“Not at all. He was perfectly correct. It does happen.”
“And that the reason you attend all these conferences in Rangoon and Riga is to . . .”
“No, that is not true,” he said. “I can see why your mysterious informant would so believe but he is incorrect. I attend these deadly conferences because I want to help; I want to influence a bit; I want to do what I can.”
“Through congresses of intellectuals?”
“Precisely.”
I looked at him standing there, his white mane glowing, brave, the poet on the battlefield.
“But,” he said, “what am I to do about Osamu?”
“Don’t do anything,” I said, but I saw his dilemma. He was a man walking on eggs and complaining that he was crushing them. “Stephen,” I said warmly, “You ought to stay in Japan. It was made for you.”
“Do be serious. What am I to do? I refuse to hurt.”
The blazing blue eyes, the halo of hair, the long neck rising from the open collar. And now I saw the resemblance so clear that I was surprised I had been blind to it—the poet Shelley.
w. somerset maugham, 1959. A very old man, neck corded, skin leathery and wrinkled, a nose like a beak, sunken eyes that seemed to be gazing at the distant past. He has already outlived nearly everyone—born a year before Ravel, five years older than Klee, eight when Joyce was born.
“There we are,” he says, having managed the stretch of parquet in his slippers, settled into a chair, handling himself with care the way that old men do, knowing they are breakable. “There, we h-h-have c-c-come b-b-back.”
The stutter is initially surprising. He is so very old, and stuttering is an affliction of the young. Even more adolescent seeming is that he has apparently never accustomed himself to it. It still retains, after all these decades, the power to disturb. He remains embarrassed by it.
He turns away when he speaks. “I suppose you two are off to paint the town red,” he says, stuttering.
His secretary turns to me, “He always says that. I am allowed out once every three weeks. It is always the same. I am forever painting towns red.”
“Alan,” says Maugham, “Don’t mumble. You know perfectly well that I am hard of hearing. And yet you mumble.”
“It is because you are hard of hearing, that I mumble,” says Alan in a louder voice, “I was saying something I did not want you to hear. That is why I mumbled.”
Maugham snorts, offended I thought but, it appears, amused. “There,” he says, “You hear that?” And he snorts, a chuckle deeply hidden, almost inaudible, sunken amid the years.
“Does he dislike being alone?” I ask, lowering my voice, wondering if third-person references were usual.
“Loathes it, hates it. Either stays up until I come back to berate me, or takes double his usual dose and goes straight off, to punish me.”
“Not very entertaining, I must say,” says Maugham, “you two mumbling away there.” But he is not irritated. When I look at him he is gazing at the opposite wall as though he had not spoken at all.
The telephone rings. This he has heard, looks apprehensive.
Alan reappears, “It was Life, wanted your impressions of Japan, said you could name your own price.”
“Refuse,” said Maugham, and his mouth shuts like a beak.
“I already have,” says Alan.
“My impressions of Japan,” he then says. “I don’t have any, shut up here like this. Oh, I was here once before though. So young. I walked in the park. Some good-looking people, some awful policemen. But Japan was even then too neat for me. I like places with a bit of mess, you see.” He sighs. “And now it is quite horrid. They will never leave one alone. I do believe that that young lady is still outside the door. Do look, Alan. Are you certain she has actually gone? Well, she was there. For hours. Waiting, dumbly. An autograph did not satisfy her. She wanted to talk about souls, it appeared. Though she was not, I believe, Christian and it is they, I believe, who have the monopoly in that commodity.” Again the hidden chuckle, the snort of amusement, like a sigh, or a snore.
I say that he is indeed famous in Japan. Perhaps more famous than Shakespeare.
“It would be disarming, I dare say, for me to appear surprised at that information but, actually, my publishers keep me well informed. As they ought, given the amount they make off me.” The telephone rings.
Alan returns. “Do you think the Emperor would ring him up?”
I say that I doubt it.
“Then I must have got it wrong. Someone official, however.”
“Refuse,” says Maugham, perhaps misunderstanding.
