About the Book
Sibylla, a single mother from a long line of frustrated talents, has unusual ideas about child-rearing. Yo Yo Ma started piano at the age of two; her son starts at three. J.S. Mill learned Greek at three; Ludo starts at four, reading Homer as they travel round and round the Circle Line. A fatherless boy needs male role models; so she plays the film Seven Samurai as a running backdrop to his childhood. While Sibylla types out back copies of Carpworld to pay the rent, Ludo, aged five, moves on to Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese, aerodynamics and edible insects of the world – they might come in handy, if he can just persuade his mother he’s mature enough to know his father’s name …
Helen DeWitt
THE LAST
SAMURAI
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Book I
1: Do Samurai Speak Penguin Japanese?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Interlude
Book II
1: We Never Get Off at Sloane Square for Nebraska Fried Chicken
Chapter 6
2: 99, 98, 97, 96
3: We Never Get Off at Embankment to Go to McDonald’s
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
4: 19, 18, 17
5: We Never Go Anywhere
Chapter 10
6: We Never Do Anything
Chapter 11
7: End of the Line
Book III
1: 1, 2, 3
2: a, b, c
3: 9999997= 999993000020999965000034999979000006999999
Book IV
1: Trying to feel sorry for Lord Leighton
2: I know all the words
Chapter 12
3: Funeral Games
4: Steven, age 11
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
5: For David, with best wishes
Chapter 15
Book V
1: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
2: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
3: A good samurai will parry the blow
4: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
5: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
6: A good samurai will parry the blow
7: I’m a genuine samurai
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Published by Vintage 2001
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Copyright © Helen DeWitt 2000
The right of Helen DeWitt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Chatto & Windus
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 09 928462 6
To
Ann Cotton
THE LAST SAMURAI
Daughter of an American diplomat, Helen DeWitt grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador. She started a degree at Smith College and dropped out twice, the first time to read Proust and Eliot while working as a chambermaid, the second time to take the Oxford entrance exam. She read Literae Humaniores at Lady Margaret Hall, went to Brasenose College to do a doctorate in Greek and Latin literature then spent a year at Somerville College as a junior research fellow. In 1988 she started her first novel. Over the next decade she started work on around 50 other novels while working as a doughnut salesperson, dictionary text tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, management consultant and night secretary for a Wall Street law firm’s London office. The Last Samurai is her first finished novel; rights to it have been sold in 13 countries. Helen DeWitt lives in London.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In 1991 Ann Cotton went to a school in Mola, a village in a remote rural district of Zimbabwe, with the idea of doing research on girls’ education. She ended up talking to two schoolgirls who had come 100 km alone to attend the school. It did not take boarders, so they were living in a hut they had built themselves. They considered themselves lucky because most girls could not go to secondary school, as fees were charged; they dropped out and got married at twelve or thirteen instead. Ann went back to Britain and started raising money for scholarships by selling cakes in Cambridge Market. She founded the Cambridge Female Education Trust in 1993. She persuaded the Body Shop to fund a hostel in Mola. She persuaded other organisations to fund scholarships for more schools, first in Zimbabwe, then in Ghana. She persuaded me to become a Trustee; I could not have finished this book if she had not said ‘Of course’ each time I said I would do something for CamFed as soon as I had finished my book. Information about CamFed is available from 25 Wordsworth Grove, Newnham, Cambridge CB3 9HH and at http://www.camfed.org.
Professor David Levene has made the book more interesting and less prone to error in too many ways to count; it is impossible to express my debt to his unfailing generosity. I owe more than I can say to my mother, Mary DeWitt Griffin, not only for moral and financial support, but for sharing her remarkable gifts over the course of many years. Tim Schmidt, Maude Chilton and Steve Hutensky have been extraordinary friends; they know how much I owe them.
Alison Samuel of Chatto & Windus brought a fresh eye and keen attention to detail to bear at a stage when both were much needed. I am also grateful to Martin Lam, author of Kanji from the Start, for advice on the Nisus program, and to Neil and Fusa McLynn for extensive help with Japanese; also to Leonard Gamberg for casting an eye over the atom, to Chris Done for looking at the astronomy in an early version, to James Kaler for kindly answering a question at the very last minute raised by Stars and their Spectra, and to Ian Rutherford for finding a Greek font at the postultimate minute. It should go without saying that they are in no way implicated in any mistakes that remain. I owe a special debt to the many people who helped me appreciate the achievement of Akira Kurosawa; the book would have been very different without their assistance.
Without the enthusiasm of Jonathan Burnham of Talk Miramax Books there would be a manuscript but no book; the extent of that debt speaks for itself.
I am grateful for permission to use copyright material from the following: The Biographical Dictionary of Film, by David Thomson, The Eskimo Book of Knowledge, by George Binney, by permission of the Hudson’s Bay Company; Theory of Harmony, by Arnold Schoenberg, translated by Roy E. Carter (English translation ©1983 Faber and Faber Ltd); interview with John Denver, Melody Maker 27/3/76, p. 11, © Chris Charlesworth/Melody Maker/IPC Syndication; Foundations of Aerodynamics: Bases of Aerodynamics Design, by Arnold M. Kuethe and Chuen-Yen Chow, ©1986, reprinted by permission of John W. Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Half Mile Down, by William Beebe (Bodley Head); The Films of Akira Kurosawa, by Donald Richie (University of California Press), ©1984 The Regents of the University of California; The Solid State, by H.M. Rosenberg (©1988 Oxford University Press) by permission of Oxford University Press; Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar edited and enlarged by E. Kautzsch, second English edition by A.E. Cowley (1910), by permission of Oxford University Press; Njal’s Saga (extracts from pages 244-246), translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson (London, 1960) © 1960 Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. I would like to thank Kurosawa Production K. K. for permission to reprint material from the screenplay Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai).
Prologue
My father’s father was a Methodist minister. He was a tall, handsome, noble-looking man; he had a deep, beautiful voice. My father was an ardent atheist and admirer of Clarence Darrow. He skipped grades the way other boys skip class, he lectured my grandfather’s flock on carbon 14 and the origin of species, and he won a full scholarship to Harvard at the age of 15.
He took the letter from Harvard to his father.
Something looked through my grandfather’s beautiful eyes. Something spoke with his beautiful voice, and it said: It’s only fair to give the other side a chance.
My father said: What do you mean?
What it meant was that my father should not reject God for secularism just because he won arguments with uneducated people. He should go to a theological college and give the other side a fair chance; if he was still of the same mind at the end he would still be only 19, a perfectly good age to start college.
My father, being an atheist and a Darwinist, had a very delicate sense of honor, and he could not resist this appeal. He applied to various theological seminaries, and all but three rejected him out of hand because he was too young. Three asked him to come for an interview.
The first was a seminary with a fine reputation, and my father because of his youth was interviewed by the head.
The man said: You’re very young. Is it possible that you want to be a minister because of your father?
My father said he did not want to be a minister, but he wanted to give the other side a fair chance, and he explained about carbon 14.
The man said: The ministry is a vocation and the training we offer is designed for people who feel called to it. I doubt very much that you would benefit from it.
He said: This offer from Harvard is a remarkable opportunity. Couldn’t you give the other side a fair chance by taking a course in theology? I believe the college started out, after all, as a College of Divinity, and I imagine they must still teach the subject.
The man smiled at my father kindly and he offered to give him a list of books to read if he would like to do any more in the way of giving the other side a fair chance. My father drove home (they were living in Sioux City at the time) and all the way he thought that this might give the other side a fair chance.
He spoke to his father. The point was made that one course in theology in a strongly secular environment would probably not make a very considerable impact, but all the same my father must decide for himself.
My father went to the second seminary, which had a good reputation. He was interviewed by the Dean.
The Dean asked him why he wanted to become a minister, and my father explained that he did not want to become a minister, and he explained about carbon 14.
The Dean said he respected my father’s intentions, but still there was something whimsical about it, and he pointed out that my father was very young. He recommended that my father go to Harvard first and then if he still wanted to give the other side a fair chance he would be delighted to consider his application.
My father returned to his father. The beautiful voice pointed out that a man with a degree from Harvard would find it hard to resist the temptation of going instantly into a career, but it said that of course my father must decide for himself.
My father drove to the third seminary, which was small and obscure. My father was interviewed by a Deputy Dean. It was a hot day, and though a small fan was blowing the Deputy Dean, a red fat man, was sweating hard. The Deputy Dean asked why my father wanted to be a minister and my father explained about the fair chance and about carbon 14.
The Deputy Dean said that the church paid the fees of the seminarians who planned to become ministers. He said that as my father did not plan to become a minister they would have to charge $1,500 a year.
My father returned to his father, who said that he supposed my father could earn $750 over the summer at one of the gas stations, and that he would then give him the rest.
So my father went to a theological college. When I say that he went to a theological college I mean that he enrolled at a theological college & went every Saturday to synagogue out of interest because there was no rule to say you couldn’t, and spent most of the rest of the time shooting pool at Helene’s, the only bar in town that would serve a 16-year-old.
He waited for my grandfather to ask how he was finding it, but my grandfather never asked.
At the synagogue my father met someone ten years older who ran the services and did most of the readings. He looked a lot like Buddy Holly, and in fact people called him Buddy (he preferred it to Werner). At first my father thought this was the rabbi, but the town was too small to support a rabbi: The services were run by local volunteers. Buddy had wanted to be an opera singer, but his father had insisted he train as an accountant, and he had come from Philadelphia to take up a job as an accountant. He too spent a lot of time shooting pool at Helene’s.
By the end of three years my father was very good at shooting pool. He had saved up about $500 from his winnings, and he played carelessly so as not to win too much or too often. He could beat everyone in the bar, but one night a stranger came in.
By some accident the stranger played everyone else first. He played with smooth, economical movements, and it was obvious he was in a different class from anyone my father had played so far. My father wanted to play him; Buddy kept trying to warn him off. He thought there was something not quite right about the stranger; either he would win more than my father could afford to lose, or he would lose and pull a gun. My father thought this was ridiculous, but then the stranger’s jacket rode up as he bent over and they saw a gun strapped to his waist.
The game came to an end and my father walked up. He said: My friend here says you’re dangerous.
The stranger said: I can be.
My father said grinning broadly: He says you’ll kill me if I win.
The stranger said: Are you so sure you’ll win?
My father said: There’s only one way to find out.
The stranger said: And who might you be?
My father said he was at the seminary.
The stranger expressed surprise at finding a seminarian in the bar.
My father said We are all sinners, brother, in a rather sarcastic tone of voice.
The stranger and my father played a game and five dollars changed hands.
The stranger said: Do you want your revenge?
They played another game which took longer. My father was still playing carelessly; he naturally did not talk while the stranger was playing, but when it was his own turn he answered the stranger’s questions with sarcastic stories about the seminary. The stranger was a man of few words, but he seemed amused. My father won in the end with a lucky shot and five dollars changed hands.
The stranger said: Now let’s make it interesting.
My father said: How interesting do you want to make it?
The stranger asked how much money my father had in the world and Buddy Holly mouthed the words NO NO Don’t tell him you stupid jerk from behind his back and my father said he had $500.
The stranger said he would give any odds against the $500. My father couldn’t tell if he was serious.
He said: A hundred bucks. Best of five.
The stranger said in that case he’d like to see the color of his money, because he had to get back on the road and he was not going to hang around for a hundred bucks. He said 5 to 1.
My father had $25 on him. He borrowed $25 from Buddy and the rest in tens and fives from people in the bar who knew he was good for it.
They played two games and the stranger won them both easily. They started the third game and the stranger began to win easily, but then my father’s luck turned and he pulled himself together and won. He won the fourth game, though it was a hard fight, and then he won the fifth game and it was silent in the bar. Other people in the bar had seen the gun too.
The stranger reached inside his jacket and everyone froze. Then he took out a wallet. He extracted five $100 bills from a thick stack.
He said: I don’t suppose you’ve had this much money all at one time before.
My father pointed out that he already had $500.
The stranger said: $1,000! That’s a lot of money.
He said: I hate to see a man with money who doesn’t know what to do with it.
My father said: What do you mean?
The stranger said if you knew something a little ahead of other folks you could sometimes make money if you already had money.
My father said: What do you know?
The stranger said he wouldn’t be surprised if the new highway was built that way.
My father said: If you know that for a fact why don’t you do something about it? Buy some real estate.
The stranger said: I don’t like property. It ties you down. But if I didn’t mind owning property, and I had $1,000, I’d know what to do with the money.
The bar closed and the stranger drove off. It happened that Mrs. Randolph, Buddy’s landlady, wanted to sell her house and move to Florida, but no one was buying. My father pointed out that if the stranger was right they could buy this house and turn it into a motel and make a lot of money.
If, said Buddy.
The fact was that they were both convinced that the stranger knew what he was talking about; the gun lent a mysterious conviction to the story.
My father said he wasn’t going to have time for that though, because once he was through with the seminary he was going to Harvard. He had written to Harvard to take up the earlier offer.
A few weeks went by. A letter came from Harvard explaining that they would like to see what he had been doing for the past few years and asking for his grades and a reference. My father provided these, and a couple of months went by. One day a letter came which must have been hard to write. It said Harvard was prepared to offer him a place based on his earlier record, and it went on to explain that scholarships however were awarded purely on merit, so that it would not be fair to other students to give one to someone with a D average. It said that if he chose to take up the place he would need to pay the normal cost of tuition.
My father went home to Sioux City for Easter. Buddy went home to Philadelphia to celebrate Passover. My father took the letter to his father.
My grandfather looked at the letter from Harvard, and he said that he believed it was God’s will that my father should not go to Harvard.
Four years earlier my father had had a brilliant future. Now he faced life with a mediocre degree from an obscure theological college, a qualification absolutely useless to a man incapable of entering the ministry.
My father was struck speechless with disgust. He left the house without a word. He drove a Chevrolet 1,300 miles.
In later years my father sometimes played a game. He’d meet a man on his way to Mexico and he’d say, Here’s fifty bucks, do me a favor and buy me some lottery tickets, and he’d give the man his card. Say the odds against winning the jackpot were 20 million to 1 and the odds against the man giving my father the winning ticket another 20 million to 1, you couldn’t say my father’s life was ruined because there was a 1 in 400 trillion chance that it wasn’t.
Or my father might meet a man on his way to Europe and he’d say, Here’s fifty bucks, if you happen to go to Monte Carlo do me a favor, go to the roulette table and put this on number 17 and keep it there for 17 spins of the wheel, the man would say he wasn’t planning to go to Monte Carlo and my father would say But if you do and he’d give him his card. Because what were the odds that the man would change his plans and go to Monte Carlo, what were the odds that 17 would come up 17 times in a row, what were the odds that if it did the man would send the money on to my father? Whatever they were it was not absolutely impossible but only highly unlikely, and it was not absolutely certain that my grandfather had destroyed him because there was a 1 in 500 trillion trillion trillion chance that he had not.
My father played the game for a long time because he felt he should give my grandfather a sporting chance. I don’t know when he played it for the last time, but the first time was when he left the house without a word and drove 1,300 miles to see Buddy in Philadelphia.
My father parked in front of Buddy’s house. A piece of piano music was being played loudly and bitterly in the front room. Doors were slammed. There were loud voices. Somebody screamed. The piano was silent. Somebody started playing the piano loudly and bitterly.
My father found Buddy who explained what was going on.
Buddy had wanted to be an opera singer and was an accountant. His brother Danny had wanted to be a clarinettist and worked in his father’s jewelry business. His sister Frieda had wanted to be a violinist and worked as a secretary before marrying and having three children. His sister Barbara had wanted to be a violinist and worked as a secretary before marrying and having two children. His youngest sister, Linda, wanted to be a singer and she had now refused point-blank to go to secretarial college; his father had refused pointblank to let her study music. Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.
The fact was that their father was Viennese and had very high standards. The children could all play five or six instruments with flair but they hated to practice: They emerged from each piece either bloody but unbowed or miraculously unscathed, and they had all assumed they would be musicians. Buddy was the first to find they would not. Mr. Konigsberg thought that either you had talent or you did not; none of his children played like a Heifetz or a Casals or a Rubinstein, therefore they did not have the talent to be professionals; therefore they would be better off just enjoying their music, and he explained when Buddy finished high school that he thought he should be an accountant.
Buddy said to my father: You know at the time I didn’t want to upset my father, I didn’t want to make a big thing of it, I thought who am I to say I could be a singer, but then all the others gave in without an argument. I keep thinking, what if it’s my fault? If I’d put my foot down maybe my father would have gotten used to the idea whereas instead they all thought they didn’t have a choice, I keep thinking what if it’s all my fault?
& he waited hopefully—
& my father said: Of course it’s your fault. Why didn’t you stand up to him? You let the whole side down. The least you can do is make sure it doesn’t happen again.
My father knew that he would always hate himself for respecting his own father’s wishes, and he now thought that at least someone else could avoid this mistake.
Does she have a place? he asked.
No, said Buddy.
Well she should go for an audition, said my father, and he went into the front room followed by Buddy to argue for this point of view.
