Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

by Helen Dewitt

  I read rapidly:

  ‘“I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving in a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn.”’

  ‘Straight out of the Enquiry,’ says X. ‘If Hume had had a Pomeau he’d have been cheering. Il était mort en athéiste non en théiste.’

  ‘The bulk of my estate,’ say I, ‘I leave to my beloved son, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.’

  ‘Boswell writes Hume very well, doesn’t he,’ says X. X puts an arm round my shoulders and looks down at the book in my lap.

  We read together:

  ‘“Well,” said I, “Mr Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity.” “No, no,” said he. “But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new.” In this style of good humour and levity did I conduct the conversation. Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections through the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith.’

  ‘Oh ho!’ says X. ‘La mort de l’auteur c’est la naissance du lecteur. Happy birthday Bozzy.’

  ‘The author really is like God,’ say I. ‘Dead? Not dead? Opinion is divided. The Barthesian texts, meanwhile, are like the witty, iconoclastic works of Hume and Voltaire. You remember, in “La mort de l’auteur”? Refusing to assign a single sense to a text releases activity which is “contre-théologique, proprement révolutionnaire, car refuser d’arrêter le sens, c’est finalement refuser Dieu et ses hypostases, la raison, la science, la loi.” Boswell would have gone to the deathbed of Barthes.’

  ‘The author can’t die yet,’ says X. ‘S’il n’y avait pas d’auteur, il aurait fallu l’inventer — capitalism requires the existence of someone to pick up the cheque.’

  ‘I know what Barthes would have said to Boswell,’ say I. ‘On n’a donc rien écrit?’ I am proud of the ‘on’, and wait for applause. Then it occurs to me that this is cheating. I have wilfully revived the author, or rather ‘l’auteur’, constructing ‘characteristic’ remarks to be uttered by the collector of royalties in extremis. I could have said this at dinner. X will have something to say about it.

  ‘Oh, you!’ says X. X kisses me. ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ says X.

  There is a text which I could insert at this point which begins ‘I’m not in the mood,’ but the reader who has had occasion to consult it will know that, though open to many variations, there is one form which is, as Voltaire would say, potius optandum quam probandum, and that is the one which runs ‘I’m not in the mood,’ ‘Oh, OK.’ My own experience has shown this to be a text particularly susceptible to discursive and recursive operations, one which circles back on itself through several iterations and recapitulations, one which ends pretty invariably in ‘Oh, OK,’ but only about half the time as the contribution of my co-scripteur. I think for a moment about giving the thing a whirl, but finally settle on the curtailed version which leaves out ‘I’m not in the mood’ and goes directly to ‘Oh, OK.’ X and I go upstairs.

  X and I sit on the bed. The subtext is suddenly too much with us, and it is clear it will soon push us into what is not spoken. X begins to move oddly: a hand traverses space but makes no gesture. X’s movements, my movements must become the thing meant; X cannot approach this. The words have slipped away, the distance between signifier and signified is no doubt not very great — but the threshold of silence is daunting. X begins to talk about construction and deconstruction of gender, and succeeds again in ‘placing a hand on my knee.’ ‘What is woman?’ says X. ‘Is this the mark of woman?’ X puts a hand on my breast, cannily pursuing sous-texte sous prétexte.

  X talks about clothes, which gesture at the difference they conceal. Or don’t. X begins to undress. Each signifier, says X, signifies a further signifier. Each difference is meant and meaning. Difference gestures beyond itself. I begin to undress. X is talking very fast while unfastening all fastenings: buttons fly from holes, zips unzip, clothes fly from skin to the floor. My clothes fall to my feet. And X, who has been taking this road very fast, goes into a skid on the slippage of meaning and smashes up against silence. It is as if we have accidentally removed, with our clothes, all signs of desire and desirability, as if we have sloughed off tits cunt prick with bra skirt trousers and find ourselves, stripped of language, indifferent featherless bipeds, trying to put it all back — but we are to each other as pale and lumpish and uninteresting as Cranach’s Adam and Eve. We catch each other’s eyes, after all we always understand each other.

  ‘Blue, not-blue,’ say I.

  X shows a flicker of interest at the Edenic language: his cock lifts its head.

  ‘Blue and not-blue,’ he replies. He thinks a moment. He holds up crossed fingers. ‘Bleu,’ he says grinning. He pulls me over onto the bed, and starts kissing my breast.

  We plunge at last into silence. No. Silenced, beneath X, my text goes sous-texte and presents the question: is it then the physical which makes sense of my story? Is it here that you find the array of possible meanings contracted — does this compel you to take things a certain way? Must X be a man? It seems inescapable to me.

  It is as if I am lying on the bottom of a lake looking up through clear water at the sky: I see ripples across the surface at the meeting of water and air. I wonder how this looks to X. X sees, perhaps, a single body of water across which Hume, the scratch wig, that pleasing notion immortality skim and skitter like watermen. I close my eyes. I see a vast slate-coloured ocean with an immense and wrinkled skin.

  I think of one of the fragments d’un discours amoureux. ‘This cannot go on.’ I think: ‘This could go on all night.’

