Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (26 page)

When the movement ended, he nodded at Guenther to lift the pickup. And just sat there, not saying a word, but trying to imply: I rest my case. Later, at supper, where everyone ate hugger-mugger, some of his students told him how much they had liked the music. In another mood, he might have taken this amiss, and presumed they were saying they didn’t like something else – his way of teaching, his clothes, his opinions, his books, his life – but the music had delivered, if not a peacefulness, at least a quiet pause into his being. And more and more, he thought that was the best you could hope for in life: a kind of pause.

The next afternoon, he decided to tell them about Hemingway. He began with the man in the white jeep on Naxos, which over the years had become for him an emblematic warning of what happens when a writer’s life takes over from a writer’s art. Why would anybody want to go around pretending to be Hemingway? he asked. He didn’t imagine there had ever been false Shakespeares in England,
ersatz
Goethes in Germany,
faux
Voltaires walking around France. They laughed at this, and had he known the Italian for ‘fake’, he would have thrown in Dante to please Mario.

He told them how for a long time he had disregarded Hemingway, but in recent years come to admire him greatly. The stories, rather than the novels: in his view, the Hemingway method worked better over the shorter distance. Well, it was
the same with James Joyce.
Dubliners
was a masterpiece, but
Ulysses
, for all its opening brilliance, was essentially a short story on steroids, grotesquely bulked up. If
Ulysses
were entered for the Olympics, it would fail a drugs test. He liked this opinion of his, and the way it always caused disquiet – here more than usual, he noted.

But he wanted to direct them to a story called, appropriately, ‘Homage to Switzerland’. Not among Hemingway’s more famous stories, but one of his most formally inventive. It had a three-part structure. In each part, a man – an expatriate American – was waiting for a train at a different Swiss railway station. It was the same train they were all waiting for, and the men, though they had different names, were versions of one another, or, quite possibly – not literally, but metaphorically, fictionally – the same man. He was waiting in the station café because the train was late. He drank, he propositioned the waitress, he teased the locals. Something, we are meant to conclude, had happened in the American’s life. Perhaps he is burnt out. Perhaps his marriage is in ruins. The train’s destination is Paris: maybe he has been running away from something and is now returning to it. Or maybe his ultimate destination is America. So it was a story about flight and return home – also, perhaps, a flight from the self and a possible, hoped-for return to it. And the way the three parts of the story overlapped, just as the men overlapped and the bars overlapped and the train overlapped, made us think about the way our own lives overlapped with one another. How we are all connected, all complicit.

There was silence when he finished speaking. It was odd, he thought, how much easier it was to talk about something you hadn’t reread for a while. You didn’t get so bogged down in particularities – the wider truths of fiction seemed to emerge naturally as you spoke.

Eventually Karin, a quiet but determined Austrian girl, broke the silence.

‘So, Herr Professor, you are telling us that Hemingway is just like Sibelius?’

He smiled enigmatically, and made the coffee sign to Guenther.

3. The Maestro in the Midwest

The only view was of classrooms and other offices, though if you pressed close to the window you could see discouraged grass below and sky above. From the start, he had declined to take his expected position at the head of the three metal tables that had been loosely bolted together. He would place the student whose work was being discussed at its head, and the principal critic, or responder, at its foot. He himself would sit a third of the way along one side. His positioning was designed to say: I am not the arbiter of truth, because there is no final truth in literary judgement. Of course, I am your professor, and have published several novels whereas you have only had stuff in campus magazines, but this doesn’t necessarily make me your best critic. It may well be that the most useful assessor of your work will be found among your classmates.

This wasn’t false modesty. He liked his students, all of them, and believed the feeling reciprocated; he’d also been surprised how each, regardless of ability, wrote with an individual voice. But everyone’s critical sympathies only ran so far. Take Gun-boy, as he thought of him, who turned in nothing but Gen-X stories set in a rough part of Chicago, and who, when he didn’t like someone else’s work, would shape his hand into a revolver and ‘shoot’ them, adding the gesture of the gun’s recoil for emphasis. No, he would never be Gun-boy’s best reader.

