The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Read online

  “Isn’t that extremely enlightened of your northern friends?”

  “Of course it’s without pay.” Freddie laughed as if this were the greatest joke in the world. “The worthy aldermen who employ me are all for that. And it suits me very well. Still, I don’t manage to be straight with myself about it all. Waiting there at Orly I saw that clearly. Again, how appalling! To return a large insensitive negative to Phèdre, and then catch myself resenting as demeaning – for that was it – my continued association with city councillors and honest mill-owners and unassuming provincial professors! And it was as I glimpsed this, my dear Jonathan, it was at this dismal nocturnal moment, that I heard my flight called. I must now cross the Alps. To that end I followed the appropriate light, climbed into—do they call it?—a camion, and was trundled out to my plane.”

  Freddie’s pause was so clearly a calculated break in narrative – giving the kind of relief that comes from a little blank space on the page – that I was almost ashamed at finding myself take a covert glance towards the Torre dell’Orologio. Presently Othello’s bronze kinsmen there ensconced would strike the hour, there would be a fuss among the unlearning pigeons, and I would have to think about meeting the vaporetto from Murano. But meanwhile I was perfectly prepared to play the wedding-guest. It was with some abruptness indeed that Freddie Seston had leapt the barrier of those twenty-five years to take up the theme of Freddie Seston so at large. But he couldn’t be called a bore. He couldn’t even be called an egoist in the accepted sense. The ego upon which his eye was fixed acknowledged itself as so frankly under fire as one went along. So I sat back and listened. The third Cinzano wouldn’t have helped in the slightest. Freddie’s fluency was already entire.

  “Well now, this is about Phèdre. It was only, you see, when that plane was roaring down the runway at Orly that it made its effective impact on me.”

  “The plane?”

  “Phèdre, you ass. In the theatre, and after it, I’d been reduced to supposing that it wasn’t going to make any impact at all. Nor, exactly, did it. I wasn’t, as you might say, suddenly struck. The fact was rather that, just as we became air-borne, Phèdre appropriately quite caught me up.”

  “It must have been a satisfaction to you,” I said.

  Freddie grinned happily. “Don’t imagine that all this I’m telling you doesn’t strike me as absurd. Being worried, for instance, about the play’s being a frost with me. I needn’t repeat, Jonathan, that I’m not precisely a literary type – or not in the sort of context in which one ponders Racine. As you know, it’s upon line and pigment that I’ve brought words to bear with any seriousness of intention. Paint’s my subject – and that chiefly in the historical way. If I’m remembered for a time, it will be as having a little sorted out the Venetian painters here and there.”

  “You’ve done rather more than that. You’ve opened some people’s eyes to the qualities – the aesthetic qualities – of much of their work.”

  With an effect that was totally unexpected, Freddie blushed. “Well, it’s true I’ve never denied myself that sort of excursus. I’ve tried to tackle the impalpable thing as well as all the factual relations. After all, if I were doing Orly, say, for another purpose, and being thoroughly careful about the time-schedules and all the rest of it, I’d still be impelled to do as cleanly and sharply as I could the strange and almost pristine thing that a great airport remains. You see?”

  “I see.” In point of fact I didn’t – which is only to say that I was being rather stupid about Freddie by this time. “But Phèdre?” I asked.

  “You know how it is when you’re about to take off in an aeroplane. You fasten your safety-belt, and a light goes on telling you not to smoke, and a certain small tension generates itself as the engines open up a bit. Then the plane trundles forward and begins to gather speed. There’s a great deal of noise, and experience tells you that for a few seconds there’s going to be far more: a row suggesting the generating of energies utterly beyond human conception or control. But then in no time you’re in the air, and the racket sinks to something the pilot plainly has quite under his thumb. Well, all this happened at Orly. And what was so odd was this: it was when the noise was at its very maximum that my next line came to me.”

  “Your next line?” I supposed Freddie to have had some revelation about the right course of his career.

  “Yes. Not the one about Venus and her prey any more. Another one. Mais tout dort, et l’armée, et les vents, et Neptune. This terrific clamour, you see. And then, of all lines, that one.” Freddie paused impressively. “Moreover, for some moments at least, it acted as a conjuration of perfect stillness. Mais tout dort, et l’armée, et les vents, et Neptune.… I discovered that I was high above Paris, and that the transition had effected itself in a sort of ultrasonic vacuum fleetingly created by Jean Racine.”

