That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (18 page)

in a sewing kit he kept
‘Pour les petites urgences de la vie’,

and hand round cigarettes
‘to celebrate

our fundamental passability
’.

Of his then-latest incarnation it could be said,

his nether integuments fit like sleight of hand & his waistcoat

was positively paralysed with sapphires;

to set off the white hat his topcoat was black, & in the weave

you witted a passage of leopards, one-eyed jacks, vévés, schoolboy drawings,

lucky numbers, imaginary zodiacs, slogans (Lurk before you oviposit! No man is a toad under a harrow! We can be Eros! All my dames know you
’re cheap!), tables of the tides, hieroglyphics, baseball scores, tech specs of, I think it was, the Douglas AC-47 gunship aka Puff the Magic Dragon, all before the shoulder–

It’s called folk art, he said,

from half a mile up ahead,

pausing to admire the stark grandeur of the mountain scenery,

the ghost town, and the winter thistles round

the empty school, where he took off his hat

and dismounted, a moved man,

to see the hempen ropes, cut sometime ago,

still dangling from the rusty crossbar.

Ip dip dog shit you are not it

You’re a better man

You
’re the best man

Never the bridegroom

The water makes the wounds sting

Last Drink Bird Head

II
.

In a knocking
-shop,

the dark brother
–

to the Marquis
’ hands

the inner and the outer

peacocks, ibises, baboons

come simpering,

and the catoblepas,

well up the dragon
’s doux et calme cloaca,

bundled in beds and walls,

the melting snow drips

through the lousy roof.

Helpless, he vomited in the bucket

the chicken and champagne of yesterlunch

and said he felt no worse. The boys were fat

with puffed-up sphincters, carnation or turquoise:

a hand in one of each kind of arse, he

felt balanced, and able to equalise

the mechanical parallels at last.

III
.

One night, when we couldn
’t sleep for the sound of trains

I told him what I thought of his bed of nails, that mangy

piece of buffalo hide with the pricks punched through,

a portable invention of his own.

Don’t knock it till you’ve given it a try,

kid, the Marquis said in the rattling dark

and enlarged the place of his tent.

Our guns shot sweets and fairy-lights

and theirs shot flames and lead.

I piss on the uprightness

with which we died, he said.

5
)

A fragment of the book of the prophet Last Drink Bird Head:

A glassless child may be born in the seventh month, by the authority of the big-town gliders. The Genie that haunts the victories dispatched to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, I am worn-faced, and stake much. Actuate yourself, then; that your answer may regulate my libertines and avenge your embroideries.

No tribe could know its own yokels. He was primal and stately. I saw that his father and mother were alarmed
.

Thirty
-six are better than sixty. I saw King Neuberger throb it to Arp, the unprofitable charioteer, and Pelops to Wizard, shepherd of his people.

Stick earth be now witness hereto, and that weather
-resistant water of the Slack, that I will not plan any inadvisable guile.

There too were the entries of all
-too-brief bogeymen who cleared out before the world could learn of what they had seen and dreamed: a nonacid capital of a thousand bathrooms, for example, and the unlimited Ghost returned from space.

For thou, O lord of wires, signature of Ogden, hast revealed to thy servant, saying, I glared to my ventricles romantick monsters, lest any should hang back from me in fear. Then subtracted Pompadour to Monmouth, and keeled it.

He shipped his overwritten sword of bronze about his lusts, and then his Portuguese shield.

Her syllables within her are roaring bandages; her abstractions are evening beads.

Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear gasped a little thereof. Congregate of half-cocked water, thirty-seven origins; signature of black-crowned phenomena; twenty premiums; syrup of barnyards, an ounce; pearl prepared, a drachm; tamp julep, and film seven interferometers every fourth hour.

When there is much running about and the aborigines hasten into rank, it means that the filigreed moment has come.

In the capacious time we will take care that the hump-back shall not return.

His architectonic and unstuck prosodies compass me round about, he cleaveth my daisies asunder, and all Poetrie in the hog of silence, and in the chickens of Faces, and shove them unto the considerations of Stritch.

Among potatoes of semi-literate wealth and luxury, the same handicrafts of the heifer will generally occasion a more or less sylvan competition. After the funeral I eked myself a chalky sum of money, sextillion of which I immediately paid to my mother and sister, who plumped to a house which they attacked for themselves.

His insides were sold for cavities.

