Death by Publication

by J. J. Fiechter

  My role in their separation was not negligible. During the early days I remained on the sidelines, very much the spectator, watching first one then the other, listening to the secrets they each confided in me, rejoicing inwardly at the rapid disintegration of their marriage—which represented Nicolas’s failure. A perverse sense of duty nonetheless made me try to warn him.

  “Nicolas, you’re playing with fire here. You can’t treat Anne that way and not expect it to backfire.”

  His response was as swift as it was scathing: “What do you know about women, Edward?”

  I did not respond, but I showed him in my own sweet way that my knowledge of feminine psychology was not exactly nil. My first revenge on Nicolas was to work ever so subtly on Anne, not by encouraging her to stick with him or give him another chance but by helping her free herself from his clutches entirely. Without her knowing it, I became her confidant and mentor.

  Using words filled with friendship and tenderness for my old friend Nicolas, I slipped in just the right clever, perfidious poison. Pretending to praise him, I all but buried him. One has no idea, really, how easy it is to suggest ill of someone under the thinnest guise of barbed compliments. I made Anne understand that her husband was a man without depth, a man with a mask to the world, an errant playboy, a charlatan. A phony. And I took enormous pleasure in seeing her love begin to crack and break up, like the icebound Saint Lawrence River in the thawing spring.

  Nicolas was the first to be surprised by this new turn of events as he saw his wife’s feelings toward him change, veer away, disappear. I sincerely believe he was not only taken aback but hurt. For once. Perhaps for the first and only time in his life. Thus his departure for Central Africa took on the appearance of flight, as if he were running away from a situation that he couldn’t control. He talked of resigning from the diplomatic corps. “Embassy life is so sterile, you know,” he would say, “and so demanding.” So it was not as if his thoughts of quitting were an effort to win back his wife and son—who it turned out he did not finally take with him to his new post—but simply because there was nothing more to be gained from the “career.” It was intruding on his other life, his “work”—his writing—which was taking more and more of his time.

  His next three novels—Flight of Eagles, The Mountebanks, and Wild Oats—were all solid successes, but with each new work his imagination seemed to freeze up a trifle more. Traveling, in the past a source of inspiration, no longer seemed to work. Actually, if he had accepted that far-flung post in Central Africa, it had been for the sole purpose of trying to get his flagging creative juices flowing again. To no avail: the steaming tropics seemed, if I may be permitted the expression, to leave him cold. He wrote me long, despairing letters, which I must say did move me.

  What a void this place is! No Anne. No Peter. I miss Peter enormously. But what in the world would a four-year-old child do here under this blistering, unrelenting sun? I would love to drown myself in my work but here that is quite out of the question. Everything is geared to making sure we remain as idle as possible. My peers and superiors seem bound and intent on making sure we get bogged down in a world of exasperating calm. I try to fight my boredom by galloping full tilt on horseback through the brush and by flying a local plane, to keep my hand in.

  Or again this letter, written a few weeks later, from Nicolas-the-Exhibitionist, still intent on making sure one didn’t forget what a heartthrob he was.

  As for my love life, zero. Think of me in that context as an anorexic. I’m working on my divorce as slowly as possible. I don’t want you to think from the above that I’ve turned celibate, for in fact I do have my fair share of European women here—mostly hysterical, generally more concerned about keeping thin than anything else—and if I do yield now and again to their presumed charms it is without conviction, to keep my hand in (so to speak; sorry, Edward, you’ll edit that), and to uphold the honor of France here in the colonies. In this remote city my every movement is followed and commented on. I remember with great fondness my years in Belgium. That was provincial too, God knows, but there at least I was free to come and go at will. Here I’m stifled, choking to death. To boot, no chance of tasting the exotic delicacies that abound here. Verboten. The local beauties, it has been made eminently clear to me, are strictly off-limits. Edward, you should see their breasts—most of the time they go about uncovered—golden and sculpted by the gods. In short, I’m bored to death.

