by Paul Theroux
It was the last time I saw him. Lettfish too stopped calling me. And Alison said, "Don't ever do that to me again."
SEVEN
Man Alone
RUPERT MOODY told me the story of Arturo Tripodi, and so I knew there must be something missing in it.
We were in London. He had come over to my house on his bicycle, a rare visitor. He said, "My wife's down in the country. I'd be there myself but I'm fronting a TV program for Julian. Stop looking at me as though I'm a media slut!"
It was late summer, a season I was so unused to in London (I normally spent the summer on Cape Cod) that it seemed like a different city, and another of its lives was revealed. When London dried out in the summer heat and became parched, its surfaces cracked—the brick walls, the stucco façades, the pavements. It was a shabbier city, with a look of exhaustion, the split masonry, the trees heavy with dusty leaves, the grass a blackish green, clumpy and uneven, thick hedges and untrimmed rose bushes leggy and out of hand, needing to be dead-headed. The magnificent flowers of spring and early summer had vanished and gone to seed. There were no blossoms in August, and the days were either clammy and humid or else sunk in harsh, headachey heat with dense, gassy air. In summer the city was overwhelmed by its weather, and with its windows open, noisier. The English seemed self-conscious in the street, looking vulnerable and underdressed, their flesh exposed, either very pale or burned pink.
"My wife and I were supposed to be in Tibet, but this TV program came up," Rupert said. "We'll head for India in October. It's a better month anyway and there's that fantastic puja there at that time, the Kumbh Mela, which is absolutely not to be missed. What are you doing?"
Irritable in the city heat, I was writing a novella, I told him. I had sent Alison and the children to Cape Cod; I was in London alone.
"And what does your little family think of that?"
"I'm not very popular these days."
"I was in Amsterdam last month. People were raving about you. You're big in Holland, you know."
"Someone interviewed Alison recently. She was quoted as saying, 'Even Genius has to do the dishes.'"
"Oh, yes, the death of the artist is the pram in the hall."
"I don't have that problem. It's just that writing seems to be a very antisocial activity. Wouldn't you hate to be married to a writer?"
"My wife writes all the time. She's always scribbling her head off."
But I was thinking about my house, my marriage, and wondering whether I had overstayed my welcome.
"What is this novella you mentioned?"
"I started it in May. The trouble is, it's not portable. I can't leave until I finish it. I like it too much to leave it behind. So I'm here alone until it's done."
It was, I said, about a young American woman, Lauren Slaughter, leading a double life, as a political science researcher by day and a social escort, a glorified call girl, by night. It seemed to me to be the best way of revealing the layers of life in London. This American had penetrated to all levels of English society, from her Brixton bed-sitter and her research institute in St. James's to her luxury flat in Mayfair, where her address, Half Moon Street, would give the story its title.
The grand people who ignored Lauren Slaughter as a lowly and underpaid researcher later hired her through an agency, and as an escort she dined with wealthy oil sheiks. Such a woman was at home everywhere and nowhere, for without a husband she had no status. But she was one of the few people who knew her way through the London labyrinth. Being American helped. Being intelligent and pretty was also crucial. She did not mind being a prostitute—in fact she rather enjoyed it, the glamour of it, the way it balanced her other life. She had no money. She had no conscience.
Rupert said, "My wife met someone exactly like that at a dinner party in Belgravia. 'Are you with Whitey Grutchfield?' 'Oh, is that his name?' the tart said. Sir Stafford Grutchfield."
Moody plied me for more details of Lauren Slaughter. He considered himself an outsider and was always mocking the English, although he was English himself. He liked the lowlife aspects of my story, the obscurity and audacity of the woman, the vicious sex, the money changing hands, the way in which a grand figure—a total mystery in the House of Lords, an enigma to his family and friends—was naked before the eyes of an American popsie who knew all his secrets. These things fascinated me, too. I asked him about Sir Stafford Grutchfield's tart.
