend. Or at least he had taken a first step that way, obeyed an impulse in the matter which it was now incumbent upon him to take means to further. A laudably charitable intention was at work in Sir Vivian Cardwell, but it was also true that an element of intellectual curiosity had its influence with him. He had moved much among men and affairs, and had developed in consequence an interest in the character and conduct of actual men and women in a way unknown to Humbert, who viewed nearly everything through the spectacles of books. Just how could one persuade, coax, edge, prod a chap like Herbert in one direction or another – always, of course, entirely to his own benefit? The question was a complex and challenging one, Herbert being the very gifted and exceptional individual he was.
As they left the restaurant, Cardwell secured his friend’s address. It may have been significant that he felt this to be a slightly tricky operation, even although it was clearly essential if they really were going to keep in contact with one another. There was a certain wariness about Herbert, which no doubt went along with the sense of being an unsuccessful man. Obvious and honest as was his admiration for his former intimate, he had what might almost be called an impulse to elude capture if he could. And so it came about that, if only ever so faintly, Sir Vivian Cardwell felt much as he did when, following his favourite recreations at Chantries, he was out with a gun or casting a still fly over a pool.
The present Lady Cardwell had never met Herbert Humbert. It turned out, indeed, that she had never even heard of him, and it was this circumstance that appeared particularly to strike her when her husband reported on the encounter in the London Library.
‘Has Mr Humbert ever been to Chantries?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes. He stayed here – I think it was for about a week – when we were both still at Trinity. I don’t know that he greatly enjoyed himself. He must come of very simple people, I suppose. My mother liked him.’
‘Because he was extremely clever?’
‘It would have been partly that.’
‘You used to tell me quite a lot about your undergraduate days, Vivian. It’s odd that you never mentioned this close friend.’
‘Herbert wasn’t exactly that. But it is odd, all the same, and requires accounting for. Do you know? I think that by the time you and I met I may have developed some unconscious sense almost of guilt about the chap. About having rather dropped him, that is. Perhaps that’s why I never told you about him. I ought to have – if only because he was an enormously interesting man. He still is, in a way.’
‘Is it true, Vivian, that you got a great many of your ideas from this Mr Humbert?’ Lady Cardwell asked this in some amusement. Her husband had confided to her the means he had taken to cheer up his former associate.
‘Well, as I told you, darling, I wasn’t being quite honest there.’ It was with a certain discomfort that Cardwell reiterated this. ‘It was all give-and-take between us, really. Or that’s how I remember it.’
‘At least it wasn’t the other way round? Mr Humbert, that’s to say, didn’t get nearly all his ideas from you?’
‘No, no – nothing like that.’
‘If he had, I think it might have been he who dropped you. His spirit would have felt rebuked by you, as they say.’
‘What an odd idea, darling.’
‘It isn’t odd at all.’ Lady Cardwell, who was quite as intelligent as her mother-in-law had been (and had, indeed, been courted by Vivian Cardwell on that account) was seldom slow in speaking out like this. ‘If one knows in one’s heart that someone with whom one is expected to live on equal terms is in fact very much one’s intellectual superior, it’s quite likely that one day one will unobtrusively pack one’s bags. And you say there is something a little elusive about Mr Humbert still. So that’s it. The poor man knows he isn’t quite up to you.’
‘I wouldn’t care to think of it in that way at all.’ Cardwell made a momentary pause. ‘Or the other way round, for that matter.’
‘Are you going to see more of him?’
‘Yes, I think so. I’ve a notion of looking him up at the address he gave me when I’m next in town.’
‘Why not ask him down here? You say he has been to Chantries once. And I’d like to have a look at him – just as your mother must have done.’
‘Later, perhaps, darling. I’ll sound him out about it first. It’s a question of finding just the best way to help him.’
‘He needs help?’
‘Well—encouragement, say. But, yes—definitely a leg-up.’
‘Is he very poor, or something?’
‘I’d hardly suppose so. It’s true that a university lecturer is rather miserably paid. But Herbert’s an unmarried man, and I’d imagine him to be of pretty simple tastes. What needs seeing to is his doing himself justice by means of publishing more. That kind of thing.’
