The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  An astonishing piece of naïve writing, as I recall it, and I’m genuinely embarrassed not to be able to remember for you the name of this lost adventurer and writer, a young woman who had travelled as a man and soon died in North Africa, alas, and—of all things—in a flash flood. I truly regret I can’t bring her back for you, that (in effect) the flood has washed her away.

  Or, maybe the truth is that I don’t want to.

  For Raymond had silently stolen from every one of her ninety-or-so pages—a word here, a phrase there, a hundred tiny borrowings. All these moments were patiently identified by Julian with Post-it notes stuck into the text, so many of them that the book looked as if it had grown many-coloured feathers and was about to flap into the air and squawk out its uncomfortable truths to the world. A hundred little sins: more, a small, brave, many-coloured celebration of deceit.

  And, it seemed as I pressed on with it, more than that. I read with my heart beating faster. There were whole paragraphs marked out by Julian’s pencil, the first of them beginning like this:

  It was the month of July. Not even a strip of green remained on the land’s exasperated palette. The pines, the pistachio trees and the palmettos were like blackish rust against the red earth. The dried-up river beds with their banks that seemed to have been drawn with sanguine made long gaping wounds in the landscape, revealing the gray bones of rock inside, among the slowly dying oleanders. The harvested fields gave a lion-coloured tint to the hillsides. Little by little the colourless sky was killing everything.

  I’m sure you recognise it, or a form of it—do you? The opening sentences of Flatland, before their transformation by the Master. A great improvement, his version, I think you’ll agree, better than hers in all the obvious ways: the original text works so hard to present something—it works to please: Raymond’s version simply is, like the world itself. The words just hang there, creating out of nothing. His mastery is undeniable.

  Yet, just as undeniably, the original text is simply not his to improve on—none of it, none of the many bits and pieces, many of the same length as the above, to which (it seemed) he had helped himself in writing his Algerian fiction. As I compared passages from book to book I could see how crucial they were to what he wrote, how he both pared away the original and built around it, expanded it, reimagined it. I could see that: and, also, the exact opposite—the possibility that, without this source, these stolen words, he might not have been able to write anything at all.

  My blood, as they say in novels, ran cold. What to make of all this?

  At first, starting with the one above, I copied out a number of the passages he’d used, almost as if to begin a case against the old man. After a couple of hours of this, I stopped. What case? Wasn’t I just trying to make myself feel better, less embarrassed, less ashamed? Wasn’t I simply trying to take control of this disturbing new news? What would we do with it, anyway? The horror of Raymond’s sudden death was still with us, remember, still raw—the manner of it, the number of young people killed in the blast along with him, the sense that his past had finally caught up and also that, at enormous cost, the truth of it had finally been confirmed. Boof!

  Terrorist Attack—Revenge For Early Years In North Africa—Middle Eastern Terror Strikes Home At Last: I’m sure you’ll remember the headlines, and who can forget the uproar at the time? It went on for a year, more, with diplomats conferring overseas and the trial, and then an enquiry lingering on after that. The media was at its worst—or its most typical—and I was struck by how many new works of fiction were made out of the death of this maker of fictions.

  I was shocked—numbed: we all were—in the weeks that followed this obscenity, and barely able to function. All those children, gone—well, little more than children: the youngest student was seventeen. And Raymond, erased in a moment, like a word pencilled on a page, while Gradus survived as if he were ink: the wrongness of that disturbed me for weeks, I remember, months, until I began to see the whole thing in perspective. Death, after all, gives you a beginning, a middle and an end, like a character in a book. Gradus was too stupid, too meaningless, to be graced with that. He was an intruder in the house of fiction who didn’t deserve a literary death.

