by Helen Dewitt
Praise for Some Trick
“As you’re reading these 13 genius and altogether delightful short stories by Helen DeWitt, you may not have any idea where you’ll end up, but you can read assured, because the destination, however unexpected, is always a fascinating, expansively erudite thrill.”
—Southern Living Magazine
“DeWitt reasserts herself as one of contemporary fiction’s greatest minds in this dazzling collection of stories about misunderstood genius. DeWitt’s disdain for those who seek to profit off of genius is sharp and refreshing, and her ability to deliver such astounding prose and thought-provoking stories constitutes a minor miracle. This is a gem of a collection.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Some Trick
Also by Helen DeWitt
from New Directions
*
The Last Samurai
Lightning Rods
Contents
Here Is Somewhere
Brutto
My Heart Belongs to Bertie
On the Town
Remember Me
Climbers
Improvisation Is the Heart of Music
Famous Last Words
The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto
Stolen Luck
In Which Nick Buys a Harley
Trevor
Plantinga
Entourage
Publisher’s note
Author’s note
Landmarks
Cover
Here Is Somewhere
If ever if ever a wiz there was
The Wizard of Oz was one because
Because because because because because
‘I have nothing to give you but that’s all right because
Knowledge of lack is possession
Recognised absence is presence
Perceived emptiness plenitude.
To have not
And know it
Is to have.’
Some trick.
‘True wisdom is knowing you don’t know.’
The Scarecrow hadn’t the brain to see through it.
He bought it.
‘I don’t understand,’ he thought.
‘That’s my wisdom, that is.’
‘What would you do with a heart but try not to hurt?’
The Tin Man hadn’t the heart to disappoint him.
He thanked him.
‘I feel nothing,’ he thought.
‘But I wouldn’t hurt a Behaviourist.’
‘Courage is not being fearless, it’s facing your fear.’
The Lion hadn’t the nerve to say he was scared.
He roared.
‘I’m still terrified,’ he thought.
‘But you’ll laugh if I say it.’
Next time someone tells you desire
Is a trick of grammar
Tell him
If what I have is what I said I wanted
It’s not what I wanted
I know what I want
But I don’t know its name.
Could you say that to a puzzled, hurt, frightened old wizard?
Of course not.
You’d say
‘Thanks very much then.’
Some trick.
But Dorothy? I don’t BELIEVE Judy Garland could fake it.
I think she was glad Technicolor was only a dream
Glad to find she had never left home
Glad to wake up in grey black and white.
Because because because because because
Some Trick
Brutto
Her father was an engineer. He worshipped Daimler, so there was only one career for him. He had no particular opinion on the Jews; if you would ask him he would not be interested, probably it was an inadequate race but he wasn’t interested. If you are an engineer the only thing you care about is machines. A human being is never going to be as perfect as a machine so it is not interesting to an engineer to think about racial purity.
She was saying things to Nuala so people looking at the paintings would not feel they were under surveillance. It’s always a bit like working in Top Shop or Dorothy Perkins or Wallis, some shop where they have this etiquette of leaving the customer at arm’s length.
These open days are hard at first, but you get used to them. People come into the studio and sometimes they walk straight out. Or they look at the paintings and they want to see something figurative lurking behind it all when there is no behind. But the paintings are so explosive they don’t know what to do with it. And you’re sitting there with this poxy table with a bowl of cheese doodles and you feel like a complete wally.
This bloke was walking about.
Sometimes this mania for hospitality takes possession of you. She asked if he would like a cheese doodle.
He said I’m fine thanks.
He had an Italian accent. He had one of these haircuts that all the men have these days, where there is hardly any hair, it is like short fur on the skull. His eyes were this light glowing grey, like those little monkeys, those lemurs that you see on TV or at the Zoo, and he had this pulpy, kissy mouth. He was standing by 1.1.4.
When people number paintings they do it the wrong way. You get an idea while you’re working on a painting and you have to do it in another painting because otherwise you would use the first painting. It’s like taking cuttings from a plant. So if you just use ordinal numbers you lose all that. You lose a distinction, because sometimes a painting is just out of the blue.
Sometimes you know there’s a gap between one painting and another, that was a painting you didn’t do, so you can show that with the number and that’s good, the missing painting still has its number like a name on a grave.
He was wearing a black t-shirt and a black cashmere jacket and black jeans, these really expensive jeans, and these red cowboy boots.
