DIANA TRILLING
15
obviously meant that in ·making the claim to liberalism Orwell was
sailing under false colors.
Warburg frequently came to New York on book-buying trips and
sometimes Lionel and I had had a drink or dinner with him. He was a
tall, handsome man with a long, narrow face, olive-skinned, with bold
aquiline features. His tailoring was almost too impeccable; in a careless
world it drew attention to itsel( What I was particularly impressed by in
him was his air of good breeding, as it would once have been called; ev–
erything about him, not only the way he dressed but the way he sat or
walked, the way he handled himself in conversation, was testimony to his
unimpeachable upbringing. Late in life, he would publish an autobiogra–
phy,
A Gentleman's Profession.
Its title was embarrassingly appropriate:
Fred was nothing if not a gentleman-publisher. Plainly, his marriage to
the obstreperous Pamela was his single bid for freedom from the rigid
rules of behavior in which he had been reared and in which he was oth–
erwise still bound.
Until our invitation to dinner at Fred's flat in London, neither
Lionel nor I had met his French-born wife, Pamela de Bayou, as she was
known in the offices of Seeker
&
Warburg where, though her name
didn't appear as a member of the firm, she exerted a considerable influ–
ence in its operations. There was no trace of foreign accent in Pamela's
speech, and if it weren't for her French name, one would not easily have
guessed her birth.
It
was also difficult to determine her age; her air of
shrewdness made her seem older than she probably was. While she was
not in any conventional sense pretty, she had the assurance of a woman
accustomed to the attention of men. That Fred doted on her was not
to be missed though in her company he was measurably less a person
than when we had met him alone. She was his challenge to decorum but
the thief of his authority.
One hadn't to be in Pamela's company for long to become aware
of the pleasure she took in outraging the proprieties. Not long ago I
spoke of her to a friend in America who had been one of Fred's early
authors. "Pamela de Bayou," he chuckled. "What a terror! I remember
the first time I met her. The three of us were having dinner together and
she opened the conversation by saying that she had had an awful day.
She had lost her tampon. Inside her. She screamed this unlikely story so
loudly that everyone in the restaurant was looking at her!"
We were staying in a hotel in London's West End and took a cab
to the Warburgs'. They lived on a modest street a short distance beyond
Regents Park in a building some six or eight storeys tall. The dull,
unbroken facrade which their apartment house presented to the street