Conversation is difficult. Alan keeps fidgeting yet makes no attempt to leave. Maugham continues to look at the wall. Then, as though speaking to it, “I was here before, years ago. No,” as though in answer to a question, “I wrote nothing about the country. It was all so long ago. I don’t remember it really. Well, yes, the Imperial Hotel here. And the park across the street. I used to walk there. But nothing else. Change, change. Heavens. Neither of you were born back then.” And the chuckle, but perhaps it is not a meaningful sound, perhaps something to do with his impediment, or perhaps digestion.
Conversation probably would in any event have been difficult. I had been told there were two topics not to be even brushed against. Sex and death. He was too far from one and too near the other. Their absence indeed limits talk.
Yet, during dinner at the grill, he himself seems to skirt them. He lays down his salad fork and addressing no one, or everyone in the restaurant, he says, “So strange. I have, you know, this neighbor at Cap Ferrat.”
“Jean Cocteau,” supplies Alan.
“And I don’t know if you have seen them but in his youth he did a number of drawings, sailors mostly, sleeping mostly. And now he has in his old age done this chapel there. And in it he has drawn angels. There they are—angels, needing only wings and halos. But as you look you see—why, it is those sailors again, the very ones. And here they are, probably all dead by now, and he has made them angels—as they were, you see. The very ones.” Silence, then, “He is getting old.” Then, for the first time, he laughs.
Finally Alan says, “Well, we ought to be cracking.”
“What did you say?” asks Maugham.
“That we should be going.”
“Oh, really,” he says and slowly rises from his chair. Polite, gentlemanly, he holds out his long, wide hand. “You have been so very kind,” he says. Then he turns to Alan and holds out his hand until he recognizes him. Snatching it back, he says, “And you are not to be late. Do you hear. Not. Late.” Then, again turning to me, he chuckles, and waves a long, old finger. “You take care of him, but don’t let him stay out too late. He likes to do that you see, from time to time, stay out late at night.”
We walk to the door. I turn and watch him slowly settle himself into his chair again, arranging his legs with his hands. His head nods. He seems to be chuckling to himself. But his gaze is fixed, unseeing.
Still, he hears our leaving. As the door is closing I hear him call in a voice surprisingly strong, “G-g-good n-n-night.”
igor stravinsky, 1959. At the Kabuki he sat very still, his glasses reflecting the light from the stage, behind them his eyes alert, his hands folded in front of him, the rings on his fingers shining in the dark. With his small, compact body, his large, sleek head, and his big folded hands he looked like a cat—a cat intently staring, a cat about to jump.
We were seeing Kanjincho and Benkei was beating Yoshitsune. Stravinsky sat in his seat as though poised for a leap, and then one finger loosened itself from the others and began to tap.
As the play ended, the clappers sounding, and the great striped curtain pulled across the stage, the cat pounced. “Oh, I had no idea it was like this. I had no idea.” He beamed, looking from his wife, Vera, to Robert Craft. “Oh, the rhythm, the rhythm was fantastic. Fantastic. And, oh, the tempo.” He turned to me suddenly, “They are not the same, you know, rhythm and tempo.�
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In the interval he continued, “I do not understand. I conduct Petrouchka here and they are all right, good rhythm. But, tempo? No, no idea. And yet here! Ouf! Fantastic, incredible.”
“And the way they sang!” said Craft. Stravinsky nodded enthusiastically, “That is the way to sing Renaissance madrigals. In fact that is the way they originally sang them. No bel canto. Straight from the throat.”
“And the colors,” said Vera. “Oh, the colors!”
“Oh, we must hear more, more, more,” said Stravinsky, leaning forward in his chair.
Unfailingly curious, Stravinsky. In Kanda, looking at books and prints, “What is that? What are they doing? What does that mean?” He looked with quick, appraising glances, as though he could thus extract meaning. “Ah, look at that. See, look at this.” As soon as he learned something he explained it at once (over again) to Robert and Vera.
