Strange Music (18 page)

Aboard the Queen Mary

My darling Alex,

This is absurd, of course. The swiftest vessel for carrying this letter is the one that is already doing so. I shall post it on arrival in Southampton even though you will be there in person to meet me, and the postman will deliver it a couple of days later, by which time I will already have said everything I could possibly write here, maybe many times over. So why bother?

Because, darling, darling, I'm just bursting with so many things to say that if I don't write them now and give myself the illusion of communicating with you, I shall truly burst. But when we dock I don't want it to compete with me in person. Who dares to say women are not logical?

First and if I manage to write nothing else, this is the most important – I love you, I love you, I love you to distraction. You know that. But it's such a novel experience for me –
true
love. I mean, I've had joyful affairs, comfortable affairs, passionate affairs, often with unwise partners, but they were just affairs and this is real, really, really real. I ache for your touch and I never did that before. I can think of you in any mood. I can think of you and be calm, and be drowsy, and be stirred beyond endurance almost, and be wild with impatience that so many hours still separate us, and be dreamy, and be foolish.
I can think of you
You are with me on my mind waking and sleeping.

I wish you could've seen me with the editorial board at Doubleday. I felt you there, strong, silent, and approving all the time. When I was with the people at Simon and Schuster and again at Random House I know I did a good job of presenting my ‘Junior Art' series but even so I kept feeling something was missing. Then with Doubleday I suddenly knew what it was. The missing element was
Manutius!
I should be selling
us
as well as our products. They all knew Fogel of course – everybody in the whole publishing world knows him or knows of him, but Manutius is the missing dimension to his character, a shadow to most of them. And you know how you can tell how a group of people are gripped by what you're saying – I couldn't describe it in so many words but I'm sure you know the difference between that and mere casual interest. I tell ya – dese guys was
gripped!

So I sold the series like a charm, all on the back of first selling Manutius. The
BBC
will never have that problem (well, maybe in Yoknapatawpha County but not many other places) and, possibly, it was while imagining myself doing this same sort of thing with recordings of radio and
TV
programmes that I realized that Manutius and Auntie are two very different stables. Anyway, Doubleday bought it! No ifs, ands or buts – they signed heads of agreement on the spot and they're so gung-ho (enthusiastic) that they've sent a senior editor called Norman Crowley back with me to look at the original material and stay on as editorial advisor to the series – and, they hint, to cooperate in other joint ventures. That has to be their true purpose – scout around, get the feel of things, and make an offer to get into bed with us. Manutius might yet end up as Doubleday's Trojan Horse in London – that is, in the British book market, which spans the globe from Canada right round again to Canada, and it's where the Yanks can't sell so much as a shilling life. I know Fogel would just love to have such an admiring sugar daddy with such a bottomless purse. We have big-big ideas and big-big books waiting for Russell (philosophy), Huxley (evolution), Fisher (birds), Hogben (maths), Priestley (England – or Time, he's got a thing about Time), and dear Felix (sculpture). Oh, and more. Jung (psychology). I needn't go on. All they lack is the seed corn of money, more money than Manutius can scrape up yet. But with Doubleday's treasury to dip into and all those million-horsepower names to dazzle even those Manhattan sophisticates . . . the sky is our oyster, as Eric would say.

But back to Norman Crowley. Between you and me I have already renamed him
Ab
norman Crowley. The man is seriously weird and I'm wondering if they're not just sending him away to be rid of him. He's a pretty good editor. He knows his mind and how to keep focused (the editorial disease is to ‘masturbate over text until it's sodden.' Don't be shocked though, it's what I accuse our editors at Manutius of doing in order to shock them into releasing text to the typesetter and give us some faint chance of meeting a deadline). And he knows the market. There are a lot of good things going for dear Abnorman, so I do not underestimate him. But when, for example, you ask him a simple question like, ‘These are sixty-four pagers but we could save on printing costs by printing 128 pages back-to-back on a bigger press. It would need a bigger print run to justify it, so what are you thinking in terms of the American print run?'

