Lost for Words: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘And last but not least,’ Malcolm concluded, ‘The Greasy Pole by Alistair Mackintosh.’

  Sonny switched off the radio.

  ‘I really don’t understand,’ said Auntie, clicking her tongue again, ‘especially after that offensive letter from Mr Elton.’

  ‘Evidently,’ said Didier, ‘we are in the presence of the text-as-textile, as the fabric-ation that weaves a dissimulating veil over its apparent subject, expressing the excess of figurative language over any assigned meaning or, more generally, the excessive force of the signifier over any signified that tries to contain it. A recipe from the Palace Cookbook is also a recipe from the Anarchist Cookbook! Precisely because language explodes with meanings that subvert our logocentric reading of the text, including the text we call “Reality”.’

  ‘There you go, Auntie,’ said Sonny, as if he’d understood every word of Didier’s impenetrable excitement, ‘Didier has put it all in perspective for you.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Auntie, a little stiffly. She sighed and allowed her shoulders to relax; she liberated her hands from her lap, and seemed to be taking in the tonic of the good news.

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur Leroux,’ she went on, smiling graciously at Didier, ‘thank you for explaining that to us.’

  ‘De rien,’ said Didier.

  25

  Sam sat at his desk, his middle finger dented by the pressure of the pen he was pressing against the almost blank page. A small ink stain had spread around the pen’s eager nib. Above it, scrawled diagonally across the right-hand corner, was a list of words that failed to form a sentence but represented a kind of warm-up for the nauseating responsibility of writing one: ‘not, neither, nor, nothing, less, without, and above all, no’.

  This little doodle of negativity, like a cough before a speech, prepared Sam for the obligation of writing despite having nothing to say; indeed, the obligation to write only when he had nothing to say, since only then could a new insight emerge. Should he start with a declaration, or a description, a dialogue, or a comparison?

  Declarations would buckle under the weight of their undeserved positivity and end their sentences as denials.

  The only description worth having was a description of the gaze that produced the description in the first place.

  Dialogue was just characters discussing the plot, but there were no characters, and there was no plot. Why not throw open some quotation marks and bring them both into being, by saying something, by saying anything at all?

  The dent deepened, the stain spread.

  Comparisons didn’t bear thinking about. The ceaseless traffic of correspondences between one resemblance and another – eagle nebulae, star fruit, frog suits, foxgloves, rapier wit – generated a craving for The Thing Itself, but everybody knew, or else should know, that The Thing Itself was just another comparison, once it had been fished out of the ocean of silence by a linguistic net in which every word existed in relation to all other words. Even if it was decked in the mayoral chains of a Proper Name, a word depended on its position in a sentence as well as its history. Paris could famously turn up in Texas, and Boston could stay quietly in Lincolnshire; Byzantium and Constantinople were buried under the busy streets of Istanbul, while Leningrad was St Petersburg for the second time. ‘A table’ was a table, not the table, this table or that table; it depended on the words before and after it, just as the object it pointed to depended on its entirely metaphorical legs. The object was assembled into an illusory autonomy from bits of wood, glue and metal, while the word for it was assembled into an illusory stability out of grammatical and semantic relationships. Nothing was whole or complete. The universe was expanding as it decayed, and the language that described it, turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns, gentrifying slang, coining neologisms, importing foreign words, and dumping obsolete ones, was doing its best to keep up.

  Sam dropped his pen on the desk. It was all too complicated. To say anything at all would be a mistake.

  The truth was that he had decided to start a new novel for entirely psychological reasons: to protect himself against an unhealthy obsession with the fate of The Frozen Torrent. It was all very well having ‘nothing to say’ in the sense of having no preconceived set of ideas about the fate of his characters and the course of his plot, remaining open, discovering the truth of a situation in the course of exploring it, all of that; but it was no good really having nothing to say: being blank, blocked, lost.