  I open my eyes. X rolls over on his back. He begins to sing softly:

  ‘Well it ainno use ta sit an wonder hwhy babe, iffen you dont know by now. An it ainno use ta sit an wonder hwhy babe. It’ll never do somehow.’ X likes songs that hug the vernacular. He dwells on whatever is most untranslatable to pen and paper, whatever written language can only hint at, what written language must be distorted even to acknowledge: hoarseness — nasality — drawing out of syllables — chromatic scales through the diphthongs. X does not, of course, admit that anything could be irredeemably unwritable, his position is that all these marks of the spoken are repeatable and therefore written. But X cannot sing and state his position at the same time. Singing, X indulges in illicit joys — he will restate the position after the song.

  ‘Well it ainno use in turnin on yer light babe. The light i — never knowed. An it ainno use in turnin on yer light babe. i’m on the dark side of the road.’ X catches my eye. ‘Well i wish there was sumpn you would — do er say — Ta tryen make me change m’minden stay — We never did teuu much talkin anyway — But don think twice its all right.’

  X likes songs that gesture at inarticulacy. He is drawn to the poignancy of a world in which the unspoken is two-thirds of the iceberg. He is drawn to lovers who take things for granted. There are lovers, says the song, who do not include in their writing of la situation amoureuse the texts which play around the theme ‘I’m not in the mood’ — that must pare down discourse quite considerably. I myself am strangely drawn to a form of closure which leaves things
so largely unsaid. X and I face a very long and wearisome collaboration on the end of the affair. Having written so much it seems we must continue: language squeezes an author like an orange. X and I are not in a position to walk away; we can part but not leave. Face to face some things are impossible to say. It’ll never do somehow.

  I think of telling X that we think too much alike. I imagine writing down a song and handing it to X in a note:

  You say either and I say either

  You say neither and I say neither

  Either Either Neither Neither

  Let’s call the whole thing off.

  You say tomato and I say tomato

  You say potato and I say potato

  Tomato Tomato Potato Potato

  Let’s call the whole thing off.

  I am in the common room looking through the paper. x is reading a book in a dark blue cloth binding. I stand by x’s shoulder, the TLS in my hand, and look down at the page. In a frame which consists of the angle of x’s neck and shoulder, x’s right forearm, x’s left knee, I read:

  In the Euclidean space Rn the Cauchy-Bunyakovsky inequality has the form

  it holds for any pair of vectors x = (ξ1 . . . ξn), y= (η1 . . . ηn), or what is the same thing, for any two systems of real numbers ξ1, ξ2 . . . ξn and η1, η2 . . . ηn (this inequality was discovered by Cauchy in 1821).

  The frame is very simple: x’s checked flannel shirt, with an open neck and short sleeve, has a Wittgensteinian innocence. The dark blue trousers are just trousers. The arm is long and bony. I am looking at the score of the music of the spheres. I gaze at this silent material for some time. The harmonies I see represented remain perfectly inaudible to me, but I see from the repose and concentration of x that x can hear them.

  I have mastered subjects and failed to love them. I have looked at the sun and not been blinded; I have dimmed the sun. I will be a lover of the moon.

  I lie on a bed with x. It is covered with a spread of purple chenille. The room is filled with humble objects lent dignity by the light of the moon: an electric kettle which does not switch off automatically; a mug with a picture of Miss Piggy; a box of Brooke PG Tips, a jar of coffee powder; a packet of My Mum’s digestives; a skimpy blue and red striped towel thrown over a chair; a shiny orange anorak.

  On the desk are a pad of graph paper, four or five medium point blue Bic biros, two or three stubby pencils, a calculator. Ranged along the back against the wall are books: Diophantine Inequalities, I read on a spine. Bauer Trees of Sporadic Groups. Amenable Banach Algebras. Singular Perturbation Theory. I suppose that these books map out truth, or at any rate truths. I believe that mathematical truths are eternal, or rather timeless; but it is comforting rather than not to have so many of these truths allied to names and dates. I have not forgotten that the Cauchy-Bunyakovsky inequality was discovered by Cauchy in 1821! x has thrown a few library books on a chair by the door: Volterra Integrodifferential Equations in Banach Spaces and Applications. The Penrose Transform. Classical Fourier Transforms, Automorphic Forms, Shimura Varieties, and L-functions. These names commemorate persons who heard, wrote down snatches of the piece. I am happy for them. At the same time it is sheer accident that one rather than another happened to do so — x sometimes tells me stories of simultaneous discovery. x can’t see why these delight me. Sometimes I ask x ‘Who was Banach?’ ‘What about Shimura?’ ‘Just who was Penrose, anyway?’ just for the pleasure of hearing x’s confessions of ignorance, or professions of knowledge — the answer, when x has one, is always of the form ‘A was someone who discovered that B.’

