Death by Publication

by J. J. Fiechter

  Mother had returned home to London immediately after the war, and I was delighted to see her. My wartime forays into the big world, into London nightlife, came to an end, and once again I would return home most evenings to take care of Mother. I could see that she was declining. I was terrified to see that, day by day, life was draining from her, and I was afraid to leave her alone. What was more, she had a sixth sense that seemed to alert her each time my work was due to keep me away from London, and she would suffer immediate, frightening attacks of panic.

  As a result I spent as many evenings as possible at home, in a kind of affectionate inertia. I would hold my mother’s hand for hours on end, telling her everything I had done during the day. I doubtless should have been bored to death by my own passivity, and had I been I would surely have reacted. But I did not. To react takes energy, and I had none. I did not rebel against that reclusive existence; I was devoid of desire, stripped completely of the quality of impatience.

  The arrival of spring, of warm days and budding trees, should have roused me from my lethargy, but it did not. My blood was cold. There was no blinding light, no singular pleasure, no mad desire that invaded my being. I surveyed myself calmly, living at the edge of myself, as if I were afraid of finding my true self, of finding out what I really wanted. I sometimes had the impression that I had a Siamese twin living inside me and that I was waiting to hear from him, to find out what he wanted me to do. Actually, I haven’t the faintest notion what I was waiting for, since I did nothing to make it happen. Which, in fact, is what most people do.

  As for my sex life, it was a vast desert. The radiant image of Yasmina, the memory of her caresses, held me prisoner. Other women struck me as hideous and obscene. I found the entire female sex repugnant. In all fairness, I have to say that it was not as though I was fighting off droves of adoring ladies. I was the type whom only his secretary finds appealing. My secretary, the aforementioned Doris, was perfect: diligent, devoted, efficient, and unattractive, which made me feel comfortable with her. Her unprepossessing, rather horsey face had a gentleness that I found touching. There was not the barest hint of emotional entanglement between us; at least, so I had thought until that night when we had both remained in the office to finish up an especially urgent manuscript. In a moment of affection, and to thank her for staying late and helping me, I embraced her as we were saying good night. She misunderstood my hug and held me close, turned her face toward mine, her lips slightly opened in anticipation of the kiss that would surely follow. But instead of Doris’s face beneath me I saw that of my beloved Yasmina, and I was filled with a feeling of revulsion. I pushed her roughly away, and poor Doris burst into tears. I hate tears and will go to almost any lengths to avoid them. I tried to make amends, apologizing for my reaction, which, I assured her, had nothing to do with her. Then I decided to open my heart to her, and told her the story of my long-lost love, my Yasmina, who had made it impossible for me ever to love another woman. Did she believe me? I am not sure, but the fact is Doris has remained devoted to me to this day.

  That same evening, by a strange twist of fate, I took home with me a Greek midshipman whose ship happened to be in port, a young chap I had picked up in a Soho pub. Even as I write these lines, I am amazed that I can do so with such detachment. Nor is my memory playing tricks on me. I was not drunk, and each minute of that night will remain forever engraved in my body as well as my mind.

  I am not making any excuses for my conduct, nor do I think I need to. Whenever I look into the mirror of my conscience, I feel not the slightest twinge of shame. After all, does it really matter whether one goes with a man or a woman? To make love without love always ends with a similar feeling of dissatisfaction and, indeed, disgust when it’s over. I had to do something to exorcise the ghost of Yasmina from my life. In my memory of the evening the Greek sailor was a genderless creature, a partner, a simple prolongation of my solitary fantasies. But whenever I think of Nicolas, I cannot help’ comparing the exhilarating tumult of his sex life with the absurdity of my own. And whenever I think back to Nicolas’s own past, I remember with unbridled hatred the enormous crime, the dire act, for which he bears full responsibility.

  During the time I was picking up one Greek sailor after another and publishing other people’s manuscripts, Nicolas was crisscrossing the world, writing up a storm and breaking hearts.

