And Then There Was No One

Prologue

Gustav Slavorigin (born July 4, 1955, died September 11, 2011) was murdered in the small Swiss town of Meiringen on the third day of its Sherlock Holmes Festival. That much is in the public domain. Nor, I imagine, will it come as news to my readers that it was in Meiringen’s museum of Sherlockiana that his body was found by the festival’s organisers, alarmed at his prolonged absence from a formal reception of which he was the guest of honour. As everybody also knows, he had an arrow through his heart.

Even before the peculiar circumstances of his death enhaloed his name with a morbid new aura, he had of course been the object of fierce speculation by Britain’s and the world’s media, and if there are readers out there discouraged by the prospect of having the sensational if stale details of ‘the Slavorigin affair’ rehearsed yet again my advice is to ignore this Prologue and proceed at once to page 23, where Chapter One awaits them. I am alive to the danger of redundancy. But I do feel that, if what I am about to relate is to be adequately contextualised, it will be necessary, at the risk of boring a reader or two, to narrate not only the private history but the public prehistory of those events which drew to their dreadful climax in the Bernese Oberland. Short as this tour d’horizon will be, I still wish to apologise in advance, as Pascal did in one of his letters, for not having taken the time to make it shorter.

Slavorigin was actually born in Sofia, capital of Communist Bulgaria. (An unfunny joke which none the less pursued him throughout his adult life was that, although he impressed strangers meeting him for the first time as being as quintessentially English as the Prince of Wales, he was in reality, ho ho, of ‘Slav origin’.*) His banker father, however, was sufficiently well-off and, more to the point, sufficiently well-connected to emigrate out of that unhappy land if and when he pleased. Hence Gustav himself became a Londoner at the age of four and, except for his student years, remained one until his death. His gap year, incidentally, and much to the amusement of the braying upper-class lefties who comprised his set, he spent ‘roughing it’, I recall him quipping, as the pampered guest of family acquaintances in Amagansett, Long Island.

It was while he was still an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, where we were contemporaries, that he wrote and published his first novel, Dark Jade, a semi-autobiographical account of a fiery homosexual relationship which instantly made his name and saw him chosen as one of Granta’s Twenty Best Novelists.† That was succeeded, three years later, by what I and most people have always regarded as his very best piece of fiction, The Lady from Knokke-le-Zoute, about a Belgian divorcee in her late thirties who, after being mugged in the forecourt of the railway station at Nice while on solitary vacation, despoiled of her passport, travellers cheques, credit cards and suitcase, rapidly subsides into first destitution then prostitution. In the hands of another writer, a short-order romancer whose brilliance depends upon his remaining ceaselessly aware of his own limitations, a Zweig or a Bunin, it would have constituted no more than a twenty-four-carat gem of a short story. What Slavorigin made of this slim yet promising premise was a multi-character fresco stretching to three hundred dense pages, a ‘scathing indictment’, as more than one hack reviewer was pleased to describe it, of the moral bankruptcy of globalised capitalism. It won him – and it would have provoked a scandal had it not – that year’s Booker Prize.

There were to be four subsequent novels.‡ (He was not a prolific writer and, the heir to one of Eastern Europe’s greatest fortunes, he never had to be.) The first, A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Causes, the account of a deadpan young madman who, in the book’s opening paragraph, scrawls ‘Not to be. That is the answer.’ on the back of an unpaid phone bill and, in its closing paragraph, swallows, one by one, a jumbo tube of barbiturates, disappointed all but his unconditional admirers by its absence of humour and its flirtation with the dated fad of magical realism: ‘turgid’ was a word that began to be applied to his style. The second, The Boy with Highlights in His Hair, a surprisingly soggy coming-of-age tale and more of a novella than a novel, passed almost unnoticed (although it was the only one of his works to be filmed – wholly unsuccessfully, I might add). But it was with the third that he enjoyed a spectacular return to critical favour, even if it sold considerably fewer copies in Britain and the United States than he was accustomed to. Wayfarer, a vertiginously synoptic six-hundred-page-long overview of his native country’s twentieth-century history, traces the individual destinies, some of them interlinked, some not, of thirty-eight school-children who posed in the nineteen-twenties for an end-of-term class photograph which its protagonist disinters exactly half-a-century later while searching through his papers for his own birth certificate in order to prove to the authorities, of whom he has fallen foul for a never specified reason, that he is one-hundred-percent Bulgarian. The novel’s formal and stylistic maestria was undeniable, and Slavorigin was once more nominated for the Booker (he lost out to a Caribbean writer whose name the world has already forgotten), although I have to say that I personally tried twice to finish it and failed both times. (I doubt even God – who sees, and presumably also reads, everything – managed to get to the end.)