  Raymond had been proven right, that was the thing. For me, as I slowly began to understand what it was that had happened, there was no doubt of that. As was stated at the time in some editorial or other, if saboteurs could blow up another nation’s trawler as an act of vengeance, why could they not do the same to someone who’d talked too much about what really happened at the heart of the north African darkness? And didn’t that prove that that particular someone really had known all along the truth of which he’d written? Yes, I knew the enquiry was noncommittal in the end and (in effect) the trial, too, and I knew there’d been all sorts of rumours going around—ridiculous inventions which Robert Semple was party to, amongst others, and I’m still not completely certain Marjorie wasn’t whispering them about as well.

  For me, Gradus’s defence at the trial was an obscenity, despite all the supposed evidence brought forward on his behalf. I never wavered in thinking that, and I’ve always spoken up for the old man since. The French foreign intelligence service, I told people when they asked, even when the enquiry had come to its final, puzzled shrug. Of course, of course, they’d reply, and turn away. But nothing could take from my pride in him, in Raymond Thomas Lawrence. Nothing could take away my belief.

  What a man! I often thought—what a life, drunk to the lees as it had been, and with several extra swigs at the end just to make sure he was done. I looked back and saw him plain, in the bright, fierce flare of one man’s long existence, bursting out, intensifying, blazing: and then fading, going, almost gone—and extinguished. A life that was whole, ultimately, and complete, integrated, a life lived in a kind of truth. That was the way it seemed to me as I came to my slow terms with him in the months after he died. He really had been where he claimed he’d been, he really had done what he said he’d done, he really did have the courage to tell the truth about it and had paid the price for doing so. He had written himself through, he had lived himself out—

  And, now, here was Julian again, bringing me yet more Post-it strips sticking out of yet more books. More, he said, crisply. I sank my face into my palms. I don’t want more, I told him.

  But I read what he gave me, all the same. Who, this time?—someone hitherto unknown to me, it turned out, an American called John Hopkins whose greatest distinction, it seemed, was to have written a novel called, remarkably, Tangier Buzzless Flies. No, the eponymous insects are barely mentioned in it—just once, early on, and perhaps twice more after that. Instead, the novel is full of marvellously precise descriptions of things, of the uncreated world and the hovering, implicit, unrealised sexual tension that comes with it.

  Just like Raymond’s world: in Kerr, most obviously—and so it should be, I realised as I began to read the other man. For Raymond’s novel is full of him, in sentences flecked with his words but more often in entire scenes, perhaps six or eight throughout, that he works into something that comes to seem his own. That passage early on, for example, one of my favourites, where Kerr is prowling around the enormous lamp in the old Peñón lighthouse, following and following Anir until it’s unclear who stalks whom: but there, nearly twenty years earlier than that, are Cabell and the boy Omar, circling each other high in the lighthouse of Tangier Buzzless Flies, inspecting the mechanism that turns on a pool of mercury and the beam that reaches out for boats and up for planes and is the most powerful in all of Africa.

  I sat open-mouthed at the audacity of this. The detail about the mercury had entranced me—delighted me—when I first read Raymond’s version in Kerr. The light has a rhythm of four flashes in each twenty-second revolution, the boy tells the man in each work, the American’s and Raymond’s: in each, the man asks the boy how far the beam can be seen and the boy tells him, On a clear night, sixty-two kilometres. I’d marvelled at the precision of all this at th
e time: what was there my uncle didn’t know? Now, he seemed to be falling apart in my hands like a dry, stale cake.

  Or in fact in Julian’s hands, for here he came again a few days after, this time with an entire box of books and papers: he thumped it onto my desk. You won’t believe this! he said. Mark Twain! Mark Twain? I asked him. Innocents Abroad, he told me, and held it up. Not much, he said—just the description near the start, remember? They land and they get swarmed by the locals? Don’t tell me, I groaned. He’s used it for near the start of Bisque? Yes!—Julian, surprisingly cheery for all that was happening—page four, he said. When they land at Ibiza Town. Ray’s borrowed just a few phrases, and he uses the word order in some of the sentences as well, you can see that. He sort of writes over the top of them, he takes over their writing voice. It’s there if you listen.

