by Diana Athill
The book is too simple for him. It reads like a children’s book and requires innocence of a reader. Imagine asking Jason Epstein to be innocent . . .
Will let you see it when I come. PLEASE REPLY BY RETURN OF POST. Love.
My answer:
I did tell you publication date, I have sent you copies – or rather, copies were sent, as is customary, to your agent (if A. M. Heath is still your agent – they are on paper. I called them this morning and they said they’d post your six copies today, and I don’t know why they haven’t done this before). Here are copies of the main reviews [my lack of comment makes their disappointing nature evident]. And I didn’t put the Burroughs quote on the jacket because no one in Sales wanted me to, Burroughs being thought of here except by the few as dangerously far out and obscene, and they not wanting to present you as more for the few than you are. Should have told you this. Sorry.
I am enclosing a letter of invitation in case it may be useful with the visa people or at frontiers. It’s marvellous that you are coming . . .
Your quote from Jason Epstein made me laugh – there’s a nervous publisher backing against a wall if ever there was one. I was also, of course, scared by his reaction because there is nothing more twitch-inducing than waiting for something to come in which you know is going to be unlike anything else, for fear that it is going to be so unlike that one will have hideous forebodings about its fate. I’m dying to read it. Hurrah hurrah that you’ll soon be here. Love.
His answer, written in a mellow mood, ended with the words: ‘As for The Exquisite Corpse being unlike, yes, it is probably the most unlike book you’ve read since childhood. And probably, also, the most delicious.’
I could not have rejected The Exquisite Corpse, because it seemed – still seems – to me to draw the reader into itself with irresistible seductions. Alfred was right: you must read it as a child in that you must read it simply for what happens next, without trying to impose ‘inner meanings’ on it. The title comes from the game called in England ‘Consequences’ – it was the Surrealists who gave it the more exotic name. Do people still play it? A small group of people take a sheet of paper, the first person writes the opening line of a miniature story, then folds the paper so that the next person can’t see what he has written; the next person writes the next line, and folds – and so on to the last person, whose line must start ‘and the consequence was . . .’ Unfold the paper and you have a nonsense story which is often delightfully bizarre. You can do it with drawing, as well as with words: I can still remember a sublime monster produced that way by my cousins and me when I was a child, far more astonishing than anything any of us could have thought up on our own, yet perfectly convincing. Alfred followed the ‘consequences’ principle – it’s as though the paper were folded between each chapter, and when people you have already met reappear you are not always sure that they are the same people – perhaps the name has been given to someone else? Sometimes appalling or obscene things happen to them (I still find it hard to take the scene in which the character called Xavier watches his papa dying). Often it is monstrously funny. In no way is the writing ‘difficult’. There is nothing experimental about the syntax; you are not expected to pick up veiled references or make subtle associations; and there can never be a moment’s doubt about what is happening to the characters. The writing – so natural, so spontaneous-feeling, so precise – makes them, as Alfred claimed, delicious. The book’s strangeness lies entirely in the events, as it does in a fairy-story, remote though Alfred’s events are (and they could hardly be remoter) from those of Hans Andersen.
I was captivated, but two things disturbed me. The first was that we would be no more able than Jason Epstein to turn this extremely ‘unlike’ book into a best-seller, so Alfred was bound to be disappointed. And the second was that it left me feeling ‘one inch madder, and it would have been too mad’.
This was something to do with the contrast between the perfection and airiness of the writing and the wildness of the events. The easy elegance, the wit, the sweet reason of the style are at the service of humour, yes; of inventiveness, yes; but also of something fierce and frightening. A fierce – an aggressive – despair? If aggressive despair is screamed and thumped at you it is painful, but it makes sense. When it is flipped at you lightly, almost playfully . . . Well, it doesn’t make nonsense, because nothing so lucid could be called nonsensical, but (like Jason Epstein) I don’t know for sure what it does make. I am captivated, but I am uneasy. I am uneasy, but I am captivated. The balance wobbles and comes to rest on the side of captivation. I use the present tense because I have just reread it for the first time in years, and reacted to it exactly as I did at the first reading.