What followed was three years of silence. It was an all very relative silence, though, as he seemed to be seldom out of the newspapers, partying at Annabel’s, holidaying in Elton John’s Riviera villa with his newest boyfriend in tow (to his great credit, he never sought to conceal his homosexuality: the famous first sentence of Dark Jade was the brave and noble ‘I have always pitied any man who wasn’t gay’), firing off regular broadsides in the Guardian at the increasingly repressive policies of the Blair government. Then, when his peers were just beginning to forget that there had once been more to him than the playboy polemicist, there appeared – precisely, out of the blue – the book that was to transform his life and propel it to its premature and horrible end, Out of a Clear Blue Sky.

So much has been written about that book, even the most motivated of readers may well believe that this is one stepping-stone which can be leapt over. Yet I repeat: to comprehend what followed, and what follows in this memoir, we really must immerse ourselves twice in the same river.

The first surprise (of so many!) of Out of a Clear Blue Sky was that it wasn’t a novel at all but a loosely organised collection of essays, rambling, discursive and more than somewhat repetitious. The next surprise, considering its title and, in retrospect, its unfortunate jacket illustration – the much-reproduced snapshot of the second hijacked aircraft, United Airlines Flight 175, about to smash into the World Trade Center like a motor-powered model plane remote-controlled by a mischief-making brat – was that only one essay in the book, the last, dealt directly with the September 11 atrocity. And the third, for which his hitherto hazy left-leaning politics had not prepared us, was the sheer ferocity of his anti-Americanism, not only George Bush’s America but America tout court. ‘Once a millennial dream of generosity, tolerance and energy,’ he wrote, ‘Whitman’s rich and multifarious “continent of glories”, rugged, rowdy, aphrodisiac, wild, elastic and irresistible, it has become a poisonous carnival of bottomless bathos populated by millions of nice, ordinary, gee-shucks freaks and crackpots.’ Oddly, the one popular American artefact he owned to having a lingering fondness for was Coca-Cola, drinking three or four bottles of the stuff – never cans – every day of his life.

Since even I would find it tedious reiterating the book’s contents in their entirety, I shall limit myself here to reminding the reader of a few of its polemical high spots.

The opening essay, on popular culture, was drolly headlined ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, the regular envoi of the old Burns and Allen TV show.§ Slavorigin had always been a passionate cinéphile and had, in his journalism, expressed admiration for the work of Welles, Kazan, Kubrick and kindred neo-baroque American filmmakers.¶ In ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, by contrast, he flayed the entire mainstream Hollywood cinema as it is currently constituted, a ‘terminally infantilist’ cinema whose products he likened to greasy Big Macs – ‘and the so-called “indies” are Little Macs leavened with a few limp lettuce leaves’. Well, why not, that’s fair comment, and there are probably many of us ready to meet him halfway. But consider this: ‘If you have ever had the chance to watch those German films which were made during World War II by directors of real reputation – G. W. Pabst’s Paracelsus, to take a single example – you will know how hard it is to pass judgment on their strictly cinematic qualities, less on account of the embodied element, restrained but pervasive, of propaganda than because we cannot help reminding ourselves that the actors who appear in them were themselves Nazis, or else Nazi fellow-travellers, or else moral morons prepared, for the sole furtherance of their careers, to collaborate with the unspeakable. So it is today with the contemporary American cinema. How is one to evaluate a new film when all one sees on the screen, leering obscenely into the auditorium, are the neo-Nazoid faces of Hollywood’s current crop of performers, faces as putrid as faeces [oh, come on!], corroded by their very Americanness as an alcoholic’s by a lifetime’s intake of gin?’ Or this, of one cultish director in particular, whom I dare not name, since Slavorigin himself, had he not later had more parlous tribulations to contend with, would without doubt have been hauled into court on a charge of defamation of character: ‘X is an asshole and his movies resemble what oozes from assholes. They leave skid marks on the screen.’

