by Paul Theroux
"My wife knows the basics."
"Fayette's in awe of you."
"There's nothing to be in awe of."
"Nathan Leopold said he'd heard of you."
"Prisoners read more than the average person."
"You're a published author," he said.
"So are you, Harry."
He did not smile. He looked trapped, but he did not tell me what I was sure was the truth, that his grant to the magazine was his way of getting his poems published.
He was evasive, he was untruthful, yet still I respected him because it was in a good cause. He wanted to know what poetry was all about and, ill equipped for the task, was willing to face the difficulty. He seemed in that sense innocent and, even as Alison had said all those weeks ago, idealistic.
We did nothing more in that lesson, but he made a point of saying that he wanted another lesson the next day. When I arrived, I was determined not to make chitchat or to talk about Fayette. I said, "Shall we look at Wilfred Owen?"
"I was reading it on my trip," he said.
I had typed out the poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth" so that we could discuss it.
"It seemed a little overdone," Lazard said.
I wanted to scream: He was in a muddy trench! He was gassed! Shells were exploding all around him! He saw men dying!
"The thing is," I said, as though to a child, "Owen actually saw these events firsthand. It was a nightmarish war. He died. So did Rosenberg and Rupert Brooke."
"What did Patton say? 'War is hell.'" Lazard sipped his drink and swallowed and smacked his lips in a knowing way.
"General Sherman said that."
"You sure?"
"It's in a poem by E. E. Cummings called 'plato told.'"
Lazard accepted this, and then said, "Funny, isn't it? Poets writing about war."
"It happens all the time," I said. "That's the subject of the Aeneid. 'Of arms and the man I sing.'"
But Lazard had not heard me. He was still ruminating. "Oh, sure, they're probably good poets. But you've got to wonder what kind of soldiers they were."
"Average soldiers, I guess."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means scared shitless."
"Been to Vietnam?"
I said no, and I was going to add that living across the road from Serene House I had met dozens of American soldiers. I felt it was my patriotic duty to befriend them and make them feel at home in Singapore; and not one of them had spoken of the Vietnam War in any terms except horror and shame and waste.
We talked a bit more about Wilfred Owen. Harry Lazard gave the poem low marks.
That night in bed I tossed and turned, and when I finally went to sleep I dreamed I was clinging to the side of a building in a high wind. I woke. The wind was the overhead fan, but that was merely a detail in my dream of destitution. In the morning I sorrowed inwardly, hearing my children laugh. Only I knew that this was all coming to an end.
At our lesson the next evening I asked, "We were talking about Vietnam yesterday. Have you been there?"
"Many times."
This shook me.
"Most of my business is there."
Innocent was the acceptable word; the reality was that I was stupid.
Electronics, he had told me.
"I wrote a poem on my last trip there."
Timing devices. Circuitry. Switches. Small motors. He had also mentioned chemicals. What did that mean, napalm?
"I think it still needs some work."
He opened the stiff office folder and showed me the single sheet, clipped in. Its title was "Cap St. Jacques."
He slapped his breast pocket.
"Forgot my glasses—left them upstairs." He rose to go and then said, "Might as well come on up. We can talk there."
"I wouldn't want to disturb your wife."
"She's out—at a party."
In this seclusion and servitude on Lazard's estate I had forgotten the Singapore parties.
I followed Harry upstairs to his bedroom, and there looking like the scene of a crime was the chaise longue, the stack of magazines, the parasol lamp, and the massive Chinese herbalist's chest with the hundred drawers. Lazard had once made me feel like a prisoner. I no longer felt that way, because I now knew that I could leave at any time. I had to leave. It would be hard for me to be on my own, there would be less comfort for Alison and the boys; but they would understand when I explained.
"Go on, read it."
He passed me his poem. It was the sort of clumsy, matter-of-fact series of observations that he scribbled in the name of poetry. Sometimes his work was like bad prose, at other times like bad poetry. He was at his worst when he tried to sound poetic. The rest of the time the result was like notes jotted in an appointment book, or hurried diary entries.
