The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  KELIAN

  If you’d attended the séance that was held here last night, you would’ve discovered that those ghosts do not exist, or at least they will not manifest themselves.

  INTERVIEWER

  I did attend the séance, and I saw you there with your friend, the late, lamented novelist. Have you considered any connection between that séance, which is defined as “a sitting for summoning spirits,” and the sudden appearance of a long-departed spirit from your past, the Bolshakov person who was arrested for the murder?

  KELIAN

  Say, what is this? I thought you were supposed to be asking me questions about my working habits and what I write with and what hours I keep. I don’t mind revealing that I make a monthly pilgrimage to the local Wal-Mart, where I stock up with, among other things, several packages of common Number Two lead pencils, which I do not sharpen endlessly, like Hemingway, but prefer writing with dulled, upon Wal-Mart’s yellow legal pads of the long variety. I rise fairly early each morning, around seven o’clock, with a wake-up call from the desk…although this morning I was understandably permitted to sleep late, or to try to. After a sauna and shower—I no longer use my Jacuzzi, out of negative sentimental reasons—I usually breakfast downstairs in the Crystal Room, varying my menu from cereal one day to poached eggs with bacon the next…although this morning, understandably, I did not breakfast at all and in fact have had not had lunch either. Would you care for a bite?

  INTERVIEWER

  No, thank you, I’ve eaten. But don’t let me stop you from eating something.

  KELIAN

  I’m not hungry, but if you don’t mind I’ll refill my drink…Now, would you like to ask me something about what advice I have for the young writer or whether I read my critics or what talismans I use to conjure up the magic of my art?

  INTERVIEWER

  Your great obligations to Nabokov are obvious, by your own admission, and I’m sure you’ve noticed how your life is sort of an inversion of his most famous novel, although there is not that much similarity between yourself and the notorious double Humbert. But just as Monsieur Humbert was genuinely in love with his Lolita, or Dolores, haven’t you ever found yourself similarly in love with one of your boys?

  KELIAN (after a long pause of thinking)

  Only one.

  INTERVIEWER

  Dzhordzha himself? Islamber? Kenny? Or perhaps Jason, Travis, Billy…?

  KELIAN

  How did you know of all those boys? I didn’t mention all of them in that Vanity Fair piece, did I?

  INTERVIEWER

  I have prepared myself very thoroughly for this interview. Do you mind telling me which one it was?

  KELIAN

  If you must know, Travis.

  INTERVIEWER

  Why him more than Billy?

  KELIAN

  Intelligence, for one thing. You are going to ask me, now or later, to spell out for you the metaphor of the hebephiliac’s seduction of the innocent, virginal youth as akin to the novelist’s seduction of the innocent, virginal reader, a theme that I have been attempting with limited success to explore in my work-in-progress, my memoir, Louder, Engram!—its very title a shameless allusion to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I am not at all confident that I shall finish the book, which has often struck me as a dreadful exercise in self-indulgence. But I have been asking myself many questions about the relationship between my lust for virginal boys and my obsession with, shall we say, virginal readers.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you honestly know why it is so important to you that your boy be a virgin?

  KELIAN

  If he is not, it is as if the novelist discovers that someone else has already told his story. And perhaps done it better. Do you know, since you like to refer to my critics, that Pryce-Smythe wrote of my Original Flavor, “I feel after reading this book as if my celibacy has been ended by a master seducer.”

  INTERVIEWER

  You must be particularly gratified that so many of your short stories have been published in such magazines as Playboy, where, undoubtedly, they fell into the hands of ardent young masturbators.

  KELIAN

  What can I say? Yes, I am. I would even confess that I have often fantasized the image of some adorable twelve-year-old lad behind the locked door of his bathroom, teaching himself how to masturbate after reading a story of mine.

  INTERVIEWER

  But do you think it likely he would be using your story in preference to the full-color photographs, the gatefolds?

