'My name,' she said, 'is Helen Pratt. I have overheard as much of your conversation as I could stand and there is a little thing I want to ask you. Clare Bishop is a great friend of mine. There's something she wants to find out. Could I talk to you one of these days?'
I said yes, most certainly, and we fixed the time.
'I knew Mr Knight quite well,' she added, looking at me with bright round eyes.
'Oh, really,' said I, not quite knowing what else to say.
'Yes,' she went on, 'he was an amazing personality, and I don't mind telling you that I loathed Goodman's book about him.'
'What do you mean?' I asked. 'What book?'
'Oh, the one he has just written. I was going over the proofs with him this last week. Well, I must be running. Thank you so much.'
She darted away and very slowly I descended the steps. Mr Goodman's large soft pinkish face was, and is, remarkably like a cow's udder.
7
Mr Goodman's book The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight has enjoyed a very good Press. It has been lengthily reviewed in the leading dailies and weeklies. It has been called 'impressive and convincing'. The author has been credited with 'deep insight' into an 'essentially modem' character. Passages have been quoted to demonstrate his efficient handling of nutshells. One critic even went as far as to take his hat off to Mr Goodman – who, let it be added, had used his own merely to talk through it. In a word, Mr Goodman has been patted on the back when he ought to have been rapped on the knuckles.
I, for one, would have ignored that book altogether had it been just another bad book, doomed with the rest of its kind to oblivion by next spring. The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr Goodman's effort. But bad as the book may be, it is something else besides. Owing to the quality of its subject, it is bound to become quite mechanically the satellite of another man's enduring fame. As long as Sebastian Knight's name is remembered, there always will be some learned inquirer conscientiously climbing up a ladder to where The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight keeps half awake between Godfrey Goodman's Fall of Man and Samuel Goodrich's Recollections of a Lifetime. Thus, if I continue to harp on the subject, I do so for Sebastian Knight's sake.
Mr Goodman's method is as simple as his philosophy. His sole object is to show 'poor Knight' as the product and victim of what he calls 'our time' – though why some people are so keen to make others share in their chronometric concepts, has always been a mystery to me. 'Post-war Unrest'. 'Post-war Generation' are to Mr Goodman magic words opening every door. There is, however, a certain kind of 'open sesame' which seems less a charm than a skeleton-key, and this, I am afraid, is Mr Goodman's kind. But he is quite wrong in thinking that he found something once the lock had been forced. Not that I wish to suggest that Mr Goodman thinks. He could not if he tried. His book concerns itself only with such ideas as have been shown (commercially) to attract mediocre minds.
For Mr Goodman, young Sebastian Knight 'freshly emerged from the carved chrysalid of Cambridge' is a youth of acute sensibility in a cruel cold world. In this world, 'outside realities intrude so roughly upon one's most intimate dreams' that a young man's soul is forced into a state of siege before it is finally shattered. 'The War', says Mr Goodman without so much as a blush, 'had changed the face of the universe.' And with much gusto he goes on to describe those special aspects of post-war life which met a young man at 'the troubled dawn of his career': a feeling of some great deception; weariness of the soul and feverish physical excitement (such as the 'vapid lewdness of the foxtrot'); a sense of futility – and its result: gross liberty. Cruelty, too; the reek of blood still in the air; glaring picture palaces; dim couples in dark Hyde Park; the glories of standardization; the cult of machinery; the degradation of Beauty, Love, Honour, Art… and so on. It is really a wonder that Mr Goodman himself who, as far as I know, was Sebastian's coeval, managed to live through those terrific years.
But what Mr Goodman could stand, his Sebastian Knight apparently could not. We are given a picture of Sebastian restlessly pacing the rooms of his London flat in .1923, after a short trip to the Continent, which Continent 'shocked him indescribably by the vulgar glamour of its gambling hells'. Yes, 'pacing up and down… clutching at his temples… in a passion of discontent… angry with the world… alone… eager to do something, but weak, weak….' The dots are not Mr Goodman's tremolos, but denote sentences I have kindly left out. 'No,' Mr Goodman goes on, 'this was not the world for an artist to live in. It was all very well to flaunt a brave countenance, to make a great display of that cynicism which so irritates one in Knight's earlier work and so pains one in his last two volumes… it was all very well to appear contemptuous and ultrasophisticated, but the thorn was there, the sharp, poisonous thorn.' I don't know why, but the presence of this (perfectly mythical) thorn seems to give Mr Goodman a grim satisfaction.
It would be unfair of me if I let it seem that this first chapter of The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight consists exclusively of a thick flow of philosophical treacle. Word-pictures and anecdotes which form the body of the book (that is, when Mr Goodman arrives at the stage of Sebastian's life when he met him personally) appear here too, as rock cakes dotting the syrup. Mr Goodman was no Boswell; still, no doubt, he kept a notebook where he jotted down certain remarks of his employer – and apparently some of these related to his employer's past. In other words, we must imagine that Sebastian in between work would say: Do you know, my dear Goodman, this reminds me of a day in my life, some years ago, when… Here would come the story. Half a dozen of these seem to Mr Goodman sufficient to fill out what is to him a blank – Sebastian's youth in England.
The first of these stories (which Mr Goodman considers to be extremely typical of 'post-war undergraduate life} depicts Sebastian showing a girl friend from London the sights of Cambridge. 'And this is the Dean's window,' he said; then smashing the pane with a stone, he added: 'And this is the Dean.' Needless to say that Sebastian has been pulling Mr Goodman's leg: the story is as old as the University itself.
Let us look at the second one. During a short vacation trip to Germany (1921? 1922?) Sebastian, one night, being annoyed by the caterwauls in the street, started to pelt the offenders with miscellaneous objects including an egg. Presently, a policeman knocked at his door, bringing back all these objects minus the egg.
This is from an old (or, as Mr Goodman would say, pre-war') Jerome K. Jerome book. Leg-pulling again.
Third story: Sebastian speaking of his very first novel (unpublished and destroyed) explained that it was about a fat young student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this uncle, an ear-specialist, had murdered the student's father.
Mr Goodman misses the joke.
Fourth: Sebastian in the summer of 1922 had overworked himself and, suffering from hallucinations, used to see a kind of optical ghost – a black-robed monk moving swiftly towards him from the sky.
This is a little harder: a short story by Chekhov.
Fifth:
But I think we had better stop, or else Mr Goodman might be in danger of becoming a centipede. Let us have him remain quadrupedal. I am sorry for him, but it cannot be helped. And if only he had not padded and commented these 'curious incidents and fancies' so ponderously, with such a rich crop of deductions! Churlish, capricious, mad Sebastian, struggling in a naughty world of Juggernauts, and aeronauts, and naughts, and what-nots…. Well, well, there may be something in all that.