This is what I read:
1. Passenger ’plane. A scene from a passenger ’plane which is above cloudbanks. The clouds drift past, and as the ’plane banks and then dives, the scene is momentarily obscured, until we catch a glimpse of a large city in a gap between the wisping clouds. Sunlight shines through the clouds which thin and finally disappear, revealing the great scene below, with mountains surrounding the city. We dive swiftly down and approach towers, smoke stacks, tall steeples and see everything in sharper definition. Then into view there comes a busy main street with traffic and pedestrians moving below, gazing into shop-windows. Dissolve to
I lit the cigarette, as I thought of it. As I smoked, the fog of memory cleared and I remembered the flying dreams of my childhood, when I would soar and swoop over Belfast, diving swiftly down and gliding along Royal Avenue at rooftop height, then just above head height. It is 1950-something, and I float above a bobbing sea of hats and caps. I am invisible to the crowds that throng the street, walking purposefully or aimlessly or gazing into shop windows and I do not know whether I am remembering a dream or daydreaming in the here and now, making it up as I go along. I take another draw of the roll-up and pause to hover at the window of Burton’s the Tailor, admiring the three-piece navy herringbone suit displayed on a headless mannequin. Three buttons, narrow lapels, narrow trouser cuffs, it must be the late 1960s now. Gone for a Burton, as in dead, the suit you are laid out in when your time comes. I know that Burton’s, where I got my first proper suit, is long since gone. So is the suit, into what oubliette I do not know. I’m daydreaming now, remembering. I’m coming on eighteen. This will be a birthday suit, so to speak. My father is standing outside the cubicle where I am being measured behind the drawn curtain: chest, shoulders, arms, waist, leg, the tailor deploying his tape with practised ease, jotting down my details in a notebook. I am in his book now, the suit already beginning to take shape in his mind’s eye.
I feel slightly stoned. I lay the book on the desk and see a rolled cigarette beside it. I realize I am stoned. Only now do I get the scent of the Black Rose. Now I remember I’d rolled a joint just before my forced evacuation, and left it lying on the desk in my distraction. I am smoking a joint not the cigarette I’ve just rolled. I put it down to a happy accident. I’m beginning to see everything in sharper definition. I flick through the screenplay at random. Facing page 96 is a black and white still, captioned ‘SCENE 156: Shell realizes that Johnny is hidden in the Bar of the Four Winds’. Of course. The Four Winds. I remember that John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, also wrote The House of the Four Winds, a book I’ve never read, and I wonder if Carol Reed had it in mind when he renamed the Crown Bar. I think of the four points of the compass, and then of the Morning Star, whose sign is a compass rose or star, and again I remember that October afternoon which seems a life ago, the thunderstorm, and rain spattering the pages of the missing notebook.
I look at the still. The character known as Shell, attired in shabby overcoat, scarf and bowler hat, is in the immediate foreground, glancing suspiciously to his right at something or someone out of shot. There are some twenty other men in the bar, many of them wearing hats or flat caps. Four of them, wearing white mackintoshes, look like detectives but are most likely not. It’s just what men wore back then, in 1947. Behind the bar is the chief barman, played by William Hartnell, who later went on to play the first Doctor Who. What was his name? Fencie, that was it. Implication of illicit dealings. The fence who sells on stolen goods, which are under defence of secrecy. As I write I hear the menacing bass throb of the Dr Who theme reverberating in my memory. I’m writing this directly on to the computer now, having strayed somewhat from the notebook entry I’d made previously, what I had in mind to write. So I look up the theme tune on the net.
