by Helen Dewitt
The morning brought other pleasures. They sat in the dining car, looking at each other brightly across a table with a cloth. A waiter brought croissants and a pot of very strong coffee. They reached eagerly for croissants, for jam, drank coffee, set their cups down with a little sigh.
‘Why is it, do you suppose,’ said Edward, ‘that the Continental breakfast has only to cross the Channel to be so damp and depressing. It seems simple enough — why does it travel so badly? In England one wonders whether it is really meant to be eaten. Here it is invariably ambrosial.’
‘It is the tyranny of the toast rack,’ said Maria. ‘No self-respecting bed and breakfast can be without them; and once you’ve invested in the technology you’re committed to sliced white. But if you offer croissants and pastries of course no one will touch the white toast, so no one ever does offer anything else. They feel they must get a return on their investment.’
‘There is something in what you say,’ said Edward. ‘But that doesn’t account for everything. Why are croissants in England so awful? You never mind not having them because they taste like limp cardboard anyway.’
The subject of food is like Chopsticks: almost anyone can improvise on it. Two people who devise variations on something simple and silly end of course by collapsing into laughter: Edward and Maria smiled at each other in relief.
The yacht was comfortable, nothing remarkable. The islands, of course, were enchanting. They’d go for walks in the morning, not too early, taking a picnic lunch; stop at the beach, spread towels, eat brown olives and feta and yellow tomatoes and funny bread, drink retsina or local plonk; spend the afternoons swimming in the limpid water.
Edward had been there before and had lots of stories: about German tourists solemnly pacing through an olive grove at Mystras, heads popping up and down as they consulted an archaeological guide, sneering at the merely Byzantine and poking about for a few dusty stones of Sparta; of Americans looking haplessly round the local taverna, speaking wistfully of McDonald’s; of the plausible scoundrel who’d wanted only to open a high-class tourist shop in Rhodes, to sell genuine local handicrafts made in Taiwan.
Maria smiled and laughed. Everything was new to her.
‘Oh look!’ she cried; it was a fat old woman in black with a mule and a CD Walkman; it was a gnarled old man in Nikes with a sheep round his neck; it was a couple of very beautiful young men in very tight Calvin Klein jeans, ‘and they say there’s no such thing as Platonic love! Alive and well and on the strut in the agora, wouldn’t you say?’
But it was hard to be perfectly at ease.
Novelty disturbed Edward; he made an awkward remark or two about the old woman, was only happy when he had been reminded of one he saw years ago and could supply a polished little story for the occasion. Repetition disturbed Maria; it was like trying to play jazz with someone who has the sheet music for ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ and works it in whenever he can.
They met a couple of college pals of Edward’s in Lesbos, and took them back to the yacht for dinner.
‘Not very grand, but perfectly seaworthy,’ Edward said agreeably, leaping to the deck from the pier. ‘One learns to appreciate these things. Did I ever tell you of the time I was shipwrecked?’
If he had no one would admit to it.
‘Oh, it was yonks ago, when Angus McBride and I went island hopping after Finals,’ said Edward, leading the way to the bar. ‘(What can I get you? I think we’ve got all the usual.) Altogether a fantastic tale! We’d booked onto something that sounded perfectly respectable — the Hellenic Swan or some such thing — but turned out to be a great tub of a Victorian yacht which had been restored and put to work for the tourist trade . . .’
Edward and Maria return to the little house they have bought in Leckford Road, Maria trailing the past behind her. Every conversation she has had, every story she has heard, is on record in her phonographic memory, and on record also are the responses made by all the people she has ever known, and the records of her friendships are the most complete. Perhaps friendships are a matter of similar collections: you have the original, the friend has a backup. Her conversations with Edward are all on record, but hers is the only copy.
Edward bounds gaily into the house, the happy wanderer with his little light backpack of essentials, and she follows him slowly, carrying the luggage.
‘Shall we have some people to dinner for a housewarming?’ she asks, and sees her words thin into the air like vapour off early morning water.