  Listen I did, and there indeed it was: and back Julian came, over the next few days and weeks, with more of this sort of thing and then more of it after that. Gradually, as I read and reread, I began to see a pattern in what had been done: to see how, in effect, my uncle built his fiction. Not all of it, certainly. The majority of what he wrote was his own: but the more I reread him, the more I began to wonder what that might actually mean, not just to him but to anyone and everyone who wrote and read literature. Those opening pages of Flatland—were they his or were they hers, that long-lost unknown dead woman’s? If so, who owned them, and, if not hers, at what point did they become his?—since (of this, I became more and more clear as I thought it through) there was no doubt that what he used did become his, wherever he took it from. Or were they none of the above: were they just—writing?

  Gradually, an answer of sorts: the beginnings of an answer. As you can see, it’s something that still occupies my mind. There was a moment when, reading something from Paul Bowles—for, yes, of course, he was in the mix, too, of course he was, along with obvious others, how could he not be?—reading one of his essays, in fact, not the fiction—I heard the Master. I’d become familiar with the experience of reading passages side by side and seeing where the rhythm of the earlier writer—not words, not sentences, but the rhythm—the voice, if you like—seeing where this melted into the later writer’s and became his own. Here was the next step, the next stage: of course it was, of course—

  I forget exactly the words and sentences involved. Instead, I suddenly heard Raymond’s voice in the other man’s writing, almost as if he was in the room with me. I jerked up straight and looked around. Lord, what was this, what was this? I looked down and read more, and the old man fell silent: but not for long, because before the bottom of the page or the top of the next he started up again.

  I stared at the words on the page, I remember. How did this happen, how did it work?

  I asked myself this again a few days later when I found him writing someone else’s fiction, a woman’s, I think: work that, on the face of it, was nothing like his in any way—but there he was all the same, barking away on her page. And I asked the question once more when I read someone yet different again and heard Paul Bowles in him—or was it back to Hopkins and his first novel, the one set in Peru, with its almost selfless, pared, almost helpless prose, the nearest I’ve ever seen to somebody giving up and not writing at all? The Attempt, its title—writing as trying, in effect, writing as a long shot, writing as almost nothing at all: a feint, a gesture. And isn’t that how Raymond wrote at his best, with no ego or as little as was possible, just the words on the page, taking care of themselves, living in their own magnificent, independent word-world? Isn’t it?

  Just how much of other people’s writing had he written during his life, and how much had they written of his? Is this how it worked, had I found the trick of it at last? Was this the only world there was, and was that why he’d called his novel Flatland?—not for the desert world of Algeria, but for the flat, flat word-world of the page, the only world that really is real?

  That’s how it is. I’m sure. The words come first. It doesn’t matter where they come from, they’re the first thing that happens. In the beginning—

  Then, slowly, facts forming from words, the truth coming from the language and—not soon, not soon—becoming the hard reality we all know and agree on, the sure-footed fiction of our lives. Yes, yes, of course that happened, of course that’s how things were done: what could be more natural?

  It’s there in writing!

  Julian has told me it’s nothing new, this understanding that slowly came to me, that it’s been thought before and also that he doesn’t believe a word of it. Maybe so: but you’ve seen how much I loathe the present-moment sequences in this very book—this one, the one in your hands—those sequences which try to account for the bewildering events happening in the ever-moving now, the chaos of the living moment, the tyranny of the present, its disconnections and discontinuities, its yearning for the missing hand of the author and its all-too-manifest lack of it. What, oh what, is going to happen next? Where are we being taken?