The next essay, ‘The Statistics of American Stupidity’, was even more of a shocker. In it Slavorigin presented his readers with a childish if seductive proof that a statistical majority of Americans must indeed be as stupid as many non-Americans have always believed them to be.

‘The first thing we should note,’ he argued, ‘is that in 2004 George Bush won his second Presidential election (against Senator John Kerry) by approximately 50.7% to 49.3% of all votes cast. Let us simplify these percentages by rounding them out to 50/50%, from which it follows, if we observe equally that only 60% of the eligible electorate cast a vote, that 30% of the country’s adult population voted for Bush. If, then, we agree, as surely we do, that one definition of stupidity is satisfaction at the prospect of George Bush regaining the White House despite his uniquely calamitous first term of office, then we can already state without fear of contradiction that 30% of Americans are stupid. Now let us consider that 40% of the population which did not trouble to vote in the 2004 election and assume, for the sake of the argument, the likelihood of their being divided equally for and against Bush. Clearly, by the same token, the 20% of non-voters who would have voted for him are also stupid – as are, however, the other 20% who, notwithstanding the overwhelmingly damning evidence of that first term, were too dopey or too dozy to assist in driving the idiot of the global village out of office. 30% plus 20% plus 20% equals 70%. More Americans are stupid than not. QED.’ (Is the percentage any the less among Brits? I seriously doubt it.)

In the third essay, ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Paradigm?’, he developed this theme of American stupidity, along with ‘its physically externalised symptom and symbol, ballooning American obesity’, by linking it to what he termed the country’s ‘creeping mediaevalisation’ in matters of religion and patriotism, two terms which, for so fundamentalist a national mindset, had become ‘virtual synonyms’. Let me dip in at random: ‘Were Rip Van Winkle to awaken today after a century of slumber, or even only a decade, he would be amazed to discover that the United States had meanwhile known an intellectual regression inversely commensurate with its technological progress.’ And: ‘For Americans the Star-Spangled Banner is not merely the national flag, it is the True Cross.’ And: ‘For the Bush administration the Geneva Conventions are just that, a set of conventions.’ And: ‘Yes, admittedly, they [the American people] are warm, friendly, polite, hospitable to strangers and kind to animals, none of which, alas, prevents most of them from being also just plain dumb.’

Since the next six essays were written in the same scattershot vein, the reader will appreciate my letting them pass without extended editorial comment. But to give you the gist of it: Slavorigin systematically excoriated the pernicious despotism of American foreign policy; the lawlessness of the political-military establishment, particularly in relation to its endeavours, by the illegal erasure of damning videotapes, to cover up the pet CIA technique of ‘waterboarding’ political prisoners; the sweeping aside of numberless international treaties; the ineradicable rottenness of the Republican majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the equally ineradicable pusillanimity of the Democratic opposition; the kangaroo court of Guantánamo Bay and swinish hazing rituals of Abu Ghraib; the widespread wiretapping of telephones and interception of email messages; the neo-terroristic methodology of the entertainment industry (‘in the America of the twenty-first century,’ he wrote in one of the book’s more reckless passages, ‘pleasure has come to serve the same function as terror in Nazi Germany’, before going on to describe Disneyland as ‘that Belsen of fun’); the latent chauvinism of the nation’s intellectual elite as reflected in the many book, play and film titles to which the adjective ‘American’ is appended as a talismanic all-purpose prefix (American Gigolo, American Psycho, Harold Bloom’s ‘classic’ Emerson and the Making of the American Mind – ‘Who the Christ cares! Explain Emerson to us, yes please, Bloom, but spare us your ponderous burblings on the American Mind, whatever that is’); the religion of business and the business of religion (‘As P. T. Barnum might have said, there’s one born-again every minute’); the ubiquity of lawyers and liars; and so much more besides.

Now, that done, let’s zoom in on the gist of the gist, on the very last of the nine essays, the one which shares its title with the collection itself, ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’.

It seems, by the way, that Slavorigin’s two initial choices of title, for the essay, not the book as a whole, were ‘Come, Friendly Planes’, a paraphrase of Betjeman’s still mildly infamous line of verse ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough’, and ‘Small Atrocity in New York – Not Many Dead’, which aped the memorable winning entry in a New Statesman competition for the most boring newspaper headline imaginable.|| Naturally, his publishers vetoed both gags as just too outrageous, although somebody somewhere nodded, for both still feature in the text itself. As he elsewhere writes, however, ‘Let us have no excessive piety in the face of individual horror, for individual horror is the supreme constant of human history.’

