Odyssey 6.
Odyssey 7.
Emma was as good as her word and I was as good as my word.
In the summer of 1985 I began working as a secretary in a small publishing house in London which specialised in dictionaries and non-academic works of scholarship. It had an English dictionary that had first come out in 1812 and been through nine or ten editions and sold well, and a range of technical dictionaries for native speakers of various other languages that sold moderately well, and a superb dictionary of literary Bengali which was full of illustrative material and had no rival and hardly sold at all. It had a two-volume history of sugar, and a three-volume survey of London doorknockers (supplement in preparation), and various other books which gradually built up a following by word of mouth. I did not want to be a secretary & I did not particularly want to get into publishing, but I did not want to go back to the States.
Emma was really the next worst thing to the States. She loved America in the way that the Victorians loved Scotland, French Impressionists Japan. She loved an old Esso station on a state highway in a pool of light with a round red Coca-Cola sign swinging in the wind, and a man on a horse thinking vernacular thoughts among scenes of spectacular natural beauty, and a man in a fast car on a freeway in LA. She loved all the books I’d been made to read at school, and she loved the books we didn’t read in school because they might be offensive to born-again Baptists. I did not know what to say.
In my mind I saw a timid little mezzotint in which a lot of cross-hatching and a little hand tinting depicted some place where Europeans first going had been drunk on colour & writing a book had insisted on the Grand Canyon or Table Mountain or the South Seas being shown in a colour engraving, so that what was brilliant cobalt was represented by blue so pale it was almost white, vermilion crimson and scarlet by pink so pale almost white and there would be also a green so pale perhaps yellow so pale perhaps pale pale mauve, so that the reader might taste in a glass of water a real drop of whisky. I thought of Emma’s favourites with a scornful laugh, and yet this was stupid, you could just as well think of some other image that would not be contemptible—the black-and-white film does not show the world we see around us in its colours but it is not contemptible. The fact is that though things were better than when I had been reading things people had thrown their lives away on seventy years before at any moment a passion would fling itself on the first idea standing by and gallop off ventre à terre—how quietly and calmly some people argue.
It made me nervous to have these rages and sardonic laughs just waiting to gallop off ventre à terre, it was easier not to say anything or to say something quiet and banal. And yet if someone is very clever and charming you would rather not say something banal, you resolve instead to say something while remaining perfectly calm & in control—
I said that it seemed very quaint that in England books were in English & in France they were in French and that in 2,000 years this would seem as quaint as Munchkinland & the Emerald City, in the meantime it was strange that people from all over the world would go to one place to breed a nation of English writers & another to breed writers of Spanish, it was depressing in a literature to see all the languages fading into English which in America was the language of forgetfulness. I argued that this was false to what was there in a way that a European language could not be false to a European country, just as it was one thing to film Kansas in black & white but for the Land of Oz you had to have Technicolor, & what’s more (I seemed to be covering ground more impetuously than I had planned but it was too late to stop) it was preposterous that people who were by and large the most interesting the most heroic the most villainous the newest immigrants could appear in the literature of the country only as character actors speaking bad English or italics & by & large both they & their descendants’ ignorance of their language & customs could not be represented at all in the new language, which had forgotten that there was anything to forget.
Emma said: You mean you think they should not be just in English.
Exactly, I said. Once you think of it you wonder why you never thought of it before.
Well, said Emma, they do say desktop publishing is the way of the future—
Would you like me to type a 100-word letter in a minute? I said, for there was work to be done. A 50-word letter in 30 seconds? A 5-word letter in 3?
I hope you’re not too bored, said Emma.
I said: Bored!
I know it’s not very interesting, said Emma.
I would have liked to say But it’s absolutely enthralling. I said sensibly: The main thing is it’s giving me a chance to decide what I want to do.
This was exactly the kind of banal, boring remark I would rather not have made in the presence of someone clever and charming, but it seemed to me that Emma looked rather relieved. I said: It’s just what I was looking for. It’s absolutely fine.
The job was absolutely fine, Emma was clever and charming and I was in London. I tried to follow the example of Rilke but it was not so easy. It was not just a question of being overwhelmed by a body of work: Rilke was overwhelmed by Cézanne, but Cézanne could not have used a secretary, nor paid one. I did not like the idea of working for Rodin in order to stare overwhelmed at Cézanne; it seems as though if you turn up on someone’s doorstep you should at least be overwhelmed by his work.
Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read Leave It to Psmith for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett’s marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken.
Day followed day. A year went by.
Odyssey 8.
Odyssey 9 & just asking every word as he goes along. He hasn’t even been writing them on file cards. It is lovely that he is enjoying the story.
I came into the office one day in June 1986 to find everyone in a state of nervous excitement. An acquisitor had snapped up the firm and had assured everyone that it would remain an autonomous imprint. This sinister announcement was taken to mean that everyone would soon be redundant.
The overtaker was a big American company, and it published many writers admired in the office. There was to be a big party to celebrate the merger in a few weeks’ time.
Emma had got me my job and my work permit & she now got me an invitation to this party.
Now not only did the new firm publish many American writers admired in the office but it also published Liberace, and one of the reasons getting me invited was a favour, one of the reasons people were excited, one of the reasons I did not want to go, was that there was a rumour that Liberace would be there. By Liberace I don’t, of course, mean the popular pianist who coined the phrase ‘cried all the way to the bank’, loved no woman but his mother and died of AIDS in the mid-80s. I mean the acclaimed British writer and traveller whose technique rivalled that of the much-loved musician.