The tune was composed by Ron Grainer and realized by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1963. Grainer’s score, written on a single A4 sheet of paper, was basic: essentially, just the famous bass line and the swooping melody, with simple indications for timbre and orchestration: ‘wind bubble’, ‘cloud’, and so on. Derbyshire’s job was to put electronic flesh on the bare bones. No synthesizers existed then: the music was pieced together by hand-splicing tape loops of an individually struck piano string – duh-duh-de-dum, duh-duh-de-dum – and sounds from an array of oscillators and filters used to test electronic equipment. A white noise generator provided the hissing sounds as well as the ‘bubbles’ and ‘clouds’. I click on Grainer’s name and discover he also wrote the theme to the 1960s Maigret TV series. French accordion music evoking bistros, cafés, cobbled streets glistening under lamplight. In my mind’s eye I saw the opening titles, the black Citroën police car driving through the rainy darkness, windscreen wipers ticking metronomically; and I entered a fictional Paris.
Les Structures Sonores
The intercom gave off a noise as if of short-wave radio. The words that emerged from it were unintelligible to Kilpatrick. Gordon said some words in reply. There was a click, and Gordon opened the postern gate. They walked through a vaulted entrance into a courtyard. The fog had gone. A full moon hung in the sky and a fountain played in the moonlight. They walked through the courtyard into a stone-flagged arcade lined with statuary, mythological figures whose blank eyes seemed to follow Kilpatrick as he passed them, or else he felt them boring into the back of his head. You know the way you know someone’s looking at you, he thought, you can feel the gaze, and you turn to look at them, but by this time their eyes have turned away. Gordon and Kilpatrick walked to the end of the arcade, shoes clacking on the stone flags. They came to a door and another intercom. Again the same procedure. The door opened. They entered. They found themselves in a dark vestibule. Watch your step, said Gordon. They descended a steep stone staircase into a cellar space. Strange, ethereal music was playing. Under a series of arches along one wall were alcoves lit by art deco scallop-shell wall lamps. Interlocutors leaned towards each other over the tables, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kilpatrick could make nothing of their murmuring. He recalled how often he had sat in other bars, overhearing snippets of talk drifting in and out of the buzz, trying to guess or make up whatever story lay behind this stray phrase or that, disembodied from whatever context, words like enigmatic messages emanating from a badly-tuned short-wave radio awash with static. Sometimes he would scrawl what he had heard in a notebook. Sometimes when he looked at it again in the light of day he would find his own writing indecipherable, or else he could not think of the significance of the words and why he had written them.
At other times he liked it when he was the only customer in the bar, alone with his own thoughts as they came to him over a martini or a Manhattan. He remembered the Blue Room of the Adelphi Hotel in Belfast, where at a certain hour of the early evening he would find himself the only audient to the jazz piano in the corner, not counting the barman, who had no doubt heard it all before as a matter of routine. Kilpatrick liked to think that this time it was different, for when he had seated himself, the piano player – a gentleman of a certain age, brilliantined hair, white tuxedo, cigarette smouldering in an ashtray – would give him a nod of acknowledgement or recognition and seem to launch into another mode, fingers lingering over the keyboard in a reverie of contemplation, exploring the contours of a song that was no doubt long familiar to him, but never realized in this manner until now, the melody haunting itself in its ever-changing repetitions, variations intertwining, unfolding, recapitulating till they dwindled to a conclusion by no means foregone. After the second or third song Kilpatrick would nod to the barman and the barman would set up whatever the piano player was drinking. They never spoke.
Absinthe, said Gordon. Two bubble-stemmed glasses and a carafe of iced water had been set before them. An elaborately perforated spoon holding a sugar cube rested on the rim of each glass. Louche, said Gordon. He gently poured water over the sugar cube and as the sugar dissolved the emera
ld liquid in the bubble slowly turned a paler opalescent. Kilpatrick, never having done this before, did likewise. Louche? said Kilpatrick. French for that effect, they call it la louche, said Gordon, where it goes milky. Opaque that is, and of course shady as in dodgy, not above board, shifty, sinister, whatever you’re having yourself. He turned his eyes up as if quoting from an invisible text. The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see what you want to see, wonderful, curious things. Oscar Wilde. The element of water, said Gordon, liberates the essential oils from the spirit and releases the power of the la Fée Verte. Transformation has always been her fundamental essence. The Green Muse. The Green Fairy. Rimbaud’s Poison. Le bateau ivre. Le dérèglement des sens. How would you translate that, the deregulation, the derangement of the senses? Whatever. Santé. He lifted the glass to his lips and Kilpatrick did likewise and he felt the absinthe cool and liquid on the tongue, burning as it went down. He thought of depths of opalescent green, emerald and eau de nil.