In the front room was a 17-year-old girl with fierce black hair, fierce black eyes & ferocious red lipstick. She did not look up because she was halfway through her 41st consecutive rendition of Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor.
My father stood by the piano and he suddenly thought What would be the odds against going to a seminary and going to synagogue and learning to play pool, just suppose he fell in love with a Jewish girl from Philadelphia and made a fortune in motels and lived happily ever after, say the odds were a billion to one that was still not the same as impossible so it was not actually impossible that his father had not, in fact—
Linda plunged down to the bass and hammered out three bitter low notes. Doom. Doom. Doom.
The piece was over. She looked up before starting again.
Who are you? she said.
Buddy introduced my father.
Oh, the atheist, said my mother.
i
– Let’s make bamboo spears! Let’s kill all the bandits!
– You can’t.
– That’s impossible.
Three farmers (Seven Samurai)
A small village is yearly invaded by bandits and the farmers lose their crops and sometimes their lives. This year the elders decide to do something about it. They have heard of a village which once hired masterless samurai and was saved. They decide to do the same and send some of their number to search for willing samurai. Since there is no pay, merely food, a place to sleep, and the fun of fighting, the farmers are fortunate that they first meet Kambei (Takashi Shimura), a strong and dedicated man who decides to make their cause his own. A young ronin, Katsushiro (Ko Kimura) joins him, then he accidentally meets an old friend, Shichiroji (Daisuke Kato). He himself chooses Gorobei (Yoshio Inaba) who in turn chooses Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki). A master swordsman, Kyuzo (Seiji Miyoguchi) joins, and so, eventually, does Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a farmer’s son himself, who has been following them around for some time, attracted—as all of them are—by Kambei.
Once in the village they prepare for war. Not waiting for the first attack, they storm the bandits’ fort, burn it and kill a number of the bandits—though Heihachi is also killed. The bandits attack the village and they repulse them, though Gorobei is killed. Then they hit upon the plan of allowing a few in and spearing them to death. In the final battle both Kyuzo and Kikuchiyo are killed—but the bandits are all dead.
It is spring, once more the rice-planting season has come. Of the original seven samurai, only three are left and they soon will go their separate ways.
Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa
1
Do Samurai Speak Penguin Japanese?
There are 60 million people in Britain. There are 200 million in America. (Can that be right?) How many millions of English-speakers other nations might add to the total I cannot even guess. I would be willing to bet, though, that in all those hundreds of millions not more than 50, at the outside, have read A. Roemer, Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik (Leipzig, 1912), a work untranslated from its native German and destined to remain so till the end of time.
I joined the tiny band in 1985. I was 23.
The first sentence of this little-known work runs as follows:
Es ist wirklich Brach- und Neufeld, welches der Verfasser mit der Bearbeitung dieses Themas betreten und durchpflügt hat, so sonderbar auch diese Behauptung im ersten Augenblick klingen mag.
I had taught myself German out of Teach Yourself German, and I recognised several words in this sentence at once:
It is truly something and something which the something with the something of this something has something and something, so something also this something might something at first something.
I deciphered the rest of the sentence by looking up the words Brachfeld, Neufeld, Verfasser, Bearbeitung, Themas, betreten, durchpflügt, sonderbar, Behauptung, Augenblick and klingen in Langenscheidt’s German-English dictionary.
This would have been embarrassing if I had been reading under the eyes of people I knew, since I should have been on top of German by now; I should not have frittered away my time at Oxford infiltrating classes on Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Hittite, Pali, Sanskrit and Dialects of the Yemen (not to mention advanced papyrology and intermediate hieroglyphics) instead of advancing the frontiers of human knowledge. The problem is that if you have grown up in the type of place that is excited to be getting its first motel, the type of place that is only dimly (if, indeed, at all) aware of the very existence of the Yemen, you want to study dialects of the Yemen if you can because you think you may well not get another chance. I had lied about everything but my height and my weight to get into Oxford (my father, after all, had shown what can happen if you let other people supply your references and your grades) and I wanted to make the most of my time.
The fact that I had completed an undergraduate degree and gone on to get a scholarship to do research just showed how much more appropriate the grades and references were which I had provided myself (straight As, natürlich; lines like ‘Sibylla has wide-ranging interests and an extraordinarily original mind; she is a joy to teach’) than anything anyone I knew would have come up with. The only problem was that now I had to do the research. The only problem was that when a member of the scholarship committee had said, ‘You’re on top of German of course,’ I had said airily, ‘Of course.’ It could have been true.
Roemer, anyway, was too obscure to be on the open shelves of the Lower Reading Room with more frequently consulted classical texts. Year after year the book gathered dust in the dark, far below ground. Since it had to be called up from the stacks it could be sent to any reading room in the Bodleian, and I had had it sent to Reserve in the Upper Reading Room of the Radcliffe Camera, a library in a dome of stone in the centre of a square. I could read unobserved.
I sat in the gallery looking out across a bell of air, or at the curving walls crammed with extraordinarily interesting-looking books on non-classical subjects, or out the window at the pale stone of All Souls, or, of course, at Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik (Leipzig, 1912). There was not a classicist in sight.
I formed the impression that the sentence meant: It is truly a fallow and new field which the author has trod and ploughed through in handling this subject, so especially might this statement sound in the first moment.
This did not really seem worth the trouble it had taken to work it out, but I had to go on so I went on, or rather I was about to go on when I glanced up and I happened to see, on a shelf to my left, a book on the Thirty Years War which looked extraordinarily interesting. I took it down and it really was extraordinarily interesting and I looked up presently and it was time for lunch.
I went to the Covered Market and spent an hour looking at sweaters.
There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.
There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.
I saw several interesting sweaters in the Market but they seemed to be rather expensive.
I tore myself away at last and returned to the fray.
It is truly a fallow and new field which the author has trod and ploughed through in handling this subject, so especially might this statement sound in the first moment, I reminded myself.
It seemed extraordinarily uninteresting.
I went on to work through the second sentence, ratio of profit to expense as before, and the sentence after that and the one after that. It took five to ten minutes to read a sentence—an hour a page. Slowly the outlines of the argument loomed out of the mist, like Debussy’s drowned cathedral sortant peu à peu de la brume.
In La Cathédrale Engloutie chords of melancholy grandeur break out, at last, ff !!!! But when, after some 30 hours or so, I began at last to understand—
49 people in the English-speaking world know what lay in wait. No one else knows or cares. And yet how much hangs on this moment of revelation! It is only if we can conceive of the world without Newton, without Einstein, without Mozart, that we can imagine the difference between this world and the world in which I close Aristarchs Athetesen after two sentences and take out Schachnovelle in cool disregard of the terms of my scholarship. If I had not read Roemer I would not have known I could not be a scholar, I would never have met Liberace (no, not the) and the world would be short a—
I am saying more than I know. One thing at a time. I read Roemer day after day, and after 30 hours or so enlightenment came not in an hour of gold but an hour of lead.
Some 2,300 years ago Alexander the Great set out from Macedonia to conquer everything in his path. He conquered his way down to Egypt and founded the city of Alexandria, then went on to conquer his way east and die, leaving his followers to fight over his conquests. Ptolemy was already governor of Egypt, and kept it. He ruled the country from Alexandria, and it was he who set up one of the many splendours of the city: a Library built up through an acquisitions policy of singleminded ruthlessness.
The invention of the printing press lay as far ahead of them as the wonders of the 3700s from us; all books were copied out by hand. Mistakes crept in, especially if you were copying a copy of a copy of a copy; sometimes the copyist would have a bright idea and add bogus lines or even entire bogus passages, and then everyone after him would innocently copy the bright idea along with the rest. One solution was to get as close to the original as you could. The Library paid the Athenian public record office a massive deposit to borrow the original manuscripts of the whole of Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the lot) and make copies. It then made sure of having the best possible version by the simple expedient of keeping the originals, returning the copies and forfeiting the deposit.
So far, so not wildly exciting, and yet so much could be said, all fascinating, about the Library and Alexandria and the mad people who lived there, for the writers alone must be the most perverse and wilful the world has ever known. There are people who, needing a place to put umbrellas, go to Ikea and purchase an umbrella stand for easy home assembly—and there are people who drive 100 miles to an auction in the heart of Shropshire and spot the potential in an apparently pointless 17th-century farming implement. The Alexandrians would have been bidding against each other at the auction. They loved to rifle the works of the past (conveniently available in a Library built up by a ruthless acquisitions policy), turn up rare words which were no longer understood let alone used, and deploy them as more interesting alternatives to words people might actually understand. They loved myths in which people went berserk or drank magic potions or turned into rocks in moments of stress; they loved scenes in which people who had gone berserk raved in strange, fractured speeches studded with unjustly neglected vocabulary; they loved to focus on some trivial element of a myth and spin it out and skip the myth—they could make a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of any Hamlet. As scholars, as scientists, as mathematicians, as poets who led the flower of Roman youth astray, they crowd their way into books not mainly about them; given a book to themselves they burst out at once into a whole separate volume of footnotes—I speak of course of Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria, a book I would come back from the grave to possess (I asked for it on my deathbed once and didn’t get it). But time is short—the Boy Wonder is watching the video, who knows for how long—what was Roemer’s contribution to this marvellous subject?
Roemer was interested in the Homeric criticism of Aristarchus, who was head of the Library a little after 180 BC (the unpleasantness about the tragedies was before his time). Aristarchus had wanted a perfect text of Homer; since an original manuscript did not exist, ruthlessness and cash were not enough: he had to compare copies and spot mistakes. He marked for deletion (athetised) lines he thought did not belong in the text, and was the first to write down his reasoning in commentaries. Nothing by Aristarchus survived. There were marginal notes on the Iliad that named no names but were probably third-hand extracts from Aristarchus; there were a few other notes that named names.
Some of the third-hand extracts struck Roemer as brilliant: they were clearly by Aristarchus, who was clearly a genius. Other extracts were too stupid for a genius: clearly by someone else. Whenever someone else was said to have said something brilliant he saw instantly that it was really by Aristarchus, and if any brilliant comments happened to be lying around unclaimed he instantly spotted the unnamed mastermind behind them.
Now it is patently, blatantly obvious that this is insane. If you are going to shuffle all the names around so that one person is always the genius, this means that you have decided not to believe your source whenever it says someone else said something good or the genius said something bad—but the source is your only reason for thinking the genius was a genius in the first place. Anyone who had stopped to think for two seconds would have seen the problem, but Roemer had managed to write an entire scholarly treatise without thinking for two seconds. Having settled on stupidity as the criterion of inauthenticity he went on to discard one stupid remark after another as really by Zenodotus or Aristophanes (no, not the) or misquoted by Didymus, with many sarcastic & gleeful asides on the ineptitude of these imbeciles.
When I first worked out that this was what he was saying I couldn’t believe he could really say it so I read another 50 pages (at a rate of 20 minutes/page, thus adding another 16.66 hours to the total) and he really was saying it. I stared at the page. I closed my eyes.
Say you grow up in the type of place that is excited to be getting its first motel, moving from town to town as one motel is finished and another begun. You are naturally not enthralled by school and achieve a solid B – average. Presently you take Scholastic Aptitude Tests and astound everyone by a degree of scholastic aptitude which places the B – average in an entirely different light. Your teachers take the result as a personal insult. You apply to various colleges, who ask for references, and teachers who have reduced you to speechless torpor write complaining of apathy. You are interviewed on the basis of dazzling scholastic aptitude and you are asked about your interests and you have no interests. You have no extracurricular activities because the extracurricular activity was the Donny Osmond Fan Club. Everyone turns down your application on grounds of apathy.
One day you are lying on a bed in one of the motel rooms. Your mother is having a bad day: she is playing Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude for the 63rd time on the piano in the adjacent room. Your father is having a good day: a member of the Gideon Society has come to suggest placing Bibles in the rooms, and he has been able to state categorically that he is not having that piece of trash in his motel. Each bedside table, he explains, has a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species in the top drawer. In fact it’s a really good day because that very morning one of the guests stole the Origin of Species instead of a towel. You stare apathetically at the TV. They are showing A Yank at Oxford.
Suddenly you have an idea.
Surely Oxford, you reason, would not hold non-membership of the Donny Osmond Fan Club against you. Surely Oxford would not insist on mindless enthusiasm just to prove you can be enthusiastic about something. Surely Oxford would not accept hearsay as evidence. Surely Oxford wouldn’t hold a reference against you without knowing anything about the writer.
Why not apply?
I thought: I could leave Motelland and live among rational beings! I would never be bored again!
I had reckoned without Roemer. I now thought: Maybe it’s my German?
But he really was saying it and I really had spent 46.66 hours reading it. I stared at the page. I stared out across the dome. The space was filled with the soft sound of pages turning. I put my head on my hand.
I had spent 46+ hours on this bizarre piece of logic at a time when I had read not a word of Musil, or Rilke, or Zweig. But I did not have a scholarship to read things that were merely good; I had a scholarship to make a contribution to knowledge. I had squandered 47 hours at a time when people were dying of starvation & children sold into slavery; but I did not have a work permit to do things that were merely worth doing. If I had not needed the work permit I could have dispensed with the scholarship, & if I had gone back to the States I could have dispensed with the work permit, but I did not want to go back to the States.
There is a character in The Count of Monte Cristo who digs through solid rock for years and finally gets somewhere: he finds himself in another cell. It was that kind of moment.
I wished I had spent the 47 hours on dialects of the Yemen.
I tried to cheer myself up. I thought: I am in Britain! I can go to a film and catch an ad for Carling Black Label! Because the ads in Britain are the best in the world, and the ads for Carling Black Label were British advertising at its best. I couldn’t think of a film I actually wanted to see but the ad would be brilliant. But I suddenly thought that this was exactly the problem, this was the diabolical thing about life: one minute of a Carling Black Label ad to two hours of Ghostbusters XXXV that you didn’t even want to see in the first place. So I decided not to go to a film, and if only—
I decided against a film. I thought: Let’s go in search of fried chicken.
An American in Britain has sources of solace available nowhere else on earth. One of the marvellous things about the country is the multitudes of fried chicken franchises selling fried chicken from states not known for fried chicken on the other side of the Atlantic. If you’re feeling a little depressed you can turn to Tennessee Fried Chicken, if you’re in black despair an Iowa Fried Chicken will put things in perspective, if life seems worthless and death out of reach you can see if somewhere on the island an Alaska Fried Chicken is frying chicken according to a recipe passed down by the Inuit from time immemorial.
I cycled out the Cowley Road, past a Maryland Fried Chicken, past a Georgia, and all the time I was trying to think of something I could do without a work permit. I came at last to a Kansas Fried Chicken and dismounted.
I was just locking my bike when I thought suddenly: Rilke was the secretary of Rodin.
The things I knew about Rilke were these: that he was a poet; that he went to Paris and got a job as secretary to Rodin; and that he saw some paintings by Cézanne in an exhibition at the Grand Palais and went back day after day to stare for hours, because they were like nothing he’d seen.
I knew nothing about how Rilke got this job, so that I was free to imagine that he simply turned up on the doorstep. Why shouldn’t I simply turn up on a doorstep? I could go to London or Paris or Rome and turn up on the doorstep of a painter or sculptor, the type of person who would probably not care about a work permit. I could see things that had just come into the world and stare for hours.
I walked up and down and I tried to think of an artist who might need an assistant.
I walked up and down and I thought that perhaps it would be easier to think of an artist if I were already in London or Paris or Rome.
I did not have a lot of money, so I walked up and down trying to think of a way to get to London or Paris or Rome. At last I went into the Kansas Fried Chicken.
I was just about to order a Kansas Chik’n Bucket when I remembered that I had signed up for dinner in college. My college was famous for its chef, and yet I was tempted to stay where I was, and if only—
I won’t think that. I don’t mean that, but if only—
What difference does it make? What’s done is done.
By coincidence I had signed up to eat in college that night; by coincidence I sat by a former member who was visiting; it was no coincidence that I talked of intellectual monogamy & of work permits since I could think of nothing else, but by coincidence this former member said sympathetically that Balthus had been the secretary of Rilke, by coincidence she was the daughter of a civil servant & so not intimidated by British bureaucracy, & she said that if I could bear the shame of being known to
Why are they fighting?
WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?
WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?
Can’t you read what it says?
Of COURSE I can read it but WHY
Well they’re looking for samurai to defend the village from bandits
I know that
but some of them think it’s a waste of time
I know THAT
because the samurai they’ve asked have been insulted by the offer of three meals a day
I KNOW that
and now they’re saying I told you so
I KNOW THAT BUT WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING
I think this may be too hard for you.
NO
Maybe we should wait till you’re older
NO
Just till you’re 6
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
OKOKOKOKOK. OK. OK.
I think he is probably too young but what can I do? Today I read these terrible words in the paper:
In the absence of a benevolent male, the single mother faces an uphill battle in raising her son. It is essential that she provide the boy with male role models—neighbours, or uncles, or friends of the family, to share their interests and hobbies.
