Transparent things

18

In the second week of February, about one month before death separated them, the Persons flew over to Europe for a few days: Armande, to visit her mother dying in a Belgian hospital (the dutiful daughter came too late), and Hugh, at his firm's request, to look up Mr. R. and another American writer, also residing in Switzerland.

It was raining hard when a taxi deposited him in front of R.'s big, old, and ugly country house above Versex. He made his way up a graveled path between streams of bubbly rainwater running on both sides of it. He found the front door ajar, and while tramping the mat noticed with amused surprise Julia Moore standing with her back to him at the telephone table in the vestibule. She now wore again the pretty pageboy hairdo of the past and the same' orange blouse. He had finished wiping his feet when she put back the receiver and turned out to be a totally different girl.

"Sorry to have made you wait," she said, fixing on him a pair of smiling eyes. "I'm replacing Mr. Tamworth, who is vacationing in Morocco."

Hugh Person entered the library, a comfortably furnished but decidedly old-fashioned and quite inadequately lighted room, lined with encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, and the author's copies of the author's books in multiple editions and translations. He sat down in a club chair and drew a list of points to be discussed from his briefcase. The two main questions were: how to alter certain much too recognizable people in the typescript of Tralatitions and what to do with that commercially impossible title.

Presently R. came in. He had not shaved for three or four days and wore ridiculous blue overalls which he found convenient for distributing about him the tools of his profession, such as pencils, ball pens, three pairs of glasses, cards, jumbo clips, elastic bands, and – in an invisible state – the dagger which after a few words of welcome he pointed at our Person.

"I can only repeat," he said, collapsing in the armchair vacated by Hugh and motioning him to a similar one opposite, "what I said not once but often already: you can alter a cat but you cannot alter my characters. As to the title, which is a perfectly respectable synonym of the word 'metaphor,' no savage steeds will pull it from under me. My doctor advised Tamworth to lock up my cellar, which he did and concealed the key which the locksmith will not be able to duplicate before Monday and I'm too proud, you know, to buy the cheap wines they have in the village, so all I can offer you – you shake your head in advance and you're jolly right, son – is a can of apricot juice. Now allow me to talk to you about titles and libels. You know, that letter you wrote me tickled me black in the face. I have been accused of trifling with minors, but my minor characters are untouchable, if you permit me a pun."

He went on to explain that if your true artist had chosen to form a character on the basis of a living individual, any rewriting aimed at disguising that character was tantamount to destroying the living prototype as would driving, you know, a pin through a little doll of clay, and the girl next door falls dead. If the composition was artistic, if it held not only water but wine, then it was invulnerable in one sense and horribly fragile in another. Fragile, because when a timid editor made the artist change "slender" to "plump," or "brown" to "blond" he disfigured both the image and the niche where it stood and the entire chapel around it; and invulnerable, because no matter how drastically you changed the image, its prototype would remain recognizable by the shape of the hole left in the texture of the tale. But apart from all that, the customers whom he was accused of portraying were much too cool to announce their presence and their resentment. In fact they would rather enjoy listening to the tattle in literary salons with a little knowing air, as the French say.

The question of the title – Tralatitions – was another kettle of fish. Readers did not realize that two types of title existed. One type was the title found by the dumb author or the clever publisher after the book had been written. . That was simply a label stuck on and tapped with the side ' of the fist. Most of our worst best-sellers had that kind of title. But there was the other kind: the title that .shone through the book like a watermark, the title that was born with the book, the title to which the author had grown so accustomed during the years of accumulating the written pages that it had become part of each and of all. No, Mr. R. could not give up Tralatitions.

Hugh made bold to remark that the tongue tended to substitute an "l" for the Зecond of the three "ts." "The tongue of ignorance," shouted Mr. R. His pretty little secretary tripped in and announced that he should not get excited or tired. The great man rose with an effort and stood quivering and grinning, and proffering a large hairy hand. "Well," said Hugh, "I shall certainly tell Phil how strongly you feel about the points he has raised. Good-bye, sir, you will be getting a sample of the jacket design next week." "So long and soon see," said Mr. R.