Kilpatrick looked around him. The other customers were all drinking absinthe too. They were talking more volubly now, as if they had turned their conversation down a notch when Gordon and he entered the room. They were elegantly dressed. He noted a lady in what looked like a Chanel jacket and a Hermès scarf opposite a gentleman in an impeccably cut navy-blue suit and a tie in black shantung silk with orange and emerald green splotches, colourful as an Oriental fish against the sea-blue herringbone ground of his shirt. The man fingered the knot in his tie and Kilpatrick found himself doing the same, fingering the Charvet tie that had been so mysteriously bestowed on him it seemed an age ago. He caught Gordon looking at him with a quizzical expression. You’re wondering what these people are doing here, he said. Perhaps, said Kilpatrick, or wondering what we’re doing here, if it comes to that. Oh, we’re doing what they’re doing, said Gordon, chasing the Green Fairy, being themselves, or rather one of their selves. Like us. Look around you, Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick looked around him and saw that every booth was occupied by a single couple not necessarily paired by sex. It’s not what you think, said Gordon. Les Caves des Changes is about change, and to change one must become another self; so these people offer each other counterparts. The interlocutors play off each other as it were, reciprocating and elaborating each other’s phrases, syncopating them as they would the musical score that is the sum of their parts, for they have rehearsed these words often in their memory, and they go back a long way, ever-changing as they move into the future or as time elapses. They are conducted by the mirror neuron, which reflects the words before they are framed by the conscious mind, the neuron firing a good few blinks of the eye before the phrase is even at the back of the mind or on the tip of the tongue; so they speak trippingly, pausing every now and then to consider what has been said, letting silence speak. They do not pretend to know each other, but go with the flow. The absinthe helps. So does the music. Listen. Kilpatrick listened to the ambient music he had first heard when he entered the room. He thought of tubular bells of wood and crystal swaying and chinking in the breeze through a wood as it blew through them, and the wavering of a wind-harp. He heard the birds in the trees. And he imagined John Bourne listening to that eerie music as Bourne walked through the forest of John Kilpatrick’s memory, following him into the dark.
According to Strange
With the accordion music of the Maigret theme still in my head, I opened another of the books that had come to me that morning, Jean Cocteau’s Tour du monde en 80 jours (Mon premier voyage). I had read no more than a few pages when it seemed to me as if I was reading a different book to that called Round the World Again in 80 Days (Mon Premier Voyage), translated by Stuart Gilbert. So it proved. I took the Gilbert from the shelf and compared it to the Cocteau. The format and typographical conventions of each were, of course, different, but so was the sense.
Cocteau: ‘ — <
Gilbert: ‘ “Sixty thousand dollars for you, Captain, if your ship makes Liverpool before one o’clock.” In Phileas Fogg’s appeal I still hear the call of the sea. Never for me will any real ocean have the glamour of that sheet of green canvas, heaved on the back of the Châtelet stage-hands crawling like caterpillars beneath it, while Phileas and Passepartout from the dismantled hull watch the lights of Liverpool twinkling in the distance.’
