by Helen Dewitt
People were laughing, smiling, drinking their beers. It was kind of upbeat to hear except that presumably, then, no one in the room was even a friend?
Rachel sat cross-legged at the other end of the squashy sofa. Silky black hair drifted over her shoulders; glass-green eyes, a bittersweet mouth endorsed uncalculating simplicity with their beauty. She wore a black t-shirt with white stick figures who said:
MAKE ME A SANDWICH
WHAT? MAKE IT YOURSELF
SUDO MAKE ME A SANDWICH
OKAY
This t-shirt too had the lovable cuteness of the First Dog.
Cissy stood at the back of the crowd in the cruel grip of consciousness.
Cissy had met Peter Dijkstra in Vienna. She had booked a room through venere.de but it had fallen through: an apologetic e-mail in exquisitely courteous German had explained that the room had gone through another booking service a few minutes earlier. She had been offered an alternative but instead had found Angel’s Place through booking.com, closer to the center and with the look, somehow, of a hi-tech monastery. The rooms were underground, with very white plaster walls, arched ceilings of bare brick, and fierce gleaming black flat-screen TVs. It was enchanting. And then there were only four rooms, so unlike the free-for-all of a hostel, it would be silent, pure, a place to read and think and write. And so she had taken the train down from Prague and checked in late and gone out in the morning for Sachertorte at Oberlaa Kurkonditorei and wandered all day.
She got back very late, close to midnight. In the breakfast room at street level a man sat at a table reading. He held a pen; a notebook was open. It was as if she had walked into a hotel and found Wittgenstein writing quietly at a table.
He looked older, wearier than in the only picture anyone had seen, though his very pale hair would not show gray. He was unassumingly dressed in the way that older Europeans are unassuming: he wore a short-sleeved blue-and-white checked shirt, well, white with pale blue double lines in a grid, and faded gray pants, and stout brown walking shoes. He did not bother to look up when she came in.
She could not bring herself to speak. She could not bring herself to go to her room. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She heard the scrape of his chair. When she turned she saw him standing, holding a pack of Marlboros. He went to the door and into the street.
The book, she saw, was Detlev Claussen’s biography of Adorno; he had left it open face down on the table. She would have liked to look at the writing on the page of the open notebook but she knew it would be bad. She put water into the coffee machine and slotted in a capsule of espresso.
The door opened just as the coffee began to drip into the little plain cup.
She knew she would hate herself always if she did not speak. She said, “You’re Peter Dijkstra, aren’t you? I love your work.”
He said, “Thank you.”
She said, “Do you like Vienna?”
He said, “Very much. It’s my first time, for one reason and another.” (She knew that he had been in an asylum for five years.)
He said, “They speak German like robots. It’s pleasant hearing a language mechanically spoken. I wish I had known.”
He said, “Adorno came as a young man to study with Alban Berg. Claussen is quite amusing on the subject.”
But he had picked up the book and put his pen in the fold to mark his place and closed it and he was picking up his notebook.
“Don’t let me disturb you,” she said. “I was just going to bed.”
“So am I,” he said. “That was my last cigarette for the day.”
In the morning she asked Angel if she could extend her booking for a week.
She would have liked to tell this story, she desperately wanted to tell this story and be drawn to the squashy sofa to be pumped for details, singled out for envious excited questions and exclamations and comments, enfolded in the collective embrace. But she had not been invited. Nathan had told her to come because Gil was a friendly guy, but he had not been able to introduce her while Gil was talking and now he was talking to other friends.
She stood awkwardly at the back.
Across the room she saw Ralph, who had found a publisher for her book when no one was buying. He caught her eye and smiled and she drifted across. He wore a pale aqua polo shirt with a crocodile on the breast, chinos, and sockless Topsiders, because he had never wanted to be a suit.
He had not done for her what he had done for Rachel, who floated now on a magic carpet.
“You should represent Peter Dijkstra!” she said gaily. “I met him in Vienna. I could put you in touch!” It felt like a thing to be doing. She imagined Peter Dijkstra in New York. There would be an inner circle of admirers. Some kind of dinner, maybe, conferring over what could be done for the genius. Sontag had introduced Sebald to New Directions.
Peter Dijkstra in New York, the inner circle, Sontag, Sebald, New Directions — she was not the only dreamer in the room.
Peter Dijkstra lay on a very white bed, his head on his arm. The television was on; German tripped off the metal tongue of a female chat show host.
At 2 am he went upstairs with his laptop and cigarettes.
An e-mail from his editor at Meulenhoff forwarded five e-mails from altruists across the pond, relaying the declared devotion of a young American writer of some fame.
He went outside to smoke a cigarette.
He did not want to be locked up again. He was sane enough as long as he lay on the bed watching TV, or stood in the street smoking a cigarette, but it’s true, the bills did mount up. He was sheltering under his credit cards.