‘It sounds to me as if you’ll have to be rather tactful, Vivian dear. Mr Humbert isn’t a young man, and he may well be set in his ways. If you suddenly turn up out of a remote past with the evident intention of running him or treating him as a protégé—’
‘My dear, I’ve spent a large part of my life, as you know, ladling out tact to all sorts and conditions of men. It’s now next to second nature with me.’ And Sir Vivian Cardwell laughed – gaily, but perhaps with a shade of complacency as well. ‘Dear old Herbert Humbert has nothing to fear from me there.’
Nevertheless Cardwell didn’t remain quite certain that, in proposing to drop in on Humbert unheralded and in a casual way, he hadn’t begun on the wrong foot. The little street to the north of Dorset Square bore so run-down an appearance that to visit it felt like going slumming. But perhaps, he thought, Herbert worked at Bedford College, and it would no doubt be a convenient address for that. Still, he found himself rather hoping that his friend would be out (which seemed likely enough) so that he could effect some different approach. His wife had been right. An immediate invitation to Chantries might only have alarmed Herbert. But it would have been the gracious thing, all the same.
He came to a halt before a door badly in need of a lick of paint. On one side there was a row of small electric bell-pushes, like buttons on a grubby waistcoat. Most had names against them, either scribbled on slivers of pasteboard or punched out on a strip of metal tape. Humbert’s name did not appear. But two of the buttons were anonymous, and the uppermost was one of them. Deciding that it was somehow in character that Herbert should inhabit an attic, and that there was an equal likelihood of his not bothering to intimate his tenancy to the world, Cardwell pressed this at a venture. Nothing happened, so he tried the door. It proved to be unlocked, so he went in and climbed several flights of stairs. Milk-bottles, some full and some empty but not cleaned, stood outside doors, and beside one or two of them lay newspapers of the more popular order. He was stared at disapprovingly by a woman in carpet slippers carrying a mop and bucket; he was similarly stared at by a cat which had the appearance of being in ill-health. These evidences of unimproved life were dispiriting, but he pressed on. On the top landing somebody stood in an open doorway, as if expecting him, so that he concluded the bell to have effected some sort of summons, after all. But this wasn’t Herbert, and for a moment he supposed that he must have guessed wrong. Then he realised that here was the person, encountered in the London Library, whom Herbert had described as a former pupil. Cardwell, who had a well-trained memory for names, said, ‘Good morning, Mr Hinkstone’, in a proper tone of mild cordiality.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ Hinkstone produced this singularly incontrovertible statement, contrastingly, on a note of distinct disappointment, much as if he would have preferred the appearance of a man to read the gas-meter, or even of a policeman with a summons for speeding.
‘Is Herbert at home?’ It seemed best to Cardwell to treat the unexpected encounter as having established itself on a basis of pleasing informality, which was the reason of thus employing his friend’s Christian name.
‘Oh, yes – he’s at home. I suppose you’d better come in. Not that he’s expecting you, I imagine.’
‘Well, no. It’s a call on the spur of the moment, actually.’ Cardwell wondered why he should be prompted to a small untruth by this meagre and graceless person. ‘Do you share quarters with him, Mr Hinkstone?’
‘Of course not. I sometimes come in and do a bit of typing for him. He can’t work a typewriter. Part of his general clumsiness.’
This remark, although doubtless true, displeased Cardwell, and he felt that he ought by now to have been ushered into his friend’s presence. But he and Hinkstone were still standing in a gloomy little lobby, and the young man was looking at him rather as if he were an inconveniently dumped parcel which must somehow be got rid of.
‘It’s the hell of a climb up to this flat,’ the young man said. He gave Cardwell an appraising glance. ‘Particularly if one’s a bit out of condition, I’d imagine. But it seems to suit Herbert. Ος υπερτατα δωματα ναϊει.’
Although it was perhaps proper that one who laboured in a polytechnic should know his Hesiod, Cardwell was disconcerted by this unexpected command of an ancient tongue by so uncouth a young man. He was aware, at the same time, of having been given notice that he was dealing with a scholar, and he made a mental note that it would be prudent to treat Herbert’s young assistant (as Hinkstone now appeared to be) with respect.