  KELIAN

  A moment ago I spoke of intelligence as my reason for having loved Travis. The intelligent twelve-year-old has the wisdom both to want the seduction and to appreciate every nuance of it. The intelligent twelve-year-old is not going to be irrationally disturbed or corrupted by the initiation into sex. The intelligent boy would actually prefer the mental imagery of the story to the raw visual imagery of the cheesecake photograph.

  INTERVIEWER

  So you are saying that Billy was stupid?

  KELIAN

  If you must seize upon that particular boy, he had a number of problems, of which lack of intelligence was only one.

  INTERVIEWER

  You claim that you try to improve upon reality, or escape from actuality in your fictions. If you were inventing yourself as a character in a novel about, let us say, a famous novelist living in an old resort hotel in the Bodarks, wouldn’t you select for the character an avocation less obvious than mushrooming? I mean, after all, the idea that mushrooms remind you of young boys’ penises…

  KELIAN

  Quite frankly I have never met a mushroom the equal of a boy’s urgent thing. Nor eaten one. But yes, you are right: If I wrote a novel about myself, I’d make my avocation—or my vocation, since after all I do think of writing as my avocation—the playing of the piano.

  INTERVIEWER

  Your fondness for concerti is well known. You have even been known to express the hope that Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto will be played at your funeral.

  KELIAN

  Did I say that publicly? Well, yes, in lieu of any spoken obsequies, I’d love to have that unabashedly romantic concerto played at my funeral. It can say more about me than any words.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you think often about your funeral?

  KELIAN

  You do not know how close I came to being killed myself last night. I have a sense that my death could occur at any moment. But no, I don’t expect a full symphony orchestra with a famous pianist to gather in my honor at Stick Around and play that concerto. An old phonograph will do. The last interviewer who asked me that question then suggested that it would be more appropriate if I arranged to have my ashes shipped home to Svanetia and flung to the winds from the top of Mount Layla. A touching idea, surely, but not one in keeping with my attachment to the Bodarks.

  INTERVIEWER

  Just why are you so attached to the Bodarks?

  KELIAN

  Have you ever heard of Daniel Lyam Montross?

  INTERVIEWER

  The name is only vaguely familiar.

  KELIAN

  Too bad. He deserves to be much better known. I am going to write an idyll about him one of these days. And as I say, I consider myself an idyllist, not a novelist. I should explain that I have never “met” Dan Montross myself—he died before I was born, barely—and yet he has been the single most important person in my life.

  INTERVIEWER

  More important than any of your boys?

  KELIAN

  I will return in a minute, after opening a new bottle of vodka…There now. Where were we? Yes, all the boys were only diversions: playmates in the games of love and life. Dan has been more than that, and, just as Christians believe that their savior has promised them eternal life, I believe that Dan has promised me immortality in the elegiac but bucolic woodlands of the Bodarks. I don’t suppose, however, that this is the sort of thing that all the aspiring writers who read these
Paris Review interviews really want to hear, is it?

  INTERVIEWER

  No, they’d rather not hear your plans for the afterlife. They’d rather vicariously experience how you deal with the delicious disadvantages of your present fame.

  KELIAN

  Fame? “I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

  INTERVIEWER

  Do I detect quotes around that statement?

  KELIAN

  You don’t recognize it? Those were Nabokov’s famous last words to the Paris Review.

  INTERVIEWER

  Oh, yes.

  KELIAN

  Say, are you really from the Paris Review?

  INTERVIEWER

  Of course.

  KELIAN

  Would you mind if I asked to see some credentials?

  INTERVIEWER

  Credentials? What can I show you? I don’t have a membership card or anything like that.

  KELIAN

  A letter of authorization? Anything?

  INTERVIEWER

  Well, what about this?

  KELIAN

  Christ, that is a pistol. Put it back in your purse.

  INTERVIEWER

  Not until I’ve used it for the purpose I intended.

  KELIAN

  Which is…?

  INTERVIEWER

  Why, to kill you, of course. By your own admission, you’ve seen this coming. You expected me.