When Alfred arrived with Dris he was wigless. He looked impressive, face, scalp, ears, neck all tanned evenly by the Moroccan sun. Although he himself had already broken the taboo, I still felt nervous and had to screw up my courage in order to congratulate him on his appearance. I don’t think I am inventing the shyly happy expression on his face as he accepted the congratulations. As I learnt later, having to wear a wig because a childhood illness had left him hairless was the most terrible thing in his life, an affliction loaded almost beyond bearing with humiliation and rage; so throwing it off, which had taken great courage, was a vastly important event to him.
Morocco, I thought, had given him a new calm and freedom, and he agreed. The version he gave me of the place was all liberation and gentleness: you could smoke delicious kif there as naturally as English people drink tea; no strict line was drawn between hetero- and homosexual love; and you didn’t have to wear a wig – you could be wholly yourself. I rejoiced for him that he had found the place he needed.
A couple of days later he brought Dris to dinner at my place: handsome, cheerful Dris, with whom I could communicate only by smiling because I have no Spanish. After dinner Alfred sent him into the kitchen to wash the dishes, which shocked me until they had both convinced me that it was dull for him to sit listening to incomprehensible English. Soon Dris stuck his head round the door and offered me his younger brother – he thought it wrong that I should have no one to do my housework. Alfred advised against it, saying that the boy was beautiful but a handful and that Dris constantly had to chivvy him out of louche bars. Dris himself had become a model of respectability now that he had a loving and reliable American, and Alfred – so he said – would one day be the guest of honour at Dris’s wedding. That would be recognized in Morocco as the proper conclusion of their relationship, and probably Dris’s wife would do Alfred’s laundry while their children would be like family for him. It sounded idyllic.
The high point of the evening was the story of their adventures on their drive to England, told with parentheses in Spanish so that Dris could participate. Alfred had crashed the car in France. When the police came Dris was lying on the ground with blood on his head. It was really only a scratch but it looked much worse and Dris was groaning and rolling up his eyes so that only the whites were visible. Yes, yes, Dris intervened, sparkling with delight, with Alfred interpreting in his wake. He had suddenly remembered that a friend of his had been in an accident in France, and was taken to hospital, and when he got there he was given all his meals for free! So Dris decided in a flash to get to hospital where he would save Alfred money by getting fed, and also – this was the inspiration which filled him with glee – by complaining piteously about his foot, as though it had been hurt in the accident, he would make them X-ray his foot, as well as feed him, so that Alfred would not have to pay for an X-ray in London. Unfortunately this brilliant wheeze came to nothing because he was not allowed to smoke in the ward, so before he could be X-rayed he became too fed up to endure it, and walked out. It was pure luck, Alfred said, that they had run into each other as they wandered the streets.
Alfred’s gloss to the story was that the police and ambulance men had been fussing around so that Dris had no chance to explain his plan. Alfred had seen him whisked away without knowin
g where to, and had spent a day and a night adrift, wondering how the hell he was going to find Dris – and, indeed, whether Dris was still alive. Later this struck me as odd. It is not difficult to ask a policeman where an ambulance is going, nor to find a hospital. I supposed he must have been stoned out of his mind at the time of the accident, although I had never seen him more than mildly high and he was always careful to give me the impression that mildly high was as far as he went. I sometimes thought that Alfred tended to see me as slightly Jane-Austenish, which caused him to keep his less Jane-Austenish side averted from my view.
I didn’t see much of him on that visit. He was affectionate and easy, but after a couple of hours I would know that I was becoming an inhibiting presence, and assume that he wanted to bring out the kif – I was unaware, then, that he also used other drugs – which I didn’t use, so I would say goodnight and leave, feeling that the real evening was starting up behind me. Dris’s foot remained a mystery. He saw a doctor, he did not have an operation, someone told me that the spur had been diagnosed as a result of gonorrhoea; and Alfred, when questioned, was vague, as though the matter had become unimportant.
