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Lost Property which Sebastian had begun at that time appears as a kind of halt in his literary journey of discovery: a summing up, a counting of the things and souls lost on the way, a setting of bearings; the clinking sound of unsaddled horses browsing in the dark; the glow of a camp fire; stars overhead. There is in it a short chapter dealing with an aeroplane crash (the pilot and all the passengers but one were killed); the survivor, an elderly Englishman, was discovered by a farmer some way from the place of the accident, sitting on a stone. He sat huddled up – the picture of misery and pain. 'Are you badly hurt?' asked the farmer. 'No,' answered the Englishman, 'toothache. I've had it all the way.' Half a dozen letters were found scattered in a field: remnants of the air-mail bag. Two of these were business letters of great importance; a third was addressed to a woman, but began: 'Dear Mr Mortimer, in reply to yours of the 6th inst…' and dealt with the placing of an order; a fourth was a birthday greeting; a fifth was the letter of a spy with its steely secret hidden in a haystack of idle prattle; and the last was an envelope directed to a firm of traders with the wrong letter inside, a love letter. 'This will smart, my poor love. Our picnic is finished; the dark road is bumpy and the smallest child in the car is about to be sick. A cheap fool would tell you: you must be brave. But then, anything I might tell you in the way of support or consolation is sure to be milk-puddingy – you know what I mean. You always knew what I meant. Life with you was lovely – and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink "v" in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering "l". Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist…. This is all poetry. I am lying to you. Lily-livered. There can be nothing more cowardly than a poet beating about the bush. I think you have guessed how things stand: the damned formula of "another woman". I am desperately unhappy with her – here is one thing which is true. And I think there is nothing much more to be said about that side of the business.

'I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear race, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say "two" I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

'Good-bye, my poor love. I shall never forget you and never replace you. It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love, and that this other passion is but a comedy of the flesh. All is flesh and all is purity. But one thing is certain: I have been happy with you and now I am miserable with another. And so life will go on. I shall joke with the chaps at the office and enjoy my dinners (until I get dyspepsia), and read novels, and write verse, and keep an eye on the stocks – and generally behave as I have always behaved. But that does not mean that I shall be happy without you…. Every small thing which will remind me of you – the look of disapproval about the furniture in the rooms where you have patted cushions and spoken to the poker, every small thing which we have descried together – will always seem to me one half of a shell, one half of a penny, with the other half kept by you. Good-bye. Go away, go away. Don't write. Marry Charlie or any other good man with a pipe in his teeth. Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This blot is not due to a tear. My fountain-pen has broken down and I am using a filthy pen in this filthy hotel room. The heat is terrific and I have not been able to clinch the business I was supposed to bring "to a satisfactory close", as that ass Mortimer says. I think you have got a book or two of mine – but that is not really important. Please, don't write. L.'

If we abstract from this fictitious letter everything that is personal to its supposed author, I believe that there is much in it that may have been felt by Sebastian, or even written by him, to Clare. He had a queer habit of endowing even his most grotesque characters with this or that idea, or impression, or desire which he himself might have toyed with. His hero's letter may possibly have been a kind of code in which he expressed a few truths about his relations with Clare. But I fail to name any other author who made use of his art in such a baffling manner – baffling to me who might desire to see the real man behind the author. The light of personal truth is hard Jo perceive in the shimmer of an imaginary nature, but what is still harder to understand is the amazing fact that a man writing of things which he really felt at the time of writing, could have had the power to create simultaneously – and out of the very things which distressed his mind – a fictitious and faintly absurd character.

Sebastian returned to London in the beginning of 1930 and took to his bed after a very bad heart attack. Somehow or other he managed to go on with the writing of Lost Property: his easiest book, I think. Now, it ought to be understood in connexion with what follows that Clare had been solely responsible for the managing of his literary affairs. After her departure, these soon became wildly entangled. In many cases Sebastian had not the vaguest idea how things stood and what his exact relations with this or that publisher were. He was so muddled, so utterly incompetent, so hopelessly incapable of remembering a single name or address, or the place where he put things, that now he got into the most absurd predicaments. Curiously enough, Clare's girlish forgetfulness had been replaced by a perfect clarity and steadiness of purpose when handling Sebastian's affairs; but now it all went amuck. He had never learnt to use a typewriter and was much too nervous to begin now. The Funny Mountain was published simultaneously in two American magazines, and Sebastian was at a loss to remember how he had managed to sell it to two different people. Then there was a complicated affair with a man who wanted to make a film of Success and who had paid Sebastian in advance (without his noticing it, so absent-mindedly did he read letters) for a shortened and 'intensified' version, which Sebastian never even dreamt of making. The Prismatic Bezel was in the market again, but Sebastian hardly knew of it. Invitations were not even answered; Telephone numbers proved delusions, and the harassing search for the envelope where he had scrawled this or that number exhausted him more than the writing of a chapter. And then – his mind was elsewhere, following in the tracks of an absent mistress, waiting for her call – and presently the call would come, or he himself could stand the suspense no longer, and there he would be as Roy Carswell had once seen him: a gaunt man in a greatcoat and bedroom slippers getting into a Pullman car.

It was in the beginning of this period that Mr Goodman made his appearance. Little by little, Sebastian handed over to him all his literary affairs, and felt greatly relieved to meet so efficient a secretary. 'I usually found him', writes Mr Goodman, 'lying in bed like a sulky leopard' (which somehow reminds one of the nightcapped wolf in 'Little Red Riding Hood')…. 'Never in my life had I seen', he goes on in another passage, 'such a dejected-looking being…. I am told that the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied, also had a great inclination towards a certain listless "interesting" pose….' And further: 'Knight was very thin, with a pale countenance and sensitive hands, which he liked to display with feminine coquetry. He confessed to me once that he liked to pour half a bottle of French perfume into his morning bath, but with all that he looked singularly badly got up…. Knight was extraordinarily vain, like most modernist authors. Once or twice I caught him pasting cuttings, most certainly reviews concerning his books, into a beautiful and expensive album which he kept locked up in his desk, feeling perhaps a little ashamed to let my critical eye consider the fruit of his human weakness…. He often went abroad, twice a year, I daresay, presumably to Gay Paree…. But he was very mysterious about it and made a great show of Byronic languor. I cannot help feeling that trips to the Continent formed part of his artistic programme… he was the perfect "poseur".'