  X, who had views on everything, would not have stood for it. What was his line? ‘The truth is that counting has proved to pay.’ ‘It can’t be said of the series of natural numbers that it is true, but: that it is usable, and, above all, it is used.’ This sounds familiar — I’m sure I remember X quoting it — but whether pro or con I can’t recall. Certainly mathematics were not to have the privilege of referential semantics, but the ins and outs of the arguments for levelling escape me now. I look at the face of x, calmly intent upon a book: the light must come from somewhere.

  x sometimes has a book propped open against a knee. I look over x’s shoulder at Probability Approximations via the Poisson Clumping Heuristic; my eyes wander restfully across a page of Greek letters and brackets. x holds, sometimes, a small spiral pad, one of the blue Bic biros, from time to time x scrawls a note, pursues a line of thought in strings of symbols which modulate down the page. x’s wrist lies along the edge of the pad. I see the articulation of the joint, thin delicate bones jut out beneath thin pale freckled skin; x’s large knuckles clamp round the pen, bitten fingers press into the palm. How close they look! I am seeing the moon through a telescope. It is not the smooth flat surface you imagine, seeing that disc suspended in the sky; but there is a kind of wonder in seeing the rocky cratered plain which nevertheless disperses light — in seeing how, even at closer range, the line between black and brilliant white is absolute.

  I put my arm around x. x’s forehead is very high and pale, the skin stretched tight over the sleek pure curve of the skull. I lay my forehead against it and close my eyes. I do not strain my ears to pierce the silence; I know that within that bone and blood, a few centimetres away, plays the music of the spheres.

  oxford, 1985

  The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto

  He was a pianist. He was born on the island of Shikoku, where his father had some kind of post in the administration of the prefecture of Tokushima. His mother was from Tokyo. When she married his father she had her piano brought down on the ferry to her new home. He was taught from the age of two by his mother, and from the age of eight by a woman who had studied in Paris with Koslowski until the mid-40s, when she had cut short a promising career to keep house for her widowed father.

  Koslowski had said

  Of all my pupils the one who showed the finest sensibility in the interpretation of Chopin was Mlle Matsumoto. To praise her technique is to say nothing. The simplicity and ease with which she executed even the most difficult passages, the absence of any kind of affectation or showmanship in pieces where it is too common to see talent on display, while the pianist plays the virtuoso, all this gave one some notion of the style of performance favored by the composer himself. We know for example on the authority of de Bertha that Chopin obtained his effects by methods very different from those of today, relying not on brute force but on gradations achieved through an infinite extension of the piano. This was to have the nuances, the expressive shading of the human voice or of that instrument which comes closest to the voice, the violin. His masters were a Paganini, a Bellini, a Catalani. What was remarkable was Mlle Matsumoto’s ability to realize the impossible, to transform a percussive instrument into one which had the fluidity of the voice.

  Her retirement has robbed music of a precious ornament but it is impossible to regret it, for it springs from the very thing which made her playing incomparable — I refer to the complete absence of self . . .

  This was not the opinion of the pupil of Koslowski’s who achieved the greatest renown. He did not hesitate to express his views on the Automaton in the most intemperate language.

  Morhange said later

  All sorts of contemptible things were done during the War and even later, and they did not stop at the door of the Conservatoire. One of these was old Koslowski’s retention of Mlle Matsumoto, undoubtedly to curry favor with the Nazis, while at the same time washing his hands of anyone with any sort of Jewish connection —

  Elle avait du talent, oui, mais elle jouait d’une façon tout à fait machinale, there was a tiresome perfection about her performance —

  Koslowski said later that he had been obliged to cut back on his teaching and that M. Morhange had always shown himself so absolutely indifferent, if not positively hostile, to all suggestions on his own part that he had not supposed it would be
a hardship to the young man to be deprived of them.

  Morhange said that after the War it was of course even more necessary for him to present his actions under the guise of a simple pedagogical decision, one could naturally not admit that anyone had been excluded on account of the Semitic factor, it was therefore necessary to insist on the lack of talent, on aesthetic defects, which by coincidence happened to be found in Jewish persons.

  The virtues of the French style were usually said to be clearness of phrasing, richness of shading, a predominance of the legato element, a strict avoidance of tempo rubato. While it was not true that Morhange had the vices which were the opposite of those virtues, his attack on the keyboard was something very different. The massive shoulders hulked over the keys; fingers like cigars grabbed at chords like bunches of bananas.

  Morhange had extraordinarily long arms and a powerful upper body which he had developed further through prolonged exercise on a set of rings and bars at the local gymnasium. He was known to his fellow students as the Gorilla. One of them said later that one of the strangest sights he had ever seen was that of the Gorilla going through his daily gymnastics: he had a strong, though not particularly attractive, voice with a huge range, and as he went through the various contortions of the ring or the bar he would sing phrases from Alkan’s Funeral March for a Dead Parrot. Oddest of all, he said, was the way no one else in the room took the slightest notice, for it was apparently by now commonplace. Above his head a figure hurtled through the air —

  As-tu déjeuné, Jacquo?

  The figure hurtled back —

  Eh de quoi?

  & back again, on a cascade of notes of inexpressible pathos:

  Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

  As-tu déjeuné?

  As-tu déjeuné?

  As-tu déjeuné?