The paint is always white, this fat gloopy stuff, and people have never seen anything like it. Sometimes it’s 20 centimetres thick or maybe more, it can take a year before it’s really dry. You have to give people really careful instructions when they buy one. Once this gay couple fell in love with this painting that was really not ready to be moved but they said they would obey her instructions implicitly and of course Serge was keen to make the sale so they took it and this great big splodge fell off on a brand new carpet.
You weren’t supposed to live in the studio but of course people did surreptitiously.
If you are working with white you get fanatical about having the specific white, and you are in a constant state of panic that the white will be discontinued. Robert Ryman liked to work with a white from Winsor & Newton called Winsor White, so when Winsor & Newton decided to discontinue production he bought a whole consignment and filled a closet with it, and this is what you can afford to do if you are Robert Ryman. So this is one problem of being poor, that you can be cut off from the work you would go on to do by the discontinuance of a white. This is something people can understand, the expense of materials, these things you can touch and see. But if there is a painting that would be dry in a week and another painting that would be dry in six months there is that pressure to paint something that will survive in the time you know you can pay for. So that is the trade-off, the more white you buy the less time you can pay for. So you are always living hand to mouth.
She was two months behind on the rent on the studio. If she would get kicked out she would
never find another studio for £300 a month.
Serge owed her £5,000 from the London Art Fair two years ago.
The bloke was looking at 1.1.11111.1.
Nuala was sitting on the tall stool to keep her from feeling like a complete prat.
She said people didn’t talk about the War when she was growing up. There was this very tidy surface and you didn’t know there was anything but the surface. They didn’t talk about the camps. So then when she was 16 Max told her about them and she understood the Baader-Meinhof, she wanted to blow up a building. Her father made her do the Geselle which was three years of hell. She knew if she stayed she would kill herself. So she hitchhiked for about 6 years around Asia.
When you are that age you don’t think about the cut-off age for the Turner Prize. You don’t realise that the people who are going to get their work to a certain level before the cut-off are not hitchhiking around Asia. If you would realise it you would not be able to do anything about it, because if you would not hitchhike around Asia you would not be an artist. So you can’t say if I would have gone to art college then.
Nuala had helped with the cheese doodles and twiglets and there was juice. Wine would be better but if it’s crap wine what’s the point? And what would it be but crap wine?
She said when she was growing up her father would not let her do the Abitur, he thought she was too thick, he made her go into an apprenticeship in dressmaking. They sat in this cellar and everything had to be done just right, making buttonholes, if you did it wrong you had to do it again and that was 3 years. At the end you had to do a Gesellenstück, it’s quite an old-fashioned word, maybe they don’t have it in English, to show you had mastered the craft. It had to have all these features, this special collar and these special cuffs and special pockets.
She still had the suit she made.
There was a wardrobe off a skip in a corner. She went to the wardrobe. It had a special padded hanger.
May I see?
The Italian guy was standing at her shoulder.
She said: Yeah, OK, why not.
It was a suit in a scratchy woollen cloth. It was a dirty mustard brown. You did not get to choose what you would make up, it was a chance for the dressmaker to get rid of fabric she could not use, other places treated the apprentices better, she had heard. The suit had buttoned epaulettes and cloth straps with a button at the cuffs and a cloth half belt, and pockets with buttoned flaps, and of course a lining, and self-covered buttons. It had piping in dark brown. It had three semi-pleats above each breast, each set interrupted by a pocket. It hung on its hanger, this baleful garment that no one would ever wear because of the hatefulness of the cloth and the cut and the straps and the stitching, and all this time the garment had been locked up in a wooden coffin with no one to look at its madness.
He said: Ma che brutto!
He said: Take it over to the light.
In the white light of the studio the sullen mustard wool, the psychotic stitching, the brutal dowdiness snarled at the world.
He said: Madonna!
He said: When was it made?
She said: 1962.
He said: Can you still do this?
She said: I don’t do this any more.
He said: I want this.
She said: It’s not for sale.
He said: I want 20 of these.
She said: I am not a dressmaker.
He said: No no no! Who would wear such a monstrosity? What do you take me for? No. You are an artist. I will give you £1,000 apiece.
She said: I might be able to do one more.
He said: That’s not enough. I want to have a show. I need another 19.
He said he would have a show in his gallery in Milan.
He said: The paintings don’t interest me.
He said: You’ll get the normal terms, 50% split, the 20 grand is up front.
She said maybe she could find someone to help her and he said No. It’s got to be you or the deal is off. You know you can’t find someone to do this kind of work.
He said: Will you be able to find —
No, we go look for the stuff together.
Maybe we go to Leipzig, I think, they got a lot of ugly old stuff left from before 89, yeah I bet we can do it.
She did not know what to do because she just couldn’t.
