Old Porteous
A retired public-school master in West Bletchley, and the nearest thing Bowling has to a friend: whisky, a pipe, Latin tags, and a settled refusal to believe that anything has happened since the fall of Rome.
To be left with the eternal verities, which in practice means things going on as he has always known them: Latin, Greek, poetry, good tobacco, and no wireless in the house.
The book
At a glance
- Bowling's friend in West Bletchley; retired schoolmaster
- Nearly sixty
- Bachelor, in rooms near the church, with a woman in to do for him
- Public school, Oxford, then a master at his old school
- Greek, Latin, Keats and Wordsworth; The Times and nothing later
- "A mere adventurer. These people come and go."
- Named in Part II, chapter 4; the visit is Part III, chapter 1
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freePorteous lives in rooms in the old part of West Bletchley, near the church, with his books and his pipe and a woman who comes in to do for him. He is a bachelor of nearly sixty. Bowling says you cannot imagine the type married. He is very tall, with curly grey hair and a thin dreamy face that could almost still belong to a boy. Public school, Oxford, then back to his old school as a master, and the whole life is visible in the way he strolls up and down a room with his head tilted back.
The sitting-room is dim with pipe smoke, the ceiling almost black, and the walls carried up to it with books. On the mantelpiece are filthy briar pipes, a few Greek silver coins, a tobacco jar with his college arms on it, an earthenware lamp he dug up on a mountain in Sicily, and photographs of Greek statues, including a headless winged woman that Bowling once asked why they didn't stick a head on.
Bowling goes there to get out of a house full of women and children, and because Porteous keeps late hours and always has drinks. He likes the atmosphere and he likes being read to, without taking in the words. He also knows exactly what he is dealing with: a man who never reads a modern book, refuses to learn their names, takes no paper but The Times, is proud of never having been to the pictures, and treats the last two thousand years as a regrettable episode. Whatever subject you start on comes back to statues, poetry, the Greeks and the Romans. Mention the Queen Mary and he will tell you about Phoenician triremes.
The one night the routine fails is the night of the Left Book Club lecture, when Bowling arrives wanting to talk about the war and gets nowhere. Porteous's verdict on Hitler is that he does not think of him: a mere adventurer, purely ephemeral. Told that Hitler and Stalin are after something new, he answers that there is nothing new under the sun and pulls a book off the shelf about a Greek tyrant who might have been Hitler's twin brother.
How the book draws them
- How he looks at nearly sixtyVery tall and lanky, with a handsome head of curly grey hair carried a little back, and a thin, dreamy face that is a bit discoloured and could still almost belong to a boy. He leans rather than stands: elbows on the mantelpiece, one foot on the fender. Bowling's reading is that public-school and university men keep the look of boys all their lives, and that it is something in the way they move.
- The uniformAn old Harris tweed jacket and old grey flannel trousers which he likes you to call disgraceful, a pipe, and a settled contempt for cigarettes. Bowling bets that a man who sits up half the night still takes a cold bath every morning.
- The wireless upstairsHis opening complaint on the night Bowling calls is that the intolerable woman upstairs has bought a wireless set, and had he any legal remedy. Told there is none, he starts almost immediately on a law against musical instruments passed in Athens in the time of Pericles.
- EphemeralHis word for Hitler, delivered leaning on the mantelpiece with a foot on the fender. He is so surprised to be asked that he nearly takes his pipe out of his mouth. These people come and go, he says, and he sees no reason to pay attention.
- Dirty stories, in translationThe one modern thing he cares about, though he is always pointing out that they aren't modern. He tells them in a veiled way, translating a smutty Latin rhyme and leaving a good deal to the imagination, or dropping hints about the Roman emperors and the temples of Ashtaroth.
- How he reads aloudHe leans against something in his lounging way with his pipe between his teeth and jets of smoke coming out, and his voice goes solemn and rises and falls with the line. Bowling does not take in the words and generally likes the sound of it anyway.
- The same poem, the same quiverHe reads Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", and Bowling remembers that he read the very same poem the first time they met, in the same way, his voice quivering at the same line about magic casements.
- Bowling's verdictThat Porteous is dead — a ghost with a stopped mind, going backwards and forwards on the same little track and getting fainter. Bowling guesses the mind stopped working around the Russo-Japanese War, and adds the frightening part: that nearly all the decent people are like that, and cannot defend themselves against what is coming because they cannot see it.
Old Porteous quotes
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.