The Rebel Angels

"All right, all right, all right; I apologize on my knees; I grovel under the table. I just meant, there is something about you that is interesting, and banking doesn't interest me. So perhaps it's your great idea. Please, Arthur, tell me."

"All right, though you don't deserve it."

"I'll be quiet and respectful."

"I've had this notion since my school days, and travel abroad strengthened it because I met some people who had made it work. I am going to be a patron."

"Like your Uncle Frank?"

"No. Wholly unlike my Uncle Frank. He was a patron in a way, but it was part of his being a miser in a much bigger way. He was an accumulator; he acquired works of art and then hated to think of getting rid of them; the result is the mess I'm cleaning up now, with Hollier and McVarish and Darcourt helping me. That's not what I call being a patron. Of course Uncle Frank put some money in the hands of living artists, and spotted some winners and encouraged them and gave them what they want most – which is sympathetic understanding – but he wasn't a patron on the grand scale. Whatever he did was basically for the satisfaction of Francis Cornish."

"What's a patron on the grand scale?"

"A great animateur; somebody who breathes life into things. I suppose you might call it a great encourager, but also a begetter, a director who keeps artists on the tracks, and provides the power – which isn't all money, by any means – that makes them go. It's a kind of person – a very rare kind – that has to work in opera, or ballet, or the theatre; he's the central point for a group of artists of various kinds, and he has to be the autocrat. That's what calls for tact and firmness, but most of all for exceptional taste. It has to be the authoritative taste artists recognize and want to please."

I suppose I looked astonished and incredulous.

"You're taken aback because I lay claim to exceptional taste. It's queer what people are allowed to boast about; if I told you I was an unusually good money-man and had a flair for it, you wouldn't be surprised in the least. Why shouldn't I say I have exceptional taste?"

"It's just unusual, I suppose."

"Indeed it is unusual, in the sense that I'm talking about. But there have been such people."

I scurried around in my mind for an example.

"Like Diaghilev?"

"Yes, but not in the way you probably mean. Everybody now thinks of him as an exotic; no, no, he was hard as nails and began life as a lawyer. But Christie at Glyndebourne wasn't exotic at all and perhaps he achieved more than Diaghilev."

"It all seems a bit – hard to find a word that won't make you angry – but a bit grandiose."

"We'll see. Or I'll see, at any rate. But I don't want to be an art miser, like Uncle Frank; I want to show the world what I've made and what I am."

"Good luck to you, Arthur."

"Thanks. I can be sure of the power, but without luck, it's not worth a damn. – Now it's time we were going. Do you want to meet Egressy afterwards? I know him fairly well."

5

I did not much like the first part of the concert, which included a Festival Overture by Dohnanyi and something by Kodaly; the conductor was giving us a Hungarian night. When Egressy appeared on the platform to play the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2 I felt hostile towards him. I turned off my ears, as I had said I would, but if you really like music you cannot do that completely, any more than you can turn off the dreadful Muzak in a public building. You try not to be drawn into it. But when, during the second part of the programme, Egressy played the last three Hungarian Rhapsodies, I could not turn off my ears. Not to hear demanded an effort, a negation of spirit, that was utterly beyond me. During the fifteenth, in which the Rakoczy March appears in so many guises, I became a wreck, emotionally and to some degree physically, for I wept and wept beyond the power of my handkerchief to staunch my tears.

Of course Arthur knew that I was weeping; people on all sides knew it, though I made no noise. The remarkable thing was that he did nothing about it; no solicitous proffering of large white handkerchief, no patting of the arm, no murmur of There, there. Yet I knew he respected my weeping, knew it was private, knew it was beyond anything he could do to repair, knew it had to be. When he took me home afterwards – he said nothing more about meeting Egressy – neither of us spoke about it.

Why had I wept? Because I had behaved like a fool at dinner, for one thing, speaking of my Gypsy blood as if it were a social embarrassment, instead of a glory and a curse. How bourgeois, how mean of spirit, how gadjo! What ailed me, to speak so to a stranger about something I never discussed with anybody? As a child I had thought innocently that it was fun to be part Gypsy, but my schoolmates soon put me straight on that matter. Gypsies were dirty, they were thieves, they knew mean tricks. The parents of several children would not allow me to play with them; I was the strange child.