In his memoir Faces in My Time (1980), Anthony Powell wondered how someone as unprepossessing as John Hayward could be on everyone’s guest list:
His shrunken body, part of the toll taken by disease [muscular dystrophy], was sufficiently light in weight to be lifted, wheelchair and all, into a taxi, and, provided a party was held on the ground-floor, John Hayward was more likely than not to be one of the guests.
Suffering left its mark on Hayward’s features: “turbid lips, and an impression of implacable severity, making him look like a portrait of Savonarola.” At such parties, Hayward, dandy, wit, and bibliographer, dominated the scene:
He had much about him of Ham, the seated autocrat in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, regal yet immobile, continually dispensing a rich flow of comment, imperious, erudite, malicious.
Powell returned to Hayward in the novel The Fisher King (1986), calling him Saul Henchman, making him a professional photographer rather than a journalist-scholar, giving him crutches rather than a wheelchair, and a beautiful woman, Barberina Rookwood, who abandons her career as a dancer to devote herself to her master. A few sentences in The Fisher King might well have appeared in the memoir: “If you find yourself near Henchman, observe his eyes. Like Banquo’s eyes, there is no speculation in them.” And later: “Henchman has an extraordinary instinct for putting himself in the right.” In the army, Henchman was called The Monkey:
Not that his features are really what
