Free Daniel Martin by John Fowles Page B

advanced taste in 1950. He had some private money besides his government grant and the Art Nouveau craze was still twenty years from ubiquity. Small portables in the style could be picked up for a shilling or two in any junkshop.
    What could one deduce today from photographs of that room? Theatrical interests: a pinned-up collection of pre-1914 music-hall and musical-comedy star postcards (which he still has somewhere and occasionally adds to), a toy theatre rather too prominently on a small table by the window over the garden, above the mantelpiece an original Gordon Craig set-design sketch (then his proudest possession, foolishly given much later to the woman cited in his wife’s divorce action), a framed playbill with his own name on (as joint librettist of the revue the previous winter), a batch of masks from a production of Anouilh’s Antigone (hardly fin de siecle and already announcing a suspect eclecticism). Academic interests: a case of English literature texts and a cartoon on the wall showing Professor Tolkien being trampled underfoot by a Russian Stakhanovite bearing a lettered banner, on closer examination an undergraduate porting the runic proclamation: Down with Anglo-Saxon. (Of priceless value since The Lord of the Rings, but unfortunately burnt only three weeks from where we are, to be precise on the last day of the owner’s Final Schools, along with the abominable Beowulf and a number of other ancient printed instruments of torture all in revenge for the third-class degree frequently admonished and duly received.) Family background and personal life: difficult, yet the very paucity of evidence tells a tale. No family photographs, I seem to remember, though there was one, a blurred snapshot of an old stone doorway with the illegible (but he knew it by heart) date 1647 above, that half came into that category; and there were very probably on display some stills of the various other OUDS and ETC productions Daniel had had a hand in; and there was certainly one, misty-edged and studio-posed, of Nell on the table used for a desk—and at present cluttered with all the evidence of panic cram. The most striking effect was of a highly evolved (if not painfully out-of-hand) narcissism, since the room had at least fifteen mirrors on its walls. True, they had been collected for their Art Nouveau frames, or at least allegedly; but no other room in Oxford can have provided such easy access to the physical contemplation of self. This little foible had been cruelly lampooned (if it wasn’t that at Oxford any lampooning is less cruel than none) in an undergraduate magazine the previous term. There had been a list of ‘characters’ in the manner of La Bruyère. Daniel was dubbed Mr Specula Speculans, ‘who died of shock on accidentally looking into a mirror without its glass and thereby discovering a true figure of his talents in place of the exquisite lineaments of his face’.
    It must be remembered that this callow attempt at a personal decor existed against—or because of a background of austerity, rationing, and universal conformity. Britain was still deep in a dream of siege. Of its time, it was daring. People who went to parties in it were honoured, and told less fortunate friends about it afterwards. An added piquancy was the well-known landlady downstairs, who raged against the viper she had taken to her bosom and the bourgeois decadence of his fancy pots and pieces and his general attitude to life—or so Dan liked to pretend to his guests. The truth was that the elderly comrade, despite her eccentricities, was no fool and knew her young men, and their potentialities for the cause, a good deal better than they knew themselves. Not one whom Dan had shared that house with, and who had like him in later life achieved some public notice, had become a Communist; but rather more remarkably none had become a Conservative, either.
    Jane knew the room too well to notice it at all that afternoon. She went to the