Once or twice a year old Rampole himself introduced an author, always with well-justified forecasts of the book’s failure. “Terrible thing,” he would say. “Met old So-and-so at the club. Got button-holed. Fellow’s just retired from Malay States. Written his reminiscences. We shall have to do them for him. No getting out of it now. One comfort, he won’t ever write another book.”
That was one superiority he had over Mr. Bentley which he was fond of airing. His authors never came back for more, like Mr. Bentley’s young friends.
The idea of the Ivory Tower was naturally repugnant to old Rampole. “I’ve never known a literary review succeed yet,” he said.
He had a certain grudging regard for Ambrose because he was one of the few writers on their list who were incontestably profitable. Other writers always involved an argument, Mr. Bentley having an ingenious way of explaining over-advances and overhead charges and stock in hand in such a way that he seemed to prove that obvious failures had indeed succeeded. But Ambrose’s books sold fifteen thousand copies. He didn’t like the fellow but he had to concede him a certain knack of writing. It shocked him that Ambrose should be so blind to his own interests as to propose such a scheme.
“Has the fellow got money?” he asked Mr. Bentley privately.
“Very little, I think.”
“Then what is he thinking of? What’s he after?”
To Ambrose he said, “But a literary review, now of all times!”
“Now is the time of all times,” said Ambrose. “Don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t. Costs are up and going higher. Can’t get paper. Who’ll want to read this magazine anyway? It isn’t a woman’s paper. It isn’t, as I see it, a man’s. It isn’t even topical. Who’s going to advertise in it?”
“I wasn’t thinking of having advertisements. I thought of making it something like the old Yellow Book.”
“Well, that was a failure,” said old Rampole triumphantly, “in the end.”
But presently he gave his consent. He always gave his consent in the end to all Mr. Bentley’s suggestions. That was the secret of their long partnership. He had registered his protest. No one could blame him. It was all Bentley’s doing. Often he had opposed Mr. Bentley’s projects out of habit, on the widest grounds that publication of any kind was undesirable. In the case of the Ivory Tower he stood on firm ground and knew it. It gave him positive satisfaction to detect his partner in such indefensible folly. So Mr. Bentley’s room, which was the most ornamental in the fine old building which they used as their offices, became the editorial room of Ambrose’s paper.
There was not, at this stage, much editorial work to be done.
“There’s one criticism I foresee,” said Mr. Bentley, studying the proof sheets: “the entire issue seems to be composed by yourself.”
“No one’s to guess that,” said Ambrose. “If you like we’ll put some pseudonyms in.” Ambrose had always rather specialized in manifestoes. He had written one at school; he had written a dozen at the University; once, in the late twenties, he and his friends Hat and Malpractice had even issued the invitation to a party in the form of a manifesto. It was one of his many reasons for shunning Communism that its manifesto had been written for it, once and for all, by somebody else. Surrounded, as he believed himself to be, by enemies of all kinds, Ambrose found it exhilarating from time to time to trumpet his defiance. The first number of the Ivory Tower somewhat belied the serenity and seclusion which it claimed, for Ambrose had a blow for every possible windmill.
“The Minstrel Boys, or Ivory Tower v. Manhattan Skyscraper” defined once and for all Ambrose’s attitude in the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy. “Hermit or Choirmaster” was an expansion of Ambrose’s theme at the Café Royaclass="underline" “Culture must be coenobitic not conventual.” He struck ferocious unprovoked blows at those who held that literature was of value to the community. Mr. J. B. Priestley came in for much personal abuse in these pages. There followed “The Bakelite Tower,” an onslaught on David Lennox and the decorative school of fashionable artists. “Majors and Mandarins” followed, where was defined the proper degrees of contempt and abhorrence due to the military, and among the military Ambrose included by name all statesmen of an energetic and warlike disposition.
“It’s all very controversial,” said Mr. Bentley sadly. “When you first told me about it, I thought you meant it to be a purely artistic paper.”
“We must show people where we stand,” said Ambrose. “Art will follow anyway, there’s ‘Monument to a Spartan.’”
“Yes,” said Mr. Bentley. “There’s that.”
“It covers fifty pages, my dear. All Pure Art.”
He said this with a facetious, shop assistant’s intonation as though he were saying “All Pure Silk”; he said it as though it were a joke, but in his heart he believed and he knew Mr. Bentley understood him in this sense he was speaking the simple truth. It was all pure art.
He had written it two years ago on his return from Munich after his parting with Hans. It was the story of Hans. Now, after the passage of two years, he could not read it without tears. To publish it was a symbolic action of the laying down of an emotional burden he had carried too long.
“Monument to a Spartan” described Hans, as Ambrose had loved him, in every mood; Hans immature, the provincial petit-bourgeois youth floundering and groping in the gloom of Teutonic adolescence, unsuccessful in his examinations, world-weary, brooding about suicide among the conifers, uncritical of direct authority, unreconciled to the order of the universe; Hans affectionate, sentimental, roughly sensual, guilty; above all Hans guilty, haunted by the taboos of the forest; Hans credulous, giving his simple and generous acceptance to all the nonsense of Nazi leaders; Hans reverent to those absurd instructors who harangued the youth camps, resentful at the injustices of man to man, at the plots of the Jews and the encirclement of his country, at the blockade and disarmament; Hans loving his comrades, finding in a deep tribal emotion an escape from the guilt of personal love, Hans singing with his Hitler youth comrades, cutting trees with them, making roads, still loving his old friend, puzzled that he could not fit the old love into the scheme of the new; Hans growing a little older, joining the Brown Shirts, lapped in a kind of benighted chivalry, bemused in a twilight where the demagogues and party hacks loomed and glittered like Wagnerian heroes; Hans faithful to his old friend, like a woodcutter’s boy in a fairy tale who sees the whole forest peopled with the great ones of another world and, rubbing his eyes, returns at evening to his hut and his fireside. The Wagnerians shone in Ambrose’s story as they did in Hans’s eyes. He austerely denied himself any hint of satire. The blustering, cranky, boneheaded party men were all heroes and philosophers. All this Ambrose had recorded with great delicacy and precision at a time when his heart was consumed by the final tragedy. Hans’s Storm Troop comrades discover that his friend is a Jew; they have resented this friend before because in their gross minds they know him to represent something personal and private in a world where only the mob and the hunting pack have the right to live. So the mob and the hunting pack fall on Hans’s friendship. With a mercy they are far from feeling they save Hans from facing the implications of his discovery. For him, alone, it would have been the great climacteric of his retarded adolescence; the discovery that his own, personal conviction conflicted with the factitious convictions drummed into him by the crooks and humbugs he took for his guides. But the hunting pack and the mob left Hans no time to devise his own, intense punishment; that at least was spared him in the swift and savage onslaught; that was left to Ambrose returning by train to England.