As I walked into his rooms, Bentley’s eyes lingered just a little too long on my scarred cheek, but I didn’t blame him for that. It made him seem human. He brewed tea and we sat in wing chairs on either side of the cold fireplace. There was an arrangement of pine cones and teasel heads in the grate that suggested there hadn’t been a fire there in a long time.
I began by asking him if he’d really burned the copy of The Wax Man Gregory had sent him, as he’d promised in his letter, and he said no. He hadn’t thought the book quite good enough for that. He also insisted that his book-burning days were far behind him. The parties had only seemed worthwhile so long as there were undergraduates who understood the perverse principle of the thing. For all that the world now claimed to be thoroughly post-modern and ironic, people just didn’t ‘get’ the idea of book-burning parties any more. He thought it probably had something to do with Salman Rushdie.
I told Bentley about my current dilemma, what to do with Gregory’s legacy, Untitled 176. I opened my bag, pulled out the bound manuscript and set it down on a low table between us. Bentley looked at it without interest. He was finding this a good deal less intriguing than I’d expected. We talked briefly about Kafka and Brod, and about one or two other famous literary incendiarists (Bentley’s term): Isabel Burton, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Moore – the burner of Lord Byron’s journals. We agreed that these precedents didn’t necessarily have a great deal to teach us.
‘You could read it if you’d like,’ I said.
‘I think not,’ said Bentley, as though I’d suggested a bracing dip in the North Sea on Christmas Day.
That was fine by me. The manuscript sat between us looking flat and dead.
‘And I suspect you’ve already decided what you want to do,’ he said.
‘I know what I want to do, but I’m not sure I should do it.’
‘What stops you? Fear of being condemned by posterity?’
‘In a way.’
‘And you need some sort of dispensation from me, from the world of academe? I didn’t think our opinions meant so much to anybody any more.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I said.
‘Or did you just want me to strike the first match?’
‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But I think the real reason I’m here is because I want all this stuff to have some shape, some outcome.’
‘You want things to come full circle? Isn’t that a little humdrum?’
‘I need a sense of an ending.’
‘Closure? Isn’t that what people call it these days?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Ultimately, I’m not quite sure what you want from me, Michael. Do you want me to help you burn the manuscript or beg you not to?’
‘Either would probably be all right,’ I said.
Bentley did his pondering act and finally said, ‘I think you’re entirely on your own here, Michael, but for what it’s worth, if you really want my opinion, I think that burning Gregory’s manuscript might be a little bit glib, a tad too neat. Don’t you think so?’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said.
He invited me to have lunch in the college, but I declined. We said polite goodbyes and I left his rooms and walked out through the college into the streets of Cambridge. They were full of clean, harmless-looking students who made me feel very old. Had I ever been so innocent, so pristine?
I wandered down to the river and stood on King’s Bridge. It was busy with people coming and going and I feared there might be something a bit melodramatic about standing there and throwing Gregory’s manuscript into the water, but nobody paid the slightest attention to what I was doing. Then I wondered if the manuscript might float, sit on the top of the water and some punting undergraduate might salvage it and return it to me, but no, I was worrying unnecessarily. I let go of the manuscript and it fell softly from my hand, hit the surface of the water and disappeared unspectacularly into the thick shallows of the river. It didn’t have the drama or the finality, and I certainly didn’t experience the sadistic thrill, that combustion would have provided, but perhaps that was no bad thing. It was good enough. The deed was done.
I walked back to the railway station, a long and not especially interesting route, but it gave me time enough to think, to make some resolutions and decisions. I knew what I was going to do when I got home, something I’d been resisting and yet moving towards for a very long time. I would start writing. I already had my title.
Bedlam Burning
A NOVEL
Geoff Nicholson
In Bedlam Burning Geoff Nicholson takes deadly satiric aim at the ivy covered walls of academia and the rubber rooms of insane asylums. When the debut novel of Gregory Collins is accepted by a publisher, he seems set on a course for literary stardom. There’s just one problem: he doesn’t quite have the looks to match his talent, and his publisher wants a photo to put on the book jacket. He asks his handsome (but dim) college classmate, Mike Smith, to take his place.
Consequently it is Smith rather than Collins who receives the offer to be writer-in-residence at an asylum where therapy is centered on the soothing powers of literature. It’s not long before the boundaries between inmate and observer are blurred in this literary cuckoo’s nest, and the comedy of errors verges on tragedy.
“Nicholson uncoils the plot with great relish, neatly manipulating plausible premises into more and more absurd outcomes … you’re never tempted to stop reading.”
—MARCEL THEROUX, The New York Times Book Review
“Intellectually engaging and outright fun, Nicholson’s new book is a winner.”
—BARBARA LLOYD MCMICHAEL, Seattle Times
“Nicholson’s antic yet mordant plot stands in considerably darker relief beside the all’s-well-that-ends-well outcomes in the literary cousins to Bedlam Burning … [He] is to be commended for this unsparingly savage portrait of a literary world that had nothing more edifying ahead of it than the 1980s.”
—CHRIS LEHMANN, The Washington Post
“Only Nicholson could weave such a playfully entangled plot while dropping riffs on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, self-perpetuating madness, and the history of book burning … Nicholson is masterful.”
—ROB SPILLMAN, Bookforum
Geoff Nicholson is the author of thirteen novels, including Hunters and Gatherers, Footsucker, Bleeding London, The Food Chain, Still Life with Volkswagens, Everything and More, Flesh Guitar, and Female Ruins (all available from Overlook).
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