'"I just met this bloke tonight—the agency sent me.' My wife had to bite her tongue so she wouldn't laugh and cause an uproar. The Duke of Westminster was there!"
So, as a sort of gift in return for my telling him this story, Moody told me the story of Arturo Tripodi. And he suggested that I might make it a companion piece, as another example of someone who lived in London in complete obscurity and had a secret.
Tripodi lived across Wandsworth Bridge in Fulham, on Musgrave Crescent, facing Eel Brook Common, in a tiny terrace house. Rupert seemed to be suggesting that I make Lauren Slaughter and Arturo Tripodi neighbors in Half Moon Street, off Piccadilly, one person going down in the world, the other moving up. The street would be their only link—that, and their other lives. They might bump into each other on the stairs one day, no more. Yet there would be resonances.
I had read Arturo Tripodi. I had heard that he lived in London, but I associated him with Cairo or Rome. It thrilled me that a great writer, someone I associated with Egypt and Italy, had turned up in a small street across the bridge from my own house. He was an Italian, from a merchant family that had lived in Egypt since the early nineteenth century. He was fluent in Arabic, he also wrote in French. He had a very strong accent. You had the impression, when he spoke, that his English was faulty. And yet he was one of the great prose stylists in English.
"My wife saw him in Paris, on that program Apostrophe. His French is perfect, as you would expect, with a slight Arabic accent. That was how I got so friendly with him. You have to meet him."
"I guess I will, one of these days."
"No, that's why I'm in London. I'm doing a program about him. The talk is that he's on the next honors list for a knighthood. And I have the key to his house!"
"How did you manage that?"
"I needed it for the program. Tripodi's too deaf to hear my knock, and his housekeeper's too lazy to go on answering the door."
It was typical of Rupert to invite himself and me to tea at Arturo Tripodi's house. He said the old man would be glad to see us. And that I had to meet him in person before I saw the TV program. Afterwards, when I had my story—most of it, the essentials, or so I thought—Rupert told me the rest, and I realized that I could not write it down, nor could I assign Arturo Tripodi to a flat in Half Moon Street. I knew his secret, but it had to remain a secret. If I suppressed the secret and the truth about Tripodi ever came out, I would look credulous and naive. Rupert knew that. And so I committed the story to memory, to write about some other day.
Now Arturo Tripodi is dead. So is Rupert Moody. I can tell the story.
The afternoon tea at Tripodi's, in Fulham, was not eventful. The old man was stout, he was deaf, his sight was poor. He wore a heavy pair of eyeglasses, a hearing aid bulging from one of the earpieces. He wore thick-soled shoes, though he clearly did no walking and they looked wrong for his small house. He wore baggy pants, a rumpled jacket, a tie. I doubted that he had dressed up for me. It was a European habit, a tweed jacket and tie on a hot summer afternoon, and this effort made him seem more disreputable than if he had worn rags.
I asked him a question, something about living in London, hoping for a usable reply.
"Rupert knows all the English intellectuals," he said. He had not heard my question. Perhaps he was offering me a compliment.
But "intellectuals" was a word that no one in England used. In English it had an old-fashioned and faintly ridiculous sound. It was a European word—an intellectual was a European, someone who spoke with a strong accent and who dressed like this man, in cheap itchy tweeds, and sat in his jacket
and tie in an overstuffed chair, wearing heavy shoes, among bookshelves. Who smoked a pipe and ate heavy meals, served by a devoted old woman with a mustache.
"There are no English intellectuals," Rupert said.
The old man did not hear that either.
In spite of the heat we drank hot tea, and Tripodi remained in his tweed jacket. There were herbs in the window boxes and pictures on the walls of classical scenes—Piranesi prints, Greek ruins, and in several vases there were dead flowers. I could not tell whether they had simply expired and blackened or else been deliberately dried. Whatever, they gave a funereal effect to the room.