This is all very well but Ludo is an uncleless boy, and I don’t happen to know any well-meaning stamp collectors (if I did I would do my best to avoid them). It’s worrying. I once read that Argentine soldiers tied up dissidents and took them up in planes over the sea and threw them out. I thought: well, if L needs a role model let him watch Seven Samurai & he will have 8.
The farmers see a crowd of people. A samurai has gone to the river’s edge to be shaved by a monk.
A man with a moustache and a sword pushes his way through the crowd and squats scratching his chin. (It’s Toshiro Mifune.)
A handsome, aristocratic young man asks someone what’s happening. A thief is hiding in a barn. He is holding a baby hostage. The samurai has asked for monk’s robes and two rice cakes.
The samurai puts on his disguise. He feels Mifune watching and turns. His eyes are black in a white face on a black screen. Mifune stares blankly back. The samurai’s eyes are black in a white face. Mifune scratches himself. The samurai turns away. He turns back and looks at Mifune; his eyes are black his face is white. He turns away and goes to the barn.
Mifune sits on a stump close behind him to watch.
The samurai tells the thief he has brought food, tosses the rice cakes through the door, and follows.
The thief runs from the barn and falls down dead.
The samurai drops the thief’s sword in the dirt.
The parents of the child rush forward to take it.
Mifune runs forward brandishing his sword. He jumps up and down on the body.
The samurai walks off without a backward look.
type (I had admitted to 100wpm) I could have a work permit & a job.
I was about to say earlier that if I had not read Roemer on the 30th of April 1985 the world would be short a genius; I said that the world without the Infant Terrible would be like the world without Newton & Mozart & Einstein! I have no idea if this is true; I have no way of knowing if this is true. Not every genius is a prodigy & not every prodigy is a genius & at 5 it is too soon to tell. Sidis knew 12 languages at 8, lectured on solid geometry at Harvard at 12, and ended unknown to all but anxious parents of early over-achievers. Cézanne taught himself to paint in his twenties. But Bernini was a prodigy and a genius, and so was Mozart. It’s not impossible. It’s possible.
It’s possible, but is it likely? If L is a Mozart or a Newton people 10 centuries from now will be interested in the fact that he so nearly
Why did he cut off his hair? Why did he change his clothes?
WHY DID HE CUT OFF HIS HAIR? WHY DID HE CHANGE HIS CLOTHES?
WHY DID HE
He had to disguise himself as a priest so the thief wouldn’t be suspicious and kill the child.
Well why couldn’t the priest go?
I think Buddhist priests don’t believe in violence. Besides, the priest might not have been able to disarm the thief. Anyway the thing that matters is that he does it for nothing, and he does it to rescue a child, because we discover later that his greatest regret—
I would like to tell him to let the film speak for itself. I am about to say this in the confidence that he cannot go wrong when I remember Mr. Richie’s comments on the final rice-planting scene. Mr. Richie is the author of The Films of Akira Kurosawa, and as I rely on this book for everything I know about the many films of Kurosawa which are not available on video I wish he had not said that the end showed the ingratitude of the farmers and a rice-planting scene as an element of hope. If the film does not speak for itself I will have to say something about the film which I would very much rather
I say to L that I read somewhere that in the Tokugawa period it was punishable by death for a non-samurai to carry a sword. I say that Mr. Richie says that shaving the head would normally be a mark of humiliation for a samurai. I say that the name of the actor with the moustache is Mifune Toshiro because I don’t want him to pick up my bad habit of putting the names in the Western order out of laziness and I write it down on a piece of paper for him so he will know it next time. I say that the name of the actor who plays the samurai is Shimura Takashi and I write down after a little thought the characters for Shimura and after a lot of thought the character for Takashi. I say that I have seen Kurosawa’s name spelled two ways, the characters for Kuro (black) and Akira (don’t know) are always the same, but I have seen two different characters used for Sawa. I write down both versions & I say that it seems more polite to use the form preferred by its bearer. He says which one is Kurosawa and I say he does not appear, he is the director and he says what’s a director and I say that it will be easier to explain when he has seen the film. It occurs to me that these pieces of information are flimsy defences against whatever it is that makes a man when told to toss a person from a plane do as told, which is too bad as L instantly wants to know more. He asks me to write down the names of all the other actors so he can look at them later. I say I will try to find them in the autobiography.
never existed; Roemer will be as momentous in his way as the plague that sent Newton home from Cambridge. But why shouldn’t he end badly? The business of getting a baby from womb to air is pretty well understood. Out it comes, a dribbling squall. Presently its talents come into the open; they are hunted down, and bludgeoned into insensibility. But Mozart was once a prodigious, prestidigious little monkey.
My father used to say with a mocking smile when things went wrong, which they for the most part did: Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been. If L comes to good not by some miracle but by doing the right thing rather than the wrong others may profit from his escape; if he comes to bad (as is not unlikely) his example may spare them.
The farmers look at each other. This is the man they need. They follow him out of town.
So does Mifune.
So does the aristocratic young man. He runs up to the samurai in the road and falls to his knees.
L (reading subtitles): My name is Katsushiro Okamoto. Let me follow you
L: I am Kambei Shimada. I am only a ronin. What’s a ronin?
I: A masterless samurai.
L: I am not a samurai and I have no followers
L: Please take me
L: Stand up, or else we can’t talk properly
L: You are embarrassing me; I am not very skilful
Listen, I can’t teach you anything special
I’ve merely had a lot of fighting experience
Go away and forget about following me
It’s for your own good
L: I’m determined to follow you, whatever you say
L: I forbid you
I can’t afford to have any followers
Mifune runs up and stares at the samurai. Kambei: Onushi—samurai ka? Mifune (drawing himself up) : [incomprehensible shout]
L: Are you a samurai?
L: Of course!
Kambei and Katsushiro walk away. A farmer runs forward and falls to his knees.
I tell L that in the autobiography Kurosawa has nothing but praise for the marvellous Mifune except possibly that he had a rather harsh way of talking which the microphones had trouble picking up. I say that it’s very charming the way the translators have translated the Japanese into Penguin.
L: What’s Penguin?
I: It’s what English translators translate into. Merely had a lot of fighting experience! Determined to follow you! As it happens most English speakers can understand Penguin even if they wouldn’t use it in daily life, but still.
L: Isn’t that what they say?
I: They may be speaking Penguin Japanese, we can only surmise. Kambei says Tada kassen ni wa zuibun deta ga, tada, just, kassen is battle or combat according to Halpern (but I wonder whether that isn’t just Penguin infiltrating the dictionary), ni in, wa topic particle, zuibun a lot, deta happened, ga another particle which we won’t go into now but which seems pretty common, it’s hard to believe it is giving the flavour of Penguin to the
L: When are you going to teach me Japanese?
I: I don’t know enough to teach you.
L: You could teach me what you know.
I: [NO NO NO NO] Well
L: Please
I: Well
L: Please
Voice of Sweet Reason: You’ve started so many other things I think you should work on them more before you start something new.
L: How much more?
I: Well
L: How much more?
The last thing I want is to be teaching a five-year-old a language I have not yet succeeded in teaching myself.
I: I’ll think about it.
I would like to strike a style to amaze. I think I am not likely to discover the brush of Cézanne; if I am to leave no other record I would like it to be a marvel. But I must write to be understood; how can formal perfection be saved? I see in my mind a page, I think of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum: across the top one Latin line, the rest English (or possibly German), identification of persons obscure after 2,000 years. Just so will this look if I explain every reference for 45th-century readers, readers who may, for all I know, know the name of a single 21st-century genius (the one now five years old). What I mean is that I see in my mind a page, across the top a line with the words Carling Black Label, the rest a solid mass of small type describing Carling Black Label the beer, Carling Black Label ads the glory of British advertising, Levi’s the jeans, stonewashed Levi’s ad parodied in classic ad for Carling Black Label, lyrics of I Heard It Through the Grapevine classic song sung by Marvin Gaye in classic jeans and classic beer ad, not to mention terrible deprivation of American audiences of the time able to export the jeans and import the beer but not to sample the glories of British advertising to which these gave rise. What I mean is that I have read books written 2,000 or even 2,500 years ago or 20 years ago and in 2,500 years they will need everything even Mozart explained and when once you start explaining there is no end to it.
HOW MUCH MORE?
HOW MUCH MORE?
HOW, MUCH, MORE?
I: Well if you read the Odyssey and Books 1–8 of the Metamorphoses and the whole Kalilah wa Dimnah and 30 of the Thousand and One Nights and I Samuel and the Book of Jonah and learn the cantillation and if you do 10 chapters in Algebra Made Easy then I will teach you as much as I can.
L: Then that’s what I’ll do.
I: All right.
L: I will.
I: Fine.
L: You’ll see.
I: I know.
L: Will you teach me the alphabet while I’m working on the rest?
I: It doesn’t have an alphabet. It has two sets of syllabaries of 46 symbols apiece, 1,945 characters of Chinese derivation in common use since the Second World War and up to 50,000 characters used before then. I know the syllabaries and 262 characters which I keep forgetting which is precisely why I am not really qualified to teach it to you.
L: Then why don’t you get a Japanese to teach me?
This is a wonderful idea. I could get a benevolent Japanese male to act as an uncle substitute for L! A benevolent Mifune lookalike to come and talk about stamp collecting or football or his car in a language which would conceal the diabolical tedium of the subject. But he would probably want some money.
I: I don’t think we can afford it.
I once read a book about an Australian girl who was given an English bulldog; a big truck was sent into town to collect the (as they thought) large animal, and brought back a baby bulldog that could be held in the palm of a hand. At the time I thought I would like a tiny bulldog of my own. Little did I know. L has read Ali Baba and Moses in the Bullrushes and Cicero’s De Amicitia and the Iliad which I started him on by accident, & he can play Straight No Chaser which he learned by listening to the tape & trying to copy it about 500 times—it is wonderful that he was able to do it and yet if you are trying to type 62 years of Crewelwork Digest onto computer in the same room it can sometimes be hard to feel a proper
For who was Mozart? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was an Austrian composer of genius, taught music by his father Leopold from the age of five, and displayed in the courts of Europe playing the harpsichord blindfold and performing other tricks. He composed string quartets, symphonies, piano sonatas, a concerto for the glass organ and several operas including Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. His sister Nannerl received identical training and was not a musical genius. I have heard it argued, and by a clever man too, that this proves that women are not capable of musical genius. How is it possible to argue this, you say, AND to know that a brother and sister may have no genes in common, without being committed to the unlikely theory that any man could be a Mozart with similar training? You say it, and I thought it; but the fact is that a clever man so seldom needs to think
What’s a syllabary?
A syllabary is a set of phonetic symbols each representing a syllable
he gets out of the habit.
What’s a syllable?
You know what a syllable is
No I don’t
A syllable is a phonetic element of a word containing a vowel, take the word ‘containing’ you could break it down to ‘con-tain-ing’ and have a symbol for each part. In Chinese each word is just one syllable long, a monosyllable. What would polysyllabic be?
With many syllables?
Exactement.
And oligosyllabic would be with few syllables
It would be, but it’s not used much, people seem to work in terms of an opposition between the one and the many
Duosyllabic
It would be better to say word of two syllables on grounds of euphony. In general if you are going to make up a word you should use the adverbial form of the number, which would give disyllabic except people often seem to use bi after mono, monogamy bigamy monoplane biplane. Usually Latin numbers go with words of Latin derivation, so unilateral bilateral multilateral bicameral multinational, and Greek numbers with words of Greek derivation, tetrahedron, tetralogy, pentagon
Trisyllabic
Yes
Tetrasyllabic
Yes
Pentasyllabic hexasyllabic heptasyllabic oktasyllabic enasyllabic dekasyllabic hendekasyllabic dodekasyllabic
Exactly
Treiskaidekasyllabic tessareskaidekasyllabic pentekaidekasyllabic hekkaidekasyllabic heptakaidekasyllabic
And who was Bernini? Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was ‘the greatest genius of the Italian Baroque’, who moved to Rome at the age of seven and was taught by his father
EIKOSASYLLABIC
Pietro, a sculptor. Rudolf Wittkower (German art historian, refugee from the Nazis [where to begin?], author of Art & Architecture in Italy 1600–1750) compares him to Michelangelo ([1475–1564]),
enneakaieikosasyllabic
TRIAKONTASYLLABIC
painter, poet, sculptor of genius …) in his capacity for superhuman
oktokaitriakontasyllabic enneakaitriakontasyllabic
TESSARAKONTASYLLABIC
concentration. ‘But unlike the terrible and lonely giant of the sixteenth century, he was a man of infinite charm, a brilliant and witty talker, fond of conviviality, aristocratic in demeanour, a good husband and father, a first-rate
enneakaitessarakontasyllabic PENTEKONTASYLLABIC
heiskaipentekontasyllabic
organiser, endowed with an unparalleled talent for creating rapidly and with ease.’
And Cézanne? Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French painter of genius, associated with the Impressionist
treiskaihexekontasyllabic
school of painting. He was inarticulate: people called him the Bear. He worked very slowly and with
oktokaihexekontasyllabic enneakaihexekontasyllabic
HEBDOMEKONTASYLLABIC
difficulty. He is most famous for his landscapes and still lifes. His method was to apply blocks of paint to the canvas, often with a palette knife rather than a brush. He worked so
heptakaihebdomekontasyllabic
slowly that even fruit could not
OGDOEKONTASYLLABIC
stand still enough: it rotted
What’s the longest word in the world?
I don’t know. I don’t know all the words in the world.
What’s the longest word you know?
I don’t know.
How can you not know?
I think it’s the name of a polymer. I can’t remember how it goes.
duokaiogdoekontasyllabic
Wait a minute. Here’s a good one. di(2-ethylhexyl)hexa-hydrophthalate.
Is that the polymer?
No.
What does it mean?
I once knew.
My dad would know.
The hell he would (think I)—I would like to say this but I don’t KNOW that he doesn’t, there is only an (in my opinion) overwhelming likelihood, & I think I should not blacken his name to L without good hard evidence.
He MAY know. It didn’t come up in the conversation.
What did you talk about?
I talked about the Rosetta Stone. He talked about his car and about a writer he admired.
What kind of car does he have?
He didn’t say. Diethyl-dimethyl methane. Diethyl-diethyl malonate. Diethyl-methyl-ethyl malonate.
treiskaiogdoekontasyllabic tessareskaiogdoekontasyllabic pentekaiogdoekontasyllabic
before he was done. He used
oktokaiogdoekontasyllabic enneakaiogdoekontasyllabic
ENENEKONTASYLLABIC
wax fruit instead.
And who was Rilke and who was Zweig and who was Musil? Who was Newton and who was Einstein? Rilke
Why don’t you teach me the syllabaries?
WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?
WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?
Well
Are they hard?
Not very
Please
Well
Please
I told you the deal
Heiskaienenekontasyllabic duokaienenekontasyllabic
Glenn Gould (eccentric, brilliant mid-20th-century Canadian pianist and specialist in the works of J. S. Bach [18th-century German
HEPTAKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC
composer of genius]) said of The Well-Tempered Clavier [forget it], that the preludes
OKTOKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC
were merely prefatory
ENNEAKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC
and of no
HEKATONTASYLLABIC
real musical interest. The
You could teach me ONE syllabary
I told you the deal
Is there a language with only one syllabary?
I think Tamil makes do with one
So Tamil would be a monosyllabaric language
Yes
And Japanese is a disyllabaric language but most people would call it bisyllabaric
Yes
trisyllabaric tetrasyllabaric pentasyllabaric hexasyllabaric
reader
heptasyllabaric
may
oktasyllabaric
take comfort
enasyllabaric
in a plain
dekasyllabaric hendekasyllabaric dodekasyllabaric
preface.
hekkaidekasyllabaric
I will hope to do no worse by
heptakaidekasyllabaric
OKTOKAIDEKASYLLABARIC
ENNEAKAIDEKASYLLABARIC
EIKOSASYLLABARIC
heiskai
You’re missing a masterpiece of modern cinema. Finish the Odyssey and I’ll teach you the hiragana, yes?
Done.
Emma offered me a work permit & a job.
I said: Done.
Odyssey 1.
Odyssey 2.
Odyssey 3.
Odyssey 4.
I never meant this to happen. (L is reading Odyssey 5. He has read four books in four days. I would carry on from where I left off but I have misplaced my notes.) What I meant was to follow the example of Mr. Ma (father of the famous cellist), who I read somewhere started teaching Yo Yo when he was 2.
Coupez la difficulté en quatre was his motto, which meant that he would reduce a piece of music to a number of very small short tasks; the child was to master one task a day. He used the same procedure with Chinese characters, the child learning a character a day—by my reckoning that makes two simple tasks but you get the picture. I thought that this would be an enormous help to L for very little trouble to myself, & when he was 2 I started him on flashcards.