  He couldn’t think how to begin a new novel precisely because he was already too preoccupied with the fate of the last one; the disease was too well established for the protection to work. He might as well give in to a fever of hope, dread, second-guessing and imaginary interviews, weird dreams and troubling symptoms.

  He had been unable to escape the universal media derision for the Short List. It gave him both a sense of shame at his own inclusion and a guilty exhilaration at his increased chances of victory. He had tried not to read the press, but couldn’t help noticing that The Frozen Torrent was the favourite at Ladbrokes.

  Last night he had dreamt that the reward for winning the prize had been changed from the usual eighty thousand pounds to a night in bed with Katherine Burns. Alan and Didier had mysteriously made it on to the List, despite not having written any novels. Also among the finalists was Attila the Hun, who spoke a barking barbarian language in which Sam turned out to be fluent. A translation of their conversation appeared above the stage of the Banqueting Room, like surtitles at the opera. On the stage itself, and on huge screens around the room, the Short List was examined under a microscope by a team of experts in white coats. They bickered constantly and assaulted each other over the head with inflated pig’s bladders. When the winner was finally announced, she turned out to be an exceptionally tall woman in a silver sequined dress who strode majestically across the room, climbed some steps up to a circular bed and engaged in a long, deep kiss with Katherine, to the uproarious delight of the dissolute, sweating guests who sat at tables made of giant water lilies. Bitterly disappointed, Attila burst into tears and had to be hugged and comforted by his motherly agent, who told him that Die Christian Dog was ‘a timeless masterpiece’ and that he’d been ‘robbed’. ‘It’s my karma,’ said Attila, who turned out to be a Hollywood actor, ‘what goes around comes around.’ ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ said his agent, rubbing his back, ‘don’t blame yourself, sweetie, it’s not your fault.’

  Sam woke up from his dream with a pounding heart and an urgent desire to empty his bladder. Since his break with Katherine, he had been woken several times a night, trickling with sweat and convinced that he was about to die of a heart attack. He would lie in his damp T-shirt, breathing carefully and debating whether to take one of the beta-blockers his doctor had prescribed for performance anxiety. The horror was both persuasive and routine, without its familiarity blunting each night’s uniquely convincing chest pains. The Short Listing of The Frozen Torrent had reinforced his panic, as well as adding a layer of ambivalence to it. Would it be good to win or not? Would it be clumsy and tactless to accept the prize after Katherine’s unfortunate exclusion from the competition? Would she hate him for it? In any case, victory would mean a big speech; trunks of beta-blockers sent ahead to Melbourne, New York, Shanghai and Berlin; countless interviews using exactly the same formula to answer exactly the same question, and more and more photographs of him looking wooden and miserable. At the same time, it was out of the question not to win. And it was out of the question to have the thought that it was out of the question not to win. Hubris was bad, but insincere anti-hubris was no better. In the middle of the day, a word like ‘humility’ would present itself, like a sunlit colonnade in all its elegance and simplicity, but by the middle of the night it was transformed into a sinister ruin, with a murderer concealed behind every column.

  Sam picked up his pen and wrote, ‘In the middle of the day, a word like “humility” would present itself, like a sunlit colonnade in all its elegance and s
implicity, but by the middle of the night it was transformed into a sinister ruin, with a murderer concealed behind every column.’

  26

  Vanessa opened The Greasy Pole with dutiful resignation. Knowing that it had passed onto the Short List with the support of all the other committee members assuaged her guilt at not having read it before. It had been selected through a series of mutually beneficial deals, rather than from any spontaneous enthusiasm. Jo, it was true, had said that it passed her ‘relevance test’ with ‘flying colours’, and Penny, rather obscurely, said that it was a relief to get a book that was ‘actually about something’, but other than that, Vanessa had no sense of its merits. Now she had to marshal arguments against it (assuming it turned out not to be a masterpiece) in order to secure victory for The Frozen Torrent, the only remaining work of literature on the list.

  She cleared her mind and tried to read the text with as much receptiveness as possible.

