by Peter Carey
Sarah Wode-Douglass? The Times of London?
Not for many years.
Please see me, he said. I can come to your hotel.
This, of course, is exactly what I had wished when I carried my magazine to his shop, but that was before I knew his history.
A fright in my sarong, he said. I’ll wear my suit. Please. You show face for just a short while.
Mr Chubb, is this about the George?
Who is that?
Stefan George, the poet.
Sorry…
I thought you might have an opinion of the translation.
Forgive me, Miss Wode-Douglass. No time yet.
At this point there was a great thundering on my door. I opened it and a white-faced Slater pushed past me. As the bathroom door closed I saw a small lizard flee for the corner of the room, where it slowly turned from green to grey. It was impossible not to hear the sounds of Slater’s distress.
Mr Chubb?
Yes.
I’m sorry, I can’t meet with you.
Mem, I have something extraordinary to show you. Absolutely unique. One kind only-lah.
Some poetry, perhaps. By Christopher Chubb.
No, no, not by me.
By whom then?
Please, let me bring it to you. Can or cannot? You won’t be sorry.
I was rather surprised to find myself agreeing to meet him downstairs at the Highland Stream, which ran its tasteless course from the back wall of The Pub, beneath a wooden bridge, to a drain beside the gift shop.
5
By a quarter to two the rain had became torrential and, given the unsettled state of my stomach, I was relieved. The Australian, I was certain, would not venture out in this downpour. Fifteen minutes later he proved me wrong, appearing before me as I sipped weak green tea.
The sarong was gone. In its place was a double-breasted tweed suit made not only for a different age and climate but also, it seemed, for a more substantial man. Inside the framework of padded shoulders and wide lapels my visitor seemed shrunken, like a walnut left to wither in its shell. One could look at him and confidently guess that he had arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the late forties and had then, when the close-cropped hair on his beautifully shaped head was still black, displayed an almost sweet wistfulness around the shadowy corners of his mouth. Today he wore a white shirt and broad tie of a vaguely military design. He had done his best, as he had promised, yet the loose fit of his frayed collar gave him the appearance of even greater poverty and disenfranchisement than at that shocking moment when I spied him in his store.
I should add that although he carried no umbrella, Christopher Chubb was somehow completely dry, as if he had been recently unfolded from a camphor chest.
I offered him tea which he rejected rather brusquely. I am not here to bot on you, he said.
I made room on my settee but he chose to sit opposite me. He immediately produced two envelopes which he laid on the coffee table, then a small metal case from which he took a pair of old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles. He appeared somewhat pompous. Without looking at me he carefully examined each of the envelopes and finally chose one to give me, his manner very monkish. It was unsettling to remember that these same hands had once given another editor the fraudulent poetry which had destroyed his life.
What is this? I asked, looking into those seemingly mild eyes and discovering a sunken, sly intelligence.
Something you need.
There was nothing in the envelope but two roughly molded brown pills. If he’d said they were the work of dung beetles I would have found it credible.
Pour les maladies des tropiques, he said in an appalling accent. I am not here to poison you, Mem. Please, take it. It will help, I promise.
The pill seemed so alien, and he no less so. I doubt I would have taken it had not a particularly violent spasm arrived at just that moment.
Watching me swallow, he smiled. In my interests that they work.
I was startled that he should so plainly confess to ‘interests.’
He cast down his eyes, which produced an odd effect suggesting not whimsy or modesty but a sudden, secret arrogance. I don’t want you dashing off, he said. I need to speak to you.
He set down the second envelope. It was larger than the first and its flap had been closed with coarse black tape, clearly from the bicycle shop, and this he now fussily rolled away. From the envelope he extracted a single sheet of paper wrapped in thin clear polythene.
God knows why, but I was suddenly certain that he wished to sell me an autograph, and I did feel a twinge of compassion for this literary exile waiting for the chance to sell his little treasures. In this, I imagined, he was not unlike the boys who loitered in front of the Merlin with their rolls of batik, waiting for the Americans to come outside.