  To make things worse, the political side of my job is completely frustrating.

  As a former colonial power, France has what I would term a despot complex—especially in the light of the Algerian war—and we have to back and protect any local tin-pot dictator who comes to power in Africa, which means having to either ignore or approve of the cruelty and torture that seems part of their baggage. So here I am supporting these monsters, and their policy of exterminating this tribe or that—everything is so tribal here, Edward—all in the name of democracy, of peoples’ right to dispose of their own future. The whole thing makes me sick.

  Despite the dismal tone of his letters, that post-colonial experience ended up producing a novel, entitled Chevara Go, which was rather fierce, even cruel, but very successful So successful, in fact, that it gave Nicolas the courage to resign from the diplomatic service. I still have the letter, written after he had been in Africa for two years, in which he announced the news.

  Farewell Africa! Good-bye diplomatic service! It’s been a long time since I felt so good about something I did. I just handed in my resignation, and I have no intention of going back on my decision, despite the pressures I’ve been getting from the Foreign Office in Paris strongly suggesting I take an extended holiday—on sick pay, to recover from overwork! As if one could overwork here in Central Africa even if one wanted to! My intransigence is nourished by my irremediable disgust for the diplomatic service. Nor am I motivated by anything sentimental, or by lowly politics. It’s rather because of that unsullied image of France that I had during the war, the France I fought for so long and hard. And to think that you are forever berating me, my dear Edward, for lacking in idealism! For years I’ve suffered—physically suffered—from the drama of our lost empire. That beautiful dream of my youth. That is doubtless why I prefer to turn my back on this daily comedy that I am forced to play in my fancy ambassador’s uniform. Good-bye hypocrisy. I am leaving my talented colleagues and diplomatic brethren the task of explaining to the world just how the influence and importance of France, and French culture, is growing in direct proportion to the loss of her overseas possessions. . . .

  How in the world was I ever to believe in his profession of patriotic faith when I knew there was only one single thing whose influence and importance he was interested in—the career of one Nicolas Fabry? No, it was not some deep-seated concern about France that made him quit the world of diplomacy, not some high-minded set of principles; it was his concern about his literary career. Period.

  So Nicolas returned to Paris without a worry in the world. Free as air. He didn’t have to worry about money, for in addition to what his parents had left him he was receiving a generous monthly draw from his French publisher irrespective of the sales of his books, and the income from his foreign sales was by now becoming meaningful. In the English-speaking countries, the United Kingdom and the United States especially, his sales figures were beginning to exceed our wildest expectations—in good part thanks to my promotional efforts. Not to mention the extensive rewriting and editing I did. Yes, it was thanks to me that Nicolas’s novels had become best-sellers.

  Chapter 7

  While Nicolas was busy making a name for himself as a writer, I too had become a publishing success. With the small inheritance left to me by my mother, I bought back the Turner Press—to the enormous delight of an elderly Archibald, who more and more regarded me as his adopted son. I immediately increased the number of books the press published. One success bred another, and our list grew until soon I had to employ battalions of new ed
itors, assistants, and secretaries to help with the volume of business. These were heady times. We moved into an elegant building off Regent Street. I opened an American affiliate. In addition to an enviable stable of prestigious house authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, and Romain Gary, Turner Press boasted the most promising young talent from around the world. I, Edward Destry, had become one of the most influential publishers in the world—renowned, respected, and in due course knighted.

  The pace of my life was madness itself. I routinely worked fifteen-hour days and through the weekend, unable to slow down, like a bicyclist afraid that if he stops pedaling he will fall.

  A few minor commercial disasters brought me back to earth. I overprinted heavily on several titles, and they sold dismally. These setbacks frightened me into realizing how blindly I had been forging ahead, stumbling forward beneath the oppressive weight of an unhappiness whose source, given my outward success, seemed unidentifiable. I went to doctors, of course, but they could diagnose only the obvious—nervous depression brought on by physical exhaustion—and recommend I take four weeks of absolute rest and relaxation.

