The Rebel Angels

I set to work to become a neater fat man, as that seemed to be the best I could hope for, and sank rapidly into the ill-nature that overcomes me when I deny myself a reasonable amount of rich food and creamy desserts. I thought sourly of Ozy, and great man though he might be, I reflected that I could give a better Kober Lecture than he, fattening out my scientific information with plums from Paracelsus and giving it a persuasive humanistic gloss that would wake up the audience from the puritan stupor of their scientific attitude. Whereupon I immediately reproached myself for vanity. What did I know about Ozy's work? What was I but a silly fat ass whose pudgy body was the conning-tower from which a thin and acerbic soul peered out at the world? No: that wouldn't do either. I wasn't as fat as that suggested, nor was my spirit really sour when I allowed myself enough to eat. I wasted a lot of time in this sort of foolish inner wrangling, and the measure of my abjection is that once or twice – besotted lover as I was – I wondered if Maria were really worth all this trouble.

One of Parlabane's tedious whims was that he liked to take baths in my bathroom; he said that the arrangements at his boarding-house were primitive. He was a luxurious bather and a great man for parading about naked, which was not unselfconsciousness but calculated display. He was vain of his body, as well he might be, for at the same age as myself he was firm and muscular, had slim ankles and that impressive contour of belly in which the rectus muscles may be seen, like Roman armour. It was surely unjust that a man who had drugged and boozed for twenty years and who was, by Ozy's account, decidedly constipated, should look so well in the buff. His face, of course, was a mess, and he could not see very much without his glasses, but even so he was an impressive and striking contrast to the man who removed my old suit and some lamentable underclothes. Clothed he looked shabby and sinister; naked he looked disturbingly like Satan in a drawing by Blake. Not at all a man with whom one would want to get into a fight.

"I wish I were in as good shape as you are," said I, on one of these occasions.

"Don't wish it if you hope to be remembered as a theologian," said he; "they are all bonies or fatties. Not one like me in the lot. Put on another forty pounds, Simon, and you'll be about the size of Aquinas when he confuted the Manichees. You know he got so fat they had to make him a special altar with a half-moon carved out of it to accommodate his turn? You have a long way to go yet."

"I have it on the assurance of Ozy Froats, now distinguished and justified as the latest recipient of the Kober Medal, that I am of the literary sort of physique," said I. "I have what Ozy calls the literary gut. Perhaps if you had a gently swelling belly like mine, instead of that fine washboard of muscles that I envy, your novel might read more easily."

"I'd gladly take on the burden of your paunch if I could get a decisive answer from a publisher."

"Nothing doing yet?"

"Four rejections."

"That seems decisive, so far as it goes." He sank into one of my armchairs, naked as he was, and though he was clearly much dejected, his muscles held firm, and he looked rather splendid (except for his thick specs), like a figure of a defeated author by Rodin.

"No. The only decisive answer that I will recognize is an acceptance of the book, on my terms, for publication as soon as possible."

"Oh, come; I didn't mean to be discouraging. But – four rejections! It's nothing at all. You must simply hang on and keep pestering publishers. Lots of authors have gone on doing that for years."

"I know, but I won't. I feel at the end of my tether."

"It's Lent, as I don't have to remind you. The most discouraging season of the year."

"Do you do much about Lent, Simon?"

"I'm eating less, but that's incidental. What I usually do is take on a programme of introspection and self-examination – try to tidy myself up a bit. Do you?"

"I'm coming unstuck, Simon. It's the book. I can't get anybody to take it seriously, and it's killing me. It's my life, far more than I had suspected."

"Your autobiography, you mean?"

"Hell, no! I've told you it isn't meanly autobiographical. But it's the best of me, and if it's ignored, what of me will survive? You're too fat to have any idea what an obsession is."

"I'm sorry, John. I didn't mean to be flippant."

"It's what I've salvaged from a not very square deal in this miserable hole of a world. It's all of me – root and crown. You don't know what I would do to get it published."

He grew more and more miserable, but did not lose his sense of self-preservation, because before he left he had touched me for two more shirts and some socks and another hundred dollars, which was all I had in my desk. I hate to seem mean-spirited, but I was growing tired of listening to the romantic agonies of his spirit, while forking out to sustain the wants of his flesh.