Alfred’s next visit, two years later, came out of the blue. As I came into the office one morning the receptionist behind her keyboard half rose from her chair and signalled that someone was waiting to see me. I peeked round the corner, and there was Alfred, sitting in a hunched position, staring into space. ‘Oh my God, trouble’ . . . the reaction was instantaneous, although his attitude might, I suppose, have been attributed to weariness.
I welcomed him and took him to my room, asking the usual questions and getting the information that he was on his way back to Morocco from New York and had stopped off because he needed to see a dentist. Would I find him one, and would I give him some typing to do so that he could earn a little money while he was here? Of course I would. And then, in a tone which indicated that this was the visit’s real purpose: ‘Will you call the Prime Minister and tell him to stop it.’
Stop what?
The voices.
I must not attempt dialogue or I will start cheating. The voices had been driving him mad. They gave him no peace, and the most dreadful thing about them was that they, not he, had written every word of his work. Did I see how appalling it was: learning that he had never existed? And even Dris was on their side. They often came at night, very loud. Jeering at him. Dris, in bed beside him, must have heard them. He could only be lying when he insisted that he didn’t. It was not really for the money that Alfred needed the typing, it was because it might drown the voices.
He had been to New York, where he had attacked his mother with a knife (he had attacked Dris, too; though whether it was at this point, or a little later, that I learnt about these attacks I cannot remember). He was in London now because of what I had told him in Fez. But I had never been to Fez. Oh yes, I had, last week. Alarm became more specific because of the stony way he looked at me: I saw that it was possible to become one of ‘them’, an enemy, at any moment. I said cautiously that this Fez business puzzled me, because certainly my physical self had been in London last week.
I told him I had never met the Prime Minister (Harold Wilson it was then), and would not be put through to him if I called him, but that I could approach a Member of Parliament if that would do. I also told him that I was sure the voices were a delusion. He replied that he could understand my disbelief, and that I thought he was mad, so could I not in return understand that to him the voices were real: ‘As real as a bus going down the street’? Yes, I could grant that, which seemed to help. It enabled him to make a bargain with me. If I proved that I was taking him seriously by approaching an MP, he would take me seriously enough to see a doctor.
That settled, things began to go with astonishing slickness. When I called my dentist I got through in seconds and he was able to see Alfred that afternoon; and it turned out that we had in the office a manuscript which genuinely needed to be retyped. Both these pieces of luck seemed providential, because I was sure that Alfred would have interpreted delay or difficulty as obstruction. (He kept all his appointments with the dentist, behaving normally while there, and he typed the manuscript faultlessly.)
After he had gone I sat there shaking: it would not have been very much more of a shock if I had come across someone dead. Then I pulled myself together and went to discuss the crisis with the person in the office most likely to know something about madness, who recommended calling the Tavistock Clinic for advice. At that time Doctors Laing and Cooper were in their heyday, and someone at the clinic suggested that I should get in touch with Laing. He was away, so his secretary passed me on to Cooper.
Dr Cooper agreed to see Alfred, told me that having offered to speak to an MP I must do so – it would be a bad mistake to cheat – and asked me who would be paying him. Alfred’s family, I extemporized, hoping devoutly that it would not end by being me; and when, next day, I managed to speak to Alfred’s brother in New York, he agreed. He sounded agitated, but a good deal nicer than Alfred’s rare references to him had suggested. Then I called an MP of my acquaintance who said: ‘Are you out of your mind? If you knew the number of nuts we get, asking us to stop the voices . . .’
The thought of telling Alfred that afternoon that the MP would not play worried me enough for me to ask someone to stay within earshot of my room while he was with me. To my surprise he took the news calmly, and agreed to visit Dr Cooper in spite of my failure. I began to see what I had been doing, talking to him in Fez: of all his friends I was probably the one most likely to think of madness in terms of illness, and of illness in terms of seeing a doctor, and because we saw little of each other I had not yet turned into an enemy. Alfred wanted to be proved wrong about the voices, he wanted someone to force him into treatment. I had been chosen as the person most likely to do that.