  I took their advice and went to Capri. Why Capri? Because that was where Nicolas was. I could have taken the waters at Vichy in my beloved France, or sprawled on some sun-bleached Pacific island and danced under palm trees with nut-brown natives straight out of a Gauguin painting. But I didn’t. My demons pushed me toward Nicolas—this other self, this drinker of my blood, this inhibitor of life.

  How handsome he was in his house overlooking the ocean, my shining twin, how resplendent! He had chosen Capri for the azure of its sea and sky—and the beautiful models who paraded along the sides of the swimming pools, their breasts jiggling like so much ripe fruit waiting to be plucked. How could you blame him? How much more pleasant to sip Chianti in a dream landscape than to live, as I did, drowning lonely sorrows in a pint of warm ale in some musty urban pub.

  There in Capri, surrounded by adorers and admirers, Nicolas reigned as supreme as a satrap. He was cock of the walk, imposing his whims, alternately playing the charmer and the sadistic prison warden for his guests. One morning while I was there he organized a walk along the beach, then for no apparent reason called it off an hour later. Poor Nicole, the pretty brunette who was his mistress of the hour. He would treat her like a slave one moment, shower her with flowers the next. He demanded absolute silence while he was writing, when he would sit at his desk and assume an exaggerated expression of concentration that I found truly exasperating.

  Yet I couldn’t help but envy Nicolas his magnetism, and his childish antics didn’t seem to diminish it. He had preserved into adulthood intact the same luminous aura he had had when first I fell under his spell at the country club dance in Alexandria.

  I knew I had no such aura. I was a nonentity, a cipher, absolutely devoid of charisma. What a cruel fate it is to be the sort of chap one might envy and yet not actually be able to see. To cross a room without notice and without remark. To be seated at a formal dinner party and wholly ignored by the people seated on either side. To be helpless, powerless, lifeless.

  Sometimes I felt some essential part of me was missing, and that no matter how hard I tried, I would never find it. For example, it would frequently happen that I would go to a cocktail party and mix with the guests as energetically as I could. I would chivalrously kiss the hands of women and jovially slap the backs of men, join in conversations in every corner of the room, all the while munching lustily away on finger sandwiches—in short doing everything possible to make myself noticed—only to hear someone ask me the very next day why I hadn’t attended that very same party. Over the course of the years I must have held the door open for people more than a thousand times, gallantly insisted they go ahead of me into a store, onto an escalator, into a hotel. Yet never once did anyone ever thank me. Not that I can remember.

  Why is it that while wandering lost in a foreign city one inevitably chooses another dazed tourist from whom to ask directions? Because colorless people are as neutral as a highway marker: looked at, passed by, forgotten. That is precisely how I felt. Some are born to a place among the gods, their arrival on earth attended by fairies. No such guiding spirit of greatness stood over my crib and blessed me. Life was the stations of the cross, an upward climb toward inevitable doom. I trudged along as if atoning for some crime. What crime it was I couldn’t even say.

  Though I was talented at it, publishing had been the wrong profession for me. Gray and self-effacing, I was tailor-made for the secret service. Not only did I enjoy the advantage of transparency, I knew what it meant to lead a double life. Indeed, I had always known. Sir Edward Destry was a man with deep oppositions. Within me lived two souls—one that could function perfectly reasonably, if unobtrusively, in society; the other secretive, retreating into the cobwebbed corners of the subconscious to lick wounds that would never heal.

  Nonetheless I was convinced it was this latter figure, this thing of pathos within, that embodied what genius nature had endowed me with. I was obsessed with the notion that it was Nicolas who had dispossessed me of my gifts, who had turned my genius into a reclusive, sulking caricature of what it might otherwise have been. Nicolas had stolen my life. Nothing short of that. I watched him closely in Capri, equally fascinated and tormented by jealousy, as he flaunted his abilities like a rich and spoiled child with a toy no one else can afford.