He was shown some shunga prints. There was silence and then, “What is that?” Then, “Ah, so?” Then, “But the Japanese they are not really so large.” I said I thought they were probably not. When he found that reality was not reflected he abruptly lost interest. “OK, perhaps. Because not sexy. More like medical drawings. But inaccurate.”
He wanted to know where the prices were. They were on the back. “Look, each of the dirty pictures cost so much. And the others are much cheaper. You would think it the other way around. More dirty, more cheap.”
He shortly discovered the very cheap, a pile at one of the tables. This he turned completely over and riffled through the prints until he had located the two least expensive, both scenes of the Russo-Japanese war. These he bought.
Among the books, attempting to decide between four early European travel books and an expensive four-volume encyclopedia in Russian, he suddenly pounced.
“Ah-hah,” he cried, clutching a copy of his own Poetique Musicale in Japanese, the title alone in French. “This is it, yes, this is it, the culprit book. There, it says so here, in English, shameless David-sha. Famous. I know all about this. Not one cent. They never paid me one cent. They paid nothing. Villain David-sha. And we could do nothing. Nothing.”
I explained that David Publishing had gone bankrupt and that was perhaps the reason they had not paid. “Oh, no. They would not have. They would have taken. Here, this I will buy. How much, how much? They ought to give it to me.”
Economy, an unwillingness to waste—heard in the music, seen in the man. I told him about the singing insects of Japan, sold in small bamboo cages in July and August. “Oh, I will come in July and August, again.” One of them, I mentioned, sang only two notes. “Two notes,” he said, as though in reverence. “Imagine. Two notes.” Then, “How wonderful, a long piece in two notes. Long, very long.” Then, remembering, “Oh, I wrote a piece about one of them, but it was short, and it used many more than two notes.”
With this reference to the Three Japanese Lyrics he next wondered why the Japanese did not make more of this work. I told him that the Japanese tend to regard things Westerners do using their materials as, well, quaint. He nodded soberly. “That is Russian of them. Very Russian.”
Later Craft told me of another example of Russian economy. Stravinsky was writing away, the Movements for Piano and Orchestra, and turned suddenly and asked how much the commission had been. Told, he looked at the manuscript page, then added a few notes, drew the double bar at the end, and signed it.
At the geisha party, the same unfailing curiosity as at the Kabuki, the Noh, the print shop, the concert. “What is she doing, what does it mean? I see.” Then, hands in lap, legs folded under him Japanese-style, he listened to the samisen and watched the dance.
Afterward he was very affable as, I had noticed, he often was with women. Much kissing of hands, then holding on to them. “I am old now,” he had said the day before, indicating a passing girl, “But she is truly lovely.” Then, after a time, indicating another, “Now that, that is the way to stand.” Later yet, at the coffee shop, looking at the waitress, “That is a lovely face, a noble face, a true mask.”
The geisha gather round, they know perfectly well who he is; they all know Haru no Saiten. “How do you say that?” one of them wondered. “The Rite of Spring.” I said. “No, no,” she said, frowning, “in French.” Whether she would have then produced it for the pleasure of the master I do not know. They were obviously much taken with his manners.
Extreme politeness, always standing when introduced, always last out of the door, always bowing. And hand kissing. The geisha were enchanted. I remembered that Marian Korn, often his hostess in Tokyo, had said, “I knew he was great, knew the music, but I didn’t know how great. It takes a very, very great man to be sure enough of himself to behave so exquisitely with women.”
Party over, time to go home, with the geisha insisting as was their duty, that it go on, that the guests stay. Stravinsky smiled, blew kisses. “No, I am old. I go. But you, Robert, you stay.” He had seen that Robert, much enjoying himself, wanted to stay.
“No,” said Vera, “Robert must come back with us.”
“Ce n’est pas important,” said Stravinsky, turning away.
“Pas du toute,” said Vera, contradicting.
They then went into Russian. Robert stood between them. He had been somewhat like a confidant, a family friend, a secretary, but he was now plainly the son, and his parents were having a small and quiet argument about him.