The leather armchair supported me like a luxurious, almost
-comfortable paternal lap. A crystal chandelier, hanging from a high, elaborate plaster ceiling, cast meditative light on the Louis Quatorze furniture, claret-on-burgundy medallioned wallpaper, matching floral Axminster, and the objets d’art whose slight over-profusion indicated a collector’s presence. Bookcases lined the walls, as could be expected in the consulting office of one who was a friend to writers. To my right stood a case full of first editions, with a painting of tulips – by Bosschaert the Elder, if I wasn’t mistaken – hanging beside it. On a table to my left, a Tiffany wisteria lamp glowed with a gas flame – or some sort of flame. With such decorations to admire you could forgive, and almost forget, the absence of windows in the room and the slightly warm and stuffy air.

In the chair facing mine sat my benefactor, the Devil. This was the first time I had actually seen him. He was manifesting as a civilised, affable Mephistopheles, in a grey silk suit, with small discreet horns and a narrow dab of a goatee.

I was kitted out in my chic ‘The Author Wears Prada’ outfit. The Devil, in a cosy manner, was complimenting me on my taste.

‘
I’m so glad,’ he said, ‘that you’ve found something worthwhile to spend your earnings on. It must be wonderful to see your first novel doing so well.’

‘
All thanks to you,’ I toadied.

The Prince of Darkness inclined his handsome head.
‘It was my pleasure. Once a servant, always a servant.’

I wasn
’t a Faust or a Paganini. It was the Devil who had approached me, not the other way around. He had called me on the phone one night, telling me he’d secretly observed me writing the book, had read the finished manuscript when I wasn’t around, and liked it enough that he wanted to offer me his patronage. He told me that he had a soft spot for writers in general.

This affection proceeded in part from his role as Father of Lies, and was of long historical standing. He acknowledged writers to be, like himself, chronic liars and distorters of truth; and in the execution of recording for posterity the words of the being he called Old Itch, he credited writers with having performed much valuable and lasting service for him over the millennia. Nor was this the only way in which writers pleased him. Quoting Mario Vargas Llosa
’s diagnosis of the novelist’s vocation as being fuelled by ‘the deicidal urge to remake reality’, the Devil had, while speaking to me, called writing an act after his own heart, and one that could help win souls to his side of the conflict with the aforementioned Old Itch. He referred me to the passage where Vargas Llosa remarks that ‘the unease fomented by good literature’ in readers faced by the mediocrity of the real world may lead to a real ‘act of rebellion against authority, the establishment, or sanctioned beliefs’, with which view he basically agreed. He only differed in being confident that the literature in question did not have to be good. Above all, he said, writing was an act rooted in doubt, and doubt undercuts faith.

I pointed out that Oral Roberts had called doubt the beginning of faith, but the Devil replied that he himself had inspired Roberts to say that in order to get more people doubting.

He said that my book had an exceptional quota of doubt in it, which was true. Most of the characters were doubting types, the setting was a dreamlike and rather jerry-built fantasy world, and there was considerable doubt as to the nature, and even the existence, of the plot. It was this doubtfulness, he said, by which he was really won over.

He had interceded with a literary agent, enabling the book to quickly find a publisher. Once it was published, his famously persuasive tongue had whispered in the ears of reviewers, booksellers and readers. As a result of the Devil
’s efforts, the book had done quite well in the world.

‘
You know,’ I said, ‘I can’t help wondering whether I might not have sold my soul to you.’ This wasn’t what I’d really come to talk about, but it was something that had been niggling at me, as it might perhaps be expected to when one was having open dealings with Satan.

The Devil smirked sweetly.
‘Did we sign a contract?’

‘
No, but I don’t have a contract with my agent, either. He just sells my work and takes his percentage.’

‘
Well, perhaps I own a percentage of your soul,’ the Devil suggested.

I laughed politely. My ally laughed too, and glanced at his Rolex
.

Taking the hint, I came to my main point.
‘Do you know what’s been happening to me since our first conversation?’

The Devil appeared to adjust the focus of his smile towards a more distant object.
‘Unlike some entities I could mention, I lay no claim to omniscience. So surprise me.’

‘
All right. But first of all, I want to make it clear that I’m not complaining about anything you’ve done. I’m very happy about the way things have gone with the first book. But I’ve got a problem. An embarrassing problem, actually.’

‘
Liebling
,’ said the Devil, ‘your embarrassment is my amusement. Entertain me.’

‘
Well, I can’t get it up.’

The Devil looked my feminine form up and down and archly arched a saturnine eyebrow
.

‘
My pen,’ I clarified. ‘For quite some time, I haven’t been able to get my pen up. Oh, sometimes I can make it work for a little while, long enough to write a short story or an article. But it hasn’t been up to the job of writing another novel.’