Mike Campbell
Brett's fiancé — Scottish, charming, bankrupt two ways: gradually and then suddenly.
To marry Lady Brett Ashley, and to have the money to do it. He is an undischarged bankrupt living on an allowance from his mother, and the divorce Brett needs first is something he is trying to get his mother to pay for as well.
The book
At a glance
- Scottish veteran awaiting his discharge from bankruptcy; engaged to Brett
- Paris, Pamplona, and a quiet coda on the Basque coast
- Credit, and an allowance routed through his creditors
- The usual medals, never sent for
- How he went bankrupt — gradually, and then suddenly
- Pat Guthrie · Scotland
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMike is what's left of a certain kind of Englishman's war: a Scot with a courtesy title's manners and no money under them, waiting out his bankruptcy on credit and his mother's allowance, engaged to Brett and genuinely, hopelessly attached to her. Asked how he went bankrupt, he gives the book one of its most quoted lines: two ways — gradually and then suddenly. Drunk, which is usually, he is either the best company at the table or the worst.
The fiesta finds the worst. Cohn's presence — and what it advertises about San Sebastián — turns Mike's charm into open cruelty, and his baiting of Cohn supplies the ugliest scenes in the book. The novel extends him a strange half-sympathy: he is awful in direct proportion to how plainly he is losing her, and he is the only one who never pretends otherwise.
How the book draws them
- The charmFirst drink in, he's the most likable man in Paris — the borrowed-medals story told against himself is the book's best comic set piece about the war.
- The turnPast a certain glass the wit stops being aimed at himself — and Cohn is always in range.
- The ledgerRounds he can't stand, hotels he can't settle — the book keeps his accounts the way it keeps everyone's, and his never balance.
- The medalsInvited to a dinner where medals were to be worn, he had none, so his tailor lent him a boxful. He left early, found them in his pocket, cut them off their backing and handed them out to girls in a nightclub. They had been left with the tailor for cleaning by some frightfully military cove.
- The steerHis worst line, aimed at Cohn across a café table: why do you follow Brett around like a poor bloody steer? The fiesta's own imagery, turned on a man.
- How it happenedAsked what brought the bankruptcy on, he answers: friends. He had a lot of friends, false friends, and then more creditors than anybody in England.
The fiesta strips Mike of everything but manner: Brett leaves with Romero, the money is gone, and the book last sees him at a hotel bar in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, staying on credit and calling it comfortable — bankruptcy's method, gradually and then suddenly, applied to the engagement too. Pat Guthrie, the Scot who lived it, was Duff Twysden's companion at the real fiesta and came off no better there; the couple never married. Duff left him for the painter Clinton King, and Guthrie died in Paris in May 1932 at thirty-six, by suicide or a drug overdose depending on the account — the bleakest afterlife of anyone in the Pamplona party.