Very delicately, he removed the plastic sheath, folding it so particularly that my eyes were held and I really paid no attention to the treasure it had protected, not until the owner brought it to my attention.
It was a poem, or a part of a poem, composed in those thick rhythmic down-strokes which would later become, if only briefly, so familiar.
May I pick it up?
The tropics are not kind to paper.
And indeed the page showed the signs of both mould and water damage, having become so very fragile that it seemed likely to break in half or even shatter. It looked to have been sliced from a bound journal.
Read, Mem, read.
I did so, and I doubt it needs saying that I read with a full consciousness of the old man’s history. I approached these twenty lines with both suspicion and hostility, and for a moment I thought I had him. It was a sort of Oriental Tristan Tzara, but that was too glib a response to something with very complicated internal rhymes and, unlike Tzara, nothing felt the slightest bit false or old-fashioned. It slashed and stabbed its way across the page, at once familiar and alien. I wondered if the patois—Malay, Urdu—was disguising something as common as cod Eliot. But that did not fit either, for you really cannot counterfeit a voice. All I knew now, in my moment of greatest confusion and suspicion, was that my heart was beating very fast indeed. Rereading the fragment, I felt that excitement in my blood which is the only thing an editor should ever trust.
Who wrote this, I asked. I must have looked frightfully stern but in fact I was all atwitter. Where is the rest of it?
He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and sighed.
Oh shit, I thought, of course! It’s him. It must be him. You wrote this?
No, no, not me.
Is the author a secret?
You will not believe me.
I should like to know, I said.
It is a man named McCorkle.
I do have a temper. My family knows I have a temper. It is probably true that I will die in a room by myself because I have savaged someone who was trying to help me, and I have seen good cause to write those notes of apology one of which—my grovelling little letter to Cyril Connolly—is apparently amongst his papers in the British Museum. But in this case it should not seem peculiar that I was angry, having been titillated by the prospect of a find only to be told that its author was the man upon the stair.
I am afraid, I said, that Mr McCorkle’s notoriety precedes him.
Yes, he said, you know who he is. His manner was not as one might expect it to be—was oddly insistent, in fact. Oh, you know him certainly.
But not exactly?
He did not answer but returned the fragment to the safety of its plastic sleeve.
I doubt it has much commercial value, I said.
You think I come to hawk to you, he said brusquely.
Of course that was precisely so, but I shook my head.
Then what do you think-lah? He looked up at me with eyes still watery but also belligerent.
Oh no, I said, you are the one who sought the meeting.
He blinked. Perhaps a cup of tea, he said, and I saw what a strange and fragile creature he was, powerless, patheti
c, filled with pride and self-importance.
While I poured his tea he made himself very busy with his electrical tape, which he stubbornly forced to serve another time.
You have been out to the Batu Caves, he asked. His treasure was sealed but as he lifted his tea-cup there was a slight tremble to his hand.
I am a very bad tourist.
Yes, he said, I never liked foreign places. Still, should see the kavadi bearers. People seem to like that, bamboos driven into the flesh. He paused, staring at me intently. Slater told you all about the McCorkle business?
Yes.
He told you that Weiss died?
The editor?
He nodded and sipped his tea. The hand was now shaking violently.
You must’ve felt terrible.
Worse than that, he said in that papery, nasal voice.
At first I had been struck by his beauty, but there was now something very off-putting about him—neediness where I had seen strength, unsteady liver-spotted hands, and the disconcerting sensuality of those tea-wet lips.
You’ll listen if I tell you a story?
I looked over his shoulder to where Jalan Treacher had disappeared behind the knotted skeins of rain.
I suppose I haven’t anything better to do, I said, but in truth I had no interest in his story at all. I wished to read that fragment again, as he well knew, and so I must endure his tale.