  “But not, my dear Freddie, in his Phèdre.”

  Freddie nodded seriously. “Of course that’s perfectly true. It must be in another of the plays. Nevertheless it did, in the strangest way, touch off Phèdre itself in my mind. Other lines followed – undoubtedly from Phèdre.”

  “Ah!” I said. “La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.”

  “That one, certainly.” Freddie was again quite serious, and I realised that his mood had changed and become obscure to me. “And Ma sceur du fil fatal eut arme votre main. And l’Éclat de mon nom meme … but I needn’t go on. There were dozens of them. Some I knew quite well, and some I was entirely surprised to find myself remembering. It was extremely interesting.”

  “It must have been.” Freddie now really perplexed me.

  “Only it was a little alarming that the lines seemed to come in my own voice and from quite outside me – rather as if I were playing them back on a tape-recorder. It’s a thing you’d hesitate to tell your doctor, wouldn’t you say? But presently I wasn’t alarmed. I was much too excited.”

  “By what was virtually a paranormal experience?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I’d say it was just a delayed reaction after seeing the play. And I was excited by the force of it. At first it was simply a matter of those isolated lines. But they were urgent and commanding in themselves. I’d really scarcely a notion that I was sitting in an aeroplane, so insistent was their demand on me. Have I said that I’m not literary? Well, of course it’s evident. And I found myself trying to tackle those evidences of Racine’s incredible art in terms of my own stuff. No doubt you know how it’s all the go nowadays to dash from art to art within a period, demonstrating how their common climate of opinion conditions them all?”

  “I know the sort of thing,” I said. “Bismarck and Wordsworth are both expressions of the Biedermeier soul, and Bernini carved on the same Baroque principles employed by Cromwell in axing King Charles’s head.”

  “More or less that.” Freddie was now too absorbed in his subject to pause to make fun of my uncertain erudition. “And Nicolas Poussin is naturally the man to pipe up with here. But a different idea came into my head as I listened to those majestic alexandrines marching; they seemed to me like the processional mosaics in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. You know Ravenna? Naturally that doesn’t make sense in terms of Kunstgeschichte. But I was very excited, as I say. And quite a lot of other queer correspondences suggested themselves to me as illuminating and worth exploring. But that was only a start.”

  “Your experience extended itself beyond all those single lines?”

  Freddie nodded. “Just that. I found myself isolating phases of the action that seemed particularly moving. There’s one bit I believe I can get some way with now.” And Freddie, who had been leaning across our little table to talk to me, sat up and recited in a low voice:

  “Les a-t-on vus souvent se parler, se chercher?

  Dans le fond des forets alloient-ils se cacher?

  Hélas! ils se voyaient avec pleine licence;

  Le ciel de leurs soupirs approuvait l’innocence;

  Ils suivaient sans remords leur penchan
t amoureux;

  Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux.”

  Freddie stopped. He had spoken the lines rather well. There was a silence between us. “Why, yes,” I said cautiously. “One feels for her.” Freddie made no reply. He seemed to be staring at St Mark’s in perplexity, as if the place had just bubbled up like the pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan. “And talking of painting,” I said, “doesn’t Lytton Strachey weigh in with Claude over that last line?”

  “Strachey?” Freddie repeated the name mechanically, and at the same time made a gesture of ignorance, of disinterest. “There I was, heaven knows where – perhaps a mile or so above Chambery, above the Church of Brou – unexpectedly contriving the contemplation – wouldn’t that be the word? – of a work of literary art. And of course what I was finally seeing wasn’t lines and speeches and sentiments and the pleasures of poetry. It was terror, pity, inexorable law. I suppose that people free of that sort of thing – of high tragedy, I mean, and so forth – take it as all in the day’s work. It was almost a new one on me.”