I think that the first simple task was supposed to be cat. No sooner had he mastered this simple task than he wanted to go on, he wanted every single word in his vocabulary on a card, he sobbed PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE when I tried to stop before writing it down. The next day he started his first book, Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, no sooner had he started than he started to cry because he did not know Hop and Pop. I saw in a flash that the time required to teach a two-year-old workaholic by the look-and-say method would leave perhaps 6 minutes a day for typing, & so (doubting my ability to make ends meet on 55p a day) I hastily went over a few principles of the phonics system. He learned to say huh when he saw an h and puh when he saw a p and by the end of the week he could read as follows: Hop. On. Pop. The. Cat. in. the. Hat.
I thought: It worked! It worked!
He would sit on the floor and when he found something interesting he would bring it over to show me.
Thunder of tiny feet. He had unearthed a treasure. Yes? I would say
And he would produce from the page—O Joy!—a thing of glory
The
Wonderful!
And here was another find! What could it be? Could it—No—Yes—Yes—It was a
Cat
And he would pluck from the page one marvel after another, until at last he could nonchalantly draw now a rabbit, now a dove, now a string of coloured scarves from an ordinary empty black top hat.
Wonderful marvellous wonderful marvellous cool
I was not getting as much work done as I had hoped.
One day it occurred to him that there were quite a lot of other books on the shelves.
He selected a book with pictures, and he came to my side, perturbed.
The face on the gutta percha inkstand has a tale to tell
I explained gutta percha, inkstand and tale
it is believed to be that of Neptune, moulded to commemorate the successful use of the material to insulate the world’s first submarine telegraph cable from England to France in 1850.
& I said NO.
I said You know a lot of these words don’t you, and he said Yes, and I said Why don’t you practise reading the words you know and you can pick FIVE WORDS that you don’t know and I will explain them.
I don’t know how much of this deal he understood. He asked for Neptune, moulded, commemorate, successful, material, insulate and submarine. I explained them in a manner which I leave to the imagination. He read a few words that he knew and put the book on the floor. Then he went back for another book. What a delightful surprise! In, And, To and our old friend The in Truth and Other Enigmas! Sadly, however, no sign of gutta percha or Neptune.
He put the book on the floor and went back to the shelf.
20 books later I thought: This is not going to work.
I said: Put the book back on the shelf
& he took it down with a cry of glee
so I put it back and I put him in his playpen and he started to sob.
I said: Look, why don’t you look at all the nice pictures in Classic Plastics, and whenever you know a word you can read the word, look at this lovely yellow radio
and he sobbed NOOOOOOOOOO
I said: Well look, here’s Truth and Other Enigmas, that’s got lots and lots and lots of words, let’s see if you know a word on this page
& he sobbed NOOOOOOOOOOO and tore the page from the book and hurled the book away.
I thought: Let’s think of some other simple task. A simple task that can be mastered on a daily basis that will not lead to the transfer of hundreds of books to the floor.
So I took him to Grant & Cutler and I bought a little French picture book and Yaourtu la Tortue and L’Histoire de Babar (as well as a copy of Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne which they happened to have in stock). I taught him a few simple words on a daily basis for a few days and he left the English books alone.
I thought: It worked! It worked!
One day he found some French books on a shelf. I explained five words in Zadig. Soon 20 French books had followed it to the floor. Then he went back to the English books.
I thought: Let’s think of another simple task.
I thought arithmetic could be the simple task. So I taught him to count past 5 and he counted up to 5,557 over a period of three days before collapsing in sobs because he had not reached the end & I said with the genius of desperation that the good thing about infinity is that you know you’ll never run out of numbers. I taught him to add 1 to a number which seemed a simple task & he covered 20 sheets of graph paper with calculations: 1+1=2 2+1=3 3+1=4 until he was carried sobbing to bed. I once read a book in which a boy who studied too much at an early age came down with brain fever and was reduced to imbecility; I have never come across a case of brain fever outside a book, but still I was concerned & would have liked to stop but he sobbed if I tried to stop. So I taught him to add 2 to a number and he covered 20 sheets with 2+2=4 3+2=5.
How old was he asks a reader. I think he was about 3.
He settled down now and as long as he could cover 20 sheets with a particular calculation he did not need to go on to infinity. He did not need to take the books off their shelves. I taught him to multiply single numbers & now on 20 sheets he put times tables for the numbers 1–20. I have no idea how you would make a 3-year-old do this if he did not want to any more than I know how you could stop one that wants to, but when he had done it for a couple of months it was easy to explain variables & functions & increments. So by the time he was 4 he could read English & some French & cover 20 sheets with graphs for x+1, x+2, x+3, x+4; x2 + 1, x2+2 & so on.
About a year ago I snatched a moment to read Iliad 16. I had been typing in Melody Maker 1976 and had reached the point in an interview with John Denver where the singer explained:
You know, Chris … I have a definition of success, and what success is to me is when an individual finds that thing which fulfills himself, when he finds that thing that completes him and when, in doing it, he finds a way to serve his fellow man. When he finds that he is a successful person.
It doesn’t make any difference whether you are a ditch-digger or a librarian or someone who works at the filling station or the President of the United States or whatever, if you’re doing what you want to do and in some way bringing value to the life of others, then you’re a successful human being.
It so happens that in my area, which is entertainment, that success brings with it a lot of other things, but all of those other things, the money, the fame, the conveniences, the ability to travel and see the rest of the world, all of those are just icing on the cake and the cake is the same for everybody.
This was the kind of thing a recent President of the United States (like Denver, a genuinely nice guy) had tended to say, and as there was no point thinking about his particular way of bringing value to the life of others I thought it was a good time to take a break and read Iliad 16. I had been typing for five or six hours so it was a good day so far.
Iliad 16 is the book where Patroclus is killed—he goes into battle wearing Achilles’ armour to encourage the Greeks & unnerve the Trojans, since Achilles still refuses to fight. He wins for a while but he goes too far; Apollo makes him dizzy & takes away his armour, & he is wounded by Euphorbus, & then Hector kills him. I had remembered suddenly that Homer addresses Patroclus in the vocative & that it is strangely moving. Unfortunately I could not find Iliad 13–24, I could only find 1–12, so I decided to read Hector & Andromache in Book 6 instead.
As soon as I sat down L came up to look at the book. He stared & stared. He said he couldn’t read any of it. I said that was because it was in Greek & had a different alphabet & he said he wanted to learn it.
The last thing I wanted was to be teaching a 4-year-old Greek.
And now the Alien spoke, & its voice was mild as milk. It said: He’s just a baby. They spend so much time in school—wouldn’t he be better off playing?
I said: Let him wait to be bored in a class like everyone else.
The Alien said: It will only confuse him! It will destroy his confidence! It would be kinder to say no!
The Alien has a long eel-like neck and little reptilian eyes. I put both hands around its throat & I said: Rot in hell.
It coughed & said sweetly: So sorry to intrude. Admirable maternity! All time devoted to infant amelioration. Selflessly devoted!
I said: Shut up.
It said: Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
I said: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
—& I wrote out a little table for him:
& I said: There’s the alphabet.
He looked at the table and he looked at the page.
I said: It’s perfectly simple. As you can see a lot of the letters are the same as the ones you already know.
He looked at the table and he looked at the page and he looked at the table.
The Alien said: He is only four
Mr. Ma said: Coupez la difficulté en quatre
I said patiently:
I said patiently a lot of things which it would try my patience even more to repeat. I hope I am as ready as the next person to suffer for the good of others, and if I knew for a fact that even 10 people this year, next year or a thousand years from now would like to know how one teaches a 4-year-old Greek I hope I would have the decency to explain it. As I don’t know this I think I will set this aside for the moment. L seems to be transferring Odyssey 5 word by word to pink file cards.
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.
Liberace the musician had a terrible facility and a terrible sincerity; what he played he played with feeling, whether it was Roll Out the Barrel or I’ll Be Seeing You, and in sad pieces a tear would well up over the mascara and drop to the silver diamanté of a velvet coat while the rings on his hands flashed up and down the keyboard, and in a thousand mirrors he would see the tear, the mascara, the rings, he would see himself seeing the mascara, the rings, the tear. All this could be found too in Liberace (the writer): the slick, buttery arpeggios, the self-regarding virtuosity as the clever ring-laden hands sparkled over the keys, the professional sincerity which found expressiveness for the cynical & the sentimental, for the pornographic, even for alienation & affectlessness. And yet he was not really exactly like the pianist, because though he did genuinely have the emotional facility of the musician he had only the air of technical facility, there being to even a buttery arpeggio not only the matter of running hands up and down the keys but
L wants to know what βíηφιν means. I say he knows perfectly well what it means & he says he doesn’t.
At first (because I was explaining that βíηφιν was the instrumental form of βíη, meaning by force or violence) I thought that the writer was like a person who typing puts a hand down one key to the right or left of where it should be, so that an intelligible sentence nrvomrd duffrnly uninyrllihlnlr ot nrstly do, snf yhr gsdyrt you yypr yhr eotdr iy hryd (ψηλαφ
ων means, can I see the line? it means feeling or groping about), and in my mind I saw the hands of Liberace moving rapidly & confidently up and down the keyboard striking keys now black now white. Now I think (as far as a person can be said to think who is taking the place of a talking dictionary) that even this is not quite right, because though Liberace did strew his work with mistakes they were not the kind (πετ
σσας means spreading, it is the aorist participle of πετννυμι) that you could overlook in that way or rather (you know perfectly well what 
φαινον means No I don’t It means weave and what form is it here 1st person singular imperfect OK) it is not that he overlooked them (
ρσενες means males) but that he looked straight at them with complacency (just a minute). Breathless with adoration would Liberace litter his work with gaping arguments and images knocked awry, stand back, fold arms, Ed Wood abeam at toppling tombstones and rumpled grass (just a minute). Did he notice or not care? He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, & being unable to combine the two had settled for the one he could be sure of (δασ
μαλλοι: thick-fleeced; 
οδνεφíς: dark; λíγοισι: withies; withy: a piece of wicker-work; π
λωρ: You know what πλωρ means No I don’t Yes you do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t It means monster That’s what I thought it meant—No wonder I am sticking pins in the father of this child). Here was a man who’d learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.
Od. 10.
Met. 1.
I Sam. I? [Have not read in years.]
I Sam. II-V? [Hell.]
It is strange to think that Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre was first published in 1911, a year before Roemer brought out Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik. Schoenberg, who had a wife and two children, was scraping a living as a teacher of music & portrait painter. I think Roemer held a position at the University of Leipzig. Roemer’s colleagues might have pointed out the fallacy; I might have spoken fluent German & lost half an hour on it; I might have lost 50 hours a week later—and Ludoviticus would not now be setting Mr. Ma at defiance by mastering 500 simple tasks on a daily basis. The atoms which now direct the application of a pink Schwan Stabilo highlighter to Odyssey 10 would be going about some other business, as would I, & the world, for all I know, would be short an Einstein. And yet tactful colleagues, bad German and terrible timing might have conspired to catapult me from an academic career without effect upon Schwan Stabilo & Odyssey 10: Schoenberg, distracted by financial difficulties, might have written a stupid book. He might have written a clever book; I might have gone to buy a dress on the day of the party.
On the day of the party I walked down to Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a dress, and on my way to Boules I thought I would just stop off for a moment at Books etc. I happened to go into the music section, and I happened to pick up Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony.
My father used to say, when things went wrong, that man is the cat’s paw of fate. I think this is the kind of thing he had in mind.
No sooner had I taken the book from the shelf than I had to buy it; no sooner bought than began to read.
Schoenberg was putting forward arguments for the development of music using a much more liberal notion of consonance, and then possibly eventually of a music using a much wider range of notes (so that you could have, say, an extra four notes between C and C sharp). He said:
It is clear that, just as the overtones led to the 12-part division of the simplest consonance, the octave, so they will eventually bring about the further differentiation of this interval. To future generations music like ours will seem incomplete, since it has not yet fully exploited everything latent in sound, just as a sort of music that did not yet differentiate within the octave would seem incomplete to us. Or, to cite an analogy—which one has only to think through completely to see how very relevant it is: The sound of our music will at that time seem to have no depth, no perspective, just as Japanese painting, for example, affects us as primitive compared with our own, because without perspective it lacks depth. That [change] will come, if not in the manner that some believe, and if not as soon. It will not come through reasoning (aus Gründen) but from elemental sources (Ursachen); it will not come from without, but from within. It will not come through imitation of some prototype, and not as technical accomplishment; for it is far more a matter of mind and spirit (Geist) than of material, and the Geist must be ready.
I thought this was one of the most brilliant things I had ever heard in my life. The comment on Japanese art was obviously wrong—I no sooner read it than I saw in my mind an image of Lord Leighton’s Greek Girls Playing at Ball, with its irreproachable, its even masterly use of perspective in the handling of the girls, the antique landscape, the airborne drapery, no sooner did I see this than I started to laugh, so shallow and superficial and even artless did it seem in comparison with (say) a print by Utamaro. But the basic argument was absolutely brilliant.
Before reading this brilliant book I had thought that books should be more like the film The Godfather, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian. Now I thought that this was a rather simpleminded way of looking at the question.
If you say that in a book the Italians should speak Italian because in the actual world they speak Italian and the Chinese should speak Chinese because Chinese speak Chinese it is a rather naive way of thinking of a work of art, it’s as if you thought this was the way to make a painting: The sky is blue. I will paint the sky blue. The sun is yellow. I will paint the sun yellow. A tree is green. I will paint the tree green. And what colour is the trunk? Brown. So what colour do you use? Ridiculous. Even leaving abstract painting out of the question it is closer to the truth that a painter would think of the surface that he wanted in a painting and the kind of light and the lines and the relations of colours and be attracted to painting objects that could be represented in a painting with those properties. In the same way a composer does not for the most part think that he would like to imitate this or that sound—he thinks that he wants the texture of a piano with a violin, or a piano with a cello, or four stringed instruments or six, or a symphony orchestra; he thinks of relations of notes.
This was all commonplace and banal to a painter or musician, and yet the languages of the world seemed like little heaps of blue and red and yellow powder which had never been used—but if a book just used them so that the English spoke English & the Italians Italian that would be as stupid as saying use yellow for the sun because the sun is yellow. It seemed to me reading Schoenberg that what the writers of the future would do was not necessarily say: I am writing about an Armenian grandfather Czech grandmother a young biker from Kansas (of Czech & Armenian descent), Armenian Czech English OK. Gradually they would approach the level of the other branches of the arts which are so much further developed. Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.
An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years. There was one with the characters Hakkinen, Hintikka and Yu, set provisionally in Helsinki—against a background of snow with a mass of black firs, a black sky & brilliant stars a narrative or perhaps dialogue with nominative genitive partitive essive inessive adessive illative ablative allative & translative, people would come on saying Hyvää päivää for good day there might be a traffic accident so that the word tieliikenneonnettomuus could make an appearance, and then in the mind of Yu Chinese characters, as it might be Black Fir White Snow, this was absolutely ravishing.
I had not really wanted to go to the party, and now in this distracted state I wanted to go less than ever—but I thought it would be rude not to go when the invitation was such a favour, so I thought I could just go for 10 minutes and then leave.
I went to the party. As so often it was much easier to come with the plan of leaving after 10 minutes than to leave after 10 minutes, for instead of making a polite excuse to leave after 10 minutes I found myself describing now to this person now that the brilliant Theory of Harmony. Who publish it, they would say, Faber, I would say and they would say Oh. Some people did not seem interested and I naturally dropped the subject but others did and I did not and I ended up staying three hours.
Schoenberg would say: This scale is not the last word, the ultimate goal of music, but rather a provisional stopping place. The overtone series, which led the ear to it, still contains many problems that will have to be faced. And if for the time being we still manage to escape those problems, it is due to little else than a compromise between the natural intervals and our inability to use them—that compromise which we call the tempered system, which amounts to an indefinitely extended truce
& in my mind I would hear languages related like a circle of fifths, I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words—I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg. He had lost his last job through a merger and now the writing was on the wall so he was rather distracted but still he started telling me about the opera Moses and Aaron.
He said Of course you know what it’s about
& I said Well presumably
& he said No musically, musically it’s about, & he paused, & he said in this opera Moses spoke directly to God and he did not sing his part was in Sprechgesang it was speech, harsh speech over music and the Children of Israel could not understand; he had to communicate through Aaron, who was an operatic tenor, it was a beautiful lyric role but of course it’s Aaron who proposes the Golden Calf, he doesn’t himself understand—
I said what a marvellous idea for an opera the plots were usually so farfetched and contrived
& he said he rather liked that but yes it was a marvellous idea, and he began to tell me in a low-key English way a terrible story about the opera which he described as one of the great lost works of the 20th century. Schoenberg had composed most of the first two acts between 1930 and 1932; then the Nazis had come into power and he had had to leave in 1933 and it had been rather disruptive. He went to America and kept applying for grants to work on it but the foundations did not care for the atonal music. So he had to support his family by teaching, and he went back to composing tonal pieces in support of his grant applications so that his time when he was not teaching was taken up with the tonal compositions. Eighteen years later he had still not composed the music for Act Three of Moses and Aaron. As death drew near he said that perhaps the words could be spoken.
He said: Of course he could be quite a difficult character
& he suddenly said—Will you excuse me? I really must catch Peter before he goes.