6
I loathe dishonesty, he began, his grey eyes glittering. You would know that if you were familiar with my verse-lah. Like a good table or a chair, nothing there that does not do a useful job. So you see how bad it is that what I am remembered for is a fake. Smoke and mirrors, a joke, that’s all it was.
He paused, glaring almost accusingly. Have you been to Australia? he demanded suddenly. No, of course not-lah.
Actually, I said, my mother was Australian.
Yes, we have a terror of being out of date.
Mother did not like to talk about Australia. She had rather a set against it.
Yes, she is Australian. She is wondering, what are people saying in France or wearing in London? That is the issue for her, isn’t it? He raised his reedy voice but seemed unaware of the attention he was drawing to himself. No, we cannot wait, he cried, slapping his knee. We cannot wait another day to know, and yet we must wait-lah. They call it the Tyranny of Distance now, so I am told.
In the nineteenth century, he continued, energetically adding sugar to his tea, the women of Sydney would go down to Circular Quay to see what the English ladies were wearing when they stepped ashore. Wah, look at that. Must have one now. Whatever they saw there would be copied in the week. It will still be the same, take my word. Must have whatever fashion comes down the gangway. Osbert Sitwell, Edith Sitwell, we will have poems just like theirs on the streets tomorrow. Now, he said, one of the fashion spotters on the dock was a young man named David Weiss.
The editor?
A very handsome Jew. Parents were in the shmatte business. A man of letters also, so he thought—boy of letters really, so young. The parents were cultured in the way these people often are. I never went into a Jewish house until I met him. Who could believe it? My home bare as a cupboard, no books, dried-out plates of leftovers in the fridge. Here, suddenly—bloody walls of books, Turkish rugs, modern paintings, De Chirico, Léger. So shocking to me-lah. Unfair that anyone should have such a start in life.
Weiss and I, he said, were students at Fort Street, school for clever boys. Who would guess it now that I have become a mongrel? Then I won the exhibition in Greek and the Special Prize for an essay on the influence of Hokusai on Renoir—all this from reproductions, you understand. But it was through David Weiss—three years younger, imagine—I learned of Rilke and Mallarmé. He lent me The Little Review. We were friends, members only, but he was always foreign to me. You know these people, no natural reticence or modesty. Always thrusting themselves forward, must have a different table than the one they are shown to by the waiter. Soup has to be made hotter when any of us would eat it as it came. You must not think me an anti-Semite. Perhaps I sound like one.
Indeed he did.
Well, I was jealous of Weiss, won’t say I wasn’t. We were all struggling poets, trying to find our voices, to be published in little magazines printed on brown wrapping paper. It was the war, the end of civilisation, who could know? I was twenty-four, a private in the army in New Guinea. Weiss had some cushy job in the Department of Defence. He sat on his bum in Melbourne. I was shot by bloody Japs, carried on a litter for sixty miles, dropped and bloody-well abandoned in an ambush. Cheh. No end to it. Delivered to hospital in Rabaul; transferred to Townsville, where I was given this poetry magazine called Personae. No brown paper here-lah. Top-hole only, the best stock, a cover painting in colour. Inside, all the very latest fashions in poetry and art. And who was its editor? David Weiss! My first feeling? Jealousy. Why not? He was three years younger. No war for him, and now so far ahead. But then I read what he had chosen, and what I felt was not jealousy but … how pathetic, Mem. It was so fake, so half past six. No head, no tail. I truly could not bear it— sick in my gut. I will tell you the feeling—exactly like listening to my mother in the Church of England in Haberfield. Always the smell of something false about her. Holy, holy holy. Bellowing the responses more loudly than anyone else, making an exhibition of herself. Samah-samah, all the same— fake is fake no matter where you find it.
In Australia they think I am the great conservative. Listen, I had spent more time reading Eliot and Pound than Weiss ever did, and later I would prove this. Even great poets have tics. No problem to trick a lazy reader with the mannerisms. Weiss knew of writers I had never heard of, but there was something shallow in his character. Send him a poem with the line ‘Look, my Anopheles’ as if it were some classical allusion and he would never admit he did not know Anopheles. He might try to look it up, but if he couldn’t find it—forget it. Fake it. Never mind.