  Then, on the other hand, how much have I enjoyed sections like this, coalescing as they have, forming themselves, becoming truer and truer as the past presents its increasingly confident language to me. Oh, how the Master must have fallen on the young woman’s account of her hundred-year-old Algeria when he did, how utterly crystalline must it have seemed to him in its prose, how much hardened by time, how old and lived, how irrevocably true and real, how ripe and ready for him to find a way of gathering up all the emotion and grief and confusion he’d brought with him out of Africa. No wonder he seized it as he did, full of yearning as he was to begin to tell the truth of his time there, and the truth, untrue as it might be, of his time with the youth called Anir: if Anir was indeed a youth or something else, and if that was his name and if in fact he had a name, and if, indeed, he’d ever existed in the first place, which he quite possibly did: though, on the other hand, of course, he might not have done so and it might be the case that there was no one back there, no personal angel of his in existence at all—

  It’s plagiarism all the same, Julian said, when he’d heard me out. Oh, I know he’s a genius, I know Ray was a—yes yes of course, I said back to him. A genius. No doubt about that: and I meant it, I meant it as I hope you can see.

  An uncomfortable pause. Well, then, if he’s a genius what do we do with all this stuff? Julian, poking a foot at the boxes, as they’d become by now, on the floor of his studio. It’s radioactive, isn’t it? I presume we don’t mention it to the others? Oh, Lord God, no, I told him. Imagine if Robert Semple got hold of this—it’d be in the papers in—yes, Julian said, yes, yes it would, it’d be all over the media, we’d be sunk, Ray’d be sunk if Robert got wind of this stuff, I mean, Nobel Prize-winner and all—

  Another pause.

  We could put an embargo on it, I said. The library, I mean. Ten years, I think that’s the maximum—no one allowed access to these things for ten years? No, he said, I think it’s as long as we want, isn’t it? A library embargo? However long the trustees want? I’ll have to look into it. Then there’s the legal statute of limitations, I said. Does that apply? Only to published material, Julian said. It covers publication.

  The thing is, he said, however long we embargo this stuff, the embargo’ll end sometime, and then—

  Another pause. We knew, I’m sure, both of us, what was coming next. I can’t believe this, Julian murmured. I can’t believe we’re thinking this. Another long silence, and then he said, they’re pretty much untraceable, I suppose. I haven’t made a record of any of this, he said.

  Unforgivable, I know, I know—indefensible, even: but understandable enough, surely, given the circumstances. And for the better—well, that’s what we told each other as—I’ll admit it, I’ll admit it—we burned these things. Julian and I burned the books and the notes and the incriminating little scraps of paper, everything the Master’s borrowings had come from over thirty or forty years. We gave him back his authenticity. The two of us there in Julian’s overwhelmed backyard one
chilly midwinter afternoon, guiltily popping the poor little rag of a book into his incinerator—the dead woman’s dead little book, the first of our sacrifices—and unable, each of us, to meet the other’s eye as we did so. A book, for goodness’ sake, dropped into the face-burning, mote-dancing exhalation of the incinerator. I’ll declare it lost, Julian said, not happily. When I get back on Monday morning I’ll declare it lost.

  And then he said, I wonder how many others there are? Authors mute inglorious—you remember the line? Writers who didn’t get the Nobel Prize? All those forgotten books, millions and millions of them? Billions? All that writing, d’you ever think of that? All those words, just lying there, no one’s reading them anymore, they might as well not’ve been written? All that thought, all that imagining, all that writing, just—gone?

  Yes, I told him. I do think of that, I do. I can’t believe I’m burning books, I remember thinking. I’m sure this is a oncer, I said to him, the dry heat on my face. I mean, what we’re burning now. I’m sure there’s nothing else—

  I almost said I’m sure there’s nothing else he plagiarised, but I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t because I’ve thought a lot about this since and it’s become clearer to me that a great artist doesn’t do that, it’s become clearer that what a great artist does is something subtler and more nearly inevitable and necessary—a duty, almost, to the greater oceanic processes of literature. This is what I’ve come, over the years since, to think, and I believe it’s what Raymond believed, too. I am convinced of that.

  I didn’t say plagiarism back then by Julian’s incinerator, and stopped short and held my counsel. I smelled instead the curious, distinctive smell from when I first met my uncle that autumn morning forty years ago and more, the smell of smoke outdoors as it mingles with mist on the presenting edge of rain. And, all the while, the flames, the flames crackling at our unworthy, sinful, book-burners’ feet.