‘Oh, yes, we must,’ says Edward, and they do.
Edward and Maria sit at opposite ends of the dining room table, and between them are six or seven friends. They fill glasses, urge seconds, swap honeymoon anecdotes — the friends are married, they have their share.
‘A yacht,’ says Sarah. ‘Crumbs. George and I went Eurorail! You must have felt frightfully grand.’
Edward opens his mouth.
‘Oh,’ says Maria, ‘Edward was sickeningly blasé. One really felt it was an awful come-down for him. Have you ever told them about the splendour amidst which you were shipwrecked, darling?’
Everyone has gone, and Edward and Maria repair to the kitchen to tackle the washing up. Edward scrapes and stacks; Maria fills the basin with Fairy Liquid and steaming water. As she lets the first stack of dishes sink beneath the suds she begins to sing softly.
‘o when the saints, o when the saints, o when the saints come marching in’
‘how i long to be in that number,’ sings Edward, ‘when the saints come marching in.’
‘O WHEN THE SAINTS. O WHEN THE SAINTS. O WHEN THE SAINTS COME MARCHING IN! HOW I LONG — TO — BE — INTHATNUMBER, O WHEN THE SAINTS COME MARCHING IN.’
o when the saints (o when the saints) come marching in (come marching in) o when the saints come marching (marching in), how I long to be in that nu-u-mber. When the saints come marching in.
oxford, 1985
Famous Last Words
‘Structuralism is out of fashion anyway,’ says Brian, who likes to be a kind of thinking man’s Philistine. He slides a spoon into raspberry sorbet.
‘Post-structuralism is out of fashion,’ says Jane. They’re married, it isn’t really surprising.
‘Fashion is out of fashion,’ says X, in the tone of voice that makes you think ‘quipped’.
‘Fashion is out of structuralism,’ say I. It’s nice when they leave you the best line. X doesn’t like it, though. Didn’t see it coming.
‘I liked that pasta alla Gorgonzola,’ I say to Jane. ‘Is it really so easy? How do you do it?’
Cross looks round the table. I blush, as so often. It was an intellectual conversation. Jane doesn’t want to answer, she resents being dragged down to this level.
‘Oh, you improvise like mad,’ she says airily. ‘Gorgonzola and sheep’s yoghurt are the only essentials.’
This is not very helpful, but I don’t like to press her. Brian starts telling stories about Derrida: perfectly happy, it seems, to accept all the privileges of the author. Theories of authorial absence, says Brian, tend to leave out the curious circumstance that the author is always there to pick up his cheque.
X does not seem to resent this. X says as a matter of fact Derrida is a stickler about copyright.
I’ve finished my sorbet. I finish my coffee. I start thinking about the death of Voltaire.
X and I have a long way to walk home afterwards — X lives up the Abingdon Road, I live in Osney. It’s about midnight when we leave, and the Woodstock Road is deserted but well-lit: the road is pocked and blackened like a battered sheet of gold, the chestnut trees are brassy.
‘Brian is such a wanker,’ says X. ‘blaBLAblaBLAblaBLA — gossip gossip gossip.’
‘Lucky Brian,’ say I. I scoop up a handful of dust from a driveway and let it sift through my fingers on the wind. ‘The streets are paved with gold.’
X cheers up suddenly. ‘Still, I think I made a good impression. You can’t ignore politics.’
We cross Leckford Road.
‘I was thinking about the death of the author,’ I say. ‘People use “la mort de l’auteur” like “la mort de Dieu”. I mean, to describe the disintegration — no, the devaluation — the discrediting of a concept. It’s metaphysical. Nobody thinks God actually died: they think it was never alive in the first place. I think Barthes actually says somewhere “l’Auteur, lorsqu’on y croit!” Putting it that way is a paradox — how does a universal die, anyway?’
‘Dunno,’ says X. ‘Kind of obvious, innit?’ X sometimes likes to be a Philistine’s Philistine.