  Nicolas’s talents, I admit, could produce amusing results. But what they could have produced had I been master of them instead! His childish impulse to shock people, his need to punctuate his speech with vulgar expressions, his aggressiveness, his macho treatment of women. All so jejune. I would have done better.

  His tantrums could also afford me bitter joy. Sometimes a wave of tenderness for him would overwhelm me. When he made one of his comically ferocious facial expressions, it reminded me of an illustrated encyclopedia I used to look at as a boy, in which there was a picture of a sultan murdering the messenger of bad news in a fit of rage.

  I still believe that had Nicolas ever shown me any real consideration, all would have been forgiven. I would have been as happy as a dog praised by its master. That was it—I had always been waiting for Nicolas to stroke me. How I wanted to believe that his magisterial indifference was nothing but a facade, that he secretly rejoiced in my company! But he never gave me such a sign. Despite the years of our friendship, the memories that bound us together, and the favors that I had done for him, he treated me little better than he might someone with whom he had once eaten dinner. I was invisible to him as well. Once, over breakfast, I was passing him the toast, and he glanced at me. “Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

  Yes, it was me. Me, the flower vase sitting on a corner of mantelpiece. The one you’d stopped looking at ages ago.

  That small phrase—“Oh, it’s you”—stirred deep anger. Damn you, Nicolas, I thought. It is me.

  At least I was there enough for his son Peter, with whom over the years I had spent a great deal of time. Peter confided in me. Whenever his father, occupied elsewhere with his women or his parties, ignored him, it was to me the boy would come seeking solace. Each time Nicolas scolded him over something trivial, Peter and I were brought closer together. Even the invisible man can win the love of a child, after all, by listening to him and loving him with constancy and giving him presents and tucking him into bed at night. I learned all sorts of things about his father, though that was not why I did it. What I did for Peter was without thought of reward, but from love. He was the son I never had.

  It pleased me that Peter loved me more than he did his father, and even more that this was a source of pain to Nicolas. Of course, out of pride, he willed himself not to reveal that pain to anyone. Yet I knew it was there.

  I also secretly rejoiced when Nicolas experienced writer’s block. It happened several times during my stay on Capri. I watched with deep satisfaction as it drove him to distraction. He paced in circles like a caged
wild animal, until finally he closed himself off from the world and drank. How my self-confidence and happiness soared! When Nicolas felt empty, I felt fulfilled. That was the seed of my conviction that his loss of creative energies would bring mine to life.

  The last dry spell he hit was by far the longest, and it chanced to come toward the end of my visit. Nicolas could barely rouse himself to grumble goodbye to me, and I arrived in London feeling more at peace with myself than I had in years. I hoped his wretchedness would last.

  Then one day, some months later, I received a letter from him, telling me that things had turned around. He was writing again, writing, he said, as he never had before.

  “Something truly original and profound is stirring within. It may have been going on for years, but I have taken notice of its existence only recently. I am about to finish writing what I believe is a truly great novel.”

  He was as good as his word.

  Never will I forget the day he brought his completed manuscript to me. It was entitled, Il faut aimer. A simpleminded title, I thought—“The Need to Love,” roughly—but I knew straightaway it was unlike anything else he’d done. He had called me early that morning to tell me he had only just finished it, and that he was going to hop on a plane for London and personally place it in my hands.

  At around two in the afternoon he marched into my office, without even taking the time to flirt with Doris. He was, I was surprised to see, trembling and looking abashed, like an aspiring novelist on a visit to an editor. At first I thought that something must be seriously wrong. The look on his face frightened me.

  “Is anything the matter? Is Peter all right?” I asked in genuine alarm.

  “Peter is fine. Here is the manuscript.”

  “Why show it to me first?” I asked. “Why not Laurent?”