A Closed Book

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘Would you like a second semi-colon? Between “Firbank” and “nor”?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I want a semi-colon.’

  ‘So how should I punctuate it?’

  ‘I said nothing and nothing is what I want. No semi-colon, no colon, no comma. Is that understood?’

  ‘Paul, have I –’

  ‘I’m going on. “Take my own case. I am blind. Not only am I blind, I have no eyes. Hence –”’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Well, only that – well, I just thought I ought to point out that the very first sentence you ever dictated to me for the book was “I am blind”.’

  ‘And? In your opinion, and?’

  ‘It’s the repetition, that’s all. You’re usually so strict about repetition. I just wondered if you’d noticed? Or maybe you’d forgotten?’

  ‘You were wondering if I’d noticed I was blind? If I’d forgotten I was blind? Is that what you were wondering?’

  *

  ‘Answer me. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘You know that’s not what I’m saying.’

  ‘I know nothing of the kind.’

  ‘All I said was that you were repeating yourself. I may not be much of a literary critic, but I simply felt I should point out the repetition. That’s all.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘You’re not much of a literary critic.’

  *

  ‘How dare you. How dare you offer me advice on how I should or shouldn’t write my book. How dare you “remind” me – me! – that I’m repeating myself. Repeating myself? As though repetition, premeditated repetition, were not one of the most venerable stylistic tropes to which a writer may have recourse. “My love is like a red, red rose” – get rid of that second “red”, Rabbie Burns, you rank amateur you, you piddling mediocrity, can’t you see you’re repeating yourself! You forget yourself, Ryder. Frankly, I don’t know what mail-order course in creative writing you once subscribed to, but I’m not about to be given a lesson in the nuances and niceties of literary style by a second-hand car salesman.’

  ‘By a what?’

  ‘Or whatever you are. Can you really suppose that your opinion of my prose matters a jot to me? I shall write “I am blind” as often as I think fit. And you will type it out on that infernal machine of yours and keep your night-class insights to yourself.’

  ‘Very well. Very well, I’ll do that.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But, before I do – before I do – I’m going to make one last comment.’

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘In my opinion, you make too much of your eyes.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You make too much of your eyes. What you call your eyelessness. In the book – and, when I think of it, in person, too.’

  ‘Now just –’

  ‘What I’m about to say, and I know you won’t agree with it, and I also know it’s going to sound smug and sanctimonious, but what I’m about to say I believe I’m saying for your own good. And if it means you decide to dismiss me on the spot, well, so be it. I’ll have said what I thought, and I won’t regret it. You make too much of your eyes, Paul. You make too many self-deprecating little witticisms about your blindness. Too many puns, too many jokes. Yeah, yeah, at first it’s all very impressive, this ability you have to shrug off your own predicament. You think, my God, if I had his problems, could I be that brave? But I have to tell you, Paul, it wears off. Christ, does it wear off! It becomes tiresome and mechanical and you begin to dread the next little wink and the next little eye-joke and you begin to think it would be better if he actually did whinge. That at least would be, I don’t know, it would be sane. Healthy. Human.’

  *

  ‘There. That’s all I wanted to say. The ball’s back in your court.’

  ‘I’m going on. Ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘“Take my own case. I am blind. Not only am I blind, I have no eyes. Hence any insight” – dash – “an odd word in the circumstances” – dash – “that I might offer my readers into the writer’s condition and vocation cannot but be influenced by that flatly terrifying fact. And, plunged as I am in the endless nocturnality” – n, o, c, t, u, r, n, a, l, i, t, y – “which my life has become, I have had time to reflect a great deal on the strangely intimate correspondence that exists between blindness and fiction.” Full stop.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘“For one day” – dash – “indeed, this very day, the day on which I am writing, or rather dictating, the passage that you, the reader, are reading” – dash – “one day –”’

  ‘I assume the repetition of “one day” is deliberate?’

  ‘“One day it struck me that the blind man gains access to the world around him exactly as the reader of a novel gains access to the imaginative world conjured up by the writer.” Full stop. “Which is to say, essentially through dialogue and description.” Italicize “essentially through dialogue and description”.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘“Consider.” Full stop. “The reader can know nothing of the milieu in which a novel is set except for that rigidly restricted zone, that prescribed and proscribed precinct” – that’s “p – r – e -scribed” followed by “p – r – o -scribed” followed by “p – r – e -cinct”.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘“That prescribed and proscribed precinct, that codified plot of fictional terrain, of which the writer deigns to apprise him. If the writer, who may have his own good reasons, elects to leave the outward aspect of his settings or characters sketchy in the extreme, then that is all the reader is ever destined to know of them. He cannot peek over the tops of the words on the page, as he might endeavour to peek over the bobbing heads of a crowd of sightseers goggling at a passing parade, in order to get a better view of the world beyond them, for there is of course no world beyond.” New paragraph. “Similarly with dialogue. It is above all, perhaps, through exchanges of dialogue that the reader comes to know the characters in a work of fiction. Only if the author elects to assume a first-person voice in his own narrative, by the device of an interior monologue, is that same reader granted privileged access to the intimate mindset, to the moods and motivations, of any one character.” Read those last two sentences back to me, please.’

