I did see the wisdom in this. After all, I had seen the gutting of Annie Chapman, and I believed no sane man could do such a thing. It was hard for a sane man to even look upon it.
“Since it’s your idea, Harry, perhaps you should write it,” said O’Connor.
“Wish I could, boss,” said Harry. “But I’m not what you call a poet. Words come out of me like little tiny rabbit turds. Grunting, oofing, and pushing. I’m a reporter, not a writer.”
Again silence, but this time it was accompanied by stares, which came in a bit to rest on me. They both bored into me. It dawned on me where this was going, and I had to suspect it had been set up this way to make it seem spontaneous.
“Jeb’s the best I’ve ever read. He can’t put a sentence together that doesn’t sound like music. He’s the poet we need,” Harry proclaimed.
“Ah—” I started to object, but being hopelessly addicted to praise, I didn’t object too violently, for I wanted a few more gallons to come slopping down the chute onto my head.
“I wish I had his talent,” continued Harry. “My energy, his talent, his, uh, genius, no telling how far we’d go.”
“I think you’re right,” said O’Connor.
These fellows obviously thought it was something that could be turned on like a spigot. All I had to do was crank my genius faucet fully to the right and out would gush words for the ages. They had no idea that the faucet was rusty and temperamental, and the more you twisted it, the more you fretted and forced, the less likely it was to arrive on schedule. In fact, there was no schedule. It happened when it happened, and sometimes that was never.
“Now, listen here, Jeb,” said O’Connor. “Let’s think this through carefully. Indeed, yes, it’s built around a name, a name that clangs like a fire bell. But it’s also a tone. You’ve got to find something new. It has to play with words in an uncommon way, strike a chord that hasn’t been heard, affect an attitude new to the world. It has to be coldly ironic, for a start.”
“I don’t get ironic,” said Harry. “Never have. Iron, the ore? It has to have iron in it?”
“No, no, Harry, not the ore. It’s got to have a deft way of saying something A, so absurd and preposterous, that it decodes to something B, the exact opposite. When you asked Jeb about the shooting, he said, ‘Quite jolly.’ Lacking much sense of how we speak over here, you thought he meant ‘Quite jolly.’ But in his voice was that elusive tone of which I speak, nuanced, coded, subtle, a series of inflections meshed perfectly with little facial expressions such as slightly lifted left brow, slightly snarled upper lip, and a kind of trailing, dissipating rhythm, by which he communicated to me and far more to himself that he considers such action as blowing little birdies out of the sky with twelve-dram blasts, so that there’s nothing left but feathers and gristle, positively ghastly. That’s irony. That’s what this letter needs. That will make it last.”
Harry took an excellent lesson from this. “He doesn’t like hunting?” he asked incredulously.
We ignored him. He’d never get it, even if the initial impulse had been his.
“I’m not sure I’m up to this,” I said.
“Jeb, you’re halfway to a fine future. I’ll play you big in recompense, and in a bit you’ll be able to jump to a posh rag like the Times, where your gifts will make your fame, and they’ll send you all over the world and all the publishers will be beating down your door for a manuscript.”
I knew I was doomed. He had me cold. I was the birdie in the sights of his four-dram. The man was a genius.
And so, my first masterpiece. Like any piece of great writing, it has no autobiography. You cannot segmentize it and say, This came from there, and then I figured out that, and then from somewhere else that arrived, and there it was. No, no, not like that at all. It is more a process not of writing, I suppose, even less of willing, but somehow of becoming. You become what you must become.
Still, as I sat at what had become my desk in the newsroom, later that night after all the editions had been put to bed and most of the boyos had gone home or to the beer shop, I do remember odd notes coming together to form a melody, almost as if I were merely the conduit and something, some force (not God, as I don’t believe in Him and if I did, surely this is not the sort of enterprise He would willingly join), were dictating to me. For some strange reason, the word “boss” was in my mind, as Harry had used it to O’Connor, and it was not a common Britishism but more a bit of American slang, not the word, per se, but using it as a term of address. We call no one “boss,” we call the boss “sir.” Universally. So it amused me that whoever our fellow was, he’d address the world, via the Central News Agency, as “Dear Boss.” He wasn’t writing the coppers, you see, but in some sense the public, his true supervisor, as if putting on the whole show for their edification. I was conscious also of O’Connor’s dictate of irony, and I knew instinctively he was right. Our writer couldn’t be a foamer, a threatener, a bloviator, a loudmouth on a crate in Hyde Park haranguing the proletariat on its meat-eating habits. You couldn’t feel the sting of a volley of saliva when he talked. No, he’d been much too dry for that, so I used my own line from the meeting, “down on whores,” which understated by a thousand percent the carnage that he had released upon them. The word “shan’t” quite naturally appeared to me next, as I had never heard it spoken except on the lips of genteel vicars at the occasional ecumenical tea I had attended; I needed something harsh to play off the softness of “shan’t,” so I tried “cutting,” “slashing,” “whacking,” “sawing,” “hacking,” all of which did not, to my ear, work.
Then from somewhere—God’s mouth to my ear, or the devil’s lips to my brain—I came across “ripping,” which was perfect euphonically, even if wrong technically. He hadn’t ripped them, he’d cut them. But ripping had the right sound and connoted a savagery that the world would adore, even if, bent in the quarter-moon over his felled carcass, the man would in no way resemble a wild ripper, since his movements had to be focused, concentrated, driven by considerable application of disciplined force, all of it done with the knife’s sharp edge, none of it “ripped” as if by a crazy man’s churning hands, fingers all tightened to clamp strength as they tore asunder gobbets of flesh and flung them wildly. Whatever he was, he was no ripper, and perhaps the man could not have called himself a ripper, but the delicious sound of the word “ripper” trumped all those considerations. There is a poetic truth higher than fact.
After that, it seemed to come. I had to work in the word “jolly” some place, and I did, and I left it poetically adangle, in a form I’d never seen or heard. “Just for jolly,” I said. I avoided, out of fastidious liberal grounds, any mention of Jews, as one of my secret impulses was to absolve them in my fiction. I wanted no pogroms and no Peelers acting as Cossacks on my conscience, as full as that organ already was. That I was proud of, that I took some moral pleasure in.
And finally, the name. Well, “Ripper” was already achurn in my mind, and I was so pleased with the phrase “shan’t quit ripping” that I didn’t want to let it go, although I knew I had to alter it to a noun form from the verb, both to prevent repetition of an uncommon sound and to continue a kind of word melody playing with that sound. “Ripper” presented itself to me. So if “Ripper” is more or less the anchor, one needs something without an R in it, to avoid singsong or alliteration. “Robert the Ripper” or “Roger the Ripper” just sounded silly. Indeed, you needed counteriteration, a name bereft of R’s and P’s, yet also, to place it firmly in British tradition, a stout, sturdy Anglo-Saxon blurt of a name. “Tom” came to me, and I almost went with that, as “John” was too soft and “Will” hard to say because it need a fricative stop in order to slide easily into the sibilance of the R’s and P’s, and then I remembered the flag, like some common shopkeep or mill hand, and the patriotic treacle of it provoked my radical sensibility profoundly, amused me.