Turbott Wolfe

1 I think Turbott Wolfe may have been a man of genius. I hardly saw him from the time that I was at school with him until he was about to die, at no great age, of a fever that he had caught in Africa. He knew how ill he was, and sent for me to come and see him at his lodgings at E. I found him in a ridiculous room, looking tired rather than ill as he sat up in bed. His window gave on a slum that might have been anywhere but near the sea, yet at night you could hear a muffled noise of waves, while the day-time, always dingy there, came with street noises, and sometimes in the afternoons seemed to become more dismal with the sounds of football somewhere near at hand. The room itself was so tawdry as to be grotesque. Patterns of flowers, sewn or painted or printed in smudgy colours, decorated the walls, the curtains, the linoleum on the floor, the linen, the furniture; and they were all different. I felt obscured by all those scentless bouquets, but Turbott Wolfe seemed so little obscured that he might have purposely designed those enormous bistre-and-green roses that were tousled and garlanded up and down the coverlet on the bed; and the wall behind his head, with its bouquets of brown marguerites, its pomegranates and bows of ribbon and forget-me-nots, became for him an ideal background. He was dignified in a curious way perhaps peculiar to very intelligent people. All the time that he was talking he seemed profoundly excited, and now and then his gestures became, like his narrative, erratic, but there was with him an assured grace, perhaps because of the fine culture that he had and because of the intense natural sensitiveness of his nature. There came to me a timehe saidnot very long after I left school, when I found myself as lonely as it is possible to be. I was ill, and hardly recovered from the aftermath of adolescence. I came to feel as though circumstances had driven me with cunning deliberation and relentless activity to a point of complete isolation. I found myself with no friend, no passion, no anchor whatever. My life seemed to be then a structure that had grown steadily without the least deviation from the architect's planevery stone was being put in place, every malicious ornament. Lack of money; perhaps an extreme sensitiveness; a deep-rooted immovable cowardice; sudden flowers of courageall these seemed due to an invisible constructor of my life, who must have been Gothic, so intent was he upon his work, so nice with satire. But the cruel building was suddenly ruined. I was inflamed with the sun of a new day. Perhaps you remember? I was suddenly ordered to Africa by some fool of a doctor. My people sought, obtained, and paid nothing for advice that was considered good. I was to be started with a trading-station, in a region neither too civilized nor too remote. The prospect pleased me. I could think of nothing more thrilling than a small business, under my own eye, under my own hand, in which no halfpenny would be able to stray. A small business, I reflected, would be like an instrument. It would be entirely dependent on me for the music; for the volume, the pitch, the tone, the quality of the music. I thought then, as I think now, that trade is like art. Art is to the artist and trade is to the tradesman. I think the greatest illusion I know is that trade has anything to do with customers. It must have been so long ago, almost before history I should think, so very long ago quite plain that you must never, if you are to be a success in trade, in art, in politics, in life itself, you must never give people what they want. Give them what you want them to want. Then you are safe. But it is a platitude, and I digress. You can imagine my delirious weeks of preparation. I rushed to and fro in the City buying what I was told to buy, because the peopPlomer, William is the author of 'Turbott Wolfe', published 2004 under ISBN 9780812971200 and ISBN 0812971205.