‘But I don’t want to hold up your work,’ he said. ‘Perhaps—’
Whatever accommodating remark was to follow upon this remained unuttered – being interrupted, from beyond a closed door, by a cry of dismay, a clatter as of overturned furniture, and sundry dull bumpings to which it was not easy to assign a cause. But Hinkstone appeared to be in no doubt as to what had happened, and now raised both arms in air with a gesture more of irritation than alarm.
‘Oh, God!’ he exclaimed. ‘If Herbert hasn’t gone and fallen off that library ladder again.’
It was a big room, and although on one side the windows scarcely came knee-high in the sloping roof, on the other there was a lofty blank wall clothed to the ceiling with books. It was here that the misadventure had occurred and that Herbert still lay sprawled on the floor with a dozen volumes on top of him. The library ladder seemed substantial enough; it was a solid mahogany affair, terminating in a stout pole with a knob for holding on to when you were on the top step. The trouble lay, it appeared to Cardwell, in the treacherous character of the terrain beneath it. The whole room lay ankle-deep in waste paper – or it might have been safer to say in manuscript material. Some of this looked freshly crumpled up but much was already yellowed with age. There were loose sheets, torn sheets, little bundles in process of freeing themselves from paper-clips, larger bundles tied up with tape or string. And since all this was deposited on top of slippery linoleum of an antique sort, any venture around the room could be undertaken only at considerable hazard. This was clearly the opinion of Bernard Hinkstone – who was picking up Humbert, dusting him down, and angrily chiding him, all at one and the same time.
‘You’re not safe!’ he shouted. ‘It’s not just that you can’t safely be let out alone. You can’t even be left alone in your own room. How often have I told you to give over scrambling up that damned thing? I’ll have to move in on you, Herbert. There’s nothing else for it.’ Hinkstone turned to Cardwell. ‘They talk about being accident-prone,’ he said, ‘and of just that Herbert’s the bloody mark and acme.’ He picked up an enormous tome from Humbert’s feet. ‘Stunning yourself with quartos and folios is all very well. But one day he’ll stroll out into the middle of the street and have a little chat with a bus.’
Sir Vivian Cardwell, although not a fussy man, liked to have everything neat and shipshape around him. The scene of disorder upon which he had intruded, therefore, distressed him a good deal.
While Humbert recovered breath and prepared to talk (for talk wonderfully he certainly would) his former companion took further stock of the situation. It didn’t greatly trouble him that Herbert so clearly lived a physically comfortless life; that from the crumpled paper in one corner of the room there rose an iron bedstead with equally crumpled bedding, that the one-bar electric fire was dulled by a corroded reflector, that Herbert’s notion of home cookery was evidenced by a single frying-pan perched on a primus stove. Herbert had always been like that, and there was nothing discreditable about it in a man devoted to unceasing intellectual toil. It was the coil into which the toil so hopelessly degenerated that was disheartening. All this litter perfectly epitomised Herbert’s mind – a mind of which the thoughts were like a scattered pack of cards. It was easy to say that here in Herbert Humbert was a sovereign intellect but a subject will. The truth wasn’t really quite like that. The intellect itself was imperfect, being incapable of ordonnance, of construction on any large scale. Another way of saying this would be to declare that poor Herbert was incapable of grasping his own fleeting conceptions and excluding other people’s while he expanded and developed what was radically his own. He was, in a way, too open, too suggestible in his intellectual life. Perhaps he was that in his personal life too. If Herbert had a personal life. Meditating thus, Cardwell was perhaps coming insensibly to regard his old associate as an intriguing puzzle; almost, it might be said, as laboratory material. Nothing could be more interesting than to find out what, under just what circumstances and compulsions, so extraordinary a creature as Herbert would do.
‘I can see you feel I live in rather a mess,’ Herbert said cheerfully when Hinkstone had shoved him into a chair. ‘I suppose it’s true in a way, and Bernard would agree with you. Bernard tries to tidy me up from time to time, but I have to stop him. If you tidy everything up it means you can never put your hand on something when you want it, because it isn’t where it was.’