  As his train hurtled from Edinburgh to London, from capital to capital, Angus Stewart, the youngest Member of Parliament to be returned to Westminster after the closest election for a generation, felt a familiar pang of loss, and a no less familiar pang of anger, at leaving his fair homeland for the riot-torn nation to the south. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Salford, Nottingham, Liverpool, one after another the English cities had been ignited, filling the television screens of peaceful Scottish homes with images of destruction and chaos, and making Angus more determined than ever to break free from the cursed Union between his country and its bullying neighbour; a forced marriage between a comely maiden and a lustful old man, long overdue for dissolution, and too steeped in injustice to be remedied by any other means than divorce. One day, God willing, Angus would be the Prime Minister of a proud and independent Scotland, husbanding its own resources; its own oil, when the contracts with foreign petroleum companies came up for renewal, its own fisheries, once the quotas could be renegotiated with the EU, its own Toyota factories, and its very own wind farms.

  Angus’s deep clear eyes, like two Highland lochs, settled on the young man in sportswear sitting opposite him, and he felt a politician’s instinctive desire to reach out to ordinary voters, and find out what they were thinking about the great issues of the day.

  ‘So, what do you make of these English riots?’ he asked with a broad smile.

  ‘Well, I seen this policeman on TV last night,’ said the young voter, ‘and he said a gang is people that intimidates members of the public, right? So, I thought, in that case, the biggest gang out there is the police, right?’

  ‘So would you be in favour of reforming their stop and search powers?’ asked Angus.

  ‘What I’m in favour of, mate,’ said the young voter, ‘is rioting. I want some of that free stuff I seen on TV…’

  When Vanessa heard her phone ring she reached impatiently into her handbag to switch it off, but seeing that the call was from Penny, she decided to take it after all.

  ‘Hello, Penny, how are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m rather reeling from the news. Have you heard?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fasten your seat belt,’ said Penny. ‘It turns out that Malcolm’s old boss at the Scottish Office is the author of The Greasy Pole. Alistair Mackintosh is just a pseudonym. Can you beat it? Malcolm has been quite subtly, not to say cunningly, pushing that novel in the hope of currying favour with a senior colleague.’

  ‘What a coincidence, I was just about to read it,’ said Vanessa, disguising the intensity of her disgust. ‘It was the only one I hadn’t got round to yet.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re all behind with our homework,’ said Penny. ‘In his defence, I don’t think Malcolm meant any harm. It was just a prank that went rather too far. And, as he says, there’s nothing on record to show that he promoted the book himself.’

  ‘Except in all our memories,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Penny. ‘He did persuade Tobias, and I’m afraid me, to vote it onto the Short List. Neither of us had the chance to have a proper look at it, but I suppose we just trusted him as Chairman.’

  ‘So we’re down to five books,’ said Vanessa. And we should be down to four judges, she thought. She wanted Malcolm to resign, she wanted him to be publicly reprimanded, but as she imagined the scandal unfolding, a certain world-weariness came over her. There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it; besides, if Malcolm lost his authority, it might improve the chances for The Frozen Torrent.

  ‘Yes’ said Penny, ‘one book each, which is fair. Mind you, I’m not fanatical about my choice. I’m prepared to concede gracefully if nobody else likes Conundrum.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure we all think it’s a ripping yarn,’ said Vanessa, ‘but perhaps it’s not quite right for this prize.’

  ‘That’s probably true,’ said Penny, ‘in fact, we might as well say that we’re down to four.’

  Vanessa was struck by Penny’s acquiescence, not to say her eagerness to get rid of her candidate, but she was too relieved to question it.

  ‘I’ll tell the others,’ said Penny, ‘to count Conundrum out.’

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ said Vanessa, trying not to sound as pleased as she felt. ‘How’s Malcolm taking it?’

