52b
PARTISAN REVIEW
the endless struggle with unfeeling demands for income-tax, with rising
costs and standards of living, the impossibility, for English writers, of
living cheaply in a sun-warmed cottage by the Pacific, the fatal English
mixture of intelligence, administrative ability, humor and good sense
with imagination which makes it so hard for us to exist only as artists,
to suffer only as artists, to be deprived as artists of the human right to
bring up and educate a family. We live here in a time when only success–
ful novelists can make a living by their pens. Poets are doomed; essay–
ists, critics fare little better; biographers may just survive. These mellow,
sensitive, elderly and so individual faces who surround young Bisbee
are perhaps the last known herd in existence of that mysterious animal,
"the English man of letters"-if there are no young people in the group,
is it entirely due to the retardation of war, or is it not, perhaps, that
there is so little to tempt them?
One might continue the day-dream further. Let us picture Harold
Bisbee with his clear eyes, charming mouth, slow western accent, his
anecdotes of Cody, Neb., his passion for the 1920's, his success story
ties, his Bebop records, his wonderful "trouvaille," James's butler's
granddaughter his cook in Bolton Street! Let us picture him really en–
dearing himself to all our tired literary business men and women, who
fling open their doors with a welcome they have long ceased to keep
for each other, as he
in
turn slowly falls under the spell of their charm
and taste and conversation-that wonderful conversation which uncovers
as it proceeds the skeletons of the books they have not written. Might
he not find in us the ideal subject-always such a problem-for a second
novel? What could be a better field for his energy and powers of analysis
than to consider this trusting group of middle-aged friends and discover,
quite ruthlessly, what has gone wrong? Was it our schools? Was it our
families? Was it the war? Is it taxation? Is it the Socialist Government?
Is the Government not socialist enough? Or is it the next war? The un–
certainty of living "entre trois guerres"? I see summer coming; Bisbee's
ticket to Paris expires; now he's too late for the Pont Royal, now the
season at Procida's over; and,
10,
the squares and parks of London are
thick with golden maple leaves, autumn mists curl through Bolton Street,
in leafy Kensington or river-scented Chelsea all doors open to Bisbee.
"Yes, I knew Lytton welL" "I once met David Garnett." One night an
English girl, struck by something poetical in his fading youth, takes him
to her bed
"sauter pour miex reculer,"
as is the English way, and after
talking about frigidity there for an hour and a half she tells him about
her former lovers, and bursts into tears. November is here, and all the
other prize-winning novelists have returned home. Haggard, unshaven