‘Which probably meant buried invisibly beneath something else,’ Cardwell said with a careful lightness of air. ‘It seems to me, Herbert, that you’ll have to live as De Quincey did, migrating from one set of rooms to another when the first became too jam-packed to move about it. He simply flitted in what he stood up in and started the process of accumulation all over again. It was a simplification, but one couldn’t call it exactly efficient.’
‘It didn’t prevent him,’ Hinkstone said, ‘from publishing no end of rubbish. Seventeen volumes of it, all sozzled in opium. Herbert is still seventeen short of that, but at least he keeps a clear head.’
‘I don’t doubt that,’ Cardwell said brusquely. He didn’t care to have this young man appear in the role of one defending Herbert against criticism. But at the same time he fleetingly wondered whether it would be possible to make an ally of Hinkstone. It might have to be either that or an enemy. For there was no doubt that this polytechnic person, so incongruously well-seen in Greek, was devoted to his old teacher.
‘The same is true of Bernard,’ Herbert said with a sudden cheerful splutter. ‘About the clear head, I mean. Not that there aren’t phases of obfuscation from time to time. The poor lad has got hung up lately on this chap Chomsky – Syntactic Structures, you know. And that reminds me, Vivian. I’ve put together a few notes on Chomsky that I’d like you to see. Irreverent, perhaps – but those outstanding fellows must put up with a little of that. Mind you, I’ve nothing against Generative Grammar in a general way. But when you begin to hear of Cartesian Linguistics it’s time to ask a question or two, wouldn’t you say?’ As he offered these arcane remarks Humbert was already fussing around the room – turning over books tumbled on tables, peering at shelves and into cupboards, actually here and there stirring the silt of papers on the floor with his foot. Then he came to a baffled pause. ‘Bernard,’ he demanded, ‘just where is that Chomsky file?’
‘I haven’t a clue, Herbert.’ It was with a hint of impatience that Hinkstone made this reply. Here had perhaps been an appeal of a kind that reached him too often.
‘You see?’ It was triumphantly but without malice – in fact it was with the most genial of splutters – that Humbert had turned to Cardwell. ‘Bernard has tidied the Chomsky file away, never to be seen again. Time will perform the same office by the man himself, of course. But it’s a shame he can’t even have a run for his money with me.’
Herbert Humbert couldn’t have been called a witty man (except in an obsolete and superior sense of the word) but he was always pleased when he achieved some approximation to that character. He promptly forgot about Professor Chomsky now and talked about other things. With a little translation into his own fields of concern, it might be said that he talked about shoes and ships and sealing wax, and this without omitting cabbages and kings. Intermittently there was a hunt for appropriate documentation – for other files than the Chomsky one. More often than not, the search was again futile. But on half-a dozen occasions either jottings in Humbert’s hand or Hinkstone’s typescript copies (or perhaps recensions) of similar material were placed in Cardwell’s hands. He didn’t make a great deal of them. (Perhaps he made less than he ought to have done.) In places the effect was momentarily dazzling, as if a flash of lightning had lit up some far territory not commonly seen. But what was the use of that when the total effect was of helplessness and confusion? Cardwell found that repeatedly asking himself this question was fatiguing, and he was quite glad when the moment came at which he could get away. This didn’t mean that he was at all ditching Herbert. He was now quite clear that he was going to ‘do something’ for Herbert; was going to rehabilitate him by one means or another. Not that ‘rehabilitate’ was quite the right word, since poor old Herbert could scarcely be said ever to have been habilitated in the first place. Rather he was going to bring Herbert forward: that was it. And already he had a vague plan, a wholly benevolent plan, in his head. He couldn’t, however, broach it in this messy room, and with young Bernard Hinkstone standing jealously by. Herbert must be got down to Chantries, and there softened up – or chatted up, as the young people said.
