The Last Samurai (8 page)

In my mind I saw a timid little mezzotint in which a lot of cross-hatching and a little hand tinting depicted some place where Europeans first going had been drunk on colour & writing a book had insisted on the Grand Canyon or Table Mountain or the South Seas being shown in a colour engraving, so that what was brilliant cobalt was represented by blue so pale it was almost white, vermilion crimson and scarlet by pink so pale almost white and there would be also a green so pale perhaps yellow so pale perhaps pale pale mauve, so that the reader might taste in a glass of water a real drop of whisky. I thought of Emma’s favourites with a scornful laugh, and yet this was stupid, you could just as well think of some other image that would not be contemptible—the black-and-white film does not show the world we see around us in its colours but it is not contemptible. The fact is that though things were better than when I had been reading things people had thrown their lives away on seventy years before at any moment a passion would fling itself on the first idea standing by and gallop off ventre à terre—how quietly and calmly some people argue.

It made me nervous to have these rages and sardonic laughs just waiting to gallop off ventre à terre, it was easier not to say anything or to say something quiet and banal. And yet if someone is very clever and charming you would rather not say something banal, you resolve instead to say something while remaining perfectly calm & in control—

I said that it seemed very quaint that in England books were in English & in France they were in French and that in 2,000 years this would seem as quaint as Munchkinland & the Emerald City, in the meantime it was strange that people from all over the world would go to one place to breed a nation of English writers & another to breed writers of Spanish, it was depressing in a literature to see all the languages fading into English which in America was the language of forgetfulness. I argued that this was false to what was there in a way that a European language could not be false to a European country, just as it was one thing to film Kansas in black & white but for the Land of Oz you had to have Technicolor, & what’s more (I seemed to be covering ground more impetuously than I had planned but it was too late to stop) it was preposterous that people who were by and large the most interesting the most heroic the most villainous the newest immigrants could appear in the literature of the country only as character actors speaking bad English or italics & by & large both they & their descendants’ ignorance of their language & customs could not be represented at all in the new language, which had forgotten that there was anything to forget.

Emma said: You mean you think they should not be just in English.

Exactly, I said. Once you think of it you wonder why you never thought of it before.

Well, said Emma, they do say desktop publishing is the way of the future—

Would you like me to type a 100-word letter in a minute? I said, for there was work to be done. A 50-word letter in 30 seconds? A 5-word letter in 3?

I hope you’re not too bored, said Emma.

I said: Bored!

I know it’s not very interesting, said Emma.

I would have liked to say But it’s absolutely
enthralling
. I said sensibly: The main thing is it’s giving me a chance to decide what I want to do.

This was exactly the kind of banal, boring remark I would rather not have made in the presence of someone clever and charming, but it seemed to me that Emma looked rather relieved. I said: It’s just what I was looking for. It’s absolutely fine.

The job was absolutely fine, Emma was clever and charming and I was in London. I tried to follow the example of Rilke but it was not so easy. It was not just a question of being overwhelmed by a body of work: Rilke was overwhelmed by Cézanne, but Cézanne could not have used a secretary, nor paid one. I did not like the idea of working for Rodin in order to stare overwhelmed at Cézanne; it seems as though if you turn up on someone’s doorstep you should at least be overwhelmed by his work.

Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read
Leave It to Psmith
for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett’s marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken.

Day followed day. A year went by.

I came into the office one day in June 1986 to find everyone in a state of nervous excitement. An acquisitor had snapped up the firm and had assured everyone that it would remain an autonomous imprint. This sinister announcement was taken to mean that everyone would soon be redundant.

The overtaker was a big American company, and it published many writers admired in the office. There was to be a big party to celebrate the merger in a few weeks’ time.

Emma had got me my job and my work permit & she now got me an invitation to this party.

Now not only did the new firm publish many American writers admired in the office but it also published Liberace, and one of the reasons getting me invited was a favour, one of the reasons people were excited, one of the reasons I did not want to go, was that there was a rumour that Liberace would be there. By Liberace I don’t, of course, mean the popular pianist who coined the phrase ‘cried all the way to the bank’, loved no woman but his mother and died of AIDS in the mid-80s. I mean the acclaimed British writer and traveller whose technique rivalled that of the much-loved musician.

Liberace the musician had a terrible facility and a terrible sincerity; what he played he played with feeling, whether it was Roll Out the Barrel or I’ll Be Seeing You, and in sad pieces a tear would well up over the mascara and drop to the silver diamanté of a velvet coat while the rings on his hands flashed up and down the keyboard, and in a thousand mirrors he would see the tear, the mascara, the rings, he would see himself seeing the mascara, the rings, the tear. All this could be found too in Liberace (the writer): the slick, buttery arpeggios, the self-regarding virtuosity as the clever ring-laden hands sparkled over the keys, the professional sincerity which found expressiveness for the cynical & the sentimental, for the pornographic, even for alienation & affectlessness. And yet he was not really exactly like the pianist, because though he did genuinely have the emotional facility of the musician he had only the air of technical facility, there being to even a buttery arpeggio not only the matter of running hands up and down the keys but

L wants to know what βíηφιν means. I say he knows perfectly well what it means & he says he doesn’t.

At first (because I was explaining that βíηφιν was the instrumental form of βíη, meaning by force or violence) I thought that the writer was like a person who typing puts a hand down one key to the right or left of where it should be, so that an intelligible sentence nrvomrd duffrnly uninyrllihlnlr ot nrstly do, snf yhr gsdyrt you yypr yhr eotdr iy hryd (ψηλαφ
ων means, can I see the line? it means feeling or groping about), and in my mind I saw the hands of Liberace moving rapidly & confidently up and down the keyboard striking keys now black now white. Now I think (as far as a person can be said to think who is taking the place of a talking dictionary) that even this is not quite right, because though Liberace did strew his work with mistakes they were not the kind (πετ
σσας means spreading, it is the aorist participle of πετ
ννυμι) that you could overlook in that way or rather (you know perfectly well what
φαινον means No I don’t It means weave and what form is it here 1st person singular imperfect OK) it is not that he overlooked them (
ρσενες means males) but that he looked straight at them with complacency (just a minute). Breathless with adoration would Liberace litter his work with gaping arguments and images knocked awry, stand back, fold arms, Ed Wood abeam at toppling tombstones and rumpled grass (just a
minute
). Did he notice or not care? He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, & being unable to combine the two had settled for the one he could be sure of (δασ
μαλλοι: thick-fleeced;
οδνεφíς: dark; λíγοισι: withies; withy: a piece of wicker-work; π
λωρ: You
know
what π
λωρ means No I don’t Yes you do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t It means monster That’s what I
thought
it meant—No wonder I am sticking pins in the father of this child). Here was a man who’d learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.