Arturo Tripodi was not an exile but a distinguished foreigner, as renowned for his social commentaries and his historical insights as his gloomy exoticism. In America he would have been required to integrate and become a loyal American. In England such a man was expected to be aloof, and would become famous for his foreignness, for not quite fitting in, as Joseph Conrad had been in his day. Tripodi was well known as part of an un-English elite that included George Steiner and Sir Isaiah Berlin and Elias Canetti, all British passport holders and the sort of citizen aliens I myself might become if I persevered.
Arturo Tripodi was also famous for being penniless. A wise old man with no income, he lived by winning prizes. There were endless literary prizes in England. That was the gift the English gave him—not for work he had published but for work in progress, for his very existence. He knew the judges intimately, yet winning was not dishonest. He deserved the prize money. It was enough to get by on, not enough to make him prosperous. It was niggardly, narrow English patronage, the award coming with a sonorous name. When I saw on his book jackets Winner of the Bowood-Hancock Prize, I was reminded of the royal warrant, By Appointment to HRH the Prince of Wales, on jars of mustard.
Tripodi had published a memoir that he called a novel, a number of essays and commentaries, an analysis of Moorish thought in Spain, a recent piece on the death of Nabokov, a long piece on the artist Balthus, a book about Italo Svevo's novel Senility that was longer than the novel itself. It was felt that he would someday win the Nobel Prize; it was almost certain that soon he would be offered a knighthood—more patronage—and that he would accept. Already he was treated as though he had been ennobled.
The mustached old woman I expected to find was not there. He had made the pot of tea himself, with great care, as though carrying out a tricky chemistry experiment. He served us some stale biscuits. He was alone. In spite of his heavy accent he was known more for his talk than his writing, and better known for his silences than his talk.
Rupert had warned me what to expect before we arrived: "My wife asked, 'So what is the significance of your analysis of solitude?' and he said nothing. He just smiled. Not a word. Fantastic!"
Tripodi was remarked upon for needing no one, for being solitary, for studying it—his history of loneliness. He had been working for many years (Rupert's wife said thirty years) on this book about solitude, Man Alone.
He said little that afternoon. I could not always fill in the gaps of his famous silences. He was almost inert as he sat and drank tea, slurping it.
Whether it was the thick jacket, or the gray cast to his skin that made it opaque, or a shifting light in his eyes, I had the impression that there was someone within him, inside this clothing, this body. He was not attentive, but he seemed preoccupied with that person inside him. Was that what Rupert meant?
"Wait and see," Rupert said.
When the visit was over I was glad to leave, and I knew exactly why as I drew a deep breath of fresh air in the street outside. It was the suffocation of Arturo Tripodi's place, the small room with all the dusty books. And it was the bloodless man himself. I understood for the first time how philistines viewed bookish people—as heartless and unphysical and time-wasting talkers. The talk itself, in that accent, was almost incomprehensible, and so I could scarcely make out what Tripodi was saying. Now I could identify with the simple soul who was antagonized by a pedant. True, the word "intellectual" was seldom used in England, but "pseudo-intellectual" was uttered all the time. Yet I felt that this man who was made entirely of thought, without a heart, was eternal and indestructible.
"I'll tell you all about it," Rupert said.
"When?" But I didn't mean when. I was thinking: Will you tell me everything?
"You're just like my wife!"
Rupert was still doing voice-overs for his program about Tripodi. But he had wanted me to meet the man first, to assess my reaction. I told him what I felt.
Of course Arturo Tripodi was brilliant, I said. But he was all thought. He did not act: a head without a body. I was inspired by his work, but face to face in his airless room I was appalled by the rigid way he sat, by his jacket and tie. His accent was so strong it seemed deliberate and assertive. "No heart" seems like a figure of speech until you meet a man with such a pale face and a huge gray forehead. And he was deaf. He made me feel ignorant and restless and alive.
My reaction delighted Rupert, and very soon after that he invited me to watch the unedited tape of his program.
"There's a clue in it, and it probably won't survive the final edit," Rupert said. "My wife insists that I leave it in."
