by Helen Dewitt
I thought: Let’s think of some other simple task. A simple task that can be mastered on a daily basis that will not lead to the transfer of hundreds of books to the floor.
So I took him to Grant & Cutler and I bought a little French picture book and Yaourtu la Tortue and L’Histoire de Babar (as well as a copy of Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne which they happened to have in stock). I taught him a few simple words on a daily basis for a few days and he left the English books alone.
I thought: It worked! It worked!
One day he found some French books on a shelf. I explained five words in Zadig. Soon 20 French books had followed it to the floor. Then he went back to the English books.
I thought: Let’s think of another simple task.
I thought arithmetic could be the simple task. So I taught him to count past 5 and he counted up to 5,557 over a period of three days before collapsing in sobs because he had not reached the end & I said with the genius of desperation that the good thing about infinity is that you know you’ll never run out of numbers. I taught him to add 1 to a number which seemed a simple task & he covered 20 sheets of graph paper with calculations: 1+1=2 2+1=3 3+1=4 until he was carried sobbing to bed. I once read a book in which a boy who studied too much at an early age came down with brain fever and was reduced to imbecility; I have never come across a case of brain fever outside a book, but still I was concerned & would have liked to stop but he sobbed if I tried to stop. So I taught him to add 2 to a number and he covered 20 sheets with 2+2=4 3+2=5.
How old was he asks a reader. I think he was about 3.
He settled down now and as long as he could cover 20 sheets with a particular calculation he did not need to go on to infinity. He did not need to take the books off their shelves. I taught him to multiply single numbers & now on 20 sheets he put times tables for the numbers 1–20. I have no idea how you would make a 3-year-old do this if he did not want to any more than I know how you could stop one that wants to, but when he had done it for a couple of months it was easy to explain variables & functions & increments. So by the time he was 4 he could read English & some French & cover 20 sheets with graphs for x+1, x+2, x+3, x+4; x2 + 1, x2+2 & so on.
About a year ago I snatched a moment to read Iliad 16. I had been typing in Melody Maker 1976 and had reached the point in an interview with John Denver where the singer explained:
You know, Chris … I have a definition of success, and what success is to me is when an individual finds that thing which fulfills himself, when he finds that thing that completes him and when, in doing it, he finds a way to serve his fellow man. When he finds that he is a successful person.
It doesn’t make any difference whether you are a ditch-digger or a librarian or someone who works at the filling station or the President of the United States or whatever, if you’re doing what you want to do and in some way bringing value to the life of others, then you’re a successful human being.
It so happens that in my area, which is entertainment, that success brings with it a lot of other things, but all of those other things, the money, the fame, the conveniences, the ability to travel and see the rest of the world, all of those are just icing on the cake and the cake is the same for everybody.
This was the kind of thing a recent President of the United States (like Denver, a genuinely nice guy) had tended to say, and as there was no point thinking about his particular way of bringing value to the life of others I thought it was a good time to take a break and read Iliad 16. I had been typing for five or six hours so it was a good day so far.
Iliad 16 is the book where Patroclus is killed—he goes into battle wearing Achilles’ armour to encourage the Greeks & unnerve the Trojans, since Achilles still refuses to fight. He wins for a while but he goes too far; Apollo makes him dizzy & takes away his armour, & he is wounded by Euphorbus, & then Hector kills him. I had remembered suddenly that Homer addresses Patroclus in the vocative & that it is strangely moving. Unfortunately I could not find Iliad 13–24, I could only find 1–12, so I decided to read Hector & Andromache in Book 6 instead.
As soon as I sat down L came up to look at the book. He stared & stared. He said he couldn’t read any of it. I said that was because it was in Greek & had a different alphabet & he said he wanted to learn it.
The last thing I wanted was to be teaching a 4-year-old Greek.
And now the Alien spoke, & its voice was mild as milk. It said: He’s just a baby. They spend so much time in school—wouldn’t he be better off playing?
I said: Let him wait to be bored in a class like everyone else.
The Alien said: It will only confuse him! It will destroy his confidence! It would be kinder to say no!
The Alien has a long eel-like neck and little reptilian eyes. I put both hands around its throat & I said: Rot in hell.
It coughed & said sweetly: So sorry to intrude. Admirable maternity! All time devoted to infant amelioration. Selflessly devoted!
I said: Shut up.
It said: Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
I said: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
—& I wrote out a little table for him:
& I said: There’s the alphabet.
He looked at the table and he looked at the page.
I said: It’s perfectly simple. As you can see a lot of the letters are the same as the ones you already know.
He looked at the table and he looked at the page and he looked at the table.
The Alien said: He is only four
Mr. Ma said: Coupez la difficulté en quatre
I said patiently:
I said patiently a lot of things which it would try my patience even more to repeat. I hope I am as ready as the next person to suffer for the good of others, and if I knew for a fact that even 10 people this year, next year or a thousand years from now would like to know how one teaches a 4-year-old Greek I hope I would have the decency to explain it. As I don’t know this I think I will set this aside for the moment. L seems to be transferring Odyssey 5 word by word to pink file cards.