It was time now, to leave, leave Japan, and Stravinsky was hosting a splendid lunch at the Imperial. All sorts of delicacies, everything done perfectly, very expensive. Like everyone leaving, he had already left—his mind was back home in California. “My books, oh, but I have missed my books.” He was thinking also of the airplane. He spread his arms like a small eagle, holding them out at either side, looked down at his plate. “This is the way I want airplane to fly. Strong.” Then he flapped his arms and rolled his head. “I do not want airplane to fly this way. Not strong, frightening.”
He turned, smiled, reached for the whiskey. “Like milk to me,” he said with his cat’s grin. “Blood too thick. This is my medicine.” He beamed. “Doctor’s orders!”
After we had eaten, drunk, talked, and it was time to go to the airport, Vera seeing to last-minute packing, Robert assisting—Stravinsky folded his hands, looked at his napkin, then looked up at me, curious, appraising.
As he had the day before when he signed my copy of the full score of Threni, then stopped midway through, looked up, alert, and said, “You did buy this copy, didn’t you?”
Now he looked up again, intelligence manifest, and said, “You tell me. Gagaku—do I have it right?” A single finger unfolded and began to beat out the opening rhythm, from very slow to very fast, an unbroken tempo of beats, consistently accelerating—a Japanese concept of time, one unknown to the West.
He did it perfectly.
With Igor Stravinsky, Marian Korn. Tokyo/Mejiro, 1959. donald richie
rudolf arnheim, 1960. A boxer’s face, and a gentleness found often in those so strong that appearing weak is of no concern. Slow, large, graceful, the kind of man who can pick up a kitten without frightening it.
After dinner he talks about Russia, about Eisenstein. “I only met him once. Only once was I allowed to talk with the great man. Didn’t understand a word he said, though he spoke perfect German. He was leaning on a mantelpiece, holding forth—his theories. What a mixed-up man.”
I mentioned that the Russian director had wanted to come to Japan, almost had. “Oh, yes,” said Arnheim, “and what a good thing he didn’t. He would have gotten it wrong too.” Then, “Now, Dziga Vertov. He was truly amazing. He lived in the house of this most respectable married couple, friends of mine. “And he used to bring in his little friends to live with him, and the couple would say, ‘Dziga, you cannot do this, this is not to be done.’ And he would say, ‘No, in Russia, this is physical kultur, physical kultur. ’ ”
Mary Evans (Richie), 1958. yato tamotsu
“And the l
ast time I saw him he was going back to Russia, this was all in German, you understand. And naturally he had bought everything you were not supposed to buy in capitalistic countries. When I came in he had dozens of silk shirts, all new, lying on the floor. The first thing he said was, ‘Are your shoes dirty?’ When I said they probably were, he said, ‘Good. Now you will please step on my shirts.’ So I walked back and forth on them and eventually they were dirty enough that he could get them into Russia as laundry.”
He then began talking about beauty, female beauty. He had noticed it all around—the Japanese eyes, the Japanese hair, the Japanese skin. “But, you know, it is an abstract beauty for me because I have no associations. Oh, some glimpses of woodblock prints, things like that, but that is scarcely enough. And beauty, beauty you can understand and feel, that is almost entirely association.
“Take Garbo, for example. That beauty is the kind we call perfect, and what we mean by it is it is both inviolate and inviolable. It is odd that we should think first of destruction when presented with perfection, but we do. She is really the Pre-Raphaelite beauty brought up to date, a prime romantic beauty.
“We put her in a shrine, we worship her. Do you know that story of Kästner’s about the beautiful girl who complained about it—men wanting to put her in a niche, never touching her? Which means, of course, that Garbo’s beauty appeals most strongly to those who feel safe only when she is enshrined, endistanced, made inhuman.”
“That’s what I mean by an associative appreciation of beauty. We all know this Garbo-type of beauty. We all agree upon it. Look at Mary there.” He indicated the writer Mary Evans, tall, beautiful, now backlit by the bridge lamp.
He talked on—I was listening to intelligence, inquiring, comparing. It is rare that intelligence speaks. With Arnheim one saw behind the talk, glimpsed the intelligence, outlining, isolating, and defining the pool of the mind.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 Page 14