  “But not, surely, a new experience in kind?” I was surprised by the importance Freddie seemed to be attaching to his encounter with Phèdre. “Your responses to the visual arts—”

  “Well, yes – there’s that. I don’t pretend to be a Philistine. Those mosaics I was talking of: I don’t doubt that my responses to them are the same sort of thing – and indeed more controlled and discriminated and so on. More a professional job, you might say. But what got me in that blessed play was the intimate application of aesthetic law to – well, to men and women, happiness and misery, sin and expiation. The whole circus, in fact.” Freddie offered this last summarising image with a renewed lightness of air. Then he looked at his watch. “I suppose,” he added, “that we ought to be getting along.”

  But when we rose it was under no impulse to part immediately. Freddie was entirely gay again, and I remembered that his animation always so evidently proceeded from an amiable impulse to give pleasure that one never in the least resented its hint of a factitious note. And when one didn’t quite know where one was with him – which was distinctly my case now – this was demonstrably because he had the habit of not quite knowing where he was with himself. The rather solemn note that he had hit with Phèdre wasn’t easily interpreted; I didn’t know whether it had brought me in contact with something deep in Freddie or merely with his impulse to put on an act. But even granted a good deal of the theatrical, he remained attractive. Certainly I didn’t like him the less from having discovered that to his old familiar performance something fresh had been added on a wavelength I wasn’t yet at all adequately receiving.

  I still had a quarter of an hour in hand, and Freddie’s occasions with Carpaccio didn’t seem to command him with any urgency. It was hot; the air quivered above the great paved expanse of the piazza, so that the duomo beyond looked more than ever like an exhaltation; we strolled gratefully first in one and then in another colonnade. Here and there we paused idly before a shop window – and Freddie, I noticed, was entirely childlike in his manner of lingering longest before such objects, whether sweetmeats or glassware or scientific instruments, as had most colour or glitter to catch the eye. Nevertheless it was into a bookshop that, after a moment’s hesitation, he finally led me.

  “Are you looking for a Racine?” I asked – less in mere facetiousness than from a lingering sense that it was here there was a mystery to explore.

  Freddie was quite startled. “Well, yes – that is my idea, as a matter of fact. I never read English when I’m abroad. And the Italians buried their literature with poor old Dante. A queer race, my dear chap. Plenty of daubers and chisellers, and chaps like Sansovino who could run you up affairs like that.” Freddie made a sweeping backward gesture perhaps aimed at the Loggetta dei Cavalieri. “I’ve given my lifetime to them, bless their hearts. But I’m well aware that they haven’t raised a great man since they made Galileo stop fooling around with the solar system and sign on the dotted line … yes, I’ve a fancy to try Bérénice now. I never have. I’m scarcely literate, you know. Such slow consecutive contrivances, books.”

  For some minutes, we rummaged comfortably among the slow consecutive contrivances. Freddie chattered on in his harmless sub-ironic manner, conscientiously creating the effect of talking for effect. And he must have forgotten about Bérénice almost as soon as he had mentioned it, for when he bought a book it turned out to be in German and to concern an archaeological survey of Etruria. Then we looked at a table of English and American books. Rather gingerly, Freddie turned over some paper-backs with lurid pictorial covers. “Do you ever read thrillers?” he asked casually.

  I shook my head. “No. I can’t say I do.”

  “No more do I.” The satisfaction which Freddie was taking in my recovered company, already flattering and delightful, seemed suddenly enhanced – as if in this shared neglect of a literary field we had come upon a bond indeed. “Of course,” he added, as if some explanation were needed, “I read oceans of them when I was an undergraduate. I’ve hardly a memory of them now.”

  “Yes, I seem to remember you as an addict. I suppose I used to read them now and then in those days too.”

  “But now it would be too much of a busman’s holiday?”

  I was at a loss before this, until it occurred to me that Freddie probably shared the common misconception that all barristers put in most of their time prosecuting or defending desperate criminals. “Nothing of that sort,” I said laughing. “My profession has nothing to do with it.” Then an odd memory struck me. “Unless there’s something relevant in an experience I had long ago.”

  “Do tell me.” We were out of the shop, and making our way back towards the Molo, where I was to meet my family. Freddie took my arm – it had been sanctioned social behaviour in our day – and repeated his request with charming eagerness. “Do tell me about that.”

  I hesitated – partly because the memory wasn’t agreeable, and partly perhaps because there was stirring in my mind a piece of latent knowledge which ought to have asserted itself by this time. “Well, it was before I was called to the Bar, and when I was doing a turn as a judge’s marshal. You know about that. One goes round with the old boy on circuit, and does the odd jobs on the social side. It’s supposed to be good experience. And one did pick up experiences of a sort.”