Odyssey 6.
Odyssey 7.
Emma was as good as her word and I was as good as my word.
In the summer of 1985 I began working as a secretary in a small publishing house in London which specialised in dictionaries and non-academic works of scholarship. It had an English dictionary that had first come out in 1812 and been through nine or ten editions and sold well, and a range of technical dictionaries for native speakers of various other languages that sold moderately well, and a superb dictionary of literary Bengali which was full of illustrative material and had no rival and hardly sold at all. It had a two-volume history of sugar, and a three-volume survey of London doorknockers (supplement in preparation), and various other books which gradually built up a following by word of mouth. I did not want to be a secretary & I did not particularly want to get into publishing, but I did not want to go back to the States.
Emma was really the next worst thing to the States. She loved America in the way that the Victorians loved Scotland, French Impressionists Japan. She loved an old Esso station on a state highway in a pool of light with a round red Coca-Cola sign swinging in the wind, and a man on a horse thinking vernacular thoughts among scenes of spectacular natural beauty, and a man in a fast car on a freeway in LA. She loved all the books I’d been made to read at school, and she loved the books we didn’t read in school because they might be offensive to born-again Baptists. I did not know what to say.
In my mind I saw a timid little mezzotint in which a lot of cross-hatching and a little hand tinting depicted some place where Europeans first going had been drunk on colour & writing a book had insisted on the Grand Canyon or Table Mountain or the South Seas being shown in a colour engraving, so that what was brilliant cobalt was represented by blue so pale it was almost white, vermilion crimson and scarlet by pink so pale almost white and there would be also a green so pale perhaps yellow so pale perhaps pale pale mauve, so that the reader might taste in a glass of water a real drop
of whisky. I thought of Emma’s favourites with a scornful laugh, and yet this was stupid, you could just as well think of some other image that would not be contemptible—the black-and-white film does not show the world we see around us in its colours but it is not contemptible. The fact is that though things were better than when I had been reading things people had thrown their lives away on seventy years before at any moment a passion would fling itself on the first idea standing by and gallop off ventre à terre—how quietly and calmly some people argue.
It made me nervous to have these rages and sardonic laughs just waiting to gallop off ventre à terre, it was easier not to say anything or to say something quiet and banal. And yet if someone is very clever and charming you would rather not say something banal, you resolve instead to say something while remaining perfectly calm & in control—
I said that it seemed very quaint that in England books were in English & in France they were in French and that in 2,000 years this would seem as quaint as Munchkinland & the Emerald City, in the meantime it was strange that people from all over the world would go to one place to breed a nation of English writers & another to breed writers of Spanish, it was depressing in a literature to see all the languages fading into English which in America was the language of forgetfulness. I argued that this was false to what was there in a way that a European language could not be false to a European country, just as it was one thing to film Kansas in black & white but for the Land of Oz you had to have Technicolor, & what’s more (I seemed to be covering ground more impetuously than I had planned but it was too late to stop) it was preposterous that people who were by and large the most interesting the most heroic the most villainous the newest immigrants could appear in the literature of the country only as character actors speaking bad English or italics & by & large both they & their descendants’ ignorance of their language & customs could not be represented at all in the new language, which had forgotten that there was anything to forget.
Emma said: You mean you think they should not be just in English.
Exactly, I said. Once you think of it you wonder why you never thought of it before.
Well, said Emma, they do say desktop publishing is the way of the future—
Would you like me to type a 100-word letter in a minute? I said, for there was work to be done. A 50-word letter in 30 seconds? A 5-word letter in 3?
I hope you’re not too bored, said Emma.
I said: Bored!
I know it’s not very interesting, said Emma.
I would have liked to say But it’s absolutely enthralling. I said sensibly: The main thing is it’s giving me a chance to decide what I want to do.
This was exactly the kind of banal, boring remark I would rather not have made in the presence of someone clever and charming, but it seemed to me that Emma looked rather relieved. I said: It’s just what I was looking for. It’s absolutely fine.
The job was absolutely fine, Emma was clever and charming and I was in London. I tried to follow the example of Rilke but it was not so easy. It was not just a question of being overwhelmed by a body of work: Rilke was overwhelmed by Cézanne, but Cézanne could not have used a secretary, nor paid one. I did not like the idea of working for Rodin in order to stare overwhelmed at Cézanne; it seems as though if you turn up on someone’s doorstep you should at least be overwhelmed by his work.
Sometimes I rode the Circle Line reading a book on organic chemistry and sometimes I read Leave It to Psmith for the 20th or 21st time and sometimes I watched Jeremy Brett’s marvellous grotesque Sherlock Holmes or of course Seven Samurai. I sometimes went out for Tennessee Fried Chicken.
Day followed day. A year went by.
Odyssey 8.
Odyssey 9 & just asking every word as he goes along. He hasn’t even been writing them on file cards. It is lovely that he is enjoying the story.