  ‘He’s very robust,’ said Penny, ‘and unapologetic. Frankly, he seems more put out by discovering that the author of wot u starin at is not only a well-paid lecturer in medieval love poetry at Edinburgh University, but none other than The Mc Dougal of Mc Dougal, one of the most ancient titles in Scotland. It makes Malcolm’s blood boil to think that he pretended to write a book of gritty social realism, when in fact he was leading a life of extreme privilege, dividing his time between his ancestral castle and a set of plush rooms in a prestigious university.’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Quite!’ said Penny. ‘It should be judged on its merits alone. Absolutely. Well, I’ll see you at the next meeting. Down to four: we’re really coming into the home straight.’

  Vanessa switched off her phone, dropped it back in her bag and tossed The Greasy Pole onto the floor under the table.

  She suddenly had a free afternoon. She could rush to meet her next responsibility and mark the first year’s essays on Insanity and Alienation in Tennyson. All of them would quote, ‘And my heart is a handful of dust’ from Maud; most of them would quote the climax of grief from In Memoriam, ‘And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day’; some of them would get round to Tithonus’s, ‘Me only cruel immortality / Consumes’, and point out how alienating it must have been to have his girlfriend turn him into a grasshopper; but most of all, the discussion would centre on that cautionary tale of opium addiction, The Lotos-Eaters, since most undergraduates knew little about alienation and insanity except from their self-imposed drug experiences.

  On the other hand, she could leave her suddenly free afternoon free: she didn’t have to cram it with new obligations, or move her schedule forward to annihilate the unexpected good fortune of a few uncluttered hours. She had read enough about Poppy’s illness over the years to know that an anorexic’s mother was typically a highly controlling perfectionist. Feeling the strain of leaving her afternoon empty, she made a concession to magical thinking and let herself believe that if she resisted imposing control on this stretch of free time she would be indirectly helping Poppy to recover.

  It was a pity to ignore the thesis she was supervising, just when the semi-colon was about to reach its nineteenth-century peak of power and prestige; and difficult to neglect her own artful analysis of Undine Spragg’s mother, which took the reader around Wharton’s oeuvre, as well as fairly deep into the social history of her age: the rapidly changing attitudes to divorce, the high concentration of American fortunes in female hands, and so on and so forth; but these insights would have to wait. Th
is afternoon, she would not let her judgemental mind characterize as mere laziness the subtle therapeutic space she was opening for her daughter. Just as an anorexic has to walk down the street rejecting the abundance of food offered on all sides, wasn’t there something punitive and self-defeating about turning down an opportunity to stop working, to relax, to play? Wasn’t there a family resemblance between the inability to take in nourishment and the inability to rest?

  Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull, who catalogued anorexia and gave it the surname ‘Nervosa’, was also suspected of being Jack the Ripper. An expert on treating nervous women, he may also have been an expert on making women nervous, occupying that disturbing border between the healer and the killer, where a surgeon’s knife could be used to save a life or to end it. What good could come from a realm of mental illness claimed by such a sinister conquistador?

  Even if there was some connection between Vanessa’s need to rest and Poppy’s need to eat, it was problematic for Vanessa to take the lead in doing nothing. Poppy would read Vanessa’s inspiring example as a manipulative strategy, a covert attempt to rob her of control with the cheap sacrifice of an afternoon’s work. Anorexia had been unknown in the Third World until the advent of Western television: it was supremely the disease of social comparison, of fatal competitiveness, of the final consummation of advertising, in which the image of emaciation is consumed rather than any product promoted by it.

  Nevertheless, Vanessa decided that she would spend her afternoon without reading, or marking, or correcting, or writing. She would never tell Poppy, but she would just sit there thinking about her kindly, hoping it wasn’t too late to stop being too busy.

  27

  Katherine was woken at two in the morning by a shock of shame.

  What could she have been thinking of? John Elton; the dark green sofa in his hotel room; the coffee table pushed roughly aside; property magazines slithering clumsily to the carpet; his socks still on; her yearning to run through the door she could see reflected in the mirror above the fireplace, and her horrified sense, as the cluster of clinking glasses on the tray toasted her abasement, that she had found a new level of alienation in her erotic journey, something like volunteering to be raped.