Somehow, though. The fact that a fame-kissed young American would happily hand over all his worldly goods did not make it socially straightforward to write asking for a gift of 20,000 euros. If something was not socially straightforward he could feel his mind cracking. He wondered whether the boy might in fact give him a place to stay if he went to New York but it seemed terribly complicated. If the boy did move out it would be all right, but if he did not it would be impossible. He could not think of any sentences that would ascertain the position in a socially acceptable fashion.
Anyway, it was comfortable among the robots. Americans are so natural and friendly and sincere. The Viennese have the mechanical predictable charm of a music box; you don’t have to warm to it. He would have liked it if the boy had set up an account for him at a pastry shop. That would have been a nice gesture. The Wiener Phil — imagine if an admiring reader were to give him a subscription! Americans do like you to warm to them, and he thought he might very well warm to someone who gave him a subscription to the Wiener Phil, but it did not seem a very American thing to do. An American, he thought, would see it as too finely tuned.
A Hungarian might do something lavish and extravagant along those lines. He might keep madness further at bay if he took to writing in Hungarian.
Come to think of it, a limitless supply of Marlboros would not come amiss — but no, an American would find that quite shocking.
Cissy knew she had to be in New York, and she knew Ralph had to do the things he was doing for her, but oh! it was horrible, grubby and horrible. People he knew had read her book and sent quotable quotes and now her book would be plastered with names of people whose work she despised. Was it like this in Europe? She wished she was back in the white cellar with its brick walls and its green-and-white tiled bathroom and its gleaming black flat-screen TV. It would be so different, so different and good, if her book were read by a man in an unassuming check shirt who smoked Marlboros and called Adorno Teddie Wiesengrund the Wunderkind. It wasn’t about the quotes, though if the name could go in the book with all the others plastered there she would not feel so sick.
She ran into Rachel at a party at the KGB. She said, “I think we should do something for Peter Dijkstra!” (She did not know if Ralph had asked Rachel, and this way she did not h
ave to think about it.) She talked wildly and impulsively and enthusiastically.
Rachel said, “Well, I love Peter Dijkstra.” She wore skinny white jeans and a sloppy lilac-blue v-necked sweater, sleeves rucked up to her elbows, cashmere. She was drinking Campari. She said, “But I don’t know. He seems pretty private, or at least that’s the way I imagine. Let’s see what Gil has to say.”
Gil had come back from the bar. He said, “I’m a sucker for really good vodka. They have stuff here you just don’t see anywhere else. I’m behind on a deadline, but hey, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe the piece needed an authentic Russian vodka with an authentically unpronounceable name.”
Cissy told the story of walking into Angel’s Place. She said it was like walking into a hotel and seeing Wittgenstein writing at a table.
“Awesome!” said Gil. He did not pump her for details, but she gave some anyway.
She said, “I think we should do something!”
“What kind of thing?” said Gil.
She did not really know. She did not know enough to know the kind of thing. She babbled about conferences, readings, a lecture. She said he should have a trade publisher, like Sebald, a book deal with a lot of money.
Gil took a swallow of vodka. “Ahhhh,” he said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean. The thing is, there are people who like that kind of thing. They like hustling, and they’re good at it. But even so they don’t just run out in the street and randomly hustle, they get approval, an arrangement, authorization. Those might be good things for him, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable rushing around and orchestrating on his behalf. And the other thing is, I’d be afraid of losing something that really means a lot to me, something very precious. Something I need so much I can’t imagine life without it. What if it changed the books for me? What if I no longer had them for myself in this private place where it’s just me and the book? It doesn’t work that way for people who like hustling, you don’t get the impression that agents have lost something they loved. But maybe that’s why it makes sense for that kind of person to do that kind of work. Does he have an agent? Maybe he should talk to Ralph.”
“I did talk to Ralph about it, but he made regretful noises about the market for translations.”
“Oh, Ralph says these things but he’s just trying to be sensible because he’s so impulsive.” Rachel, indulgent. “If he falls in love with a book he’ll besiege people.”
Ralph was not an intellectual but maybe the secret of success was not caring. Or maybe an actual genius would be so far above, would be used to being so far above, that it wouldn’t matter.
Maybe it would matter, though, that Ralph was so careful to be cautious. If you went to a café he would order wheatgrass juice and gluten-free toast with tapenade — that is, he would insist on going to the kind of café where you could order these things. Maybe a man who had spent five years in an asylum needed someone who stayed sane without effort.
Cissy knew it was not safe to say these things to Rachel. The magic carpet had carried her on but Ralph was still a good friend.
Needless to say, crowdsourcing a limitless supply of Marlboros was not an idea whose time had come.
Partly to keep madness at bay, and partly to take the most direct route to keeping his credit cards afloat, he was writing in English. He could not see the point of writing in Dutch in the hope that he would join the elect. Why should he get the lucky ticket and be translated and touted? He had had two novellas and some stories turned into English by the kind of publisher that will publish novellas and stories, and though the phrase “cult classic” had come to his ears it did not buy many Marlboros. This is what you get if you are dependent on an editor whose wife happens to know some Dutch. But if you write in English you can send the thing anywhere, you can send it to the big boys, people who wouldn’t touch a novella with a bargepole.