He walked off and it was only after he had gone that I realised I had not asked the crucial question, which is Do we ever hear God?
I hesitated and then hesitantly followed but he was already saying Peter!
& Peter said Giles! Good to see you! How are you keeping?
& Giles said Exciting times.
So it was not a good time to intrude. I mingled casually with a nearby group.
Peter said something and Giles said something and Peter said something and Giles said Good Lord No not at all in fact if anything and they talked for quite a long time. They talked for half an hour or so and suddenly they paused, and Peter said Well this is hardly and Giles said Quite, and they paused again and without another word left the room.
I had meant to leave after 10 minutes; it was high time to leave. But now there was more noise by the door and Liberace appeared smiling and kissing women on the cheek and apologising to people for being so late. Several people in my group seemed to know him and tried to catch his eye, and I hastily murmured something about a drink and slipped away. I was nervous of heading for the door, because I was afraid someone might introduce me to Liberace as a special favour, but it seemed safe enough to stand by the buffet. Phrases from Schoenberg kept coming back. At this time I had never heard any of his music but the book on harmony seemed a real work of genius.
I stood by the buffet eating cheese sticks, looking up from time to time at the door—but though Liberace moved gradually into the room he was still between me and the door. So I stood thinking about this brilliant book, I thought, I must buy a piano, & after a while who should come up but Liberace.
He said Are you as bored and frustrated as you look?
It was not easy to think of a reply which would not be rude or flirtatious or both.
I said I never answer trick questions.
He said It’s not a trick question. You look completely fed up.
I realised that, faced with coming up with a reply, I had thought of the question and not the questioner. Some people would see that until you have determined how bored and frustrated you look you have no way of knowing whether your sentiments match your appearance—but Liberace had proved himself so innocent of logic in all his written work—was it likely that he would marshal greater powers of reasoning in casual conversation at a party? No.
I said I was thinking about leaving.
Liberace said So you were fed up. I don’t blame you. These things are horrible aren’t they?
I said I had never been to one before.
He said I thought I hadn’t seen you before. Are you with Pearce?
I said Yes I am.
I had a brilliant idea. I said I work for Emma Russell. Everyone in the office was so excited when they heard you’d be here. You must let me introduce you.
He said Would you mind if I didn’t?
And he smiled and said I was just about to leave when I saw you. You know misery loves company.
I knew nothing of the kind but I said So they say.
And I said If we leave we won’t have any misery to share.
He said Where do you live? Maybe I can give you a lift.
I told him where I lived and he said it was not far out of his way.
I realised too late that I should have said I did not need a lift. I said it now and he said No I insist.
I said That’s OK and he said Don’t believe everything you hear.
We walked along Park Lane and then along various streets of Mayfair, while Liberace said this and that, in a way that seemed intentionally flirtatious and unintentionally rude.
I realised suddenly that if the Chinese characters were the same as the Japanese I knew the characters for White Rain Black Tree: 
! I put these provisionally into the mind of Yu and laughed out loud and Liberace said What’s funny. I said Nothing and he said No tell me.
At last in despair I said You know the Rosetta Stone.
What? said Liberace.
I said The Rosetta Stone. I think we need more.
He said One’s not enough?
I said What I mean is, though I believe the Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity. You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.
What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island. The great thing is that people who were put off Greek at school would then have another chance, I think they’re put off by the alphabet but if you’ve learned one at the age of six how hard can it be? It’s not a particularly difficult language.
Liberace said When you get the bit between your teeth you really get carried away don’t you? One minute you’re so quiet I can hardly get a word out of you, then all of a sudden there’s no stopping you. It’s rather engaging.
I did not know what to say and he said after a pause What’s funny about that?
Nothing, I said and he said Oh, I see.
I asked after a pause where his car was. He said that it should be here. He said that it must have been towed, and he swore The bastards! The bastards! and then he said abruptly that it would just have to be the Tube.
I walked with him to the Tube, and when we got to his stop he said I must come back to his place to take his mind off his car. He said I could not imagine the horror of going to a party such as the one we had left and then discovering that it had cost you fifty pounds or so plus the sheer horror of going to West Croydon or wherever it was they kept the cars to get it back. I said something sympathetic. I had left the train to continue the conversation and now I found myself leaving the Tube station and walking through the streets with Liberace to his place.
We walked up the steps and upstairs inside and Liberace started up a little conversational medley on the subject of cars and towing and wheel clamps. He improvised on the subject of the depot for the towed-away cars. He improvised on the officials who obstructed attempts to reclaim a car.
His way of talking was a little like his writing: it was quick and nervous and anxious to seem anxious to please, and every so often he would say Oh God I’m talking too much I’m boring you you’ll walk out on me and leave me alone to brood on my you know I don’t personally consider my car I mean if you could see it you’d see I couldn’t possibly consider it a phallic but the meaning’s out there isn’t it there’s something potentially horribly symbolic isn’t there about having it towed away just when you’ve offered a lift to I mean you may think that’s too obvious I couldn’t agree more but fuck, and he would say Tell me if I’m boring you. No one had ever asked me if he was boring me who wasn’t, and I never knew what to say, or rather it always seemed as though the only possible answer was No and so I now said No not at all. I thought it would be better to change the subject so I asked for a drink.
He brought drinks from the kitchen and talked about this and that, showing me souvenirs from his travels and making comments by turns cynical and sentimental. He had a new computer, an Amstrad 1512 with two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives and 512 kilobytes of RAM. He said he had installed Norton Utilities to organise his files, and he turned it on to show how Norton Utilities worked.
I asked if it could do Greek. He said he didn’t think so, so I didn’t ask whether it could do anything else.
We sat down and to my horror I saw on a nearby small table a brand new book by Lord Leighton.
By Lord Leighton, of course, I don’t mean the Hellenising late-Victorian painter of A Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in Procession and Greek Girls Playing at Ball, but the painterly American writer who is the spiritual heir of the artist. Lord Leighton (the painter) specialised in scenes of antiquity in which marvellous perplexities of drapery roamed the canvas, tarrying only in their travels to protect the modesty of a recruit from the Tyrone Power school of acting. His fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch, so bare do they strip the mind of their creator. Only the pen of Lord Leighton the writer could do justice to the brush of Lord Leighton the painter, for just so did Lord Leighton (the writer) bring the most agitated emotions to an airless to a hushed to an unhurried while each word took on because there was all the time in the world for each word to take on the bloom which only a great Master can give to a word using his time to allow all unseemly energy to become aware of its nakedness and snatch gratefully at the fig leaf provided until all passion in the airlessness in the hush in the absence of hurry sank decently down in the slow death of motion to perpetual stasis: a character could not look, or step, or speak, without a gorgeous train of sentences swathing his poor stupid thoughts and unfolding in beautiful languor on the still and breathless air.
Liberace saw my glance and said Are you a fan and I said No and he said But he’s marvellous.
He picked up the book and began to read one lovely sentence after another—
& I said in despair How beautiful, as one might say Look at that feather! Look at the velvet! Look at the fur!
I have naturally often thought that it would be nice to get some money from Liberace for Ludo, and I have sometimes thought that even apart from the money I should tell him. Whenever I think this I think of this conversation and I just can’t.
I would say But he is like a man who plays Yesterday on the piano with Brahmsian amplitude & lushness and so casually kicks aside the very thing which is the essence of the song he is like the Percy Faith Orchestra playing Satisfaction
and he would say Listen to this
and he would read out a sentence which was like Yesterday with Brahmsian harmony or the Percy Faith Orchestra playing Satisfaction by special request
and I would say He is like a man who plays the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata so slowly he makes mistakes, these logical fallacies are more glaring because he has so much the air of taking his time
and Liberace would say But listen to this
and he would read out a lovely sentence full of logical mistakes
and I would say Or rather he is like a man who plays the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata with dazzling virtuosity & complete ignorance of the music, Schnabel’s teacher once told him that he was a musician but he would never be a pianist & this writer is exactly the opposite
and Liberace would say Yes, but listen to this
and he would read out a sentence which was the work of a stupid virtuoso
and he never did seem to see what I meant. Lord Leighton was like this and like that and the other & he was like a man who piles mattresses on a pebble & I was like the princess & the pea, I was not going to say something about English & the American novel to be told I was engaging so I drank my drink and when Liberace had finished reading he talked for a while about Lord Leighton.
Now I am sure or rather I have no reason to doubt that if I had told Liberace about Ludo he would have done some decent thing. And yet— The fact is that 99 out of 100 adults spare themselves the trouble of rational thought 99% of the time (studies have not shown this, I have just invented the statistics so I should not say The fact is, but I would be surprised if the true figures were very different). In a less barbarous society children would not be in absolute economic subjection to the irrational beings into whose keeping fate has consigned them: they would be paid a decent hourly wage for attending school. As we don’t live in that enlightened society any adult, and especially a parent, has a terrible power over a child—how could I give that power to a man who—sometimes I thought I could and once I even picked up the phone but when I thought about it I just couldn’t. I would hear again his breathtaken boyish admiration for lovely stupidity his unswerving fidelity to the precept that ought implies cant and I just couldn’t.
Liberace talked on and on and on. Gradually as we drank more drinks Liberace talked more and more and more and asked more and more if he was boring me, and as a result it seemed less and less possible to leave, because if he wasn’t boring me why would I want to leave?
Then I thought, there must be some other way not to listen to all this, and of course there was a way. Surely Liberace had brought me back here to pick me up. It would be rude to put a hand over his mouth, but if I were to put my mouth on his mouth this would stop him talking just as well without being rude. His eyes were large, a clear glass green, rimmed with black like the eyes of a nocturnal animal; it seemed as though, if I only kissed him, not only would I not have to listen to him, but I would somehow be closer to the animal with these beautiful eyes.
He said something, and paused, and before he could say anything else I kissed him and there was a sudden, wonderful silence. It was silent except for the silly little laugh of Liberace, but once he had laughed it was over whereas there was no end to his conversation.
I was still drunk, and I was still trying to think of things I could do without being unpardonably rude. Well, I thought, I could sleep with him without being rude, and so I responded in a suitable manner as he unbuttoned the buttons of my dress.
This was a terrible mistake.
The wind is howling. A cold rain is falling. The brown paper window pane is flapping in the fierce rain and wind.
We are sitting in bed watching a masterpiece of modern cinema. I sat at the computer for three hours this morning, & allowing for interruptions typed maybe an hour and a half. At last I said I was going upstairs to watch Seven Samurai & L said he would too. L has read Odyssey 1–10; he has read the story of the Cyclops six times. He has also read a voyage of Sindbad the Sailor, three chapters of Algebra Made Easy, and a few pages each of Metamorphoses, Kalilah wa Dimnah and I Samuel following some scheme which I don’t understand, and every single one involves a constant stream of questions.
I know or at least tell myself that it is better than Japanese (since at least I know the answers to maybe 80% of the questions), & I know I told him to do it. It took him a year to read the Iliad so I do not know how I could have known he would read 10 books of the Odyssey in three weeks.
It occurs to me that the Book of Jonah is just four pages long. Questions on Hebrew have got to be better than questions on Japanese. Wonder if it’s too late to say I really meant Jeremiah.
I should be typing Advanced Angling as they want it back by the end of the week, but it seems important to preserve my sanity. It would be a false economy to forge ahead with typing until maddened to frenzy by an innocent child.
Also in the interests of sanity I have written nothing more for posterity in several days. I have been finding this rather depressing to write—writing of Mozart I thought suddenly of my mother blundering through the accompaniment to Schubert lieder with my Uncle Buddy, Jesus, Buddy, said my mother, what’s the matter, you sing like a Goddamned accountant, and slamming down the lid stormed out of my father’s latest half-finished motel & off down the highway while my Uncle Buddy softly whistled a little tune & said nothing much. What’s the use of remembering that?
I then thought of a priceless line I’d read somewhere or other: It is my duty as a mother to be cheerful. It is my duty as a mother to be cheerful, & so it is clearly my duty to watch a work of genius & abandon Advanced Angling & composition.
Kambei is samurai 1. He starts to recruit the rest.
He picks out a samurai in the street. He tells the farmer Rikichi to bring him to a fight. He tells Katsushiro to stand inside the door with a stick and bring it down. He sits inside waiting.
The samurai comes through the door, seizes the stick and throws Katsushiro to the floor. Kambei tells him the deal; he isn’t interested.
Kambei picks another samurai.
Katsushiro stands inside with the stick. Kambei sits waiting.
2 comes to the door. He sees through the trick; he stands laughing in the street.
Gorobei knows the farmers have a hard time, but that’s not why he accepts. He accepts because of Kambei.
I say to L: Kurosawa won a prize for a film he made before this one, called Rashomon, about a woman raped by a bandit; in that one he tells the story 4 times, & it’s different each time someone tells it, but in this one he did something more complicated, he only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true.
He says: Uh-huh. He is murmuring snatches of Japanese under his breath, & also reading the subtitles out loud.
3 doesn’t have to pass the test. Shichiroji is an old friend of Kambei’s. He’d given him up for dead.
Gorobei finds 4 chopping wood to pay for a meal. Heihachi is a second-rate swordsman but he’ll keep them in good spirits.
Kambei and Katsushiro come across two samurai stripping bamboo poles for a match.
The fight begins. A raises his pole and pauses. B holds his pole over his head and shouts.
A draws back his pole in a beautiful sweeping movement, and pauses. B runs forward.
A raises his pole suddenly and brings it down.
B says it was a draw.
A says he won. He’d have killed him with a real sword. He walks away.
B wants to fight with swords.
A says he’d kill him, it’s stupid.
B draws his sword and insists.
A draws his sword.
He raises it and pauses.
B holds his sword above his head and shouts.
A draws back his sword in a beautiful sweeping movement. B runs forward.
A raises his sword suddenly and brings it down. B falls down dead.
I would like to watch the rest of the film, but there is Advanced Angling to consider. I tell L that I have to go downstairs & put the heater on to type, & that he will have to stay in bed and watch the video. Of course he instantly begs to come too. I say You don’t understand, we need £150 for the rent and £60 for the council tax, that alone is £210 and as you know I make £5.50 an hour before tax, 210 divided by 5.50 is approximately 40—
38.1818
38.1818, fine,
18181818181818
the point being
1818181818181818181818181818
that if I work 10 hours a day for the next 4 days I can get the disks in Monday, we’ll get the cheque on Friday, and we can pay two bills, and if we stretch out the £22.62 we now have in the house we can also buy food.
The master swordsman isn’t interested in killing people. He only wants to perfect his art.
I can’t work with you downstairs. I know you don’t mean to distract me but you do.
I just want to work.
Yes but you always ask questions.
I promise I won’t ask questions.
That’s what you always say. You stay here and watch Seven Samurai and I’ll go downstairs and do some work
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Kambei doesn’t want to take Katsushiro. They can’t take a child. Rikichi wants to take him. Gorobei says it’s child’s play. Heihachi says if they treat him as an adult he’ll grow into an adult.
I’m sorry but it has got to be done. You don’t have to watch Seven Samurai, if you would rather just sit in bed you can. Do you want me to turn it off?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Kambei gives in. 5 has never fought before.
All right then, I’ll see you in a little while.
PLEASE let me come
I’m sorry
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
6 is standing at the door. The master swordsman has decided to come. You never know why Kyuzo changed his mind.
PLEASE let me come PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE I PROMISE I won’t ask any questions I PROMISE
No.
I went downstairs and turned on the computer and I typed in a piece about angling in weed and another on bait. For the whole hour I could hear him howling upstairs, to a background of the samurai theme. At last I couldn’t stand it.
I went upstairs and I said All right, you can come downstairs.
He kept crying into the pillow.
I picked up the remote control and turned off the video. I picked him up and kissed him and I said Please don’t cry, and I took him downstairs to the warmer room with the gas fire. I said Would you like a hot drink, what about a cup of tea? Or hot chocolate, would you like some hot chocolate?
He said Hot chocolate.
I made him a cup of hot chocolate and I said What are you going to work on?
He said very softly Samuel.
I said Good. He got out the dictionary and the Tanach and Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar and he sat down near the fire to read.
I went back to the computer to type, and behind me I could hear the rustle of pages as he looked up word after word after word without asking questions.
An hour went by. I got up to have a cup of tea, and he said Is it all right if I ask a question now?
I said Sure.
He asked a question and he asked another question and he asked another question, and in connection with one of the questions I opened Gesenius to look at tithpa’el verbs, having looked at this and answered the question I began to leaf through the book. I would have liked to cry into a pillow myself, and with a sore heart I began to read these words of comfort:
§49. The Perfect and Imperfect with Waw Consecutive.
1. The use of the two tense-forms, as is shown more fully in the Syntax (§§106, 107, cf. above, §47, note on a), is by no means restricted to the expression of the past or future. One of the most striking peculiarities in the Hebrew consecution of tenses1 is the phenomenon that, in representing a series of past events, only the first verb stands in the perfect, and the narration is continued in the imperfect. Conversely, the representation of a series of future events begins with the imperfect, and is continued in the perfect.