The thesis of the essay is, in brief (and ‘brief’ is the word, since it is by far the shortest of the collection, a mere eight pages): notwithstanding the eschatological glamour of September 11 (‘Ah, those images, how we gorged on them, how we feasted on them!’), notwithstanding the undoubted and, as Slavorigin concedes, understandable shock to the nation’s system, a shock he compares not to that of the Pearl Harbor bombing, frequently referenced in this context, but to the sinking of the Titanic and the extinction of all the plush Edwardian complacencies which sank along with it, it was, from the loftiest of overviews – I repeat, this is Slavorigin speaking – a relatively minor atrocity, boasting (his word) fewer than three thousand victims and causing the destruction of a pair of skyscrapers of scant architectural distinction, leaving scores of others intact.

What followed was an abject and disastrously ill-judged ‘poetic’ description of the event itself, from which I decline to quote. Then a few, very few, words in memory of the victims, a gesture immediately subverted by a phrase I never thought to see in a text published by a reputable house (and for letting which pass, neither diluted nor deleted, some poor copy reader who had doubtless been terrified of crossing so touchy and temperamental an author, was sacked), ‘But, after all, they were only Americans.’**

Slavorigin concluded thus: ‘For what was, I repeat, a middling massacre, on the human and urban scale alike, when compared with the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and East Timor, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in occupied Iraq itself, to have been exploited by such excrement as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and that pallid fall-guy Colin Powell, with the overt or tacit support of virtually the entire population of the United States, in order to justify the invasion of a secular country which could not conceivably have played a role in the jihadist attack on the World Trade Center – that was the true atrocity of September 11.’

It was, in short, a polemic deliberately designed to stir up controversy. Nor did the argument, indefatigably inflammatory as it was, possess any real analytical depth or sophistication. And, probably to Slavorigin’s own disappointment, the furore he had so obviously sought quite failed to materialise in the British media. Aside from a rave review from a single diehard Slavoriginite, the book received mostly mixed and muted notices from the national press, the principal criticism being of the untethered bombast of its style. It did, however, become an instant bestseller, a rare distinction for such a ragbag of undisciplined musings, and the ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’ essay itself was reprinted in the London Review of Books.

It was, instead, on the other side of the Atlantic that the scandal finally erupted.

Slavorigin’s American publishers wouldn’t even touch the book. It was available on Amazon, however, and soon circulated as freely as if it had been published. Naturally, in view of its author’s reputation, it took no time for the first of what would turn into a cascade of newspaper articles to hit the stands. To begin with, and for the next several weeks, these articles did not much more than acknowledge its existence and the vague disquiet which had been occasioned by its British publication. Then there came a full-frontal assault from an influential neo-con monthly published out of Washington DC, followed by another, suspiciously similar piece in the Wall Street Journal. Then, as the rumpus gathered pace, and ordinary Joe Six-Packs were gradually made conscious of the blasphemous affront to that occurrence in their country’s history which more than any other since Lincoln’s assassination had been brushed by the sacred, even moderate rags began to editorialise on its implications for the special relationship between the USA and what Slavorigin scornfully referred to as the UKA. He was savaged by the tabloids. He was denounced, absurdly, as a Twin Towers ‘denier’. Why, there was even talk of a diplomatic incident. The American ambassador in London dispatched a note to 10 Downing Street ‘in protest at this unwarranted attack on the single most tragic event in the history of the United States by a writer who has been honored by the government of our nation’s oldest and closest ally’. (This, as it happens, was slightly misleading, Slavorigin having rejected the OBE which had been offered him.) The response of Her Majesty’s Government was that, while it too regretted the intemperance of the book in question, its author had committed no crime, none at least, save possibly that of libel, added a perfidious little parenthesis, for which he could be held to account in a British court of law, and his views, however offensive, were protected by the right of free speech, that same right, note well, which Slavorigin claimed had been irreversibly undermined by Blair and his yes-men.