‘The life of the author in Barthes is a matter of being paid too much attention. Death would just be being ignored. No more Paris Review interviews — no more of those weird questions. “Do you write on the typewriter?” “Do you write to a schedule?” “When did you start to write?” “Does it come easily?” “Was it hard for you to write about oral sex?” Leon Edel — Leslie Marchand — André Maurois — Gordon Haight — will languish unread on the shelves.’
‘Kind of a Berkeleian non-existence,’ says X, going along with it. ‘There’s no one to think of the author but God, and God’s dead.’
‘But,’ I say, ‘that leaves you with the death of the author. There are what we could call, for the sake of argument, impostors — people who have deathbeds. There is a sense in which the death of the author is incompatible with “la mort de l’auteur”. Think of somebody like Voltaire. There’s something strangely fascinating about the way everyone tried to write his death.’
X holds up a finger, and says in a strong Cockney accent:
‘An orphan’s curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high,
But oh! More horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!
Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse
And yet I could not die. —
‘Your basic author,’ says X, ‘is transfixed by the eye of the dead God. What you’re talking about,’ says X, ‘is the night of the Living Dead.’
I think this is clever, but, allowing for the accent, it’s the kind of thing Brian might have said.
‘But it’s interesting,’ say I. ‘It’s a different slant on the question of sincerity. Not, “What did you really mean?” but “Would you still say it?” Recantation . . .’ I say it emphatically, it’s a word I expect to appeal to X.
‘Authority . . .’ X says thoughtfully.
‘Exactly. This idea of getting the one who said it first to take it back — or stick to it! More words from the same source. It’s this business of validation, or invalidation, coming from a particular direction — ’
‘Parsifal!’ says X. ‘Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug.’
‘Eh?’ (I can read German, but it never seems to sound the way it looks.)
‘The wound must be healed by the spear that made it.’
‘Yes. And I think there’s something very striking about the candidates for deathbed conversions: intensely rational, articulate, revolutionary people — Voltaire and Hume. As if no one could be sure of their own arguments unless they could get Voltaire or Hume to repeat them. All these deathbed confessions of Voltaire — it’s hard to say what’s more interesting, the multiple last statements or the endless arguments about them. Which was genuine? Why did he refuse the sacrament? I’ve got this book at home, La religion de Voltaire, that gets incredibly anxious about it.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ says X.
‘Oh, it is. Pomeau thinks the confessions are tongue in cheek — he goes through them word by word. Which of course simply shows the futility of the exercise — the very problems of sincerity, of interpretative validity, which were to be settled at last without possibility of revision, are all to be settled again for the “final words”.’
‘I wouldn’t mind having a look at that,’ says X.
‘I’ll have to show it to you some time,’ say I.
‘It’s not that late,’ says X. ‘I can come by your place.’
‘Oh,’ say I. ‘Oh, OK.’
My place is very small. I have use of the kitchen, and a room on the second floor with a narrow view of the canal and swans. X and I sit at the kitchen table, surrounded by books about deaths of authors. I have Noyes’ biography of Voltaire, and Pomeau, both with extensive discussions of the death of Voltaire. Noyes also includes a description of a visit to Voltaire by Boswell. Besides these I have the volume of Boswell’s journals which includes his interview with the dying Hume. I say that I think I once read something somewhere about the death of Foucault, but I can’t remember where.
‘The thing that interests me,’ I say. ‘One of the things that interest me is the way there is this emphasis on inserting the body of the writer into the scene, as if making a connection between this physical presence and the derniers mots will somehow make these specially valid. Look at Noyes.’ I pick up the book.
‘“We must obviously not picture him here with the ‘eternal grin’ of Mr Lytton Strachey, but with the blood-stained rag at his lips, and eyes that had been looking into the face of Death. Those eyes are turned for a moment, with the curious wonder which is a sick man’s only way of reproach, upon a secretary who is trying to defeat a purpose definitely decided upon before this illness occurred.”