  His parents had been killed in an automobile accident in 1945, leaving him well off. After leaving the service, Nicolas had taken the competitive examinations for entrance into the school for future diplomats and passed them brilliantly. Perhaps he had chosen that path in memory of or in deference to his father; more likely it was his thirst for adventure and travel that had motivated him. I like to think that if he emerged from his studies near the top of the class it was because the Foreign Office, rebuilding its image and staff after the war, was looking to recruit those whose wartime activities were beyond reproach. The jury whose job it was to evaluate the graduating class was, I am told, especially lenient toward this war hero because of his “exceptional services in the cause of Liberation.” Personally, I refuse to believe that the high marks he received were based on merit alone.

  His first diplomatic post disappointed him greatly. Hoping for high adventure, he landed in a country whose landscape was as flat as its challenges: Belgium. Nonetheless, instead of yielding to boredom and the Wallony mists he put the time to good use by writing his wartime memoirs, reconstituting in exquisite detail the fog-shrouded atmosphere of the British airfields. Like so many veterans, he felt the overriding need to recount the war as he had lived it. Whenever he got bogged down in the writing, he fled to Paris in search of the ideal publisher for his work, which he had tentatively entitled Cross-Channel Memoirs. For the most part he was getting a rather chilly reception. The last thing the French wanted to read about in those early postwar days were stories about exemplary deaths.

  But Nicolas was not a man to give up easily. Whether the public liked it or not—or rather, despite what the publishers thought—he intended to write about those young men who had given their lives for freedom.

  One day the phone rang, and my secretary said that Mr. Fabry was on the line.

  “Edward,” he said, and I could tell he was calling to announce good news—that is, good news for himself. “I’ve found a publisher for my first book. He tells me he loves the manuscript, but I know better. He’s a cagey old fellow, but I can see right through him. He doesn’t like my subject any better than the other publishers I’ve submitted it to, and he knows the marketplace isn’t ready for it. But what he sees is a bright new title, a new name to add to his stable.”

  So there it was! Nicolas was going to be a published author. And from his words—“I’ve found a publisher for my first book”—it was evident that he planned to write others.

  And indeed he did. His second book, The Great Ball, was a fiasco. Which didn’t deter Nicolas, who went on to write a third; Guanamoroso, which was published a year later, won one of the more prestigious literary prizes that year, and earned him the jealousy of his fellow diplomats. Nicolas was on his way. A small name, but a name nonetheless. His passage from anonymity to relative fame struck him as perfectly normal, for he was convinced that he was a genius. When I think that Balzac complained of his mediocrity, that he kept telling everyone that he lacked talent and the inspiration to go with it! But self-doubt was a quality Nicolas lacked.

  It goes without saying that I became Nicolas’s English publisher. Not only that, but the translator of his masterpieces. I could have left well enough alone and simply translated them, but no, I had to do more, much more than that, I had to fiddle with them, improve on them, for in some curious way I considered myself the real author of these works. I was convinced that by some strange magic Nicolas had tapped into my soul and turned to his advantage the rich vein of creativity buried within me. I discovered in his works harmonics that were mine and mine alone, though stifled and suppressed, deformed and denat
ured by his mediocre interpretation. I was the composer, Nicolas nothing more than the interpreter of my music, and a clumsy one at that. So as I had done so many years before in Alexandria, reworking and rewriting his abominable short story, I took his raw manuscript and made it better. I blue-penciled his endless redundancies, I gave his vague ideas substance, I replaced his clichés and platitudes with phrases that had bite and flavor. I took his skeletons and gave them flesh, for his plots of passionate love and high adventure, with inevitably exotic backgrounds, were as thin as ice in September. All the characters were distressingly alike, papier-mâché creatures devoid of flesh and blood; and at the center of every plot was the all-conquering Don Juan himself.