In the interest of this preliminary part of his plan, Cardwell went vigorously to work at once. Even Hinkstone couldn’t take exception to Herbert’s spending a weekend or a week on a visit to a very old friend. And eventually Herbert agreed. He was evidently alarmed, but when Cardwell fished out a pocket diary and fixed a date he submitted at once. Cardwell wondered whether, long ago, he had been able thus to give Herbert his orders, at least in the common affairs of life. He couldn’t remember. What he did remember (now for the first time in many years) was that in intellectual matters it had been Herbert who held the lead. Perhaps he himself (despite all the prizes he had taken) had been rather a slow developer. It was commonly said that slow developers got furthest in the long run.
Rather to Cardwell’s surprise, Hinkstone saw him not only to the door of the flat but politely down the staircase as well. This proved, however, to be only because he had something not particularly agreeable to say.
‘He should be let alone,’ Hinkstone said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Cardwell produced this in a manner sufficiently frigid, he supposed, to quell further impertinence. But Hinkstone was resolved to have his say.
‘You may mean well, Sir Vivian. But you’ll only mess him around.’
‘My dear young man, I am prepared to give you credit for meaning well too. But Herbert Humbert and I were close friends before you were born. You will forgive me if I say that you speak a little out of turn.’
‘He’s perfectly happy as he is.’
‘I think not. Herbert has not been done justice to within his profession, and he feels it keenly. He ought to be a professor by now.’
‘Nothing of the kind. A reader, perhaps. Readers are more learned than professors, but lack guile.’
‘Indeed?’ This facetiousness had seemed to Cardwell misplaced. ‘Let us say that Herbert has not received proper recognition, and that it is partly his own fault. He ought to have published more. He must be encouraged to publish.’
‘And you’re going to encourage him?’
‘He and I, Mr Hinkstone, used to work closely together. And the thought has come to me that we might do so again. I confide this to you, despite a certain acerbity in your tone, because I recognise that you have Herbert’s interest at heart. It has occurred to me that if he and I were to collaborate it might . . .’ Cardwell had been about to say, ‘bring Herbert forward’. More circumspectly, however, he said, ‘help matters along.’
‘Collaborate?’ The two men had now reached the front door, and Hinkstone opened it as he echoed the word. ‘Herbert collaborate with you? Don’t make me laugh.’
With this fantastically discourteous speech (particularly shocking in a Grecian from Christ’s Hospital) Bernard Hinkstone virtually thrust Sir Vivian Cardwell into the street.
Cardwell no longer played tennis with the daughters of the neighbouring families. But he sometimes played croquet with his wife, and on the second day of Herbert’s visit to Chantries it occurred to him that this would be a reasonable diversion to which to introduce his unathletic friend. He wasn’t exactly finding Herbert heavy in hand, but literary talk with him wasn’t sufficiently easy to be a resource right round the clock. As undergraduates they had frequently disagreed with one another vehemently, but at the same time owned so much common ground that the disagreements often proved fruitful as well as being fun. Now in late middle age their interests didn’t so exactly coincide. Perhaps it might be said that Humbert took the whole notion of a Theory of Literature more seriously than Cardwell; he certainly took more seriously (and commanded more familiarly) what Cardwell would have been disposed to call the current jargon in the field. Humbert had never been easy to follow, and now there were times when Cardwell simply didn’t know what he was talking about. Cardwell had to admit to himself that he was still some way from even beginning to see how to sort poor Herbert out.
At the start the croquet was quite a success. Herbert insisted on calling it pell-mell, and he talked about flamingos and hedgehogs in a manner Cardwell found perplexing until he remembered Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Sir Vivian had never much cared for Alice.) The processes of ‘making a croquet’ and ‘taking croquet’ pleased Herbert, and the discovery that he was allowed so to hit his own ball that it scarcely moved whereas his opponent’s went hurtling into the gooseberry bushes delighted him inordinately. But he couldn’t be brought to realise that, by way of scoring, more was required of him than to bang his ball at random through any hoop he chose. And every now and then he would recall Alice again, and either shout ‘Off with her head!’ or turn himself into a soldier pretending to be a hoop for Lady Cardwell’s benefit. It was quite as much the croquet as the literary conversation that suggested to Sir Vivian that the unspeakable Hinkstone had been right, and that Herbert was simply not to be collaborated with. The notion of an impressive work by V. Cardwell and H. Humbert had to be ruled out.