  “You picked up an unpleasant one?” Freddie looked at me attentively. He was very far from being obtuse.

  “It must certainly be called that – the occasion I’m thinking of. I can’t remember the assize town. What I do recall is a crowded stuffy courtroom and a case of rape. There was a girl who couldn’t or wouldn’t speak above a whisper. She was examined and cross-examined through a long afternoon. It was a ghastly strain. And everyone in court was aware of a queer noise from somewhere outside or down below. There was hour after hour of it – quite faint, but in that hushed atmosphere one just couldn’t sink it beneath the threshold of one’s awareness. For a time some of us at least thought it was a dog howling. But it was a woman. It was a woman down in the cells – screaming and screaming. She had been sentenced to death that morning for the poisoning of her husband. She was of low intelligence, but nevertheless it had been quite an ingenious affair. Which is rare, you know. Poisonings aren’t common. When they do happen, they’re usually either extremely crude or mere absurd fiascos. But there this woman was. Screaming and screaming. There had been some hitch in the arrangements for taking her away. It wasn’t easy to forget. And perhaps it has given me a lingering distaste for crime fiction. It’s called that now, isn’t it? And it’s the honest name for it.”

  “That’s awfully interesting.”

  Freddie had spoken at once when I concluded my little narrative. He didn’t appear much impressed by it. We had reached the Molo and were looking across the Canale di San Marco to San Giorgio Maggiore. Between us and the freighted island the sea flashed a splendid blue. It wasn’t at all as in many of the old pictures of th
e place – for to their waters the painters loved to transfer greens which may be discerned lurking in the depth of certain marbles. Nevertheless I felt that my friend must see it all as strictly picturesque. Wherever he turned, some intimately known, but as it were, unfinished canvas would present itself to him; the unchanging backcloth to successive occasions, chronicled or fabled, which one or another artist according to his generation had filled in. Across these waters there must move, for Freddie, antique craft as toweringly elaborate as any of the palazzi anchored around them, Doges minded augustly to espouse the ocean, local saints stripped to dredge up sunken relics with a miraculous ease and to the edification of the city’s assembled notabilities.

  The vaporetto was approaching – carrying, I supposed, my wife and those three daughters in the interest of whose polite cultivation we had arranged our distinctly modest holiday. I don’t think it occurred to me to envy the unhoused free condition of my friend, or his ability – presumably a matter of private means – to go on indefinite leave without pay. But I did feel some envy for a life exclusively devoted to artistic interests and satisfactions. It was true that I’d be not much good at it myself. And I wasn’t ignorant that, once back in my chambers, I’d be quite as satisfactorily absorbed – and extended in terms of my own limited capacities – as Freddie was likely to be in the Accademia. But it did seem to me very enviable to have all one’s daily concern with the consequences of human conduct coming at one so exclusively from its estimable and creative side. I knew nothing about Carpaccio as a man. In life he might have been a headache to all who knew him. But what he had left was sheer enchantment – and that not of a sort so elevated as to be daunting. Yes, Freddie’s life clearly passed in pleasant places. And pleasant places make pleasant people. I was at least delighted that I should have Freddie to present to my family.

  But when the crowd came off the little steamer, my wife and daughters weren’t among them. This indeed had been an agreed possibility, and I must simply wait another quarter of an hour. Freddie was disappointed; he had looked forward to a meeting, and now because of some engagement he had to go. Before he took his leave of me we fixed up a rendezvous for the following day. Then I stood and watched him walk away across the piazzetta. His youthful look was partly a matter of his having remained very slim; he walked with a quick buoyant ease that seemed to mirror his mood. His hands were in the pockets not of his trousers but of his linen jacket; his chin was up, his head a little on one side – and on his forehead, I knew, there would be a small unequal frown. It all gave wonderfully the impression of a man alert to life’s finer surfaces; it confirmed my sense of Freddie’s enviable lot as I had been forming it a few minutes before. And yet, of course – if ever so slightly – it was a turn. Freddie was going off-stage; was going off-stage, you might say, in the first theatre of Europe.