  Never in any of the novels was there a sense of commitment, an effort to deal with a serious problem. As in his novels, so in his life. A smattering of ideas and desires waiting to be fulfilled in his life, to be rendered cogent in his writing. To him tragedy was anathema. Misfortune and suffering turned him off immediately. He operated on helium—anything lighter than air—and when he couldn’t figure where to go next in his tale, he’d head for the heavens. He merely sketched in his characters, filled in his settings in broad strokes. My role was to come behind, fill in the blanks, turn the sketch into a finished painting.

  An unfulfilling role? Perhaps, but I have to say I took a certain albeit dubious pleasure in playing that part. The world may not have known, but I knew that Nicolas’s success in Great Britain, and indeed in the English-speaking world, was my work. Nicolas owed me that glory. And because the novels were not signed by me, because they bore the name of Nicolas Fabry, all my creative inhibitions disappeared, and I felt free to exercise my “talents” to the fullest.

  Never once did Nicolas mention the work I put in on his novels, never once did he even allude to the changes. He seemed completely unaware of these “translations.”

  He was handsome, wealthy, and elegant. He was a diplomat. And with literary fame added to the mix, Nicolas was fast becoming a celebrity. From his post in Belgium he had been transferred to Ankara, where word of his fame and good looks had preceded him, so that he was in constant demand at every embassy in the city. Women fought for the privilege of being seen in his company, yielding to his seductive charms without exception: those of previously impeccable virtue as much as those known to be coquettes, princesses as much as commoners. He mistreated them? They kissed his hand. He threw them over? They came crawling back.

  He explained his conduct by saying that he needed “to spend his life between his ladies’ legs” to keep his equilibrium, to maintain his mental center of gravity. He went on to say that he did his best to concentrate his affairs of the heart on chance encounters. Simple Is Best was his motto. He especially enjoyed natural, spontaneous liaisons. And here in Ankara, his preference ran to non-French-speaking partners, where the lack of a common language filtered out everything but the essential, so that only what he called “an exchange of elementary feelings” seeped through. He took as his own Victor Hugo’s pregnant sentences: “I look upon women as Vauban looking upon fortresses. They are there to be taken. The only question is how much time you should spend on each.”

  “There’s not a grain of ethnology in my makeup,” Nicolas used to say, “but there dwells within me an insatiable curiosity about all forms of life, about every sensibility. I do not believe that my endless quest for the various wellsprings of human nature can be equated with Don Juanism. It’s a veritable passion, almost vampirism. And in these prophylactic liaisons—sorry for the pun, old boy!—I am constantly discovering treasures that by their tenderness, the confidence they engender, the generosity they reveal, are simply shattering. What I can offer in return is pitiable in comparison.”

  Having opted to live in the temporary, to savor the provisional, Nicolas had learned to love only the present moment, not just the day but the hour, the very minute, of pleasure enjoyed. For him it was infinite happiness. Therein perhaps lay the true reason for his apparently insatiable need to conquer.

  He went on plucking women the way most people pluck grapes from a vine, until the day he fell in love, however incredible that may seem. He was then in Canada, where he was first secretary at the French embassy, and from all reports he loved everything about the country: the vast stretches of open, still unsettled country; the searing heat of summer; the bone-chilling cold of winter; the “hilarious accent,” as Nicolas described it, of the French Canadians. He wrote me lyrical, wildly enthusiastic letters about the place. He was, in short, a happy man.

  When Anne came into his life—at approximately page six of his Canadian adventure, the way heroines of pulp-fiction novels appear—he suddenly realized for the first time “how empty and sterile his life up till then had been.” To quote one of his letters: “My earlier life, my dear Edward, has been nothing but one long yawn.” He had never known what it was to feel this way, and he plunged headlong, but with eyes presumably open, into the sublime adventure commonly known as monogamy.

  Anne Delariviere had been sent to the French embassy to get some information about pursuing her studies in France. She was studying psychology, and after receiving her undergraduate degree in Canada had been awarded a fellowship to obtain the equivalent of a master’s degree in France. The orderly on duty had sent her to see the cultural attaché, and as chance would have it his door was closed, so she took the liberty of going to the office next door, which happened to be Nicolas’s.