Nevertheless he could bring himself to visit Dr Cooper only once, because: ‘I don’t like him, he looks like an Irish bookmaker.’ Cooper then volunteered to find a psychiatric social worker to talk him through this crisis, telling me that if this one could be overcome, Alfred would be less likely to experience another – perhaps. A pleasant, eager young man came to me for a briefing, then started to make regular visits to Alfred who had found himself a room in a remote suburb – I think it was lent to him by friends, but I didn’t know them. What Alfred thought of his conversations with the psychiatric social worker I never heard, but the young man told me that he felt privileged to be in communication with such a mind. I remember fearing that Alfred would draw the young man into his world before the young man could draw him back into ours.
Two, or perhaps three weeks went by, during which I called Alfred a couple of times – he sounded lifeless – but did not ask him to my place or visit him at his. I knew I ought to do so, but kept putting it off. This was my first experience of mental illness, and I felt without bearings in strange and dangerous territory. Having taken such practical steps as I was able to think of, I found to my shame that the mere thought of Alfred exhausted me and that my affection was not strong enough to overcome the exhaustion. Not yet . . . next week, perhaps . . . until the telephone rang and it was the psychiatric social worker reporting that Alfred had left for Morocco – and I felt a wave of guilty relief. Asked whether he was better, the young man sounded dubious: ‘He was able to make the decision, anyway.’ And after that I never heard from Alfred again.
I suppose it was his New York agent who sent me a copy of ‘The Foot’, his last novel, which has never been published. There was wonderful stuff in it, particularly about his childhood and losing his hair – when the wig was first put on his head, he wrote, it was as though his skull had been split with an axe . . . But much of the book had gone over the edge into the time of the voices. After reading ‘The Foot’ I saw why The Exquisite Corpse is so extraordinarily vivid: more than anyone had realized at the time, its strange events had been as real to Alfred ‘as a bus going down the street’. He was already entering
the dislocated reality of madness, but was still able to keep his hold on style: instead of leaving the reader, flustered, on the edge of that reality, he could carry us into it. When he came to write ‘The Foot’ his style had started to slither out of his grasp. By that time the sickness which found such nourishment in the ‘liberation and gentleness’ of Morocco, with its abundance of delicious kif, had won.
Without knowing it, Alfred left me a delightful legacy: his oldest and truest friend, the poet Edward Field. Some years ago Edward’s tireless campaign to revive Alfred’s reputation in the United States caused him to get in touch with me, and almost instantly he and his friend, the novelist Neil Derrick, took their place among my most treasured friends. It is Edward who told me about Alfred’s last, sad years.
Back in Morocco, his behaviour became so eccentric that he lost all his friends and alarmed the authorities. He was thrown out, and moved with his dogs – new ones, not Columbine and Skoura – to Israel, where he survived by becoming almost a hermit, still tormented by the voices and trying frantically to drown them with drink and drugs. I was shown by Edward what was probably the last thing he ever wrote: a piece intended to be published in a periodical as ‘A Letter from Israel’. It was heart-breaking. Gone was the sparkle, gone the vitality, humour and imagination. All it contained was baffled misery at his own loneliness and hopelessness. The madness, having won, had turned his writing – a bitter paradox – far more ordinary than it had ever been before. The world he was describing was no longer magical (magical in horror as well as in beauty), but was drab, cruel, boring – ‘mad’ only in that the mundane and tedious persecutions to which he constantly believed himself subject were, to other people, obviously of his own making. When he died – probably from heart failure brought on by drugs and alcohol – he was alone in a rented house which he hated. It is true that his death cannot be regretted, but feeling like that about the death of dear, amazing Alfred is horribly sad. However, other people are now joining Edward in keeping his writing alive in the United States: it is still a small movement, but it is a real one. May it thrive!