It was at this stage of the crisis, just as the original press coverage was petering out for want of a replenishment of new developments, that, like a spider, the Web started to spin its own web. Virtual rumours ricocheted round the blogosphere before converging on an exceptionally eccentric website, albeit one which received many more hits than most such eccentric websites. It was called For a Trans-World America and the man who apparently masterminded it, even though his identity was nowhere disclosed on the page itself, was that Howard Hughes-y individual, down to the very initials of his name, Hermann Hunt V, notorious for never venturing out of his Scottish baronial-style castle in suburban Dallas.

HHV, as he was referred to by his mythologising cronies and toadies, was by no means the self-made billionaire his trumped-up legend made him out to be. His grandfather, Hermann Hunt III, had founded the Hunt fortune in Texan oil in the fifties, a fortune that his father, whom it occurred to no one ever to call HHIV, had neither squandered nor augmented when he died of a ruptured aneurysm at the age of forty-three. While still in his twenties, HHV, coerced by family pressure to forgo youthful ambitions of becoming a writer – with, so word had it, Ayn Rand as his model – began the process of transforming what was still, relatively speaking, a mom-and-pop business into a vast tentacular corporation by diversifying, first, into real estate, then into the liquor business, then agricultural equipment, then timber and forestry, then by a natural extension, the proprietorship of a myriad of ultra-reactionary publications.†† It was whispered meanwhile that an indeterminate number of shady organisations, all of them based in the West and South-West of the country’s hinterland, that ‘mainland of madness’, as Slavorigin had dubbed it, owed their inexplicable solvency to his generous financial backing.

Spoken of in this context were several survivalist communes in the Anaconda Mountains of Montana. A white supremacist group which held covert recruiting sessions in a desert motel, the Clandestine Inn, located seventy miles or so from Reno, Nevada, and owned by a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. The Neo-McCarthy Brotherhood, anti-Jewish, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-French and, although one assumes just for old times’ sake, anti-Communist. The Knights of the White Camelia, a fraternity of Doomsday prophesiers whose mailing address was a shopping mall in Eugene, Oregon, and all of whose members, running their respective businesses on a pleasantly profitable day-by-day footing while in anticipation of the looming Rapture, belonged to divers Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce. These and many, many others had benefited from HHV’s inexhaustible munificence.

Then, suddenly, the website began twitching with a whole new set of instructions to the faithful. Nothing connected with HHV, however, was ever straightforward. If you sought to decipher them, you had to print out each of the site’s four pages, cut them up into two unequal halves, unequal in one and only one fashion (i.e. one fat oblong and one thin one, each oblong being parallel to one of the four sides of the rectangular page itself, and no two widths being identical), then paste them together again, but differently, like the four individually incomplete and independently meaningless segments of a pirate’s treasure chart. Once they had been successfully recombined, and it had all fallen into place, the very first change to catch the eye was an unexpected refinement of the site’s typeface, causing its name now to read For a Trans-World America. What was the point, you asked yourself for a moment, of those five ugly bold-type caps? But only for a moment. A moment later enlightenment irradiated the screen. F.A.T.W.A.

The acronym was patently intended to remind impressionable bloggers of the Salman Rushdie affair, an affair which, for most of us, seems already to belong to a dim, nearly unknowable past when (in a narrative that Chesterton would not have repudiated) a significant fraction of the planet’s population had actually set off, by plane or by proxy, in pursuit of a single hapless human being. In a world in which terrorism itself has become globalised, we are all potential Salman Rushdies now, are we not, so who could be the object of this new personalised fatwa?

It was of course Slavorigin – Slavorigin who had blasphemed against the American creed, who had lampooned its prophets (‘the so-called, pompously so-called, Founding Fathers whose fabled Constitution is about as relevant to the contemporary world as the Ten Commandments’) and spat upon its martyrs (the fallen of September 11).

If the website’s cunning dynamics still made it impossible to know for sure who was calling the shots, even a technological duffer, blessed with a modicum of patience and luck, would have been able to work out what was at stake. All it required of the committed hacker was a diligent bout of clicking, copying and pasting. Then, assuming a few booby-traps had been sidestepped, the screen would display a cute little rebus whose pictorial clues, including a popular coconut-filled chocolate bar (simple), the forementioned town of Eugene, Oregon (even simpler) and a movie by the director Sam Peckinpah (a bit trickier), would, when aligned in the correct order, end by generating the unequivocal message: ‘A bounty of one hundred million dollars for the head of Gustav Slavorigin’.