Then Serge came in, he had been down the hall in Danny’s studio schmoozing with a buyer who maybe would take something for his company headquarters. Serge said: Adalberto!!!!!!!! Christ, I’d no idea you were in town.
So maybe you can imagine if five lizards would be in an icebox and somebody would put them up the back of your jumper so they would be crawling up your back with their cold claws, because realistically how many people in the artworld would there be with the name Adalberto —
Adalberto said: Yeah I’m really excited about this piece she did back in the 60s.
At first Serge got excited because of the sale and then he started to be pissy because Adalberto wanted to be the gallerist for the material in Italy so Serge would not get a commission, but Adalberto said No no no we’re not gonna argue this is the most exciting work I’ve seen in a long time but I gotta have a free hand to take it where it needs to go, we’ll work something out, we’re not gonna be assholes about it.
It would never have arisen in the first place if Serge had paid her the £5,000 he owed her from the London Art Fair.
People were coming into the studio and looking at the paintings and all it would have taken was just one to buy just one.
She could tell that Serge was flattered and Adalberto was talking about dinner and she could tell he would bamboozle Serge into agreeing to anything.
Serge was thinking he could make some good contacts, and if he knew the right people he could get some publicity for his next opening, maybe Nick Serota would come, if Nick Serota would come it would be the bees knees.
She was completely skint.
She said she would have to think about it because she was not working in that tradition at all, and Adalberto said Yeah, sure, think about it, I have to go to New York next week so it would be good to go to Leipzig tomorrow so you can do some before I come back.
Adalberto said: Look, let’s not pussyfoot around, I give you £2,500 apiece, that’s 50 grand.
Serge was just standing there completely gobsmacked.
It’s easy to say you can just walk away from it.
They flew first class to Leipzig out of City Airport. It was sort of the way you are always imagining it would be if you would get your lucky break, you know you are sleeping in a sleeping bag on a concrete floor and there is no heating and no loo but you think maybe one day you will be discovered, but meanwhile everybody is poor. If she would have lunch with Serge he would always go somewhere really cheap, and then they would go Dutch. And meantime Serge had given her the scoop on Adalberto, she had heard stories of course but it turned out he was this really hot potato, he was on the committee for the Venice Biennale so if Adalberto would like her work it would be phenomenal.
When they got to Leipzig they took a taxi to this posh hotel. Adalberto said he did not know if they would find what they were looking for in Leipzig, maybe they would have to go deeper, but they would maybe have some luck.
The thing that is famous in Leipzig is the passageways, these arcades. The most famous is the Mädler-Passage, but they have them all over, these passageways between streets that were built to be fashionable places to be seen, with shops selling things that fashionable people would want to buy, well you can imagine how popular that would be in a socialist republic. So they would go down an arcade and out into the street and down another arcade, looking for this thing Adalberto had in his head.
If you would go to East Germany in those days it was still the way it was under the Communists. You would go into a shop and it was lik
e a time warp. A shop would have a little window display and it would be a pair of knickers and a packet of tights. You forget what people used to wear, so if you suddenly see it in a shop window you can’t believe it. You can’t believe that it went on looking completely normal. So they would be drawn into these shops that were not selling what they needed, because it was like a museum.
Adalberto was still wearing the red cowboy boots. He saw all this stuff and he went completely mad. He would see a garter belt in a glass case in a little shop and he would be like a man possessed, he would buy maybe the entire supply of garter belts. He would ask what is the German for this, and it would be a garter belt or an antique pair of knickers or a slip.
Then he would say: We gotta be focussed, we gotta be totally focussed on this, this is gonna be, what is that word, humongous. Estupendous.
Then they found a haberdashers.
It had these bolts of this disgusting beige jersey. Adalberto said: We gotta be focussed. We gotta be totally focussed.
He said: Ask where they keep the suiting materials.
So they went to the back and she thought she would throw up. There were these bolts of woollen cloth.
Adalberto was saying Madonna.
There were all these conservative colours that you don’t see any more, this navy blue, navy blue is the hardest colour to match so it dates really obviously because the idea people have in their head of a dark neutral blue changes over the years, people in the fashion industry, the way they perceive a dark blue is affected by the other colours they are working with at the time. So there was this navy blue that had survived like a finch in the Galapagos, and a prehistoric brown, and some greys that also date really quickly. They were not utilitarian colours, just colours of cloth that was meant to end up in respectable clothes and you would not imagine the body inside and you would not imagine that people would sign a form to put people on a train to go off and be butchered.
Adalberto was saying: Ma che brutto! Che brutto!
He was saying: If we were not coming now it would be too late!