In future years Cardwell would have found hard to remember either the point at which a bold new plan came to him, or the mingled (and even conflicting) motives that had gone to the framing of it. He may have begun from the perception that if anything were to be effected at all the first step must still be to gain some sort of ascendancy over Herbert of a kind not easy to define but the possibility of which he sensed as buried deep in their relationship. This was, in fact, the ‘softening up’ he had already thought of, and it didn’t sound wholly agreeable expressed in that way. Cardwell was by no means blind to the possibility that the lure of power was here jostling with his benevolent intentions – and indeed that his benevolence might be less active than his mere curiosity. He certainly wasn’t going to let Herbert return to London (and the clutches of Bernard Hinkstone) without exploring him a good deal further. He gave his friend the typescript of the book which at one time was to have been called Concrete Universals in Literature. It wasn’t exactly that kind of book now.
Humbert took the book to bed with him, and had of course read it through by breakfast-time next morning. He was enthusiastic. He was enthusiastic – an informed spectator might have felt – in an almost curiously undiscriminating way. This ought to have irked Cardwell quite as much as it pleased him. But he felt nothing of the kind. He felt simply that Herbert was well on the road to where he wanted him.
‘Vivian, you simply must publish it! It would be criminal not to.’ Humbert was stammering and spluttering – something he had so far contrived not to do at Lady Cardwell’s table.
‘Let’s go and talk about it on the terrace, Herbert.’ Cardwell appeared to be making this suggestion out of consideration for his guest’s embarrassingly over-moist condition, but may also have felt that he might get further in helping Herbert if both were out of his wife’s eye.
‘My dear Herbert,’ he said as he began to stuff his morning pipe, ‘we must be realistic about this. Or, rather, we must simply be honest.’
‘Honest, Vivian?’ Not perhaps surprisingly, Humbert was a little puzzled by this suddenly conjured up moral imperative. ‘Honest about what?’
‘Simply about whose book it is. And I’ve pretty well told you about that already. It’s yours, almost every word of it. You alone can properly send it to the printer.’
As he produced this remarkable speech Sir Vivian Caldwell kept his friend held in a level and penetrating gaze. It had come to him that the softening-up process was something to be achieved not by slow and cautious habituation but – as now – almost at a stroke. The right technique, in fact, was something very close to the stage hypnotist’s. It mightn’t work. But it was as likely to work as anything else was.
‘To the printer?’ Herbert’s features were more than commonly at sixes and sevens. ‘What printer?’
‘Whatever printer you please. It’s simply time the book – your book – was published.’
‘It’s not my book, Vivian. It’s your book.’ Herbert said this in a strange small voice not habitual to him.
‘Look, Herbert – you and I are philosophers in a fashion, and we can see this thing in its essence and not its mere appearance. Of course I scribbled the book. But at a deep level I was nothing but your amanuensis. Of course there will be passages and turns of expression and so forth that you will improve in one way or another. But published your book must be.’
Cardwell, although offering this speech with all the authority of the gentleman in tails and a cloak who has just made passes over the face of the yokel from the audience, felt inwardly a little at sixes and sevens himself. He took a good deal of satisfaction in what he appeared to be getting away with. He admired his boldness and even a certain element of selflessness and sacrifice inherent in his design. It was true that the old manuscript (brilliant though it probably was) meant little to him. It was with rather different material that he had secured his position on the literary front—but that had come to mean little to him either. He had been a junior minister. If the next general election went as it should he had a good chance of winding up his career as a senior, although not particularly important, member of the Cabinet. And he would have the further satisfaction of numbering poor old Professor Humbert among his acquaintances.
So Sir Vivian Cardwell was rather pleased with himself. But there can be no doubt that, like most of us, he had two sides to his head, and was therefore aware that thus to make a monkey of an old friend was not an altogether amiable proceeding.
