I Like It Here

to the avowed objects of their inquiry. These, however, were mostly dead and buried: a vitally important point. All criticism, in my view, even that which we call creative, is an activity of a lower order than creative work in the more usual sense, and we see the relevance of that view when we apply it to criticism of the living. I may have mentioned that I instructed my publisher to send me no reviews of my work as it appeared. My reason was that I needed no false praise which might mislead me with regard to my merits, and —more particularly—no abuse which might discourage me. You will remember that Gabriel Rossetti, whom my father had several times the privilege of meeting in the great man’s last years, was reduced to poetic silence for half a decade as a direct result of ill-natured attacks in the public print. These journalistic outpourings are now deservedly forgotten, and their only effect upon posterity has been to deprive it of a number of poems we should not have chosen to be without, to put it no higher.”

“Very much the same sort of thing happened in Elgar’s career,” Bowen blurted out before he could stop himself. He tried to cheapen it with “So a fellow was telling me, anyway,” but only succeeded in making himself sound modest. A moral failure on this scale came about through attending too closely to what people were saying. Those perishing vodka martinis at the International Musicians’ Club that time must have weakened his protective shell without him noticing. He had thought that the film-composer chap who was buying them all had merely been boring him. And now here was this gross betrayal into non-ironical cultural discussion. When he got home he would wait for Barbara to bring up the topic of integrity and then announce that he was going to cancel the New Statesman.

“Madeira is not perhaps the ideal liquor on a hot afternoon like this,” Buckmaster said.

“A bit heavy, you think?”

“Between meals, yes, I do. I recommend a bottle of cold beer.”

“That sounds an excellent suggestion.”

“Two cervejas, then. Excuse me a moment.”

When Buckmaster had gone, Bowen sat up very straight, his heart beating. There had been something striking about that oration on criticism. It was not just that he had been a trifle unfair to the Sunday Times, that the proper people to eat Buckmaster were the powers at our older universities, where he would be a valuable counterblast to clever young men like F. R. Leavis.

More than that. Could a man who had really written all those novels really be bounded by James and Conrad and Edith Wharton and Meredith, could he really not have noticed anything that had happened since? And wasn’t Buckmaster’s whole attitude that of a reader rather than a writer, wasn’t his whole persona arranged on the lines of what a reader would expect a writer to be like? And, if this was so, wasn’t the non-production of any Strether document an incredibly fishy evasion? Why was it that no pal of Buckmaster’s had been produced or mentioned as booked to appear, nobody who might give away that he wasn’t Strether if he wasn’t Strether? Why was it all so difficult? A burst of neurotic frustration rocked Bowen in his seat: it was like putting a new ribbon in his typewriter to the accompaniment of a ringing telephone, a waiting taxi and a full bladder.

Just then a car became audible and soon afterwards rounded the corner of the dusty track that led up to the house. It was a big open car, glittering fiercely in the sun, and it contained a man and a girl. Before it reached the paved yard below him Buckmaster reappeared, carrying two bottles of beer and two glasses on a tray. “I thought I heard___” he said. His voice broke off instantly and, banging the tray down on the slatted table, he strode to the veranda rail. Bowen saw the man in the car, who was driving it, raise a brown hand in greeting and flash a smile.

Buckmaster’s feet moved agitatedly. He looked back and forth between his visitors and Bowen, as if trying to gauge the effect each party might have on the other. His mouth, no longer sensitive, hung down in a slack and rather pitiable way. Bowen stopped himself from asking if he was all right. The slamming of the car doors below made them both jump. Buckmaster looked hard at Bowen for a moment, this time with the unmistakable air of one visualising another’s response to some plan or hint. He said in a precarious undertone: “This is a man I used to know slightly some time ago. Not, I fear, a very prepossessing character.”

“Oh, pity,” Bowen said as bluffly as he could.

The new arrivals could be heard laughing and chatting gaily to each other as they mounted the wooden stair. Buckmaster hurried forward to meet them, blocking Bowen’s view when they reached the veranda. A pang of almost unbearable excitement, as well-defined as a pang of fear, displaced all his uneasiness when he heard the man say in a jovial, lightly-accented voice: “Why, hallo, John.” My God, the whole thing might be settled one way or the other in the next couple of minutes.

“I hope you don’t mind us just to pop in like this,” the man was going on, “but we were making a visit at Lisbon and thought we’d look you up. You don’t know my friend, I think.” Bowen made out the friend’s name as Emilia (or Amelia) something, the something containing one specimen each of the sh and the owng which seemed compulsory in all Portuguese words of more than one syllable. “And how is your health these days, John old man?”

Still talking, his hand on Buckmaster’s shoulder, the man made his way along the veranda. He didn’t look in the least unprepossessing, in fact for a man of at least fifty he was remarkably handsome and