  At first sight—to coin a phrase—Nicolas fell, hook, line, and sinker. For the first time he glimpsed the pit of passion into which he had so often managed to avoid falling. Anne fell just as hard, as had all her many predecessors. . . . Three months later she was pregnant. It was at this period that I met her for the first time, during one of their lightning visits to London, and I too immediately fell under her spell.

  To say she was beautiful was an understatement. Her long, flowing blond tresses framed a finely sculpted, alabaster face in which were set two enormous sapphire eyes. So white was her skin, in fact, that one could follow every inch of the delicate maze of her veins. When she smiled, it was as if the sun had just shone through a bank of clouds. Her legs were long and lithe, and the firm roundness of her bust was irresistible; no matter how one tried, one’s eyes would inevitably be drawn to it.

  The woman was luminous—no other word will do—she shone like one of those opaline lamps that used to grace my grandmother’s Victorian living room.

  I couldn’t refrain from thinking that never would such a sublime creature as this fall in love with me. Never. Me the graceless, charmless, talentless one, the Mr. Nobody who, with my thirtieth year staring me in the face, was beginning to go bald! Me, Mr. Boring himself, the obscure pen-pusher whose task in this world was to correct the spelling and syntax of others. No, there would be no Anne Delariviere in my life. I had had my brief moment of happiness with Yasmina. Now it was over. My opportunity was dead and gone. Murdered. Cast out. Buried. And I was jealous of Nicolas as I watched him gaze lovingly and in wonder at his wife’s belly, as if he could see through her, as if the shape of their future child was visible to him.

  The birth a few weeks later of their son, Pierre-Yves-Dominique, later to be known as Peter, was, according to Nicolas, “the most important moment of his life.” I became the child’s godfather, and I went to Montreal for the christening. My mother had died only a short while before, leaving me distressed and forlorn, thinking of all the things I could have done as a son to better her lot, but also leaving me free at long last of her confining presence.

  Anne struck me as changed. Radically changed. She was pale, her former glowing health dimmed. She looked dull, almost tarnished, far from the radiant, blossoming new mother. It took me only two days to figure out why: Nicolas was stifling her by slow degrees. When you got right down to it, for Nicolas this superb beauty was no more than a mound of clay that he was intent on shaping as he saw fit, to squeeze into the mold of his own whims and caprices. Anne Delarivie
re should above all be Mrs. Fabry, the meek servant of a despotic master.

  In taking care of her, Nicolas was taking care of himself, his comfort, his image. He wanted people to admire her so that they would in effect be admiring him. He wanted her to be cultured, so that her savoir-faire would redound to his advantage.

  He dressed her in accordance with his own tastes, according to his own image, the only image he had ever truly loved. And before long she lost that wonderful smile as she began to let herself go, turned her back on her own personality, abdicated to her husband’s desires.

  “He doesn’t let me breathe,” she confided to me one day.

  And yet, even as he continued to proclaim to the rooftops how madly in love with her he was, to play with words, he was at the same time playing the fool to try and conceal the true emptiness of that love, that public display of mad passion. Before long Nicolas began to stay away for long stretches, and when he was in town he would often come home late in the evening. He was adept at inventing sudden rendezvous—some in far-off places. In short, barely six months after the birth of their son, Nicolas was back at his old habits, reverting to the insatiable satyr he doubtless was at heart. When Anne began to make scenes, he made fun of her, called her stubborn, possessive, and infantile, argued that she left no room for sharing, whereas he, despite his love for her, was undemanding. Love, he explained, did not imply exclusivity.

  When it became clear that Nicolas intended to live by his words, Anne informed him that she had no intention of joining him after he had been appointed to a diplomatic post in Africa. Nicolas informed her that she could do as she liked, but she should know that he intended to take Peter with him. Anne filed for divorce.