Varieties of Literary Experience by Herbert Humbert was published six months later and received with universal obloquy and disdain. An influential journal (which had always been eager to print any of the elegant essays which Sir Vivian Cardwell wrote from time to time) described it as mannered and largely devoid of substance; another declared it to be ‘hauntingly démodé’ and a farouche young critic in an avant-garde weekly found it ‘as toothsome and nutritious as expanded polystyrene’.
In the face of this unanimous censure it is necessary to conclude that Humbert’s relationship with his friend had become in its final phase essentially pathological; that not only was his will impaired to the extraordinary degree evidenced by his accepting the bizarre and demeaning deception proposed to him but also that his critical judgement was so overlaid by a cloud of fatuous admiration for Sir Vivian Cardwell that he had mis-estimated the quality of the book (let alone its consonance with his own early thinking) in a singularly strange fashion.
Cardwell, naturally enough, didn’t see the matter quite in this light. It was of course a great shock to him. But he was outraged as well. It staggered him that a work which would have been competently examined and justly praised had it appeared under his own name should be laughed to scorn when supposed to be the work of an unknown drudge in an obscure academic situation. Sir Vivian actually composed a long letter to The Times about this before he realised (with the help of his wife, to whom he had confessed the whole thing) that a certain inconvenience must attend upon any public denunciation of the monstrous fate his labours had met with.
Humbert, perhaps because he had long ceased to expect very much from the world, was not at first nearly so upset. He had certainly got himself involved in an odd situation, and with the peculiar patchy clarity that characterised his mind, he saw that it wouldn’t have happened if that mind hadn’t been affected by some degree of premature senescence. This discovery about himself interested him very much, and he would talk about it acutely to Bernard Hinkstone for hours on end. At other times he was increasingly abstracted and withdrawn. His clumsiness increased, together with an attendant liability to petty physical mishap.
Then something really worrying turned up on his horizon. He certainly was never going to be a professor now – and he began to doubt whether he would for long even continue to be a lecturer. His appointment in that academic grade would soon be due for renewal, and it seemed to him that, after the fiasco of Varieties of Literary Experience, there was a strong probability that the renewal would not take place. This was of course a totally baseless notion, as Hinkstone strove to persuade him. Only if that absurd deception were made public could there be the slightest risk of such a disaster and humiliation. But Humbert continued disturbed. He wasn’t depressed. Hinkstone was to assert later that, in any recognisable clinical sense, Humbert was from first to last not under that sort of weather. But he did become more and more absent-minded. Then one day he went out to buy a box of matches, chose to cross the street at an injudicious moment, and was knocked down by a small motor-cycle and killed instantly.
Sir Vivian, although much distressed by the news of the fatality, also felt a certain measure of relief. His conscience had been pricking him over the freakish experiment (as it had been) with Varieties of Literary Experience, and it had been striking him that the only thing to do was to return to the proposal of producing along with Herbert a collaborated work. His own name, carried on the title page of such a better-conceived venture, would surely bring Herbert the enhanced reputation which was required. But he had also been conscious that there would be difficulties (Herbert was difficult) of a formidable order to be overcome if such a project were to be achieved. So perhaps what had happened was just as well.
It was nearly two years after this that there appeared in the bookshops, in two volumes, The Chomsky File and Other Literary Remains of Herbert Humbert, edited by Bernard Hinkstone. Than this monstrous collection of disjecta membra, of the outpourings of waste-paper baskets, of sweepings-up from a littered floor there had been, in the highest literary and academic circles, no such sensation since the turn of the century. To the roll of the great English critics – Dryden, Johnson, Arnold, Eliot, Leavis – a new name had been added overnight. Humbert’s former employers in a corner of the University of London were appalled at the little regard they had paid to the genius in their midst; a spectacle that could only have been paralleled had, say, Richard Bentley been constrained to vapour away his days in a private school. So they touted around and found a millionaire – the owner of some chain-stores – who approved of education, and from him they got enough money to endow their college with a Herbert Humbert Professorship. The first incumbent of the Chair was, very rightly, that sound scholar, Bernard Hinkstone. When, a good many years later again, the distinguished belletrist and litterateur Sir Vivian Cardwell was given an honorary degree, Professor Hinkstone made an urbane little speech about him.