The author of the grammar discussed this marvellous grammatical feature with a kind of stiff scholarly charm, so that he would (for example) explain in a little footnote that ‘the other Semitic languages do not exhibit this peculiarity, excepting the Phoenician, the most closely related to Hebrew, and of course the Moabitish dialect of the Mêša ‘inscription’— just the three words ‘excepting the Phoenician’ were better than hours of the kind of help you can get on a helpline.
This progress in the sequence of time, is regularly indicated by a pregnant and (called wāw consecutive1), which in itself is really only a variety of the ordinary wāw copulative, but which sometimes (in the imperf.) appears with a different vocalization.
I was beginning to feel almost not too bad.
I finished the section & then I turned to the cross-references in Syntax & then I read this and that & when I looked up two hours had gone by. L was sitting by the fire reading about David and Jonathan and singing a little song.
I gave him lunch and then another half hour had gone by. I returned to the computer & typed for three hours with only occasional questions from L. I took a short break and typed for half an hour; I took a break for dinner and typed for two hours; I put L to bed at 9:00 and went back downstairs at 9:30 and typed for three hours and then I went back upstairs.
It seemed to be rather cold.
I did not see how I could leave him upstairs in the morning and I also did not see how I could bring him downstairs.
The Alien whispered It’s only fair to give the other side a chance.
The Alien whispered He’s not a bad man.
I did not really want to go to bed knowing I was just going to wake up the next day. I put on three sweaters and rewound the video. PLAY.
A striking peculiarity of the film is that though it is called Seven Samurai it is not really about seven samurai. Bandits are about to attack the village and only one farmer wants to fight; without him there would be no story. Rikichi glared from the screen with burning eyes; his pale face glowed in the cold dark room.
1This name best expresses the prevailing syntactical relation, for by wāw consecutive an action is always represented as the direct, or at least temporal consequence of a preceding action. Moreover, it is clear from the above examples, that the wāw consecutive can only be thus used in immediate conjunction with the verb. As soon as wāw, owing to an insertion (e.g. a negative), is separated from the verb, the imperfect follows instead of the perfect consecutive, the perfect instead of the imperfect consecutive. The fact that whole Books (Lev., Num., Josh., Jud., Sam., 2 Kings, Ezek., Ruth, Esth., Neh., 2 Chron.) begin with the imperfect consecutive, and others (Exod., 1 Kings, Ezra) with wāw copulative, is taken as a sign of their close connexion with the historical Books now or originally preceding them. Cf., on the other hand, the independent beginning of Job and Daniel. It is a merely superficial description to call the wāw consecutive by the old-fashioned name wāw conversive, on the ground that it always converts the meaning of the respective tenses into its opposite, i.e. according to the old view, the future into the preterite, and vice versa.
Interlude
My mother’s father was a jeweler. He was a handsome, shrewd-looking man; he was an accomplished amateur musician. He spoke excellent English, but he could hear his own accent and he knew there was something comical about it.
Buddy said he did not want to be an accountant and his father told him he had no idea the amount of work it took to be a professional musician. Five years you studied the violin his father said and did you practice five minutes? Five years piano.
Something looked through my grandfather’s eyes and it said Werner and du and mein Kind in tones of tenderness and authority. Buddy could more or less understand what was being said but he could not argue back, he tried to think of something from Schubert lieder or Wagner but it all seemed too melodramatic. Something looked through my grandfather’s eyes. It said Being an accountant, it’s not the end of the world.
Something looked at my Uncle Danny. Something looked at my aunts and it said A secretary, is that so terrible?
Linda had seen four before her do something that was not so terrible and already there was something about them, their whole lives ahead of them and the best thing cut off, as if something that might have been a Heifetz had been walled up inside an accountant and left to die.
Doom. Doom. Doom.
My father got straight to the point. He argued passionately that Linda would never forgive herself if she did not give herself this chance.
Our lives are ruined, said my father, are you going to let the same thing happen to you? He argued passionately and used words like “hell” and “damn”, strong words for the time, and there was something masculine and forceful about it.
What do you think? said Linda, and she looked at Buddy.
Buddy said: I think you should go.
—because of course if she went anywhere she would go to the Juilliard.
My father said: Of course she should go. She can be in New York by noon. Linda said she could pretend to be going downtown to look for a sweater, because she had just been saying she needed a new sweater.
My father said he would drive her to the station.
Buddy said he would come too in case anybody asked any questions.
Linda said: If anybody asks you just say I went to look for a sweater.
Buddy said: That’s right, if anybody asks me I simply explain that you were threatening to kill yourself when you suddenly remembered you needed a sweater. I think I’ll come along for the ride.
Linda said actually maybe he should come with her to New York, she needed him to carry the cello.
Buddy said: Why would you want to take the cello?
Linda said: For my audition.
Buddy said: If they don’t take you on piano they sure as heck aren’t going to take you on the cello.
Linda said: Don’t you tell me what to do
& they got into a heated argument while my father stood idly by. My mother was convinced that the Juilliard would despise her if all she could play was the piano, whereas if she brought a selection of instruments they would see she was a real musician.
The Konigsbergs all despised the piano, there it was all the notes conveniently divided up into a keyboard you went away and when you came back there it was the notes all still attached to the keys just where you left them, how boring, a child of four could play it (they all had). They also hated sight reading, & it is a tiresome feature of piano music that (since 10 or more notes may be played simultaneously) it involves anything up to 10 times the amount of sight reading of any other instrument. It was an instrument no Konigsberg would play if someone smaller could be made to play it instead, & since my mother was the youngest she never got the chance to hand it over to someone else. It may seem odd that the youngest got the part with the most sight reading, but as four brothers & sisters a father and a mother pointed out if she got in trouble she could always play it by ear. It wasn’t, anyway, that she couldn’t play the violin, viola and cello (not to mention flute, guitar, mandolin and ukulele)—it was just that she never got the chance.
Buddy argued that he didn’t think her technique on any of the stringed instruments was up to the Juilliard, & Linda said how would you know when was the last time you heard me.
At first she wanted to take everything to show what she could do, but at last she agreed to take just a violin because she could play some hard pieces, a viola because she got a better tone on it for some reason, a mandolin because it was quite an unusual instrument to be able to play and a flute because it never hurts to let people know you can play the flute.
Buddy: And you will tell them you want to audition on the piano.
Linda: Don’t you tell me what to do.
My father: Do you mean to say you’re not planning to play the piano? You’ve got this fantastic talent and you’re not going to play it? What about that piece you were just playing, you’re not going to play it for them?
Linda: Do you know anything about music?
My father: Not really.
Linda: Then mind your own business.
My father said: Well we’d better go if you’re going to catch that train.
Buddy said again that he would come along for the ride & Linda said he could explain she had gone to look for a sweater why did he always make such a production out of everything & Buddy said yes she had gone to look for a sweater & had taken along a violin a viola a flute & a mandolin just in case he thought he would come along for the ride.
My father said as a matter of fact he needed to talk to him, so they all three drove down to the station.
Linda got on the train. She had the violin case & the viola case in one hand, the mandolin case and her purse in the other, and the flute under one arm.
The train pulled out & my father commented to Buddy: You guys are amazing. I always thought a musician would take some music or something along to an audition.
Buddy said: Oh. My. God.
It was too late to do anything about it, though, and anyway she could always buy some music in New York, so they went to a nearby bar, and my father said: Let’s buy that motel.
Buddy said: What if that guy was wrong?
My father said: If he was wrong we’ll have a worthless piece of real estate. On the other hand, old Mrs. Randolph will be reunited with her widowed daughter and spend her declining years under the sunny skies of Florida, so at least someone will be happy.
To the sunny skies of Florida, said Buddy.
To the sunny skies of Florida, said my father.
My father and Buddy decided to drive down immediately to clinch the deal. They left in my father’s car, Buddy driving, my father asleep on the back seat.
My mother meanwhile reached the Juilliard. She found her way to the general office and demanded an audition. This was not a simple matter to arrange, and she was told many times that it was necessary to apply and fill in forms and be given an appointment; but she insisted. She said that she had come all the way from Philadelphia. She was very nervous, but she had an inner confidence that if she could only start to play for someone she would be safe at last.
At last a homely man wearing a bow tie came out of an office and introduced himself and said he would find a room. The Juilliard had its forms and applications and procedures, but people there were no different from people anywhere: they loved a story, they loved the idea of a brilliant young musician getting on the train in Philadelphia and going to New York and walking in off the street. So my mother (carrying violin viola mandolin handbag & flute) followed him to a room with a grand piano, and the homely man sat in a chair down the room, one leg crossed over the other, and waited.
It was only now that she realized that she had overlooked something.
Under my father’s urging she had walked straight out the door. In her excitement at the idea of just walking out the door she had walked out the door without stopping to practice and without even her sheet music, and now she had nothing to play from and nothing prepared.
Some people might have been daunted by this setback. The Konigsbergs faced musical catastrophe on a daily basis, & their motto was: Never say die.
What are you going to play for me? asked the homely man.
Linda took the violin out of its case. She explained that she had left her music on the train, but that she was going to play a Bach partita.
She played a Bach partita, and the homely man looked without comment at his knee, and then she got through a Beethoven sonata with only a couple of hairy moments, and the man looked calmly at his knee.
And now what are you going to play? said the homely man without comment.
Linda asked: Would you like to hear me play the viola?
Man: If you would like to play it for me I will be happy to hear you play it.
Linda put the violin back in the case, and she took out the viola. She played an obscure sonata for viola solo which she had learned a couple of years ago. Even at the time it had seemed completely unmemorable, the type of composition which composers do for some reason foist off on the viola. For a moment she wondered whether she would be able to remember it, but it came back once she got going. She couldn’t remember how to go on after the first repeat & so had to do it twice to stall for time, & she had to make up a new andante having temporarily forgotten the old one (but luckily the piece was so obscure he probably wouldn’t notice), but apart from that she thought she scraped through pretty well.
The homely man continued to look at his knee.
She said: That’s just to give you the general idea. Would you like me to play another piece?
He said: I think I’ve got the general idea.
She said: Would you like me to play the mandolin?
He said: If you would like to play it.
She played a few short pieces by Beethoven and Hummel just to give him the general idea, and then she played a few pieces on the flute so he would see she could play the flute.
He listened without comment, and then he looked at his watch and said: Is there anything else you’d like to play for me?
She said: I can also play the cello, the guitar and the ukulele, but I left them at home.
He said: Would you say that one of those was your best instrument?
She said: I wouldn’t say best instrument. My cello teacher said I showed promise, and of course any idiot can play the guitar, and if you can play the guitar you don’t have to be a genius to play the ukulele, but I don’t know that I would say best instrument.
A musician can develop a kind of sixth sense for the mood of his audience. My mother sensed that the audition was not going well.
The man in the bow tie looked at his watch again, and he stood up and paced up and down and said: I’m afraid I have an appointment so—
I can play the piano, she said reluctantly, & she said vivaciously: Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb!
I’m a little pressed for time, said the man, but he sat down again & crossed one leg over the other & looked at his knee.
My mother went to the piano and sat down. She had not practiced, but in the last week she had played Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor 217 times. She began to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor for the 218th time that week, and for the first time the homely man looked up from his knee.
He said: I’d like to hear something else.
He said: Do you want me to find you some music? If there’s something you need we can get it from the library.
She shook her head. She must play something. She began to play the Moonlight Sonata. There was something odd about this; it was odd not to be playing Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor for the 219th time.
And what are you going to play for me now? asked the man.
She began to play a Brahms intermezzo. This time she did not wait for him to ask but launched into another piece and another and another, filling in more and more as she went along, her hands skittering up and down the keyboard.
In the middle of the piece the man stood up and said That’s enough.
He walked quickly over the creaking boards toward her; he was saying No, no, no, no, no. She thought at first he was complaining because she was improvising where she couldn’t remember the piece.
No no no no, he said stopping beside her.
You can’t play the piano like that.
He said: There’s no weight in your hands.
Linda took her hands off the keys. She did not understand what he meant. And he said: Can’t you FEEL how tense your wrists are? You’ve got to play with the whole arm. Don’t play from the wrist. You’ve got to relax or you’ll never be in control.
He asked her to play a C major scale and before she had played 3 notes he said No. He told her to play with the whole weight of her arm on each note. He told her not to worry about mistakes.
Someone knocked on the door and looked in & he said Not now.
He stood by for an hour while her clever hand moved stupidly over the white keys.
At last he said that was enough. He gave her a simple exercise & he said: I want you to play this four hours a day for two months the way I showed you. After that you can go back to one of your pieces, but you must play with a relaxed wrist. If you can’t play with a relaxed wrist don’t play it. And you should play the exercise for two hours before you practice anything.
He said: Go back to the beginning and in a year you may have something to show me. I don’t promise we’ll take you, but I promise we’ll hear you play.
He said: You may think that promise isn’t worth a year of your life.
And he said: You may be right, but it’s the best I can do.
My mother shook his hand and said thank you politely.
She said: What about the violin? Is there anything you’d like me to do on the violin?
The homely man started to laugh & said No I don’t think so. He said he also had no advice to offer on the viola, the mandolin or the flute.
He said: Still, Rubinstein never played the flute and it doesn’t seem to have hurt him.
He said: I don’t know who’s been teaching you, but—Where is it you’re from, Philadelphia? Give this man a call, you can mention my name. Don’t call him if you’re not going to work, he’ll never speak to me again, but if you’re serious—Actually don’t call him for a couple of months, try it and see if you really want to put in the time, and if you’re serious give him a call.
He wrote a name & a phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to her and she put it in her bag. She asked if it was all right to play the exercise in B major instead, and he laughed and said she could play it 50% of the time in B major as long as she played it with a relaxed wrist. So she thanked him again, and she picked up the violin viola mandolin handbag and flute and left the room.
Another minute and she was outside in the street, staring up at the buildings. It was early afternoon.
If she had been accepted by the Juilliard she would have gone to the top of the Empire State Building and looked down on the city she had conquered; New York would have lain at her feet.
She did not want to go to the Empire State Building, so she walked to the Plaza Hotel to see the fountain where Fitzgerald and Zelda had danced in the nude. She said later that she stood by the fountain crying and shaking & yet thinking that it was the happiest day of her life, because if you were the youngest of five no one ever took you seriously, & now someone had taken her so seriously as a musician that he had told her to spend four hours a day on a single exercise. If the Juilliard said something like that even her father would have to take her seriously, & by some miracle she out of the whole family would be a real musician.
It was true that she actually wanted to be a singer but at least it was a start.
It began to drizzle, so she went to Saks Fifth Avenue to look at sweaters, and then she went back to the station and caught a train back to Philadelphia.
She got home and explained and nobody seemed to understand that somebody had taken her seriously.
What does he know? said my grandfather. Who ever heard of him? If he’s such a genius how come we never heard of him, eh?
I have to practice, said my mother, and she went to the piano. The memory of her heavy arm, with the weighted hand stumbling over the keys, was still new. She put her hands on the keys and for an hour a terrible, jerking noise came from the front room. All of the children had played the piano attractively from the age of three; no Konigsberg had ever played a scale in living memory; my grandparents had never heard anything so horrible in all their lives.
My grandparents had previously thought that nothing could be worse than to hear Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor 30 times a day. They now thought they should have known when they were lucky. My grandmother went so far as to say Why don’t you play that lovely piece you were playing the other day, Linda?
My mother said she could not play anything but the exercise for two months.
Meanwhile everybody was wondering what had happened to Buddy, who had just driven off with his friend without a word to anybody.
My mother said maybe he went downtown to look for a sweater.
My mother practiced hours every day, hours as painful to hear as to play. At first everybody thought she would give in. Day followed day, and the terrible stumbling sounds went on for hours on end.
She did not know what else to do.
In retrospect almost every aspect of the audition was much more hideously embarrassing than it had been at the time, the viola sonata in particular with the three repeats and the new andante kept coming back to haunt her. The only good thing about it was that at least she hadn’t opened her mouth to sing. But even after just three weeks of the exercise she thought that she would never again be able to walk innocently into a room to show what she could do.
Uncle Buddy and my mother had wanted to be singers because they loved opera, but they did not really know what you had to do to become one.
The way they saw it was, obviously a music school couldn’t let in every Tom Dick and Harry, it would assess people on the basis of their instruments, once you got in you could start singing. But after the audition my mother thought it might work some other way. If there was this desert of technical work to be crossed before you could play the piano, maybe every other instrument and maybe the voice was also surrounded by a desert.
My mother kept playing the exercise. She did not belong to the school choir because it spent most of its time preparing for the Christian highlights of the year. Who knew what you had to do to be a singer?
My mother kept playing the exercise because the Juilliard had said the piano was her instrument.
One day my grandmother came into the room. She said You know your father only wants what’s best for you. She said You’re driving him crazy, what do you think it’s like for a man like that to hear this day after day? She said Look. Don’t decide today. You’ve done two hours already, enough for one day, come downtown with me and help me pick out a blouse for your sister.