One hundred million dollars! That put those stingy mad mullahs in their place. And yes, before long, through deepest cyberspace coursed the Chinese whisper that scores of claimants – at least one of them said, with a tremor of excitement, to be a woman – were boarding trains and planes, were heading for London, had already landed at Heathrow, on the first stage of the million-dollar crusade.

What happened next everybody knows. Like Rushdie before him, Slavorigin instantly went into hiding. Withdrawing from circulation, from the social and literary circus of which he had been both cynosure and clown, he found himself escorted, in the weeks that followed, weeks that would drag into months, and months into years, from one safe house to another.

During his long internal exile he was, however, neither idle nor suicidal. The despair he must initially have experienced – the more so as, to nobody’s surprise, the American government, taking its lead from the British, refused to intervene – began to be cushioned, after a rigorously cloistered first year, by an occasional dinner in town, at the Caprice or the Ivy, by a starry gala première at Covent Garden, the sole sign of his unannounced attendance being the proximity of two hefty minders wearing wraparound dark glasses night and day, pacing up and down outside restaurant or theatre rain and shine.

Then, almost exactly two years into his ordeal, he completed another book, a shortish thriller (of sorts, naturally).

How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Or, rather, an alleged murderer. For, as the reader comes to realise, there has occurred a gross miscarriage of justice. The real murderer (A Reliable Narrator is written in the first person, as if we were inside this murderer’s head) has eluded the law, has, as they say, got away with it. But therein lies his dilemma. It transpires that the murder he committed was no more than a parenthesis, open then closed again, in an otherwise suffocatingly dingy existence. The protagonist was a nonentity before he committed it and, never having had the chance to bask in the limelight of guilt, never having enjoyed his fifteen minutes of infamy, he has become a nonentity all over again. Just imagine the agony of his frustration. To have destroyed a fellow creature, to have barehandedly squeezed the last breath out of ‘a whorehouse miscarriage, a lying, foul-mouthed, poo-flinging ape’, yet to gaze into his shaving mirror every morning and see gazing back at him the same old pre-murder loser – this becomes so insufferable to his self-esteem that he howls out his guilt to anybody who will listen to him. But nobody will. Nobody but the reader, of course, who alone knows.

Hence the title. That first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

A Reliable Narrator was published to a set of reviews, not only in Britain, that most writers would die for. Which is undoubtedly why its author was invited to Meiringen by the organisers of its first Sherlock Holmes Festival. (Why he agreed to go is another question.) And which is also when my own part in his story begins.

* The ‘g’ of his surname, hard in Bulgarian, was eventually palatalised by the wear and tear of English usage.

† It was dedicated to the Scottish (gay) poet Edwin Morgan, ‘my spectral mentor’.

‡ Plus, published by Granta, an unrewarding and most cruelly selective autobiographical fragment, A Biography of Myself – composed, significantly, in the third person – and a theatrical squib, Enter Godot, staged at the 1993 Edinburgh Festival but never revived.

§ ‘It is too often forgotten,’ read another passage, ‘that the cultural glory of the contemporary United States has always been its high, not its populist, art.’ And he singled out for praise the poets Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Marianne Moore, etc, and the novelists Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Gaddis, etc, if less so the ‘much-overrated’ Fitzgerald.

¶ Even so, he regarded these as exceptions. The Hollywood movies which he truly adored, and which he dated meticulously as belonging to a three-decade Golden Age that stretched from 1929 to 1959, were almost all, so he tendentiously asserted, made by European immigrants, cultural and political refugees: i.e. Lubitsch, Lang, Hitchcock, Siodmak, Curtiz, Ulmer, Preminger, etc. And I recall how he enjoyed teasing his fellow film-buff students at Edinburgh with the (in fact, true) statement that he had never bothered to catch up with either Godfather I or II. ‘The Mafia as Borgias, no thanks!’ he would sneer. Or ‘Why should I go see a film in which Marlon Brando hams it up as a big dumb thug with cottonwool in his cheeks?’

|| The subject of the original had been a small earthquake in Chile.

** Emphasis mine. In the original the aside is rendered all the more provocative by the omission of italics.

†† Trees and newspapers, after all, form two successive generations of the same dynasty, the latter being the literate offspring of the bluff, inarticulate former, like college-educated children of peasant stock.