This was about ten lines long, and it was dated. Its subject was the sky seen from the terrace of a fine hotel, clear air in the morning, helicopters and C-130S during the day, and at night galaxies of stars and fighter planes.
"It's a sky seen over the period of twenty-four hours," he said.
I said nothing.
"I'm a bad sleeper," he said.
I was holding the poem without wanting to read it again or even look at it. A hasty man would have crumpled it and thrown it in his face, but I was an enemy infiltrator, in the disguise of a simple scholar.
"That's the old name, Cap St. Jacques," he explained. "That's where the French used to hobnob. Now we're hobnobbing, I guess you could say. They renamed it Vung Tau."
He was still smiling at me. He began to look uncomfortable.
"Will you excuse me? I think I picked up a tummy bug in Saigon. Ho Chi Minh's revenge."
He had not noticed that I had been silent the entire time. I watched him leave the room. And then I heard the bathroom door close, and the click of the lock. That was comic—did he think I was going to intrude on him?
I went to the Chinese herbalist's chest, opened a drawer, and there was Fayette's jade carving. I quickly put it into my pocket and shut the drawer.
When Harry Lazard returned, I said, "I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."
He looked stricken. "You don't like my poem?"
We flew out of Singapore the next evening, stopping in Colombo, Karachi, Beirut, and Frankfurt, before arriving dazed and unsteady on our feet in London. For a week I had attacks of vertigo, an actual spiraling sense that I was dropping to the ground, and I had to look up at the sky to regain my balance.
The £13,000 I realized on the jade carving of the child's burial mask (it was Chinese, Later Liang Dynasty, say tenth century), at the auction at Christie's in South Kensington, was the purchase price of a Victorian house in Clapham. The spoils of war, I would have said, if anyone had asked. No one asked.
FOUR
Lady Max
1
YOU DIDN'T BECOME a Londoner simply by living there. After seven years I was still an alien. I wanted to write about the city from the inside, and be anonymous in the streets. I felt it was happening, I was at last becoming a Londoner, the winter I discovered Gaston's.
Only the professionals knew Gaston's. The poet Ian Musprat (The Dogflud Chronicles) had shown me the place. It was a small used bookshop in an alley off Chancery Lane. A square of cardboard stuck in the window was printed in Chinese characters and English, No Rickshaw Parking —an obscure joke. There was no other sign, but there were stacks of books.
Gaston was fussy about the books he bought and sold—they had to be new, unmarked, and in demand by libraries. London book reviewers were Gaston's suppliers, and if you lingered by the plain wooden counter where the books were piled, you would meet the great names, the savage reviewers, the literary hacks, the stragglers. They entered and left like punters at a pawn shop, trying to put a jaunty face on their shame. All of them were doing something they faintly despised, selling copies of the books they had reviewed, at half price, cash.
Friday was a popular day, because it was a deadline day
for both the Sundays and the weeklies. After lunch I typed my review, made my way from Clapham to Fleet Street, and sold my books at Gaston's. Then I turned in my review at the New Statesman, nearby. I did roundups, three or four books, sometimes as many as six, "The Week's Fiction," or else four travel books. The crime reviewer did many more in half the space. The Statesman was just on the other side of Lincoln's Inn (barristers looking silly in self-important wigs and black gowns). After I handed in my review, I had money in my pocket, a check in the mail, and the weekend ahead. Saturday was for shopping, Sunday for outings with Alison and the boys—I never wrote a word those days. On Monday it was back to my novel, and I read the review copies in the evenings. On Friday I did my review, and then it was time for Gaston's again.
I liked being rid of the books. It gave me pleasure to turn a stack of bound proofs into a box of Lego blocks, a jar of marmalade, The Hobbit, and four ounces of Player's Navy Cut pipe tobacco. And I needed the routine. London monotony was necessary to the writing of a long novel.