It had been a good idea to come to this Midwestern campus, to remind himself of the normality and ordinariness of America. From a distance, the temptation was always to see
it as a country which every so often went mad on power, and gave itself over to the violent outbursts of a steroid abuser. Here, away from the places and politicians which gave it that bad name, life was much like life everywhere else. People worried about the usual small things which to them were big things. As in his fiction. And here he was treated like a welcome guest, not a pariah, not a failure, but someone with his own life who had perhaps seen a few things they hadn’t. Occasionally, there was a certain gulf in understanding: yesterday, he’d been sitting up at a lunch counter when his neighbour asked genially, ‘So what language do they speak in Europe, then?’ But such details would be useful for his American novel.

If he ever wrote it. No, of course he would write it. The question was: would anyone ever publish it? He had taken this job partly to escape the shame of having his last novel,
A Kind of Pause
, turned down by twelve publishers. And yet, he knew it wasn’t a bad book. Everyone said it was as good as all his others – and therein lay the problem. His sales had been flatlining for years; he was white and middle-aged, with no other identity – smug TV panellist, for instance – to lift his profile. In his view, the novel – indeed, The Novel – delivered its rare truths through the artful mingling of intimate voices; yet nowadays people wanted something noisier. ‘Perhaps I should kill my wife and then write a book about it,’ he would complain in self-pitying moments. But he didn’t have a wife, only an ex-wife towards whom he bore sentimental rather than murderous feelings. No, his novels were good, just not good enough, that was the truth. One publisher had written to his agent that
A Kind of Pause
was ‘a classic, well-crafted mid-list book, the only trouble being that the mid-list doesn’t exist any more’. His agent, with perhaps excessive candour, had passed the judgement on to him.

‘Maestro?’

It was Kate, his cleverest student, even if she did have too many dogs in her stories. Once he had written in the margin
in red biro ‘Kill the dog’. The next story she had presented to the class was called ‘The Immortal Dachshund’. He’d liked that. Teasing, he thought, could almost be as good as love, and sometimes better.

‘I think you’ve covered all my points,’ he said. Though his main point, had he been harsh enough to make it, would have been: why is this male take on existential angst so reminiscent of all the others you have submitted? But he didn’t say things like that; he felt his students’ vulnerability as if it were his own. Instead, since they were nearly halfway through the three-hour session, he simply called ‘Cigarette Break.’

Often, he would join the class’s three smokers in a huddle round a waste bin. Today, he strode off as if he had business elsewhere. Well, he did. He walked to the nearest edge of the campus, which was built on a rise, and looked out into the flat, inexpressive, agricultural distance. He didn’t even need to light a cigarette. The view and its vast ordinariness were as good as nicotine. When he was young, he’d got satisfaction from imagining himself different from others, potentially special; now, he was comforted by reminders of his own – our own – insignificance. They calmed him.

Maestro
. He grunted quietly to himself. When he first met the class, one of them had addressed him as ‘Professor’. He’d jibbed at this – after all, he wasn’t an academic, and preferred to think of himself as a writer among fellow writers. On the other hand, he didn’t want them calling him by his Christian name. Some distance was necessary. And ‘Mister——’ didn’t feel right either.

‘Why don’t we just call you Maestro?’ Kate had suggested.

He’d laughed. ‘Only if you do so ironically.’

Now, he grunted again. At times, the label hurt. How proud he’d been to see his name on title page and book jacket, year after year. But what did that signify? Jane Austen’s name was set in print only twice in her lifetime – and that in subscription lists for other people’s books. Oh, enough, enough.

Every so often, to change the class’s diet, he would hand out a short story he hoped would help them, or at least give a sense of perspective. So later that afternoon, he distributed Xeroxes of ‘Homage to Switzerland’.

‘Oh, Maestro,’ Kate said, ‘I can tell I’m going to be off sick next week.’

‘You mean you have preconceptions?’

‘Let’s call them post-conceptions.’