‘The blood-stained rag,’ I say, ‘says this is real and true. The document is genuine. Its statements may be attached to Voltaire.’
X is flipping through Pomeau.
I start rehearsing facts and dates. On February 26, 1778 Voltaire took confession and signed a statement: ‘Je meurs dans la Religion Catholique où je suis né, espérant de la miséricorde divine, qu’elle daignera pardonner toutes mes fautes, et que si j’avais jamais scandalisé l’Eglise, j’en demande pardon à Dieu et à elle.’ He refused to take the Sacrament because he was spitting up blood and might ‘spit up something else’ (the exact words are disputed). On February 28 he issued the following statement: ‘Je meurs en adorant Dieu, en aimant mes amis, en ne haïssant mes ennemis, et en détestant la superstition.’ At the time of his death, he was attended by the curé of Saint-Sulpice, La Harpe, and Prince Bariatinsky. The curé asked whether he recognised the divinity of Jesus Christ. Voltaire replied, ‘Laissez-moi mourir en paix.’
X has found Pomeau’s analysis of the confession. ‘Wouldn’t take the sacrament — says he dies in the church, not a member of it — second statement the real Voltaire — Whew! “Il était mort en théiste, non en chrétien.”’
‘Whereas Noyes,’ say I, ‘says Voltaire’s early religious training gave him a strong sense of the sanctity of the host.’
X puts a hand on my knee.
‘Boswell sounded Voltaire out on immortality,’ I say. ‘Boswell wore his flowered velvet at the interview. Noyes smiles up his sleeve at this: if the bloody rag is the mark of intellectual commitment, the flowered velvet is that of silly Scottish dilettantism. Boswell asks whether immortality is not a noble idea. Voltaire agrees, but thinks it more desirable than likely. “Potius optandum quam probandum” — isn’t that a great line? On Voltaire’s authority, Boswell goes to see Voltaire’s doctor for confirmation that Voltaire had never been afraid of death.’
I look for this in Noyes, and read: ‘“Had he any horror of it?” “No! The more seriously ill he is, the better Deist he becomes . . .” “Ah, well,” says Boswell, “I can say all that, then, on the best authority. M. de Voltaire bade me ask you whether he feared death, as ministers of religion had affirmed.”’
X and I are smiling. We are both charmed by the flowered velvet. X’s hand moves up my thigh. I have noticed this tendency to reductionism in X before. The text is infinitely variegated, the subtext always the same. I tried once to resist this by accusing X of believing in final c
auses — that for the sake of which the rest is there — but it didn’t work. X said I took everything personally. X takes nothing personally: X discussed the deconstruction of teleology and put a hand on my knee.
What is a subtext? You may think of it as a movement in the circumambient language, whose presence you divine by distortions and ripples in the text; what lies between the lines is as invisible, as plain to the eye as the breeze which stirs the leaves of the copper beech in the quadrangle, the high wind that toppled trees in Hyde Park. And we know that the disruption is not in one direction only: the text is a kind of windbreak.
One walks quicker with the wind at one’s back. I feel the subtext pushing us forward, and I am rather afraid it will outstrip the text altogether, before I have got to Boswell and Hume, so that — although I could say a good deal more about the ‘solemn and singular conversation’ — I hasten to open Boswell in Extremes, 1776–78, and bring to X’s attention Boswell’s recollections of the day when he was too late for church, and went to see David Hume who was a-dying.
‘“I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing-room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons, and a kind of scratch wig. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present.”
‘You see what I mean,’ I say, ‘ — the physical presence, with its marks of imminent dissolution, guarantees the seriousness of the speaker — at the same time that it threatens permanent absence of the speaker. This, it says, is your last chance to find out what he really thought.’
‘Yeh,’ says X. ‘Basically it’s your capitalist perspective on meaning as property: authorial presence can be bequeathed to some textual children — others may be disinherited. Boswell’s hoping for a bit of melodrama — a deathbed scene where the Treatise and Enquiry are cut out of the will.’ X squeezes my thigh.