"How's your book?" Alison asked on those weekends, when she saw me looking thoughtful.
I always said my book was going fine, and it was, but I would have preferred a bit more—a bit more money, a bit more space in the Statesman, a lead review instead of a roundup, one book instead of four, my name on the cover of the magazine. Yet I didn't complain. I was reassured by the routine. Cozy, predictable London was at its best, its blackest, in the winter, in cold, dead, and dreary January, with spring seeming a long way off. Londoners hated January and February, and often muttered as much grumblingly to strangers on buses.
For me it was writing weather, and I loved it. I was not a Londoner in the way I enjoyed those months, those fogs, those thick white skies. When it rained the city was blackened, and I liked that too. The short days and long nights kept people indoors. I worked in a small pool of lamplight in an upper room, overlooking the slate roofs and chimney pots and the leafless trees in the back gardens. Everyone else was inside, too. In the London winter I never had the feeling that I was missing anything.
I usually met Ian Musprat in Gaston's. I saw him that dark Friday in January when I came in with my stack of books. He was negotiating nervously with Gaston, dickering over a book. When they were done he stepped aside, looking fussed. As I sold my four ("God, the price of books," Gaston said, handing me £7), Musprat covertly slipped a book into his briefcase.
"Gaston made me wait, because Angus Wilson came in to sell that Christmas junk he reviewed in the Observer."
"I wish I had seen him," I said.
"He looks like the head of Girton."
"That's a women's college, isn't it?"
"You Americans are so literal," Musprat said, and we threaded our way through the wet footpaths of Lincoln's Inn, the short cut to the Statesman.
I said, "Did Gaston refuse to buy one of your books?"
Musprat shook his head and said, "I bought one from him."
"I've never seen anyone buy a book there," I said. "I thought they sold them by the pound to libraries."
Musprat inhaled but said nothing, only sighed. He went very quiet. He was just my age but seemed much older. He was balding and had bad teeth, and was cranky in the way only Englishmen in their thirties could be—assertively seedy. He cultivated a look of failure, he boasted of his bad reviews. He could have passed for fifty.
I had never seen Musprat without a necktie and a jacket, and yet I rarely saw him in a place where he needed them. He wore a tie at home, in his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He told me that he put a tie on before he answered the door—a school habit, he said. So much in English life originated not at home with the family, as it did in Europe, or in the street, as it did in America, but at school—the table manners, the slang, the rules, the habits, the dress code, even the food. What was oddest of all in this school-obsessed country was that people claimed they hated school—Musprat's school poems were angry and sad. He had been thrashed by his sadistic housemaster, mocked for being a loner, disliked for not being a rugger hearty, and he still wrote poems about the school he had left twenty years ago. His writing was his way of getting even, and he saw his poetry as a form of revenge.
"So what book did you buy?" I asked him.
His briefcase was a battered satchel, like something else from school. He whacked it against his leg as he walked.
"Jesus, you and your bloody questions," he said. He was genuinely irritated, but he fumbled open the flap of the satchel and took out the book, The Dogflud Chronicles.
"You bought your own book?"
"Rescued it," he said. "Some bastard sold it to Gaston. I couldn't bear seeing it on the shelf. Half price, shopworn, flogged to a library. It's only been out a month."
"I think I'd do the same if I saw one of my books there."
"No one sells your books to Gaston," Musprat said, and he smiled. "That's the highest compliment a reviewer can pay."
Waiting outside the literary editor's office at the New Statesman, Musprat said, "This is like a tutorial, isn't it? Clutching our ridiculous essays, waiting for our tutor to summon us."
Musprat was smoking. He puffed out his cheeks and blew smoke.
"Hoping he'll give us an alpha," he said crossly. "Are you going to that Hodder's party?"
I said that I didn't know anything about it.
"It's for that boring American woman who writes picture books about Nash terraces. Every twit in London will be there."
"So are you going?"