He liked the way she held her own.

‘For instance?’

She sighed. ‘Oh, the ultimate dead white male. Papa Hemingway. The celebration of machismo. Boys with toys.’ She deliberately looked at Gun-boy who, just as deliberately, took aim and shot her.

‘Good. Now read the story.’ And, in case she took offence, added, ‘Dog-killer.’

The following week, he started by telling them about the Hemingway clone on the Greek island; then about the Swiss Alps and being asked whether he was comparing Hemingway with Sibelius. But this got little response, either because they hadn’t heard of Sibelius, or – more likely – because he hadn’t explained it properly. OK, over to them.

It depressed him how soon the class divided along sex lines. Steve, who was phobic about adverbs anyway, liked Hemingway’s stylistic economy; Mike, whose formal high-jinks often concealed a paucity of subject matter, approved the structure; Gun-boy, perhaps deploring the lack of firearms, said the story was OK but didn’t blow him away. Linda talked about the male gaze, and wondered why Hemingway hadn’t given the waitresses names; Julianne found it repetitive. Kate, on whom he had been counting, tried to find praise but even she ended, wearily,

‘I just don’t see what he’s got to say to us.’

‘Then try listening more carefully.’

There was a shocked pause. He had turned on his favourite;
worse, he had stepped out of character. There was a tall poet on campus with a reputation for humiliating his students, destroying their poems line by line. But everyone knew poets were crazy and unmannerly. Prose writers, especially when foreign, were expected to be civil.

‘I’m sorry. I apologise.’

But there was a tightness about Kate’s face that made him feel guilty. It’s not your problem, it’s mine, he wanted to say. He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn’t really mind – or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn’t sure what this might mean – except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

But he didn’t tell them this. Instead he began again, as if for the first time. He talked about the myth of the writer, and how it was not just the reader who became trapped in the myth, but sometimes the writer as well – in which case we should feel pity rather than blame. He talked about what hating a writer might mean. Did we hate Marlowe because he was a murderer? He quoted Auden on time pardoning Kipling for his views – ‘And will pardon Paul Claudel, / Pardons him for writing well’. He confessed to his own early dislike for Hemingway, and how it had taken him a long time to read the words without seeing the man – indeed, this might be the most extreme example of the myth obscuring the prose. And how that prose was so different from the way it looked. It seemed to be simple, even simplistic, but at its best was as subtle and deep as anything by Henry James. He talked of Hemingway’s humour, which was much overlooked. And of how, alongside what might appear to be boastfulness, there was often a surprising modesty and insecurity. Indeed, this was perhaps the key, the most important thing about the writer. People thought he was obsessed with male courage, with
machismo and cojones. They didn’t see that often his real subject was failure and weakness. Not the hero of the corrida but the humble aspirant stabbed to death by a bull made out of kitchen knives strapped to a chair. The great writers, he told them, understand weakness.

He left a pause, then turned back to ‘Homage to Switzerland’. Note how the three-in-one American expatriate, despite wit, sophistication and money, is morally inferior to the simple Swiss waitresses and bar patrons, who are sturdily honest, who do not run from reality. Look at the moral balance sheet, he urged, look at the moral balance sheet.

‘So why doesn’t he give the women names?’ Linda asked.

Which was coming out on top, irritation or depression? Perhaps there were some writers who would always be read and misread for the wrong reasons, who were, in fact, unrescuable. Auden, revising his work in later life, had cut those famous lines about Kipling and Claudel. Perhaps he came to believe them untrue, and that in the end time didn’t pardon.

‘They’re waitresses. The story is seen through the eyes of an American outsider.’

‘Who just wants to pay them for sex – as if they are whores.’

‘Don’t you see, the women have the high ground?’

‘Then why not give one of them her own name?’

For a moment, he thought of telling them the story of his life: how Angie had left him because he was a success, and then Lynn had left him because he was a failure. But he didn’t tell them that. Instead, he turned to Kate, in a final attempt at something – he wasn’t even sure what – and asked,