He had a little pack of file cards on which he wrote words and phrases that took his fancy, and he constructed stories out of them. Stories, okay, not the fast track to debt-free nirvana, but you can’t be always breathing down your own neck. Think of Gurrelieder. Something that starts out small and self-contained can morph (“morph”! English is so great!) into an extravaganza. You have to give the horse its bit.
He was sane enough to spot likely words in a text, and sane enough to write them on a file card, and sane enough to string them together, or rather doing these things kept his mind quiet and good. He didn’t know if he could do much more. But it was nice not having to be cheery and down-to-earth and sensible for cheery sensible down-to-earth Dutch nurses and orderlies. It was okay now to lie quietly on the bed staring at the wall.
He got an effusive e-mail from the girl who had made coffee late one night.
Probably she got his address from the people who published the novellas.
He wrote a polite reply.
An effusive reply came within 10 minutes. There was a lot more sincerity than he knew what to do with.
She mentioned talking to her agent and his regretful comments on translation in the United States.
He was already a bit tired but clearly this was a lead which must be followed. He explained a little about the file cards and writing in English.
Fifteen minutes later, when he was starting to hope that was an end of it, a new message popped up. She had talked to her agent who would love to see some pages.
He could not say why, but he really disliked that use of the word “pages.”
At this point he was ready to go back to bed.
This was not the way to deal with all those credit cards.
She had included the agent’s e-mail address. He clicked on it and attached a Word document (after all these years he still hated Word). He explained to the agent that he normally wrote in longhand but this was what he had happened to type up.
He went outside and lit a Marlboro. If he ever had a lot of money, really a lot of money, he would just buy this place and then he could smoke inside.
Ralph called Cissy because he was simply besotted with the pages, he had devoured them at a single gulp, if the rest was anything like this —
He wrote an e-mail to Peter Dijkstra asking for a phone number and a time when they could talk.
Peter Dijkstra was not wildly keen on the phone but these things must be done. He gave the number of the hotel and proposed a discussion at 11 am New York time, 5 pm Vienna.
They talked for an hour because Ralph liked to really get to know people before he got to work. “I need to know what you care about,” he said. “All the best writers are obsessives.”
Peter Dijkstra said, “Well, maybe.” If you’ve been insane you mainly try not to let things get to you, but this was not necessarily a good thing to say to an agent. He said, “Actually, you know, there’s one thing. I really like the fact that “front seat” is a spondee. And it’s reflected in the spelling, the two separate words. And one thing I really hate is the way they try to make you agree to “backseat,” which is obviously trochaic. I don’t agree. I don’t pronounce it as a trochee, I pronounce it as a spondee, and I always spell it as a spondee, “back seat,” which has the additional virtue of being logical. But then there were these ridiculous arguments.”
“Uh huh, well, I don’t remember that coming up in the pages you sent me, but if it’s an issue we can definitely deal with it. Send me everything you have,” said Ralph. He wanted to get cracking.
You’d think it wouldn’t be that big a deal, but actually typing a text always felt like this thing you see a lot in Britain, especially in terraced houses, this practice of replacing a small front garden with a slab of concrete. It was apparently quite a common part of “doing up” a house. You would ride a bus down a long terrace of lower middle class houses, and the ones that were freshly painted and plastered all had a square of cement where the garden had been.
; At the same time, oddly enough, once the thing was typed it was up for grabs. If you wrote something in a notebook the words just were the marks your pen or pencil left on the paper, but once they were typed into Word people could smuggle in the unspeakable trochaic “backseat” behind your back.
Of course, if you want those words in a notebook to be a solution to credit card debt, there is a bridge that has to be crossed. But if you don’t want to crack up you have to be pretty careful. But again this is probably not a good thing to say.
What he did was he seized on a phrase.
Somewhere online he had come across the phrase “protective of his work.”
It had struck him as the height of banality at the time, but for that very reason the kind of thing someone who “fell in love with a book” would probably take to.
So he wrote an e-mail using the phrase “protective of my work” and promised to send the book when it was finished.
He went out for a beer, because it was restful hearing the Austrians rattle words off their sharp metal tongues. He was gone for some time.
When he got back — it was 4 in the morning or so — he found the phrase had hit the jackpot. Not only had Ralph taken to it, he had been galvanized into talking about the few magical pages in hand to everyone he knew. A magazine had offered $5,000 to publish them as a self-contained story. “I understand that you are protective of your work” — it was a lucky thing that this was conveyed in an e-mail rather than over the phone, as it did not matter that he burst out laughing — “but it would be a real wake-up call for publishers.” A number of startling proposals followed: if authorized to do so, Ralph would ask the publisher of the novellas and stories (long out of print) to “revert the rights,” so that they could then be “bundled” with the new book when put up for auction. This would then trigger a push to translate the five novels immured in their native Dutch; the 1,000-page killer whale could be the next 2666!