18
That question which I had wished to ask Nina remained unuttered. I had wished to ask her whether she ever realized that the wan-faced man, whose presence she had found so tedious, was one of the most remarkable writers of his time. What was the use of asking! Books mean nothing to a woman of her kind; her own life seems to her to contain the thrills of a hundred novels. Had she been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in a library, she would have been found dead about noon. I am quite sure that Sebastian never alluded to his work in her presence: it would have been like discussing sundials with a bat. So let us leave that bat to quiver and wheel in the deepening dusk: the clumsy mimic of a swallow.
In those last and saddest years of his life Sebastian wrote The Doubtful Asphodel, which is unquestionably his masterpiece. Where and how dig he write it? In the reading room of the British Museum (far from Mr Goodman's vigilant eye). At a humble table deep in the corner of a Parisian 'bistro' (not of the kind that his mistress might patronize). In a deck-chair under an orange parasol somewhere in Cannes or Juan, when she and her gang had deserted him for a spree elsewhere. In the waiting room of an anonymous station, between two heart attacks. In a hotel, to the clatter of plates being washed in the yard. In many other places which I can but vaguely conjecture. The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured. A man is dying, and he is the hero of the tale; but whereas the lives of other people in the book seem perfectly realistic (or at least realistic in a Knightian sense), the reader is kept ignorant as to who the dying man is, and where his deathbed stands or floats, or whether it is a bed at all. The man is the book; the book itself is heaving and dying, and drawing up a ghostly knee. One thought-image, then another breaks upon the shores of consciousness, and we follow the thing or the being that has been evoked: stray remnants of a wrecked life; sluggish fancies which crawl and then unfurl eyed wings. They are, these lives, but commentaries to the main subject. We follow the gentle old chess player Schwarz, who sits down on a chair in a room in a house, to teach an orphan boy the moves of the knight; we meet the fat Bohemian woman with that grey streak showing in the fast colour of her cheaply dyed hair; we listen to a pale wretch noisily denouncing the policy of oppression to an attentive plainclothes man in an ill-famed public-house. The lovely tall prima donna steps in her haste into a puddle, and her silver shoes are ruined. An old man sobs and is soothed by a soft-lipped girl in mourning. Professor Nussbaum, a Swiss scientist, shoots his young mistress and himself dead in a hotel room at half past three in the morning. They come and go, these and other people, opening and shutting doors, living as long as the way they follow is lit, and are engulfed in turn by the waves of the dominant theme: a man is dying. He seems to move an arm or turn his head on what might be a pillow, and as he moves, this or that life we have just been watching, fades or changes. At moments, his personality grows conscious of itself, and then we feel that we are passing down some main artery of the book. 'Now, when it was too late, and Life's shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train accident; never having seen Tatsienlu in Tibet, or heard blue magpies chattering in Chinese willows; not having spoken to that errant schoolgirl with shameless eyes, met one day in a lonely glade; not having laughed at the poor little joke of a shy ugly woman, when no one had laughed in the room; having missed trains, allusions, and opportunities; not having handed the penny he had in his pocket to that old street violinist playing to himself tremulously on a certain bleak day in a certain forgotten town.'
Sebastian Knight had always liked juggling with themes, making them clash or blending them cunningly, making them express that hidden meaning, which could only be expressed in a succession of waves, as the music of a Chinese buoy can be made to sound only by undulation. In The Doubtful Asphodel, his method has attained perfection. It is not the parts that matter, it is their combinations.
There seems to be a method, too, in the author's way of expressing the physical process of dying: the steps leading into darkness; action being taken in turns by the brain, the flesh, the lungs. First the brain follows up a certain hierarchy of ideas – ideas about death: sham-clever thoughts scribbled in the margin of a borrowed book (the episode of the philosopher): 'Attraction of death: physical growth considered upside down as the lengthening of a suspended drop; at last falling into nothing.' Thoughts, poetical, religious: '…the swamp of rank materialism and the golden paradises of those whom Dean Park calls the optimystics….' 'But the dying man knew that these were not real ideas; that only one half of the notion of death can be said really to exist: this side of the question – the wrench, the parting, the quay of life gently moving away aflutter with handkerchiefs: ah I he was already on the other side, if he could see the beach receding; no, not quite – if he was still thinking.' (Thus, one who has come to see a friend away may stay on deck too late, but still not become a traveller.)
Then, little by little, the demons of physical sickness smother with mountains of pain all kinds of thought, philosophy, surmise, memories, hope, regret. We stumble and crawl through hideous landscapes, nor do we mind where we go – because it is all anguish and nothing bur. anguish. The method is now reversed. Instead of those thought-images which radiated fainter and fainter, as we followed them down blind alleys, it is now the slow assault of horrible uncouth visions drawing upon us and hemming us in: the story of a tortured child; an exile's account of life in the cruel country whence he fled; a meek lunatic with a black eye; a farmer kicking his dog – lustily, wickedly. Then the pain fades too. 'Now he was left so exhausted that he failed to be interested in death.' Thus 'sweaty men snore in a crowded third-class carriage; thus a schoolboy falls asleep over his unfinished sum.' 'I am tired, tired… a tyre rolling and rolling by itself, now wobbling, now slowing down, now….
This is the moment when a wave of light suddenly floods the book: '…as if somebody had flung open the door and people in the room have started up, blinking, feverishly picking up parcels.' We feel that we are on the brink of some absolute truth, dazzling in its splendour and at the same time almost homely in its perfect simplicity. By an incredible feat of suggestive wording, the author makes us believe that he knows the truth about death and that he is going to tell it. In a moment or two, at the end of this sentence, in the middle of the next, or perhaps a little further still, we shall learn something that will change all our concepts, as if we discovered that by moving our arms in some simple, but never yet attempted manner, we could fly. 'The hardest knot is but a meandering string; tough to the finger nails, but really a matter of lazy and graceful loopings. The eye undoes it, while clumsy fingers bleed. He (the dying man) was that knot, and he would be untied at once, if he could manage to see and follow the thread. And hot only himself, everything would be unravelled – everything that he might imagine in our childish terms of space and time, both being riddles invented by man as riddles, and thus coming back to us: the boomerangs of nonsense…. Now he had caught something real, which had nothing to do with any of the thoughts or feelings, or experiences he might have had in the kindergarten of life….