There are no caterpillars in Cocteau’s French. And the end of the sentence, should, I think, read something like ‘while Phileas and Passepartout, hanging on to a wreck, watch the lights of Liverpool coming on in the distance.’ Nevertheless I had been beguiled by Gilbert’s translation when I first read it on the Dublin train. The caterpillars are a stroke of wayward genius. As I look at it now, I am especially taken by his translation of prestige as ‘glamour’. According to the OED, the primary meaning of the English word prestige (French from Latin praestigium illusion, as in prestidigitation) is ‘a conjuring trick; a deception; an imposture’; the sense of ‘influence, reputation, or popular esteem’ comes later. ‘Glamour’, in modern English, is a shade different to ‘prestige’; but its primary meaning is ‘magic, enchantment’. It is a variant of ‘grammar’, harking back to a time when the study of language, in its incantation of declension, was seen as a magical art. A kind of hocus-pocus. For Cocteau, as he voyages across the globe, everything is glamour and theatre, or an opium dream. In Hong Kong, the streets recall the wings of a stage set; the shops and open windows might be dressing rooms in which consummate actors are putting on greasepaint before coming down to play their parts under the red and green limelight of the streetlamps. And as Cocteau leaves Hong Kong, Charlie Chaplin comes on board, bound for Hollywood. Chaplin has no French, Cocteau no English, but they converse effortlessly through mime, la plus vivante des langues, ‘the liveliest of tongues’. Words become gesture.
Translation is the ‘removal or conveyance from one person, place, time, or condition to another; the removal of the remains of a famous person, esp. a saint, to another place; the movement of a body or form of energy from one point of space to another; the action or process of expressing the sense of a word, passage etc., in a different language; the expression or rendering of something in another medium, mode, or form of expression.’ And it occurred to me that reading is itself a form of translation, for every reader must interpret what he or she reads, visualizing the action or the scene described in his or her own way. The text is a series of stage directions, and we furnish the crime scene – the locked library room in a murder mystery, say – with the props of memory and genre, memories of real libraries we have been in and memories of other libraries in other murder mysteries. Each of us enters the room in the book in our own way. Each listener hears a different music, just as each of us is not only who we think we are, but the person seen and thought into being by others. Eyes staring at one’s back. Meeting of glances. We are others in the eyes of others. I am many John Kilfeathers. I could feel the dope talking, so I looked it up, dope from Dutch doop, sauce, from doopen, dip, mix, adulterate. I thought of Dutch painting, colours mixed on a palette, scumbled into one another to become another, and the smell of oil paint entering the brain through the nostrils, down the neural pathways, reconfiguring the dendrite fractals in a fugue of variant and deviation.
Fugue is also ‘a flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home’. I recalled the once celebrated case of Charles Burns of Belfast, County Antrim, a funeral director and a lay preacher. To all appearances he was a happily married man with a large and devoted family. O
n 17 January 1887, the day after his fiftieth birthday, Burns withdrew his life’s savings from the local bank, and disappeared without so much as a word to anyone who knew him. After some weeks of ineffective police investigation, his family hired a private detective, John Strange, to look deeper into the matter; some six months later, Strange found him in Westport, County Mayo, working under the name of Cathal O’Byrne as the proprietor of a lodging house. However, when confronted with photographic evidence of his real identity, Burns refused to acknowledge it, saying he had always been Cathal O’Byrne and that the photograph bore no relation to his features. He immediately took the photograph from my hand, said Strange, and went over to the dining-room mirror. Looking alternately at mirror and photograph, he said over and over, How can you say this is me? I am not that man, I am this man that you see before you; and as he did so, said Strange, his eyes met mine in the mirror. There was an uncanny light in them, as if someone else was looking out through those eyes. It sent quite a chill through me, said Strange. According to Strange, Burns expressed a horror of his alleged existence as a funeral director, saying that he was perfectly happy catering to the living; indeed, he was a popular figure in Westport, and all who knew Cathal O’Byrne testified to his good character, and the grace and civility with which he conducted his affairs. Strange sought the advice of the local constabulary, who, after consultation with their colleagues in Belfast, corroborated that this was indeed Charles Burns, late of Belfast. The good news was telegraphed to the family. It was decided for his safety to confine Burns to a room of his own lodging house until the family came to reclaim him. Alas, when they arrived, and the door of the room was unlocked, they found him dead. The body bore no marks of violence, self-inflicted or otherwise; he appeared to have passed away from heart failure in his sleep. It was, speculated Strange in his summing up of the case, as if Cathal O’Byrne, unable to countenance that he was indeed Charles Burns, had willed Burns to die. To sleep, perchance to dream. There were, he concluded, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
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