I came into the office one day in June 1986 to find everyone in a state of nervous excitement. An acquisitor had snapped up the firm and had assured everyone that it would remain an autonomous imprint. This sinister announcement was taken to mean that everyone would soon be redundant.
The overtaker was a big American company, and it published many writers admired in the office. There was to be a big party to celebrate the merger in a few weeks’ time.
Emma had got me my job and my work permit & she now got me an invitation to this party.
Now not only did the new firm publish many American writers admired in the office but it also published Liberace, and one of the reasons getting me invited was a favour, one of the reasons people were excited, one of the reasons I did not want to go, was that there was a rumour that Liberace would be there. By Liberace I don’t, of course, mean the popular pianist who coined the phrase ‘cried all the way to the bank’, loved no woman but his mother and died of AIDS in the mid-80s. I mean the acclaimed British writer and traveller whose technique rivalled that of the much-loved musician.
Liberace the musician had a terrible facility and a terrible sincerity; what he played he played with feeling, whether it was Roll Out the Barrel or I’ll Be Seeing You, and in sad pieces a tear would well up over the mascara and drop to the silver diamanté of a velvet coat while the rings on his hands flashed up and down the keyboard, and in a thousand mirrors he would see the tear, the mascara, the rings, he would see himself seeing the mascara, the rings, the tear. All this could be found too in Liberace (the writer): the slick, buttery arpeggios, the self-regarding virtuosity as the clever ring-laden hands sparkled over the keys, the professional sincerity which found expressiveness for the cynical & the sentimental, for the pornographic, even for alienation & affectlessness. And yet he was not really exactly like the pianist, because though he did genuinely have the emotional facility of the musician he had only the air of technical facility, there being to even a buttery arpeggio not only the matter of running hands up and down the keys but
L wants to know what βíηφιν means. I say he knows perfectly well what it means & he says he doesn’t.
At first (because I was explaining that βíηφιν was the instrumental form of βíη, meaning by force or violence) I thought that the writer was like a person who typing puts a hand down one key to the right or left of where it should be, so that an intelligible sentence nrvomrd duffrnly uninyrllihlnlr ot nrstly do, snf yhr gsdyrt you yypr yhr eotdr iy hryd (ψηλαφων means, can I see the line? it means feeling or groping about), and in my mind I saw the hands of Liberace moving rapidly & confidently up and down the keyboard striking keys now black now white. Now I think (as far as a person can be said to think who is taking the place of a talking dictionary) that even this is not quite right, because though Liberace did strew his work with mistakes they were not the kind (πετσσας means spreading, it is the aorist participle of πετννυμι) that you could overlook in that way or rather (you know perfectly well what φαινον means No I don’t It means weave and what form is it here 1st person singular imperfect OK) it is not that he overlooked them (ρσενες means males) but that he looked straight at them with complacency (just a minute). Breathless with adoration would Liberace litter his work with gaping arguments and images knocked awry, stand back, fold arms, Ed Wood abeam at toppling tombstones and rumpled grass (just a minute). Did he notice or not care? He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, & being unable to combine the two had settled for the one he could be sure of (δασμαλλοι: thick-fleeced; οδνεφíς: dark; λíγοισι: withies; withy: a piece of wicker-work; πλωρ: You know what πλωρ means No I don’t Yes you do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t It means monster That’s what I thought it meant—No wonder I am sticking pins in the father of this child). Here was a man who’d learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.
Od. 10.
Met. 1.
I Sam. I? [Have not read in years.]
I Sam. II-V
? [Hell.]
It is strange to think that Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre was first published in 1911, a year before Roemer brought out Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik. Schoenberg, who had a wife and two children, was scraping a living as a teacher of music & portrait painter. I think Roemer held a position at the University of Leipzig. Roemer’s colleagues might have pointed out the fallacy; I might have spoken fluent German & lost half an hour on it; I might have lost 50 hours a week later—and Ludoviticus would not now be setting Mr. Ma at defiance by mastering 500 simple tasks on a daily basis. The atoms which now direct the application of a pink Schwan Stabilo highlighter to Odyssey 10 would be going about some other business, as would I, & the world, for all I know, would be short an Einstein. And yet tactful colleagues, bad German and terrible timing might have conspired to catapult me from an academic career without effect upon Schwan Stabilo & Odyssey 10: Schoenberg, distracted by financial difficulties, might have written a stupid book. He might have written a clever book; I might have gone to buy a dress on the day of the party.
On the day of the party I walked down to Covent Garden at lunchtime to buy a dress, and on my way to Boules I thought I would just stop off for a moment at Books etc. I happened to go into the music section, and I happened to pick up Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony.
My father used to say, when things went wrong, that man is the cat’s paw of fate. I think this is the kind of thing he had in mind.
No sooner had I taken the book from the shelf than I had to buy it; no sooner bought than began to read.
Schoenberg was putting forward arguments for the development of music using a much more liberal notion of consonance, and then possibly eventually of a music using a much wider range of notes (so that you could have, say, an extra four notes between C and C sharp). He said:
