Temporary Kings

The smell of Venice
suffused
the night, lacustrine essences richly distilled. Late summer was hot here. A
very old man took the floor. Hoarse, tottering, a few residual teeth,
arbitrarily assembled and darkly stained, underpinning the buoyancy of his grin,
he rendered the song in slower time than ordinary, clawing the air with his
hands, stamping the floor with his feet, while he mimed the action of the
cable, straining, creaking, climbing, as it hauled upward towards the volcanic
crater the capsule encasing himself and his girl, a journey calculated to stir
her ungrateful heart.

Iamme, iamme, via
montiam su là.
Iamme, iamme, via montiam su là.
Funiculì funiculà, via montiam su là.

A first initiatory
visit to Italy, travelling as a boy with my parents, had included a week at
this same hotel. It overlooked the Grand Canal. Then small, rather poky even,
its waterfront now extended on either side of the terrace, where, by tradition,
the musicians’ gondola tied up. Near-tourist outfits replaced evening dress antique
as the troupe itself, in other respects the pattern remained unaltered, notably
this veteran and the ‘business’ of his song. Could he be the same man? A mere
forty years – indeed three or four short of that – might well have passed
without much perceptible transmutation in a façade already radically weathered
by Time when first observed. The gestures were identical. With an operatic
out-thrust of the body, he intimated the kingdoms of the earth ranged beneath
funicular passengers for their delectation.

Si vede Francia,
Procida, la Spagna,
E io veggo te, io veggo te.

The century all but
within his grasp, the singer might actually recollect the occasion for which
the song had been composed; on that great day, as the words postulated, himself
ascended Vesuvius accompanied by his inamorata, snug together in the newly
installed spaceship, auspicious with potentialities for seduction. Had a
dominating personality, the suggestive rotations of the machinery, Procida’s
isle laid out far below, like a girl spreadeagled on her back, all combined to
do the trick? The answer was surely affirmative. Even if marriage remained in
question – conceivably the librettist’s deference to convention – at least
warmer contacts must have been attained.

The stylized
movements of the hands were reminiscent of Dicky, Umfraville at one of his
impersonations. He too should have harnessed his gift, in early life, to an
ever renewing art from which there was no retiring age. To exhibit themselves,
perform before a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet
self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and
ashes. Professional commitment to his own representations might have kept at
bay the melancholy – all but chronic, Frederica and his stepchildren complained
– now that Umfraville had retired from work as agent at Thrubworth. Sometimes,
after a day’s racing, for example, he might return to the old accustomed form.
Even then a few misplaced bets would bring the conviction that luck was gone
for good, his life over.

‘Christ, what a
shambles. Feeling my back too. Trumpeter, what are you sounding now? –
Defaulters
,
old boy, if your name’s Jerry Hat-Trick. You know growing old’s like being
increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.’

‘Which ones haven’t
you committed?’ said Frederica. ‘You’ve never grown up, darling. You can’t grow
old till you’ve done that.’

Sufferance, as well
as affection, was implied, though Frederica had never tired of Umfraville, in
spite of being often cross with him.

‘I feel like the man
in the ghost story, scrambling over the breakwaters with the Horrible Thing
behind him getting closer and closer. There hasn’t been a good laugh since that
horse-box backed over Buster Foxe at Lingfield.’

As a rule Umfraville
disliked mention of death, but the legend of Buster Foxe’s immolation under the
wheels of a kind of Houyhnhnm juggernaut, travelling in reverse gear, was the
exception. It had resolutely passed into Umfraville myth. Captain Foxe’s end
(he had been promoted during the war) was less dramatic, though certainly
brought about by some fatal accident near the course, terminating for ever risk
of seeing an old enemy at future race-meetings. It would be worth asking
Umfraville if he had his own version of
Funiculì-Funiculà
, an accomplishment
by no means out of the question.

The present vocalist
to some extent controverted Frederica’s argument, supporting more St John
Clarke’s observation that ‘growing old consists abundantly of growing young’.
The aged singer looked as if thoughts of death, melancholy in any form, were
unknown to him. He could be conceived as suffering from rage, desire, misery,
anguish, despair; not melancholy. That was clear; additionally so after the
round of applause following his number. The clapping was reasonably hearty
considering the heat, almost as oppressive as throughout the day just passed.
Dr Emily Brightman and I joined in. Acknowledgment of his talent delighted the
performer. He bowed again and again, repeatedly baring blackened sporadic
stumps, while he mopped away streams of sweat that coursed down channels of dry
loose skin ridging either side of his mouth. Longevity had brought not the
smallest sense of repletion where public recognition was in question. That was
on the whole sympathetic. One found oneself taking more interest than formerly
in the habits and lineaments of old age.

In spite of the
singer’s own nonchalance, the susceptive tunes of the musicians, the gorgeous
dropscene, the second carafe of wine, infected the mind not disagreeably with
thoughts of the evanescence of things. At the beginning of the century,
Marinetti and the Futurists had wanted to make a fresh start – whatever that
might mean – advocating, among other projects, filling up the Venetian canals
with the rubble of the Venetian palaces. Now, the Futurists, with their
sentimentality about the future, primitive machinery, vintage motor-cars,
seemed as antiquely picturesque as the Doge in the
Bucentaur
, wedding his
bride the Sea, almost as distant in time; though true that a desire to destroy,
a hatred and fear of the past, remained a constant in human behaviour.

‘Do you think the
soubrette is his mistress, or his great-granddaughter?’ asked Dr Brightman. ‘They
seem on very close terms. Perhaps both.’

From our first
meeting, at the opening session of the Conference (when friendly contacts had
been achieved by mutual familiarity with
Borage and Hellebore
,
my book about Burton, and her own more famous work on The Triads), Dr Brightman
had made clear a determination to repudiate the faintest suspicion of
spinsterish prudery that might, very mistakenly, be supposed to attach to her
circumstances. Discreetly fashionable clothes emphasized this total severance
from anything to be thought of as academic stuffiness, a manner of dress quietly
but insistently smart. One of her pupils at the university (our niece Caroline
Lovell’s best friend) alleged a reputation of severity as a tutor, effortless
ability to reduce to tears, if necessary, the most bumptious female student. Dr
Brightman, it was true, was undoubtedly a little formidable at first impact. We
touched on the Dark Ages. She spoke of her present engagement on Boethius, in a
form likely to prove controversial. The male don of her name, known to me when
myself an undergraduate, appeared to be only a distant relation.

‘You mean Harold
Brightman, who played some part in organizing a dinner to celebrate the
ninetieth birthday of that old rascal Sillery? He’s a cousin of some sort.
There are scores of them engaged in the learned professions. We all stem from
the Revd Salathiel Brightman, named in
The Dunciad
in
connexion with some long forgotten squabble about a piece of Augustan pedantry.
He composed
Attick and Roman Reckonings of Capacity for Things Liquid and Things Dry
reduced to the Common English Mensuration for Wine and Corn
. I
believe the great Lemprière acknowledges indebtedness in preparation of his own
tables of proportion at the end of the
Bibliotheca Classica
.
Salathiel is said to have revolutionized the view held in his own day of the
cochlearion and oxybaphon, though for myself I haven’t the smallest notion of
how many of either went to an amphora. Speaking of things liquid and things
dry, shall we have a drink? Tell me, Mr Jenkins, did Mark Members persuade you
to come to this Conference?’

‘You, too?’

‘Not without
resistance on my own part I had planned a lot of work this long vac. Mark
positively nagged me into it. He can be very tyrannical.’

‘I resisted too, but
was in difficulties about a book. It seemed a way out.’

To say that was to
make the best of things, let oneself down gently. Writing may not be enjoyable,
its discontinuance can be worse, though Members himself must by then have been
safely beyond any such gnawings of guilt. By now he was a hardened frequenter
of international gatherings for ‘intellectuals’ of every sort. He had been at
the game for years. The activity suited him. It brought out hitherto dormant
capabilities for organization and oratory, neither given a fair chance in the
course of an author’s routine dealings with publishers and editors; nor for
that matter – Members having tried reversing the roles – trafficking with
authors as editor or publisher. The then ever-widening field of cultural
congresses pleased and stimulated his temperament. At one of them he had even
found a wife, an American lady, author and journalist, a few years older than
himself, excellently preserved, not without name and useful connexions in her
own country. She was also, as Members himself boasted, ‘inured to writers and
their inconsequent ways’. That was probably true, as Members was her fourth
husband. The marriage still remained in a reasonably flourishing condition, in
spite of hints (from the critic; Bernard Shernmaker, chiefly) that Members had
dropped out of the Venetian rendezvous because another, smaller conference was
to include a female novelist in whom he was interested. A reason for supposing
that particular imputation unjust was that several other literary figures had
thought the rival conference more tempting. These differed in this from Members
only insomuch as he had played some part in organization of the Venetian
gathering at the London end. That was why, to avoid becoming vulnerable in his
own apostasy, he had to find, at short notice, one or two substitutes like Dr
Brightman and myself. He brushed aside pretexts that I never took part in such
activities.

‘All the more reason
to go, Nicholas, see what such meetings of true minds have to offer. I should
not be at all surprised if you did not succumb to the drug. It’s quite a potent
one, as I’ve found to my cost. Besides, even at our age, there’s a certain
sense of adventure at such jamborees. You meet interesting people – if writers
and suchlike can be called interesting, something you and I must often have
doubted in the course of our
via dolorosa
towards
literary crucifixion. At worst it makes a change, provides a virtually free
holiday, or something not far removed. Come along, Nicholas, bestir yourself.
Say yes. Don’t be apathetic.

Leave we the
unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!

It’s not sepulture,
and a tall mountain, this time, but the Piazza San Marco – my patron saint,
please remember – and a lot of parties, not only crowded with culture, but
excellent food and drink thrown in. There’s the Biennale, and the Film Festival
the following week, if you feel like staying for it. Kennst du das Land, wo die
Zitronen blühn? Take a chance on it. You’ll live like a king once you get
there.’

‘One of those
temporary kings in
The Golden Bough
, everything at their disposal for a year or a
month or a day – then execution? Death in Venice?’

‘Only ritual
execution in more enlightened times – the image of a declining virility. A Mann’s
a man for a’ that. Being the temporary king is what matters. The retribution of
congress kings only takes the form, severe enough in its way, I admit, of
having to return to everyday life. Even that, my dear Nicholas, you’ll do with
renewed energy. Like the new king, in fact.

Here upon earth, we’re
kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.