  ‘“It is above all, perhaps, through exchanges of dialogue that the reader comes to know the characters in a work of fiction. Only if the author elects to assume a first-person voice in his own narrative, by the device of an interior monologue, is that same reader granted privileged access to the intimate mindset, to the moods and motivations, of any one character.”’

  ‘New paragraph. “Consider, now, the blind man. Like the reader of a novel, he, too, if he is ever to gain a meaningful purchase on the otherwise inaccessible world around him, will find himself totally dependent upon the two most prominent stylistic parameters of the traditional novelistic discourse” – dash – “description and dialogue. By description, I mean the running commentary offered the blind man by some real-life narrator, some companion, perhaps, either paid or unpaid, who takes his arm, figuratively but also literally, and whose role is to describe to him the shifting spectacle of the external world just as a commentator might describe the progress of a cricket match on the wireless. And, by dialogue, I refer to the fact that, as with the reader of conventional fiction, it is primarily by virtue of what they have to say, either to him or to each other, that the blind man understands the psychology of those in with whom” – yes, “in with whom” – “he has thrown his social and emotional lot.” End of paragraph.’

  *

  ‘Are you still with me, John?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘For a while there it seemed to me you’d stopped typing.’

  ‘I’ve been typing throughout.’

  ‘Good. Then I’ll go on. Did I say a new paragraph?’

  �
��Yes, you did.’

  ‘“Both reader and blind man, then, rely absolutely on the accuracy and sincerity” – emphasize “sincerity”.’

  *

  ‘Do you mean italicize it?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I’m going on. “The accuracy and sincerity of the information communicated to them by, respectively, the writer and the paid companion. If, however, either said writer or said paid companion should prove to be less than wholly reliable, then they are both of them, reader and blind man, marooned in the dark.”

  *

  ‘John?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You are getting this, are you?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Go on.’

  ‘I must be going deaf. Or else you’ve become an extraordinarily discreet typist.’

  *

  ‘Very well, I’m going on. “The issue is by no means a purely theoretical one, of interest solely to critics and scholars. Bizarre paradox as it may appear, a writer is capable of lying” – emphasize “lying” – “a writer is capable of lying in a work of fiction” – colon – “the examples are legion, notably in the current postmodern era. Here, however, my analogy with the condition of the blind man breaks down, or so at least one trusts. Certainly, it would be hard – it would be hard – it would be very hard – to conceive of the imaginary companion whom I have described above deliberately choosing to lie” – emphasize “lie” – deliberately choosing to lie to a blind man about the realities of the world which he is supposed, and has doubtless been handsomely paid, to describe. What would one think of a –”’

  *

  ‘Now, John, you really aren’t taking any of this down. I can hear. I mean, I can’t hear. I can’t hear any typing at all.’

  *

  ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your finger?’

  *

  ‘You can be surprisingly unsubtle, you know, Paul.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘I mean to say, for a great writer, Booker Prizewinner, Grand Old Man of English Letters, all that crap, your methods are sometimes amazingly crude.’

  ‘You, John Ryder, are a crude antagonist.’

  *

  ‘May I ask why you’re laughing?’

  ‘I’m laughing because I’ve finally found the perfect title for your book. Blind Man’s Bluff. Don’t suppose you’d care for it, though. Sounds too much like a Jeffrey Archer.’

  ‘You’re a cool one, I must say.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes, you’re a cool bastard.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘What I’ve just dictated to you? It never occurred to you that it might represent my considered reflections on certain general principles of literary theory and practice?’

  ‘No, it didn’t.’

  ‘No, it didn’t. You immediately, immediately, presumed it had to do with the – with the – the palpable tension between us. Not only that. Without further proof, without a shred of corroborating evidence, you instantly exposed your own hand. Yes, I call that cool.’

  ‘Why waste time?’

  ‘You could have been giving yourself away prematurely.’

  ‘I knew I wasn’t giving anything away. I know you too well. Though, just out of curiosity, Paul, who or what tipped you off?’

  ‘I spoke to Andrew.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Andrew Boles. My agent. I rang him up while you were in Chipping Campden.’

  ‘Aha. I see. And he –’

  ‘I naturally enquired about his trip around the world.’

  ‘I see. I see. Now that was foolish of me. I just didn’t imagine you were capable of using the phone. So you told him about me, did you?’

  ‘Actually, no. I didn’t. I could have, but for some reason I didn’t. Probably because I had – and I still have – no idea what this is all about.’

