The Back of His Head (41 page)

This novel's first epigraph was accessed from the
Paris Review: The Art of Fiction
No. 91, on 2 November 2014; and the second from the
Paris Review
:
The Art of Fiction
No. 164, on 27 March 2015. Both interviews are by Sasha Guppy. Enquiry into possible plagiarisms of these writers by Raymond Lawrence is ongoing.

More about the Scottish artist Ian Stevenson's solo raft journey from Darwin to Timor in the summer of 1952 is in Michael Stevenson, ‘The gift' (from ‘Argonauts of the Timor Sea', 2004–06, accessed on YouTube, 7 December 2014). It is likely that Lawrence came across the newspaper item reporting Fairweather's journey in a Brisbane newspaper while on the way back to North Africa in early 1953. Peter Orr's evident ignorance of Stevenson's remarkable work is regretted.

Lawrence's unacknowledged borrowings from Isabelle Eberhardt may be seen in
The Oblivion Seekers and other writings
, translated by Paul Bowles (London: Peter Owen, 1988), a collection of eleven of her stories and some diary entries. The volume incinerated by Orr and Yuile was probably an edition of
Dans l'Ombre Chaude d'Islam
(1920), an earlier version of
The Oblivion Seekers
mentioned in the introduction to that book. Peter Orr's failure to remember the name of this tragic figure is regretted.

Some of Raymond Lawrence's taste in literary models is evident in his admiration of John Hopkins's early fiction,
The Attempt
(1967) and
Tangier Buzzless Flies
(1972), which he first read in Tangier, where he knew Hopkins slightly. Interestingly, the ambiguously gendered character Hamid in the latter novel seems to be modelled on Eberhardt. Lawrence also recommended Hopkins's
The Tangier Diaries 1962–1979
(1995, 1998), which he greatly admired. Unacknowledged use of these and other Hopkins texts has been found in
Kerr
and other novels by Raymond Lawrence.

Of Paul Bowles as a stylist Lawrence thought slightly more than he did of Hopkins, and as a humanist and diarist slightly less. He acknowledged Bowles's influence in conveying something of North Africa to the page, and also in establishing, for the Westerner seeking ways to write about the Maghreb, a tactful respect for its invincible otherness. At the other end of the spectrum of style, Lawrence's ongoing admiration for C.M. Doughty's
Travels in Arabia Deserta
(1888) is evident in the unacknowledged quotations from that work in his earlier writing.

Lawrence's attitude to violence and the dignity of the subaltern, expressed late in Orr's account, suggests he knew Frantz Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth
(1963). His belief that a work of art conceals a crime suggests familiarity with Alain Robbe-Grillet's theories of writing, while his account of his ‘birth' at the hands of Berbers suggests a familiarity with the purported early life of the great German
Bullshit Künstler
Joseph Beuys, as well as with the film
The Empire Strikes Back
(1980). Lawrence's claims about his Dodge suggest he might have seen
Back to the Future
(1985), too.

Various artists have been obsessed with the colour blue over the years, and Orr names three of them late in this novel. Yves Klein's obsession with devising a particular, ultramarine-based hue for his work led to the development of the colour International Klein Blue (Tanal Dukh,
Klein: Internationaler coloriste
, Cologne, 2001). Prior to Klein, the blue flower was a crucial symbol of the unattainable ideal in the German Romantic movement; it also appears in Rainer Maria Rilke's poem ‘Blue Hydrangea,' in D.H. Lawrence's novella
The Fox
(1922) and elsewhere. Raymond Lawrence was a great admirer of Penelope Fitzgerald's extraordinary novel about Novalis and the German Romantics,
The Blue Flower
(1995), and deeply regretted that it appeared too late in his career to be fully appropriated by him. There are glimpses of it in his late novel
Constanze
, however, in the early description of washing drying on balconies and the theme of marrying into the ‘wrong' class, as well as in occasional phrases.

The cautionary tale of the turd and the orange peel was first heard by Raymond Lawrence in an academic paper delivered some years ago by Vincent O'Sullivan, who referred at the time to its origins in Robert Graves's response, following a presentation at Oxford University, to a student who over-reached in the use of the word ‘we' at question time. Elsewhere in the sentences of this novel about the provenance of writing in the written are the ghosts of many other writers, their themes, scenes, sentences and phrases dotted liberally throughout in a recurent
hommage
that awaits the reader's delighted recognition. The vegetarian plight of the geriatric Lawrence and his meat-porn visits to the local butcher-shop, for example, echo Maurice Gee. The first reader to identify and report all such references will receive an autographed gift copy of Geneva Trott's official biography
The Raymond Lawrence Story
(Hazard Press, 2015).

The author has had much support in the writing of this book, including detailed feedback on drafts, and warmly thanks the following for their gifts to him: John Newton, Nicholas Wright, Mandala White, Andrew Dean, Simon Garrett, Jim Acheson, James Smithies, Nick Frost, Julia Allen, Robyn Toomath, Paul Millar, Nathan Evans, Reg Berry, and, for their early encouragement, Mark Williams, Carl Shuker and Carl Nixon. The author thanks Peter Steel for his advice on how to blow things up and Nicholas Wright for his advice on how to lift things up.

There are special thanks due to Bruce Harding for introducing the author to the Ngaio Marsh Residence on the lower slopes of Christchurch's Cashmere Hill. Anyone who has visited this beautifully preserved museum will realise that many of its details are appropriated in this novel, including the Japanese geisha screen that represents a brothel scene and the video-viewing session in the downstairs sunroom that begins the tour of each of the Residences, Marsh's and Lawrence's.

Parts of
The Back of His Head
have been published, in
SPORT
41 (2013) and
Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings
, ‘Crime Across Cultures,' vol. 13 No. 1 (2013), and acknowledgement is made to these publications. The author is grateful to Fergus Barrowman for getting the entire novel out of him through skilled use of the powers of suggestion, and to Ashleigh Young for her empathetic editing of the work. Once more, the process of publication has been a swift and pleasant experience for the author.

Despite all this borrowing,
The Back of His Head
is not a
roman à clef
and all its characters are fully imagined and continue to lead private lives in cyberspace and the cultural imaginary alone. Had the author intended to refer to actual people past or present he would have made it evident that he was doing so. Those who think they see themselves in the novel's pages can be assured they are taking themselves too seriously.