  KELIAN

  Who are you?

  INTERVIEWER

  My name is Barbara Phillips. Doesn’t the name Phillips mean anything to you?

  KELIAN

  It’s a very common name. Have I ever met you before? Did you send me a manuscript to read? Phillips? I get an awful lot of unwelcome manuscripts in the mail, as if somehow I had the power to make them publishable, which they aren’t. I’m sorry if I didn’t respond to your manuscript.

  INTERVIEWER

  I am a writer, yes, but you haven’t read anything of mine or been sent anything of mine to read. I have spent too much of my adult life trying to be a writer, often to the neglect of everything else. Especially to the neglect of my son, William.

  KELIAN

  Getting published is often simply a matter of lucky breaks and of knowing the right people. I could help you find a sympathetic editor for your stuff, if you’d let me.

  INTERVIEWER

  You really don’t notice anything outside yourself, do you? Now you are even getting drunk, so that you can’t fully appreciate why you are being shot.

  KELIAN

  I am getting drunk because I had a terrifying experience last night, and now you are trying to give me another one. I think one horror is enough for one day. Unless this is still night…and you are simply one of my nightmares. I have noticed, by the way, that this appears to be more or less in the present tense, whereas I had distinctly shifted into the future tense in what I was creating.

  INTERVIEWER

  I ought to be your worst nightmare. But I am sure it never even occurred to you that I existed. Did you ever even think to ask Billy if his mother had any suspicion of what he was doing with you?

  KELIAN

  You—? You are Billy’s mother?

  INTERVIEWER

  It never occurred to you that he had one, did it?

  KELIAN

  No. I mean, yes, certainly. We often spoke of you. But he assured me that you didn’t care what he was doing.

  INTERVIEWER

  I didn’t, at least not at the time he was first being debauched by you. And then, later, when I did find out about it, my reaction was not shock, or even a proper mother’s protectiveness, but rather a novelist’s curiosity. I thought I could convert the story of you and Billy into a novel.

  KELIAN

  Did you?

  INTERVIEWER

  I tried. For three years I tried, but then my novelist’s curiosity was utterly obliterated by my grief as a failed parent. I have been unable to feel anything but guilt. No, I’ll correct that: guilt and anger. Over my abject failure as a good mother and over your ruining of my son.

  KELIAN

  Do you hear that desperate caterwauling? My cat wants in. Do you mind if I let my cat in?

  INTERVIEWER

  Let’s not disturb the poor thing with the sight of our gory bodies.

  KELIAN

  Our bodies?

  INTERVIEWER

  Yes, don’t you understand? I am going to kill you for your indecency, and then I am going to kill myself for my negligence.

  KELIAN

  Your tape recorder is still running. Do I have time for some last words?

  INTERVIEWER

  I’m afraid not. Haven’t you said enough?

  —Barbara Phillips

  Afterword By Clive Henry

  On a Book Entitled

  Louder, Engram!

  Did Ekaterina actually die? When I accepted the invitation from her publisher to edit these memoirs, it was with the clear understanding that I would not be able to communicate with the author. At the time of her supposed assassination, I was in Paris researching a project involving the medical profession’s habits of prevarication, which had consumed me for so long that I had not even been aware of Vanity Fair’s exposé of the true identity of V. Kelian.

  Thus, whatever surprise I may have felt at the news of her death was overmatched by my astonishment at the discovery of the identity of V. Kelian, whose first novel I reviewed so warmly in the pages of The New York Review of Books and whose subsequent books I consumed (and reviewed) with almost equal admiration. Indeed, my immediate reaction to her death was to search for a copy of that first novel and reread it in light of the knowledge that its author was female. In Paris, I could find only a used paperback of Le Garçon Georges, but that sufficed to satisfy my rethinking of the novel and my arrière-pensée that Ekaterina’s achievement in having identified so thoroughly with a twelve-year-old boy was not so much the result of having lived through an actual affair of the kind Georgie Boy depicts as it was a triumph of the empathetic imagination. For the longest time, I could only believe that Ekaterina simply wanted to imagine that she had been murdered.