They went shopping and her mother bought her a dress for $200 and another dress for $250 and a hat and another hat that looked better and a pair of shoes to go with one of the hats. They went home and her father offered her a trip to Florida which she declined. They went shopping and her mother bought her six cashmere sweaters in pastel shades.
My grandmother kept coming in whenever my mother tried to practice and my mother got angrier and angrier. What had happened was this:
My grandfather had left Vienna in 1922 and he had settled in Philadelphia and done pretty well. The quality of the music available was not really comparable to what he was used to, but otherwise it was not too bad. He married and got through the Depression all right and from a business point of view the War was a good thing because sales of wedding rings shot up. From another point of view the War changed his views.
Most of his family was still in Austria. If you are a jeweler people think you are made of money and sooner or later a letter would come, probably from someone he had never liked, he would have to come up with several thousand dollars for a surety and then he would get involved in a protracted correspondence. Say you have a man who has an advanced degree in engineering and a year of teaching at university level, say he has had to resign his position at the end of the year because students of Aryan stock should not be defiled by instruction from a person of impure blood, say he has spent some time in industry though not at the level you would expect for his qualifications, say he has an actual offer of a teaching position at an American college, you write to the State Department and the State Department explains that unfortunately a minimum of two years’ teaching experience is required for the application to be approved. You get into a protracted correspondence and one day you write to the applicant to explain what is happening and get no reply.
Mr. Konigsberg did not talk about this much, and when his children said they wanted to be musicians he did not even touch on it lightly, but he said you can never tell what will happen. He said being an accountant was not the end of the world. He said being a secretary was not so terrible.
It seemed as though the things he did not say were so terrible they could not be said, and of course it’s not so terrible to be a secretary or an accountant. But Linda had seen four before her do something that was not so terrible. Now it turned out that it had absolutely nothing to do with whether McCarthyism was anti-Semitism dressed up as an attack on the Communists or with their chances of resettling in Canada or Brazil should the need arise. What it really was was that their father couldn’t stand to be around people who were practicing to the standard set by the finest conservatory in the country. Well, if you want to ruin people’s lives, fine. You want to reenact the Goddamned Sound of Music in the home, fine. But you don’t have to blame it on Hitler.
Then Buddy and the atheist came back and the atheist said they could just buy a piano for the motel and Linda could practice there. Linda said wouldn’t it bother the guests and the atheist explained that the guests would arrive in the evening after a long day’s driving and be on their way first thing the next morning, that was the beauty of a motel. He said grinning that what’s more he would take her to Helene’s and teach her to play pool so that she would always have something to fall back on.
Sometimes my mother did practice but one thing led to another and sometimes she did not. The advice of the homely man was something of a curse. She would not practice at all if she could not practice right so that gradually she played less and less and sometimes not at all.
I used to think that things might have been different. Gieseking never played a scale and Glenn Gould hardly practiced at all, they would just look at the score and think and think and think. If the homely man had said to go away and think this would have been every bit as revolutionary a concept for a Konigsberg. Perhaps he even thought that you had to think. But you can’t show someone how to think in an hour; you can give someone an exercise to take away. My grandfather would not have been troubled by silent thought; he would not have kindly commanded my mother to enjoy her music & so driven her out of the house; and everything might have been different.
ii
—A real samurai would never get so drunk. If he’s as good as you say he’ll parry the blow.
Samurai leader as an impostor
tries to join the band of six
It is not surprising that Seven Samurai was remade by Hollywood because it is already close to the Western in its use of an elite body of brave warriors.
David Thomson,
A Biographical Dictionary of Film
1
We Never Get Off at Sloane Square for Nebraska Fried Chicken
We’ve just pulled into the Motel Del Mar, a.k.a. Aldgate: we are taking the Circle Line in a counterclockwise direction. The pillars are covered in pale turquoise tiles, with lilac diamonds on a single band of cream—it’s a colour scheme I associate with paper-wrapped soaplets & tiny towels with embroidered anchors. What kind of childhood is this for a child? He’s never even been to Daytona.
I’ve been taking him every day to ride the Circle Line to stay out of the cold: I can type at night when he goes to bed, but we can’t have the fire on 20 hours a day. He hates it because I won’t let him bring Cunliffe. Too bad.
I remember once about 10 years ago, or rather 8, reading Nicomachean Ethics Book X in a Circle Line train that had stopped at Baker Street. That lovely soft-grained sepia light filtered down; it was about 11:00 and very quiet. I thought: Yes, to live the life of the mind is the truest form of happiness. Reading Aristotle was not even then my idea of intellectual felicity, but after all it is possible to lead the life of the mind without reading Aristotle. If I could read anything I wanted I would read The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap.
This is absolutely not possible today, with L interrupting every minute or so to ask a word. He is in a bad mood because he hates having to ask; I think he thinks if he asks enough I will let him bring the Homeric dictionary tomorrow. James Mill wrote an entire history of India in the intervals of providing lexical assistance to little John—but he did not have to load a twin pushchair with a small library, a small child, Repulsive, Junior Birdman & Bit—and with all the advantages of a wife, servants & a fire in the room he was still impatient and short-tempered. Repulsive is a three-foot stuffed gorilla; the Birdman is a two-foot fighting turtle misnamed Donatello by its maker; & Bit is a one-inch rubber mouse designed to be lost 30 or 40 times a day.
Even when he is not interrupting people keep coming up. Sometimes they scold him playfully for colouring in a book, and sometimes they stare goggle-eyed when they realise he is reading it. They don’t seem to realise how bad this is for him. Today a man came up and said playfully: You shouldn’t colour in a book.
L: Why not?
Playful: It’s not nice if somebody wants to read it.
L: But I am reading it.
Idiot, winking idiotically at me: Oh really? What’s it about then?
L: I’m at the bit where they go to the land of the dead and this is the bit where she changes them into pigs and this is the bit where they go to the king of the winds and this is the bit where they sharpen a stick in the fire and gouge out the eye of the Cyclops because it only had one eye so if they gouged it out it couldn’t see.
Brain left school at six while body did time: Well that wasn’t very nice now was it?
L: If someone’s about to eat you you don’t have to be nice. It’s acceptable to kill in self-defence.
Slow on the uptake (goggle-eyed): Blimey.
L (for the five-hundredth time that day): What does that mean?
Slow: It means that’s absolutely amazing. (To me) Aren’t you worried about what will happen when he goes to school?
I: Desperately.
Only trying to be helpful: There’s no need to be sarcastic.
L: It’s not a particularly difficult language. The alphabet is a precursor to the one in which English is written, and very similar to it.
Now Only is amazed and goggle-eyed not only at the Homerolexic infant; he is goggling as only a man can goggle who has applied Occam’s razor to syllables all his life. He looks at me and asks if he can sit down.
The train pulls into Embankment. I shout ‘No Exit!’ and dart onto the platform, manhandling the pushchair.
L does the same, then dashes down the stairs marked No Exit. I follow my child, a mother following her child. We lurk behind a corner until the train pulls out, then return to the platform and buy a couple of bags of peanuts.
Of course L has not been reading the Odyssey the whole time. The pushchair is also loaded with White Fang, VIKING!, Tar-Kutu: Dog of the Frozen North, Marduk: Dog of the Mongolian Steppes, Pete: Black Dog of the Dakota, THE CARNIVORES, THE PREDATORS, THE BIG CATS and The House at Pooh Corner. For the past few days he has also been reading White Fang for the third time. Sometimes we get off the train and he runs up and down the platform. Sometimes he counts up to 100 or so in one or more languages while eyes glaze up and down the car. Still he has been reading the Odyssey enough for a straw poll of Circle Line opinion on the subject of small children & Greek.
Amazing: 7
Far too young: 10
Only pretending to read it: 6
Excellent idea as etymology so helpful for spelling: 19
Excellent idea as inflected languages so helpful for computer programming: 8
Excellent idea as classics indispensable for understanding of English literature: 7
Excellent idea as Greek so helpful for reading New Testament, camel through eye of needle for example mistranslation of very similar word for rope: 3
Terrible idea as study of classical languages embedded in educational system productive of divisive society: 5
Terrible idea as overemphasis on study of dead languages directly responsible for neglect of sciences and industrial decline and uncompetitiveness of Britain: 10
Stupid idea as he should be playing football: 1
Stupid idea as he should be studying Hebrew & learning about his Jewish heritage: 1
Marvellous idea as spelling and grammar not taught in schools: 24
(Respondents: 35; Abstentions: 1,000?)
Oh, & almost forgot:
Marvellous idea as Homer so marvellous in Greek: 0
Marvellous idea as Greek such a marvellous language: 0
Oh & also:
Marvellous idea but how did you teach it to a child that young: 8
I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.
Faced with officious advice feel almost overwhelming temptation to say:
You know, I’ve been in a terrible quandary over this, I’ve been racking my brains for weeks trying to decide whether I was doing the right thing, finally this morning I thought—I know, I’ll take the Tube, somebody on the Tube will be able to advise me, & sure enough you were able to tell me just what to do. Thank you so much, I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along—
So far have been able to resist temptation 34 times out of 35. Pas mal.
When able to resist temptation I say (which is perfectly true) that I never meant this to happen.
TEMPLE EMBANKMENT WESTMINSTER ST. JAMES’S PARK
Etymology so helpful for spelling 2
How did you teach so young a child 1
VICTORIA SLOANE SQUARE SOUTH KENSINGTON
Etymology so helpful for spelling
GLOUCESTER ROAD HIGH STREET KENSINGTON NOTTING HILL GATE
Wonderful
Wonderful
Wonderful
Etymology so helpful
PADDINGTON EDGWARE ROAD BAKER STREET and around and around and around
A man got on the train at Great Portland Street & expressed surprise & approval.
He said his youngest was about that age but of course no genius—
I said I thought small children had an aptitude for languages
He said Was it very hard to teach him
& I said No not very
& he said Well hats off to you both it’s bound to be a big help to him think of all those words heavy weather for the average boy all in a day’s work for this little chap. Hydrophobia! Haemophilia!
The train stopped at Euston Square but no stopping Hats Off— Microscopic! Macrobiotic! Palaeontological ornithological anthropological archaeological!
[King’s Cross but no]
Hats: Photography! Telepathy! [OK] Psychopath! Polygraph! [OK OK] Democracy! Hypocrisy! Ecstasy! Epitome! [OK OK OK] Trilogy Tetralogy Pentalogy! [OH NO] Pentagon! Hexagon! [STOP] Octagon Octopus [STOP]
Enapus
What’ll He Think Of Next [chuckling]:That’s a new one on me
Dekapus
What’ll [still chuckling]: This is my stop. [Gets off at Farringdon—how like a man]
Hendekapus
[NO]
Dodekapus
[NO]
Treiskaidekapus
[Oh well]
Tessareskaidekapus
[You win some you lose some]
pentekaidekapus hekkaidekapus heptakaidekapus OKTOKAIDEKAPUS enneakaidekapus eikosapus
I never meant this to happen.
I meant to follow the example of Mr. Ma (father of the famous cellist), and I still don’t know where I went wrong. I did say though that if I knew for a fact that even 10 people would like to know how you teach a 4-year-old Greek I would explain it. 11 riders of the Circle Line have now said they would like to know this. I rather wish now that I had said 10 people not including people who think it is a marvellous idea because grammar & spelling not taught in schools, but it was an unconditional offer & if I say I will do a thing I try to do it.
It seems to me that the last time I approached this subject I had explained how I had taken a break from typing in an interview with John Denver & had been interrupted while reading Iliad 6 by L. The last thing I wanted was to be teaching a four-year-old Greek, and now the Alien spoke & its voice was mild as milk.
What is the Alien asks a reader.
The Alien is whatever you want to call the thing that finds specious reasons for cruelty and how do you expect me to finish with these constant interruptions.
And now the Alien spoke & its voice was mild as milk, and it said He’s just a baby.
And J. S. Mill said:
In the course of instruction which I have partially retraced, the point most superficially apparent is the great effort to give, during the years of childhood, an amount of knowledge in what are considered the higher branches of education, which is seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of manhood.
And I said: NO NO NO NO NO
And Mr. Mill said:
The result of the experiment shows the ease with which this may be done,
And I said EASE
& he resumed implacably,
and places in a strong light the wretched waste of so many precious years as are spent in acquiring the modicum of Latin and Greek commonly taught to schoolboys; a waste which has led so many educational reformers to entertain the ill-judged proposal of discarding these languages altogether from general education. If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive; but in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par; what I could do, could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution.
The Alien said it would be kinder to say no & I longed to believe it, for the ease with which a small child may be introduced to what are commonly considered the higher branches of education is nothing to the ease with which it may not. I thought: Well maybe he’ll just. I thought: Well.
So I gave L a little table for the alphabet & said there’s the alphabet & he looked perplexed. When I learned the language the first thing we were given was a list of words like φιλοσοφíα θεολογíα 
νθρωπολογíα & so on and we would see the similarity to philosophy theology anthropology and get excited, this type of word tends not to turn up in Hop on Pop & so is not very helpful for teaching a 4-year-old. So I said a lot of the letters were the same and when he still looked perplexed I explained patiently—
There are a lot of Greek letters that are like English letters. See if you can read this, and I wrote on a piece of paper:
ατ
And he said at.
And I wrote down βατ and he said bat.
And I wrote down εατ and he said eat.
ατε. ate. ιτ. it. κιτ. kit. τοε. toe. βοατ. boat. βυτ. but. αβουτ. about.
And I said That’s good.
And I said There are some other letters that are different, and I wrote down γ = g, δ = d, λ = 1, μ = m, ν = n, π = p, ρ = r, & σ = s & I said see if you can read these.
I wrote down γατε and he said Gate!
And I wrote down δατε and he said Date!
And I wrote down λατε and he said Late!
ματε. Mate! ρατε. Rate! λετ Let μετ Met νετ Net πετ Pet σετ Set!!!!!!
The Alien said that that was enough for today.
Mr. Mill said his father had started him on cards with Greek vocables at the age of three and that what he had done could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution.
Mr. Ma said that was far too much for one day & that too much material had been covered in a superficial manner without being thoroughly mastered.
I said I think that’s enough for one day
& he said NO! NO NO NO NO
So I wrote down ξ = x. ζ = z.
μιξ. Mix! λιξ. Lix—oh Licks! πιξ Picks! στιξ Sticks! ζιπ Zip!
I said Now you know the sound H makes, and he said Huh.
I said Right. I said Now in Greek they don’t use a letter for that sound, but a little hook over the first letter of the word, that looks like this: ‘. It’s called a rough breathing. If a word starts with a vowel & doesn’t have an H sound it gets a smooth breathing, which is a hook facing the other way: ’. So how would you say this:
λπ.
He thought about it for a while & at last he said Help?
I said Good. And this? 
π
And he said Hop.
τ. Hot! íτ. Hit! τ. It? 
τ. Hat! τ At! τε Hate! τε Ate!
And I said Brilliant!
And he said This is easy!
And the Alien made a rattling sound in its throat. Coupez la difficulté en quatre, it said, with a ghastly grin.
Mr. Ma said You know my methods.
I thought: Just five more minutes. I can stand five minutes.
I said That’s good, because the next bit is a little harder. There are four letters that stand for sounds that we write with two letters. There’s θ which is th, but it’s not the th of the or thin, it’s more like what you say if you say SPIT HARD. And there’s φ which is ph as in SLAP HARD. And there’s χ which is kh as in WALK HOME. And there’s ψ, which is ps, as in NAPS. Do you want to try or do you want to stop for now? And he said he would try.
So I wrote παθιμ
and he looked for a very long time & at last I said Pat him.
And I wrote παθερ
and he said Pat HER.
And I wrote μεεθιμ & he said Meet him and I wrote μεεθερ & he said Meet HER & I said Terrific.
βλαχεαρτεδ Blackhearted? βλοχεαδ Blockhead. βλαχαιρεδ Blackhaired.
λφερ Help her. λφιμ Help him. ριψ Rips! λιψ Lips! νιψ Nips! πιψ Pips!
And I said Brilliant.
Then he picked up the book and looked at it and he said he couldn’t read any of it.
I said patiently That’s because it’s a different language so all the words are different. If you could read the words it would be English in different letters.
I said:
Look, I’ll get out some pages I’ve done on this book and you can work on that.
He said:
OK.
So I went to find the four pages I had managed to finish. Four years earlier I had started work on a sort of Teach Yourself Iliad, with text vocabulary at bottom of page translation on facing page. I had finished four pages which had been stuck in the back of the Homeric dictionary for the past four years & I had still not progressed beyond Iliad 1.68. This was depressing but at least it meant I had some pages for him to work on with vocabulary at the bottom of the page.
I said This is just to get you started reading the words, yes? I’ll give you some words and you can use one of my Schwan Stabilo highlighters that I use for my Arabic. Which colour would you like to use?
And he said Green.
So I gave him a Schwan Stabilo 33 & I picked some words that turned up a lot, but because I remembered Roemer and the something in the something with the something I tried to make sure they were not all prepositions & articles & connectives.