Well, Mem, Anopheles is a mosquito, and when I saw his magazine I had it in mind to sting him where his skin was bare. I know I said I would not bot on you….
Please, I said, whatever you want.
He ordered a cucumber sandwich, the cheapest item on the menu.
But you invented a whole life for your poet, I said. Is it true that you even produced a birth certificate?
He stared at me. Slater told you, yes or not? What lagi?
That’s all he said.
Weiss was a pinko, he said angrily. I would have made McCorkle a coal miner except they’d have gone looking for his union card. I gave birth to a bicycle mechanic instead. But his poems would be learned, so many classical allusions— from a grease monkey. Explain that. It cannot be. What a notion, that the ignorant can make great art.
It sounds as if you were very convincing, I said.
It reeked of rat-lah.
His sandwich arrived and he paused to pick it up, turning it this way and that as if he hadn’t seen one for many years.
Reeked, he said, but I knew young Weiss had lost his schnozzle. He would so want pearls in the shit of swine, so want the genius to be a mechanic that he would never stop to question the evidence. This is why I wrote this letter. Meant to come from McCorkle’s sister.
He replaced the cucumber sandwich, and as he did so his entire face changed, the cheeks sinking and the shadowy mouth becoming as tight and small as a widow’s purse. The transformation was disturbing and did not become less so when I realised that he was taking on the sister’s character.
‘Beatrice McCorkle,’ he announced in a careful nasal accent which was marked in equal part by its lack of education and its great desire for propriety.
‘Dear Sir, When I was going through my brother’s things after his death, I found some poetry he had written.’
Watching Chubb, I was reminded of a completely unnerving séance I once attended in Pimlico where an old Welsh woman suddenly began talking like a posh young man. That had been a striking mutation, and this
performance now taking place on the tartan banks of the Highland Stream was more than its equal. Christopher Chubb was still sitting there in his oversized clothes with his large spotted hands, but the voice was from quite another place and body. As would happen often in the future, all those disturbing Malaysian locutions were suddenly leached away. Witnessing the depth and detail of the character, I wondered if this was not the mother he seemed to loathe so much.
‘I am no judge of poetry myself,’ said the voice of Beatrice McCorkle, ’but a friend who I showed it to thinks it is very good and told me it should be published. On his advice I am sending you the poems for an opinion.
‘It would be a kindness if you would let me know whether you think there is anything in them. I am not a literary person myself and I do not feel I understand what he wrote, but I feel that I ought to do something about them. My brother Bob kept himself very much to himself and lived on his own of late years and he never said anything about writing poetry. He was very ill in the months before his death last July and it may have affected his outlook.
‘I enclose a 2½d stamp for reply, and oblige. Yours sincerely. Beatrice McCorkle.’
At that moment, devouring his sandwich, Chubb appeared monstrous—malicious, anti-Semitic, so grotesque and self-deceiving in his love of ‘truth and beauty’ I felt the Wode-Douglass temper rising like steam behind my eyes and I do believe I would’ve said something very sharp indeed had I not been interrupted by the Sikh doorman who’d met us on the traumatic night of our arrival.
Your friend, he said. Mr Slater. He is very sick. You must go to him.
7
Slater was waiting at his door. His face was green. From the gloomy room behind him there came the unpleasant aroma of a poorly ventilated lavatory.
I’m so sorry, he said as he accepted my last Enterovioform. I am a selfish beast, I know it.
Still standing in the open doorway, he gulped down the pill without aid of water. I rather hope it’s not amoebic dysentery, he said. I did have that once. Lost two stone in a week. You really should get to a doctor if you’re able, although they’ll charge a bloody fortune if you’re English. The Chinese chaps are better.