  I was still in Paris, putting the finishing touches on my book Why Doctors Lie when that autumn’s now-notorious issue of Paris Review appeared, with the sensational interview of “V. Kelian” wherein the interviewer performs the actual killing that many interviewers can only hope to perform symbolically. (That literary quarterly, by the way, despite its title, is not published in Paris and actually has nothing to do with that city, wherein sheer coincidence alone happened to find me at the time the issue came out.) The decision to append that Paris Review interview to the present volume was one for which I assume sole responsibility, feeling that it makes a kind of necessary coda to the essentially unfinished story of Ekaterina’s life. I have, however, felt constrained to omit the note by the Paris Review editors in which they rather coyly and disingenuously apologize for having commissioned Barbara Phillips to do the interview without knowing that she had an exceptional ax to grind or crime to commit. (“Of the one hundred and thirty-seven distinguished authors interviewed in these pages over the years, not one had ever been literally murdered.”)

  The substance of the interview itself, when first I read it, did not greatly interest me; only one item captivated my attention: the mention of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, which I had, in my review of Georgie Boy, guessed—correctly, it would seem—had mightily influenced the life and prose of the writer. I became seized with a simple wish to find out if that music had actually been played during Ekaterina’s funeral…if any sort of services had actually been held…if Ekaterina had actually died.

  But I was also somewhat uneasy about the italicized prefatory remarks to the interview, which, assuming Barbara Phillips was their author, must have been written after the supposed interview and shootings took place, but could not have been written by Barbara Phillips if she had killed herself a
fter killing Ekaterina. Could they have? I wrote to the editors of Paris Review to clarify this point but thus far have received no reply. The newspapers did say of the tragedy that it was a homicide-suicide by Barbara Phillips.

  My obsession to learn the truth was fueled and consummated through a stroke of fate that left me forever afterward a believer in Anangka, as Ekaterina was wont to render the Greek personification of Fate, sweet Ananke (the word means “necessity” in Greek): My university forwarded to me a letter from her publisher inviting me to read, evaluate, edit, and if need be annotate the manuscript of Louder, Engram! The invitation had been prompted by some references within the manuscript to myself, including, I was abashed to discover, Ekaterina’s wish to include the entire text of my original review of Georgie Boy. (Despite my insistence on its removal from these pages—no quirk of false modesty on my part—I have been persuaded to let the review stand uncut.)

  As soon as my work on the doctor book permitted, I began a close, attentive, indeed enthralled reading of Ekaterina’s uncompleted autobiography in holograph photocopy. I armed myself with a stack of books too numerous to bibliograph here—but I ought to mention three: Douglas W. Freshfield’s two-volume Exploration of the Caucasus (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1896), with, despite its age, excellent photogravures by Vittorio Sella of the Suanetian (sic) landscape and people; Clive Phillipps-Wolley’s quaint but condescending two-volume Savage Svânetia (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1883), with some amazing wood engravings; and, of our own century, Alexander Kuznetzov’s Look Down, Svanetia (as its title would translate from Russian; Moscow: Molodaya Gvardeya, 1971) with amateurish but candid snapshot photos. My leisure hours were filled with an honest attempt to read Rustavelli’s Knight in the Tiger’s Skin and the various books by David Marshall Lang on Georgian history and culture. In one of those bookstalls on a Left Bank quai, Anangka led me to a yellowed issue of the American monthly National Geographic (July 1942), which contains an article, “Roaming Russia’s Caucasus,” by Rolf Singer, who discusses Svanetia (pp. 96 ff.) and gives proof, if any were needed, that its ex-ruler was one “Prince Dadish Kiliani,” as Singer spells it, thinking Dadish the given name; I was able to determine that he was referring to our Ekaterina’s great-uncle.