I met him at the BBC building in Shepherd's Bush. We watched the tape in a studio that had the look of a laboratory and the smell of a stuffy old parlor. There were cigarette butts in used Styrofoam cups on a cloth-covered table, and a glass carafe half filled with cloudy water. How I hated these studios. I knew I could never work in television or radio, because all broadcasting was done in rooms without windows.
"Rolling," Rupert said. He was eager, bright-eyed as always. I recognized the small house. "Establishing shot, for my introduction, or maybe get him talking over the titles."
It was the house in Fulham, the park, Eel Brook Common, Musgrave Crescent, the King's Road in the distance, the camera shortening its gaze and becoming intimate, withdrawing into the room and tracking across bookshelves to the chair where Arturo Tripodi sat.
"Julian called that his 'Fellini sequence.'"
"There is no such thing as a novel anymore," Tripodi said. "It is an obsolete form. Like the sonnet. Like the verse play. How can anyone believe in it?"
"What will take its place?" Rupert's voice, but he remained off camera.
"Isn't he supposed to be deaf?" I asked.
"The questions were written on big pieces of cardboard. We had a girl holding them behind my head."
"What has already taken its place? The work that is nearer to autobiography or memoir. That is why Svevo is so important. His work is more modern than Joyce's. Joyce knew that, which was his motivation for bringing his work to the notice of European intellectuals."
"But surely the so-called memoir is as much of a conceit as the novel."
You could see Tripodi peering forward, his hands to his temples, steadying and directing his glasses as he read this question.
"It is nearer to reality," the old man finally said. "It has more shocks and they are real shocks. Real flesh, real blood."
"What other examples are there of this new form?"
"There is of course my work. But I would prefer to mention the paintings of Francis Bacon. Of course they are not pieces of writing, but they are the best example of the kind of fictions I am describing. How different they are from the formal portrait. People are so solitary when seen from an oblique angle, so defenseless when seen from behind. It is the posture of retreat. The pain, the screams, the flesh, the nausea, the eroticism. The candor."
"But" —Rupert had adopted a teasing tone—"my wife is always saying that Bacon's paintings have been superseded by abstract expressionism."
"Your wife is mistaken. All abstract art is little more than decoration. Any painting that is not figurative has no reality. It is merely design. Mondrian is simply superior linoleum. Albers is wallpaper."
"You sound so certain."
Tripodi hesitated. He leaned forward again and said, "E
xcuse me, how much longer will this take?"
"Just a few more questions."
But this reply was not written down. Tripodi did not hear it. He looked around again.
"Time will tell. Jackson Pollock might be interesting as an example of someone who is in extreme mental crisis, but his paintings have no artistic value."
"I thought we were talking about the novel," Rupert said.
And so the program continued, the old sage unmoving in his chair, his hands grasping his knees. He was alone, like a decrepit pope in an old portrait.
Tripodi lifted one hand and waved it impatiently. This was a sign of life. There was a sudden cut, the tape cartridge had to be changed. A black and white clapperboard swung shut with a crack, Tripodi BBC Arena 16/8/82, and the tape restarted.
"Flaubert never married. He worked. He wrote."
"I'm married and I like to think that I—"
But Tripodi did not hear him. It was a comment, not a question written on a card. Tripodi was still talking.
"Madame Bovary is as modern a novel as it is possible to be. But the house of fiction has many rooms. The novel as we know it is no more than an entertainment, an amusement."
Tripodi went on, speaking in abstractions, and I found myself missing connections as the talking head explained the future of fiction. I realized as I had at his house in Fulham that I was not made for such arguments. I needed something more concrete, or else I was turned into a grunting philistine. Tripodi in this program was an intellectual in full cry.
Rupert said, "I'm losing you, Paul."
"No. It's interesting."
"Your eyes are glazing over, as my wife would say."
"OK. I really don't know what he's talking about."
"Because you take a traditional approach. 'He said, she said. The clouds, the grass, the trees.'"
"I don't write stuff like that."
"I'm teasing you. But don't you realize that this man is describing exactly the sort of book I am trying to write?"