  ‘The word is “should”, Paul, not “could”.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should have told him about me, you really should. Funny. I feel almost sorry for you.’

  ‘Oh, and why?’

  ‘Because now it’s too late for you to do anything at all.’

  *

  ‘Who are you, John Ryder?’

  ‘Who am I? Aha. That’s a question I’ve been waiting a month to hear you ask me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No?’

  *

  ‘Or maybe I do. Maybe I am starting to understand.’

  *

  ‘You are someone, aren’t you?’

  *

  ‘I mean, you’re someone I know?’

  *

  ‘Someone I’ve known a lot longer than a month?’

  *

  ‘Well? Aren’t you?’

  *

  ‘Answer me, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Yes, Paul, I’m someone you know.’

  ‘Someone I know. Or someone I used to know?’

  ‘It’s a small world, Paul. Especially if you’re blind.’

  *

  ‘All right. All right now. I’m determined to stay perfectly calm. I may be blind, but I can still think and I can still talk. We can talk, can’t we?’

  *

  ‘Yes. Yes, all right, John. There’s something going on here I don’t fully grasp. But what I suspect – well, what I suspect is that you’re someone with a grievance against me? Am I right?’

  *

  ‘If that’s the case, if that is the case, John, then we can talk about it. We can always talk about it. You can tell me what – what I did, if it was something I did, and we can talk about it, can’t we? John?’

  *

  ‘Say something! Anything!’

  *

  ‘Yes, Paul. We’re going to talk about it. Or rather, I’m going to talk about it and you’re going to sit and listen.’

  ‘I’d rather stand if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You’ll fucking sit. Sit down or I’ll throw you down!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t! Just to shut you up I would!’

  *

  ‘That’s it. Now. Now. Now, Paul, you’re going to listen to me for a change.’

  *

  ‘You know, Paul, you’re unbelievable. I just can’t believe what I’ve had to take from you this past month. “Make yourself at home, John.” “Don’t forget the semi-colon, John.” “Why didn’t you laugh at my little joke, John?” “We’ll be having cocktails at seven, John.” Just who the fuck do you think you are?’

  ‘Must you use that language?’

  ‘Shut up! I can’t fucking bear the sound of your voice! You say another fucking word, so help me, I’ll stick my fist right down your fucking throat!’

  *

  ‘Good. Now I’m going to tell you a story – my story, for a change – and if you’re willing to sit and listen to it without interrupting me, I’ll try not to use too many of these nasty four-letter words you’re so squeamish about all of a sudden. Okay?’

  *

  ‘A little while ago, Paul, when you lost your temper with me, you said – and I quote – “You forget yourself.” Well, now it’s my turn to make a little joke, because you couldn’t have got it more hopelessly wrong. No, Paul. I didn’t forget myself. I remembered myself. I remembered myself at the age of eleven. Do you by any chance remember me at the age of eleven?’

  *

  ‘No need to start racking those great big bulging brains of yours. I mean to remind you.’

  *

  ‘So. I was eleven. Eleven years old. An ordinary schoolkid. Well, no, it’s true, not an ordinary schoolkid. I was in a special school, a school for difficult children, violent children, the sort no other school, no “nice” school, wanted to know about. A school for kids who’d been expelled from everywhere else.’

  *

  ‘Though I must say in all fairness it wasn’t a bad school in its way. It had a football pitch, a rugby pitch, indoor swimming-pool, lots of nice big dormitories. Just outside Chichester. Aha!
Is it starting to come back?’

  ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Why, Paul, you do remember me. Or do you? Maybe there were just too many of us for you to remember one particular boy? Especially because it was all so long ago, twenty-two years ago. Imagine, Paul, twenty-two years. Makes you think, doesn’t it? You weren’t a world-famous author in those days, were you? Just a couple of novels no one had paid any attention to. Am I right?’

  *

  ‘Yes, just another poor underpaid schoolmaster. English and physical education. How many boys were you responsible for? Thirty? Forty? We should hold a class reunion one of these days, me and the boys. Talk over old times.’

  *

  ‘But, you know, Paul, I still can’t help flattering myself I was your special favourite. “My little cherub”, you used to call me, “my little angel-face”. Teacher’s pet, that was me. Teacher’s little pet that teacher liked to stroke and cuddle and fondle and kiss, remember? Do you remember, Paul?’

  ‘Oh God, stop it, will you! Stop it!’

  ‘Hah! It is a small world. You know why I say that, Paul? You know why? Because those were the exact same words I screamed out all those years ago. “Stop it, will you! Stop it!” I can still hear myself, I can still hear those screams bouncing against the walls of the gym. But no one else could hear me, could they? Just as no one else can hear you now.’

  *

  ‘Remember, Paul? Remember what you liked best?’

  *

  ‘You liked to pull your cock out, remember? Do you? And then you’d take hold of my two hands, my two little hands –’