‘Since His Excellency could not conceivably be the Mr Williamson described in this book, he feels unable to comment at greater length. I am instructed to add for your information that there are no less than twenty families named Williamson with Placid Island nationality. If the author, or Mr Firman himself, cares to communicate direct with our Office of Information, it may be possible to clear up any confusion existing in Mr Firman’s mind, at least on that point.
‘I am further instructed to say that the only Mr Yamatoku who could be described as being in His Excellency’s employ, is financial counsellor to the Placid Island mission at the United Nations. Counsellor Yamatoku is presently stationed in New York.’
My adviser thought the letter quaint; but said that my credibility had suffered a set-back. Twenty Williamson families on Placid? Hadn’t I known that?
I explained the joke Mat had once explained to me. On Placid, changing family names was a popular sport, far more popular than the European political sport of street-name changing. In 1946 there had had to be a bye-law passed declaring a moratorium on name changing for two years. That was because every family name on Placid was suddenly MacArthur. All those Williamsons simply meant that Mat was becoming a potent cult figure.
And I don’t consider that communication in the least quaint. I think it plainly serves notice on me that, book or no book, I’m still on the run; and that if at any time I should feel disposed to think otherwise, I can put my belief to the test by writing direct to Mat’s Office of Information.
Well, I may now decide to do that.
The only reply from Symposia SA was a form letter from an official in a tribunal of commerce. It stated that Symposia was in voluntary liquidation and that any claim against it must be made by such-and-such a date. Very sad; but, as my adviser pointed out with unfeeling satisfaction, you can’t in Anglo-Saxon law libel the dead.
That left Professor Krom.
He was in no hurry to reply; and, after some weeks of silence, it was feared that he did not intend to do so. Enquiries established, however, that he had been in the United States attending another of his international police conferences, and also absent on vacation.
His reply has now been received. A copy of it was attached to the letter that arrived yesterday.
What I had expected, at best, was a tongue-lashing and a stern demand for the deletion of all references to himself and his work that he considered disrespectful. What I have received instead is — well, I haven’t yet quite made up my mind.
The waiver he gives is a conditional one, and my adviser seems to find it in some way entertaining. The conditions the Professor lays down are that, along with my account, there must be published in the same volume and as a postscript or appendix, his own brief Commentary on it. The Commentary must be published exactly as written, in full and as an uninterrupted whole. Furthermore, I may not change or modify it, as a result of anything he has had to say about it or for any other reason. ‘All those false hopes, doomed expectations, demonstrable lies and unintentional errors must remain in their original state, unspoilt and undisguised by the scratchings-over of hindsight.’ If these conditions are accepted, he will waive any objections he might have had to the submitted text.
There is a supplementary condition. While Professor Krom has the greatest respect for the publishers concerned, of whose reputation for integrity he is well aware, he must still insist upon receiving a final corrected proof of the book before it goes to press. He will wish to see for himself that the nominal price he has asked for his blessing has been fully and properly paid.
The publishers tell me, with evident satisfaction, that the Professor’s conditions are entirely acceptable to them.
They assume that his conditions will also be acceptable to me.
Well, of course they are acceptable. They must be. If I want my voice to be heard at all, I obviously have no choice in the matter.
The Professor’s Commentary is translated from the original Dutch.
I have read the edited version of Paul Firman’s book [he writes] with the keenest pleasure, the liveliest professional interest and yes, a good deal of wry amusement too. It has in it so much of what I always felt was there but failed completely to bring out myself. The reasons for my failure are plain. When the investigator-subject relationship is clouded by a basic personality conflict, the best that can be hoped for is that the investigator will ultimately succeed in functioning as a catalyst. To that modest extent, at least, I may claim success. My colleagues, Henson and Connell, both thought this subject exceptionally difficult, the latter going as far as to say, with defences arrayed in such depth, one had to ask oneself not simply what was behind them, but whether there would be room enough for a recognizable fellow creature. The simile he offered, that of a battle tank with armour so thick that it could accommodate a crew consisting only of trained mice, did not seem fanciful.
Well, Mr Firman has now set our minds at rest. The defences are formidable, yes, but there is a human being inside them. What kind of human being still remains, I think, to be seen; but we have available now a much clearer view of him. A self-serving effusion such as this, written by a delinquent of Mr Firman’s rare calibre, will always reveal more about its author’s internal world than the attempt at self-appraisal of an equally complex but less irresponsible mind. The scatological excesses of a Genet tell us more than the managed insights of a Gide.
Let us take a closer look at the material of Firman’s outer defences. At the Villa Lipp, I compared his clouds of verbiage with octopus ink, a comparison which the octopus himself faithfully reports. It is surprising, however, to find the comparison holding good for his written word. Any spoken one — its meaning so easily changed by the voice and body-language of its speaker at the moment — lends itself naturally to deception. Comedians, evangelists, fortune-tellers, demagogues, all who traffic in the human personality, know and depend upon the fact. The written word is usually less obliging. It can be examined more than once. It can be analysed and parsed. Doubters suspecting soft spots may prod and poke at it. Only those accustomed to appealing to the semi-literate, or those as full of bile and adverbs as Mr Firman, can make the mistake of believing that, if a statement is made with sufficient vehemence and a neat turn of phrase, the conviction it seems to carry will always be unquestioned.
At one point in the book, Mr Firman has much to say about the technique of the ‘smear’. By no means all of it was said, as he claims at the Villa Lipp, but no matter. To anything Mr Firman has to say about ways of smearing an adversary, I am prepared to listen. He is an expert on the subject.
Consider, for a moment, his descriptions of me and the way that I behave, socially as well as professionally.
Few men are without their vanities, idiosyncrasies and petty weaknesses. Many, I among them, possess visible physical peculiarities as well, although I am in no way abnormally handicapped. About his appearance, a sensible man of my age will have only vestigial illusions; and, if he has been much photographed at conferences and heard his platform voice coming back at him through television and radio, he will probably have dispensed with even those vestiges.