And he looks at your left eye and he looks at your right eye and he turns his head three-quarters away and looks at you askance and he chews a knuckle and he throws down his pencil, spilling it off the flat of his hand onto the table, and he says, ‘Faith – did I ever tell you 'bout mah Uncle Stu?' Well, his Uncle Stu, it turns out, was a chicken farmer, so any quantities like the print run get turned into quantities like weekly off-farm egg shipments, at the end of which he abandons me in the middle of the Oklahoma dustbowl to translate all this into an allegory about the uncertainty involved in forecasting markets.

What? Markets are uncertain? Can that possibly be true?

The thing is, if he said it all plain and straight, everyone would see it's nothing more than a simpleton's guide to uncertainty, but the allegory thing promotes him into some kind of seer who speaks in parables. Except not with me. After a couple of days of this sort of obfuscation I can perceive a sharp and rapacious mind at work. If he advises Doubleday it will be safe to play Daddy Bigbucks with Manutius, he'll make it conditional on taking over
my
position as Fogel's right brain! Fogel will see through him at once, of course, but if Abnorman is the only key to unlock those Doubleday vaults, he'll shamelessly demote me, on paper, anyway, and make dear Abnorman the titular Number Two (which, in another sense of those words, he already is to me), secretly giving me the task of seeing that the man doesn't do too much damage. (Sorry Fogel, if that's your plan, my letter of resignation is already written and waiting.)

The best news is I won't have to escort him to London from Southampton! This morning at breakfast I asked him if ‘a Manhattan sophisticate like you' could manage alone in London, having first ascertained that his New York club has reciprocal rights with the Chelsea Arts, so he won't be pounding the streets, and of course he declined my offer of guided tours to the Tower, Madame Tussauds, etc. (Actually, in all the years I've lived in London I've never visited the Tower, so I wouldn't have minded that.) So our little weekend tryst in the New Forest is definitely on. Or will have been on and is now over by the time you read this. How was it for you? I adored every minute of it.

What else? Oh, yes. The Q Mary is far superior in the second class than in the first. She's a beautiful old tub but her grandeur is just a wee bit threadbare at the edges, and the people in the first class all have the air of decayed gentlefolk – the sort of people my mother used to visit in homes for distressed gentry, bringing them dainty soaps and small bottles of inexpensive perfume and machine-monogrammed hankies with their initials on. (She had a huge stock and so could always find the apposite initial. Dear Mummy!)

But here in the second class one can sit down and work without the decayed gentlefolk turning up their noses. There's a professor of history who'd be a natural on
TV
– he can talk the hind leg off a thoroughbred horse, without notes and without the slightest sense that he might be wrong in even the smallest particular. And an economist whose views on the Israel–Palestine conflict are the precise opposite of those we heard from Terence Lanyon that night in the Johnsons' flat. That would be a good old ding-dong – aphorisms at dawn and fire at three paces! And there's a young man from Sotheby's who was an art student and studied under Victor Passmore at Camberwell. He told me that Passmore tells a wonderful story against himself. It wasn't clear when this happened, maybe before the war, but anyway it was when Passmore was on the committee of the New English Art Club and he was deputed to greet Picasso at Victoria and bring him to Whitcomb St. So when he spied Picasso getting off the boat train he went up to him and said, in schoolboy French, ‘Je . . . suis . . . Passmore . . . er . . . je suis . . . peintre!' And Picasso looked at him with those great solemn eyes and said, ‘Teins! Moi aussi! Je suis peintre!' He tells a good story. (Don't worry – I have all their names, and the purser kindly left a list of addresses in plain view, where I could see them.)

So goodnight, my dearest. Felix once told me that when he heard that line in
The Merchant of Venice
where Troilus sighs his soul toward the Grecian tents where Cressid lay that night, he said he knew he was in love with Angela because sighing his soul was exactly how it felt whenever he thought of her. I felt awfully superior not to be suffering any such malady. But, oh, how are the superior fallen! Sighing my soul toward you is precisely how it feels. If this letter is a bit tatty when you get it, it's because I'm now going to put it under my pillow all night.

All my love and then some,

Faith