Then I realised that I had forgotten to go over the long vowels & diphthongs.
I did not want to go over the long vowels & diphthongs. I don’t want to go over them now. But I knew of course that if I did not L would be interrupting & pestering me to explain them within the hour, and if I do not explain them again I know what will happen: the poet Keats will haunt my dreams. Bearing in one hand Chapman’s Homer in the other the Oxford Classical Text, he will gaze at me fixedly with an expression of inexpressible sorrow before opening the Chapman with a piteous sigh. A Connery lookalike pacing through the mists will look up in silent indignation and stalk off without a word. Well—long e has its own letter, η, like the e of bed stretched out; long o has its own letter ω, like the o of hot stretched out; παι rhymes with pie, παυ pow δει day βοι boy μου moo—I explained this in a manner which I leave to the imagination & returned to the words.
How would you say this? πολλς. Pollas? Terrific. That means many.
And this? ψυχς Psukhas. YES. That’s something like souls or spirits.
And what about these? 
ρ
ων θε
ν νδρν. Heeroooon theoon androon. Right. They mean, of heroes, of gods, of men. Now all I want you to do is go through as much as you can and colour in all the places where you see those words. We’ll worry about the grammar later. OK?
And he said OK.
So I handed over the pages and said There you go.
We have come all the way around to Blackfriars. L is up to the pentekaipentekontapus under the admiring & indulgent eyes of people who get on and are able to get off again after a few stops.
He looked at the pages and he looked at me.
I said It isn’t as hard as it looks. Look carefully and show me one of your words.
& he looked at the page and he found πολλ
ς. in line 3 & I said That’s right, so colour that green & look for the rest, OK?
& he said OK.
OKTOkaipentekontapus ENNEAkaipentekontapus HEXEKONTApus
[Well anyway]
I turned again to Iliad 6 and in two minutes Baby Driver was back. He said he was going to colour in the names of people because he could read them & he was not finding very many words to colour. I said that was a very good idea & he went away & I turned my attention to Hector & Andromache & he was back again. He said θεο
ς looked like θεν and could he count it because he was not finding many words to colour.
I was not looking forward to simplifying and explaining even the simplest points of grammar to a 4-year-old & I can’t say I am looking forward to going through it all again now but I said I would so I
HEKkaiHEXeKONtapus HEPtakaiHEXeKONtapus OKTOkaiHEXeKONtapus
will.
I am finding it rather hard to concentrate however so may salve conscience by just touching on highlights like Sound of Music cutting from Doe A Deer to seven-part harmony or heptaphony as some people (naming no names) would probably call it.
I said Yes you can and I said Do you remember what θεν meant and he said Of gods, I said Right, well θεος means to gods or by gods & do you remember what ρων and νδρν meant & he said Of heroes and of men & I said But there’s no separate word meaning ‘of’, is there, it’s all in the word so there must be a bit of the word that means ‘of’ & what do you think that would be & I don’t know about you but I am about ready for The hills are alive (A-a-a-ah).
heptakaihebdomekontapus
[Ah. Forget it]
Another day on the Circle Line, house too cold to stay in. An icy rain sweeps the city, underground it is warm and dry.
LIVERPOOL STREET ALDGATE TOWER HILL MONUMENT
Far too young
CANNON STREET MANSION HOUSE BLACKFRIARS
Etymology so helpful
TEMPLE EMBANKMENT WESTMINSTER and around and around
At St. James’s Park a woman gets on and sees the tiny head bent over a book, pudgy fingers dragging a blue Schwan Stabilo highlighter across the page. Twinkling eyes share the joke, she longs for adult bonding. He looks up & gives her an enchanting smile, all chubby cheeks and sparkling black eyes & tiny milk teeth. He says: I’ve almost finished Book 15!
She says: I SEE you have! You must have been working very hard.
Another Shirley Temple special for the nice lady. L: I only started it yesterday!
Isn’t He Adorable: Did you REALLY?
Adorable: Today I read this and this and this and this and yesterday I did this and this and this and this and this and this! [tiny fingers flip back through pages covered with fluorescent pink and orange and blue and green]
Isn’t: Isn’t that wonderful!
Wonderful: I’ve read the Iliad and De Amicitia and three stories in Kalilah wa Dimnah & one Arabian Night and Moses & the Bullrushes and Joseph and his Manycoloured Coat and now I have to read the Odyssey and Metamorphoses 1–8 and the whole Kalilah wa Dimnah and 30 Arabian Nights and I Samuel and the Book of Jonah and learn the cantellation, and do 10 chapters in Algebra Made Easy.
Slightly Taken Aback: Why do you have to do that?
All Innocence: Sibylla says I have to.
Appalled: Isn’t he rather young etymology so helpful of course for spelling inflected language so helpful of course for grammar not taught in schools but classics after all part & parcel of old divisive educational system wouldn’t he really be better off playing football I think you are making a terrible mistake.
Standard reply.
SLOANE SQUARE SOUTH KENSINGTON
Four hours have gone by. We have taken the Circle Line around four times. We have been to the toilet twice; L has hopped the length of the platform at Mansion House on one foot and back on the other foot; we have left the train each time at Tower Hill to make faces at the video camera & watch ourselves making faces in the banks of TVs. Or rather—you see yourself in one TV. In the others you do not appear—they show sometimes an empty platform, sometimes a platform with a few people, sometimes a platform with a train pulling around a bend. I think these are images from cameras further down the platform, but they look like glimpses into possible worlds, worlds where the sun rises and the trains run without you. There are pushchairs to be pushed but not by you, bad memories to be dodged but not by you.
2
99, 98, 97, 96
12 December, 1992
My name is Ludo. I am 5 years and 267 days old. It is 99 days to my sixth birthday. Sibylla gave me this book today to write in because she said I should practise writing because my handwriting is atrocious, and they will not let me write on a computer all the time at school. I said I didn’t know what to write and Sibylla said I could write about things I liked so that in later years I would be able to see what I liked as a child. Also I could write about interesting things that happened so that in later years I would be able to remember things that had happened.
One thing that I like a lot is polynomials but I do not like the word binomial because it is wrong. I have decided never to use it. I always use the right word for a polynomial whatever anybody else does. My favourite Greek word is γαγγλíον and that is all the things I like today
13 December, 1992
It is 98 days to my birthday. One interesting thing that happened today was that I took Kalilah wa Dimnah on the Circle Line too and somebody asked if my father was an Arab. Sibylla said whatever gave you that idea. The person said isn’t that Arabic. Sibylla said Yes. Then she said but my father wasn’t an Arab. I was going to ask her what he was but then I decided not to.
I think that Greek and Arabic and Hebrew are my favourite languages because they have a dual. Greek has better moods and tenses but Arabic and Hebrew have better duals because they have a feminine dual and a masculine dual but Greek just has the one. I asked Sibylla if there was a language with a trial number and she said not that she was aware but she didn’t know all the languages in the world. I wish there was a language with a dual trial quadral quincal sextal septal octal nonal and decal, if there was that would be my favourite language.
It is boring on the Circle Line but I am up to Odyssey 15.305. 9 books to go.
14 December, 1992
97 days to my birthday.
One interesting thing that happened today is that we took the Tube one way and then we took it the other way and a lady got into an argument with Sibylla. Sibylla said let’s take the example of two men about to be burned at the stake, A dies at time t of heart failure while B burns to death at time t + n, I think we can all agree that B’s life would be better if it were n minutes shorter. The lady said she thought it was rather different and Sibylla said she thought it was exactly the same and the lady said there was no need to shout. Sibylla said she wasn’t shouting she just thought it was barbaric to force people to die at time t + n and she said barbaric so loud that everyone in the train looked around!
Barbaric comes from the Greek word βρβαρος which means a non-Greek but in English it means something completely different.
15 December, 1992
96 days to my birthday.
Today I was reading the Odyssey on the Tube and a man got on and said it was good that I was starting so young. He said he started Hebrew when he was three and I said I knew Hebrew and he said what have you read in Hebrew. I said I had read Moses in the bullrushes and he taught me this song:
Pharaoh had a daughter with a very winning smile
She found the baby Moses while swimming in the Nile
She took him home to Pharaoh, said I found him on the shore
Pharaoh winked at her and said I’ve heard that one before.
I sang it three times and he said splendid and he said it was never too soon to start on your religious education. He asked Sibylla if my father was teaching me or if I was studying at school or with a rabbi and Sibylla said she was teaching me herself. He said it was a shame all Jewish mothers did not take religious education so seriously. Sibylla said she was really only teaching me the language and he said of course, of course. I was hoping he would ask if my father was Jewish but he didn’t. When he got off the train I asked Sibylla and she said she didn’t know, it didn’t come up in the conversation, but she didn’t think so.
16 December, 1992
95 days to my birthday.
One thing that is funny is that even though I have been reading the Odyssey on the Tube for a long time nobody ever asked if my father was Greek. Today I read Babar but nobody asked if he was French.
Speaking of French a funny thing happened today on the Tube. A lady got into an argument with Sibylla who said let’s take the example of two men who are about to be ritually disembowelled. A dies at time t of heart failure and B dies at time t + n from having someone plunge a stone knife into his chest and rip the beating heart out with his bare hands, I think we would agree that B’s life was not improved by the additional n minutes in which the stone knife was plunged into his and the lady said pas devant les enfants. I said parlez-vous français? The lady looked very surprised. Sibylla said would you be more comfortable if we continued the discussion in Bengali? The lady said pardon? Sibylla said or perhaps some other language he does not know? She said her Russian, Hungarian, Finnish, Basque and Icelandic were not up to much but she thought she could manage something in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish or Bengali. I was surprised because I didn’t know Sibylla knew any of those languages. I don’t think the lady did. I asked when I could learn those other languages and Sibylla said after I have learned Japanese. I asked if my father was French and Sibylla said no.
17 December, 1992
We took the Tube again today. It was boring. I read Odyssey 17 part of the time and the rest of the time White Fang. On the way home I asked Sibylla if my father was Russian, Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, Icelandic, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish or Bengali. She said No.
94 days to my birthday.
3
We Never Get Off at Embankment to Go to McDonald’s
and around and around and around and a
L is up to Odyssey 17. This is so bad for him. Hundreds of people saying wonderful marvellous far too young what a genius. It seems to me that it is does not take miraculous intelligence to master the simple fact that ’Oδυσσες is Odysseus, if you go on to master 5,000 similar simple facts you have only shown that you are a miracle of obstinacy.
Anyway I have been watching Seven Samurai once a week with L to counteract the deplorable influence of the Circle Line. But today something terrible happened.
A woman sitting across from me saw the Reader of Handwritten Japanese sitting unopened in my lap and said Are you studying Japanese & I said Sort of.
Nine green bottles hanging on the wall
I said I was mainly learning the language so I could understand Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and also (if it ever came out on video) Mizoguchi’s Five Women Around Utamaro which I had watched five days in a row when it showed at the Phoenix, and that I was also interested in a text called Tsurezuregusa by a 14th-century Buddhist priest.
NINE GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL
She said Oh and she said she had seen Seven Samurai though not the other one and what a marvellous film
I said Yes
and she said It’s a little on the long side but what a marvellous film, of course it’s basically so simple isn’t it I suppose that’s the source of its appeal, sort of like the Three Musketeers, an elite band—
and I said WHAT?
and she said Sorry?
ELITE BAND! I said staring aghast
and she said there was no need to shout.
And if ONE GREEN BOTTLE should accidentally fall
There’ll be EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES hanging on the wall
I began to imagine L seeing all kinds of things in the film which would not be incompatible with throwing a person from a plane on orders from a third party
EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL
I said politely but firmly I think if you see the film again you will find that the samurai are not, in fact, an elite band. Lesser directors have of course succumbed to the glamour of the eliteness of a band, with predictable results; not Kurosawa.
She said there was no need to take that tone
EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL
& I said politely Essentially the film is about the importance of rational thought. We should draw our conclusions from the evidence available rather than from hearsay and try not to be influenced by our preconceptions. We should strive to see what we can see for ourselves rather than what we would like to see.
She said What?
And if one green bottle should accidentally fall
I said Also, we should remember that appearances can be deceptive. We may not have all the relevant evidence. Just because somebody is smiling doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better off dead.
She said I really don’t think
SEVEN GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL
I said Let’s say A sees his wife, B, burned alive at time t. A survives. Later we see A singing in a local ritual. C, observing the ritual, thinks A has come out ahead. We infer that C is not in full possession of the facts & has been influenced by his own preconceptions since
She said It all seems rather clinical
I said Clinical!
THERE’LL BE SIX GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL
She said & isn’t this rather morbid—
I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not think it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank.
After all we both when it comes down to it we both think it’s a marvellous film, she said pleasantly.
I was afraid she might give some other example but luckily the train pulled into Moorgate and this was her stop.
SIX GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL
SIX GREEN BOTTLES
[Could be worse. He could be singing 100 bottles of beer on the wall, instead of a song that not only counts down, but starts at 10.]
277 degrees above absolute zero.
I said All right, we’ll take the Circle Line again, and we had another argument about Cunliffe.
I: Look, there’s no point in bringing a dictionary when there is no place to put it. You can’t use it if you are holding it in your lap with the book on top. We tried that before and it didn’t work.
L: Please
I: No
L: Please
I: No
L: Please
I: No
L: Please
I: No
The ideal thing would be to go somewhere with tables, such as the Barbican or South Bank Centre—but it is impossible to go to either without being faced at every turn with bars and cafés and restaurants and ice-cream vendors, all selling expensive appealing food which L wants & we cannot afford.
Please No Please No Please
I thought about another day like the last 17, 10 hours of marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius; I thought about another day like yesterday, more marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius plus nonsense about elite bands not to mention 10 hours explaining every single word/visiting toilet inaccessible to pushchair/ smiling pleasantly through 273 verses (10 + 0 + –262) of the green bottles song. Could I be sure that he would not start up again at –263 or rather would anyone familiar with the child offer even straight odds that he would not? No.
So I said All right, forget the Circle Line. We’ll take Cunliffe and we’ll go to the National Gallery, but I don’t want you to say ONE WORD. And no running through doors that say No Entry or Authorised Personnel Only. We’ve got to be inconspicuous. We’ve got to look as though we’ve come to look at the paintings. We’ve been looking at the paintings and our feet are tired so we’re just sitting down to rest our feet. We’re just sitting down to rest our feet so we can get up and look at more paintings.
Natürlich, said the Phenomenon.
I’ve heard that one before, said I, but I put Cunliffe under the pushchair along with Odyssey 13–24, Fergus: Dog of the Scottish Glens, Tar-Kutu, Marduk, Pete, WOLF!, Kingdom of the Octopus, SQUID!, The House at Pooh Corner, White Fang, Kanji ABC, Kanji from the Start, A Reader of Handwritten Japanese, this notebook and several peanut butter and jam sandwiches. I put L in the pushchair with Les Inséparables and we set off.
We are now sitting in front of Bellini’s Portrait of the Doge. L is reading Odyssey 18, consulting Cunliffe at intervals—infrequent intervals. I have been looking at the Portrait of the Doge—somebody’s got to.
I have brought things to read myself but the room is so warm I keep falling asleep and then jerking awake to stare. In a half-dream I see the monstrous heiskaihekatontapus prowling the ocean bed, pentekaipentekontapods flying before it, Come back & fight like a man, it jeers, I can beat you with one hand tied behind my back (heh heh heh). Strange to think Thatcher could work on three hours sleep, five hours & I am an idiot. Should never never never have told him to read all those things—but too late to retract.
I think the guard looks suspicious.
Pretend to take notes.
No sooner were Liberace and I in his bed without our clothes than I realised how stupid I had been. At this distance I can naturally not remember every little detail, but if there is one musical form that I hate more than any other, it is the medley. One minute the musician, or more likely aged band, is playing an overorchestrated version of The Impossible Dream; all of a sudden, mid-verse, for no reason, there’s a stomach-turning swerve into another key and you’re in the middle of Over the Rainbow, swerve, Climb Every Mountain, swerve, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, swerve, swerve, swerve. Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.
The Medley came at last to an end and Liberace fell into a deep sleep.
I wanted to clear my head. I wanted strangeness and coldness and precision.
I listened for a little while to Glenn Gould playing pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier. In recording sessions Gould would often make nine or ten different versions of a piece, each note perfect, each perfectly distinct from the others in character, and each note played bears the mark of all those to which it was preferred. I am not really capable of replaying a fugue in my head so I listened to his queer performance of the C minor prelude, Book 1, which begins with each note staccato, and then two-thirds of the way down the first page the notes suddenly run very smoothly and softly, and then I listened to Prelude No. 22 in B flat minor which I could never play without the pedal. I think that though perhaps it should not be played with the pedal it should at least be played legato, and yet the harsh abruptness with which Gould plays this piece displaced with its coldness, its lack of ease, the wilful expressiveness with which Liberace wearies the heart.
Liberace was still asleep. His head lay on the pillow, face as I had seen it, skull encasing a sleeping brain; how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep. I did not want to watch him wake to go on as he had begun.
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