"It's a drink," Musprat said, meaning yes. He looked pale and rumpled, leaning clumsily against a torpedo-sized fire extinguisher.
"Are you feeling all right?"
"Of course," he said. He was offended by the question. "You're always asking me that."
There had been only one other time. I had run into him one morning in the Strand. I had said he looked ill, as though he had just thrown up. He said he had, he had been drinking the night before, but that he was sick every morning. He said, "Don't you throw up every morning?"
"Come in, Ian!" the literary editor shouted through the closed door.
"Just like my tutor," Musprat muttered, and shuffled in. He was out in minutes, sighing and rifling the book locker. And then it was my turn, and the editor, Graham Heavage, immediately lapsed into his irritating habit.
"Bonjour, M'sieur Theroux, fa va? II souffle un vent glacial aujourd'hui. Avez-vous des engelures?"
That was his irritating habit. He often spoke to me in French—because of my name, because he spoke French well and could patronize me that way. I regarded it as an unfriendly gesture. I spoke French badly. So I always replied to him in English. This didn't bother him, but neither did it encourage him to speak to me in English. He had the sort of reddish eyes you see in most geese and in some eastern Europeans.
"I'm fine. No chilblains."
Wasn't that what engelure meant?
Heavage was a highly intelligent but fretful man of fifty or so who had never been friendly with me. He was another tie wearer. He was said to be an authority on Aleister Crowley—hard to reconcile this fastidious editor with the lecherous Satanist, but the English sometimes had surprising interests.
Goose eyes twitching, he went through my copy quickly and frowned in approval, making swift printer's marks in ballpoint as he read, and then he said, "I can't remember when anyone has used the word 'crappy' in these pages before."
"Do you want to change it to 'egregious'?"
"No. Crappy will do," he said. But he didn't smile. It was hard to tell whether he was mocking me. Still, he was scrutinizing the review—not reading it, but considering it. "And you're a trifle severe with Mr. Updike."
"I hate allegories."
"I would have said pastiche, but never mind."
Musprat was right, it was a tutorial. No praise, only nitpicking and rather wintry irony.
Shoving the pages into a wire tray on his desk, Heavage said, "We'll run this next week. On your way out, have a trawl through the book
locker. See if there's anything you want to do."
I decided to be blunt. "I'd like to do one big book instead of four small ones for a change."
"I'll keep that in mind," Heavage said. "As you say in America, I'll think it over mentally."
I wanted to hit him. I was sure that he had never had any experience of physical violence, so my slapping his face would be a great shock. In this silence he had leveled his reddish eyes at me, as though he had guessed at my hostility.
"Not many big books in January," he said, flexing his fingers. "Very quiet at the moment, though there will be the usual logjam in the spring. Find yourself a clutch of novels, there's a good chap."
He was saying no to my doing a lead review. So it was another week as a hack. Then he smiled and broke into French, which was my signal that the meeting was at an end.
I found Musprat on his knees, rooting around the book locker.
"Look at this," he said. It was a picture book, Tennyson at Freshwater: The Record of a Friendship. "I bags it."
"I didn't know you were interested in Tennyson."
"I'm not," Musprat said. "But look at the price. Ten quid. I'll just mention it in my roundup and Gaston will give me a fiver for it."
***
It was a beautiful drawing room in a Nash terrace on the Outer Circle, east side, of Regent's Park, and everyone there seemed to be out of place—reviewers, writers, editors, publicists, all drinking wine and watching for the trays of hors d'oeuvres which were carried by waiters and waitresses who were better dressed than most of the guests. I had the impression of people who had just come in off the streets, drifted out of the park, where they had been lurking—they looked damp and grateful and somewhat anxious. I mentioned this to Musprat.
"They're drunk, that's all," he said, and lunged at a woman with a tray of drinks.
While I was searching for someone I knew, a woman materialized next to me. She was almost my height, and white-faced, with an elegant neck—and a pearl and velvet collar around it—and full red lips.
"I know who you are," she said. "But I thought you were much older."