Opening the pages, I turned to the editorial, another in my series of examinations of the present malaise affecting poetry.
However, in place of the usual half-dozen paragraphs of 10-point type I was astounded to see a single line of 24-point, announcing in italic caps:
A CALL TO GREATNESS!
I broke off, hurriedly peered at the cover to make sure Graphis had sent me advance copies of the right journal, then raced rapidly through the pages.
The first poem I recognized immediately. I had rejected it only two days earlier. The next three I had also seen and rejected, then came a series that were new to me, all signed ‘Aurora Day’ and taking the place of the poems I had passed in page proof.
The entire issue had been pirated! Not a single one of the original, poems remained, and a completely new make-up had been substituted. I ran back into the lounge and opened a dozen copies. They were all the same.
Ten minutes later I had carried the three cartons out to the incinerator, tipped them in and soaked the copies with petrol, then tossed a match into the centre of the pyre. Simultaneously, a few miles away Graphis Press were doing the same to the remainder of the 5,000 imprint. How the misprinting had occurred they could not explain. They searched out the copy, all on Aurora’s typed notepaper, but with editorial markings in my handwriting! My own copy had disappeared, and they soon denied they had ever received it.
As the heavy flames beat into the hot sunlight I thought that through the thick brown smoke I could see a sudden burst of activity coming from my neighbour’s house. Windows were opening under the awnings, and the hunchbacked figure of the chauffeur was scurrying along the terrace.
Standing on the roof, her white gown billowing around her like an enormous silver fleece, Aurora Day looked down at me.
Whether it was the large quantity of Martini I had drunk that morning, the recent boil on my cheek or the fumes from the burning petrol, I’m not sure, but as I walked back into the house I felt unsteady, and sat down hazily on the top step, closing my eyes as my brain swam.
After a few seconds my head cleared again. Leaning on my knees, I focused my eyes on the blue glass step between my feet. Cut into the surface in neat letters was:
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Still too weak to more than register an automatic protest against this act of vandalism, I pulled myself to my feet, taking the door key out of my dressing-gown pocket. As I inserted it into the lock I noticed, inscribed into the brass seat of the lock:
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards.
There were other inscriptions all over the black leather panelling of the door, cut in the same neat script, the lines crossing each other at random, like filigree decoration around a baroque salver.
Closing the door behind me, I walked into the lounge. The walls seemed darker than usual, and I realized that their entire surface was covered with row upon row of finely cut lettering, endless fragments of verse stretching from ceiling to floor.
I picked my glass off the table and raised it to my lips. The blue crystal bowl had been embossed with the same copperplate lines, spiralling down the stem to the base.
Drink to me only with thine eyes.
Everything in the lounge was covered with the same fragments – the desk, lampstands and shades, the bookshelves, the keys of the baby grand, even the lip of the record on the stereogram turntable.
Dazed, I raised my hand to my face, in horror saw that the surface of my skin was interlaced by a thousand tattoos, writhing and coiling across my hands and arms like insane serpents.
Dropping my glass, I ran to the mirror over the fireplace, saw my face covered with the same tattooing, a living manuscript in which the ink still ran, the letters running and changing as if the pen still cast them.
You spotted snakes with double tongue . . .
Weaving spiders, come not here.
I flung myself away from the mirror, ran out on to the terrace, my feet slipping in the piles of coloured streamers which the evening wind was carrying over the balcony, then vaulted down over the railing on to the ground below.
I covered the distance between our villas in a few moments, raced up the darkening drive to the black front door. It opened as my hand reached for the bell, and I plunged through into the crystal hallway.
Aurora Day was waiting for me on the chaise longue by the fountain pool, feeding the ancient white fish that clustered around her. As I stepped across to her she smiled quietly to the fish and whispered to them.
‘Aurora!’ I cried. ‘For heaven’s sake, I give in! Take anything you want, anything, but leave me alone!’
For a moment she ignored me and went on quietly feeding the fish. Suddenly a thought of terror plunged through my mind. Were the huge white carp now nestling at her fingers once her lovers?
We sat together in the luminescent dusk, the long shadows playing across the purple landscape of Dali’s ‘Persistence of Memory’ on the wall behind Aurora, the fish circling slowly in the fountain beside us.
She had stated her terms: nothing less than absolute control of the magazine, freedom to impose her own policy, to make her own selection of material. Nothing would be printed without her first approval.
‘Don’t worry,’ she had said lightly. ‘Our agreement will apply to one issue only.’ Amazingly she showed no wish to publish her own poems – the pirated issue had merely been a device to bring me finally to surrender.
‘Do you think one issue will be enough?’ I asked, wondering what really she would do with it now.
She looked up at me idly, tracing patterns across the surface of the pool with a green-tipped finger. ‘It all depends on you and your companions. When will you come to your senses and become poets again?’
I watched the patterns in the pool. In some miraculous way they remained etched across the surface.
In the hours, like millennia, we had sat together I seemed to have told her everything about myself, yet learned almost nothing about Aurora. One thing alone was clear – her obsession with the art of poetry. In some curious way she regarded herself as personally responsible for the present ebb at which it found itself, but her only remedy seemed completely retrogressive.
‘You must come and meet my friends at the colony,’ I suggested.
‘I will,’ she said. ‘I hope I can help them. They all have so much to learn.’
I smiled at this. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find them very sympathetic to that view. Most of them regard themselves as virtuosos. For them the quest for the perfect sonnet ended years ago. The computer produces nothing else.’
Aurora scoffed. ‘They’re not poets but mere mechanics. Look at these collections of so-called verse. Three poems and sixty pages of operating instructions. Nothing but volts and amps. When I say they have everything to learn, I mean about their own hearts, not about technique; about the soul of music, not its form.’
She paused to stretch herself, her beautiful body uncoiling like a python. She leaned forward and began to speak earnestly. ‘Poetry is dead today, not because of these machines, but because poets no longer search for their true inspiration.’
‘Which is?’
Aurora shook her head sadly. ‘You call yourself a poet and yet you ask me that?’
She stared down at the pool, her eyes listless. For a moment an expression of profound sadness passed across her face, and I realized that she felt some deep sense of guilt or inadequacy, that some failing of her own was responsible for the present malaise. Perhaps it was this sense of inadequacy that made me unafraid of her.
‘Have you ever heard the legend of Melander and Corydon?’ she asked.
‘Vaguely,’ I said, casting my mind back. ‘Melander was the Muse of Poetry, if I remember. Wasn’t Corydon a court poet who killed himself for her?’
‘Good,’ Aurora told me. ‘You’re not completely illiterate, after all. Yes, the court poets found that they had lost their inspiration and that the
ir ladies were spurning them for the company of the knights, so they sought out Melander, the Muse, who told them that she had brought this spell upon them because they had taken their art for granted, forgetting the source from whom it really came. They protested that of course they thought of her always – a blatant lie – but she refused to believe them and told them that they would not recover their power until one of them sacrificed his life for her. Naturally none of them would do so, with the exception of a young poet of great talent called Corydon, who loved the goddess and was the only one to retain his power. For the other poets’ sake he killed himself . . .’
‘. . . to Melander’s undying sorrow,’ I concluded. ‘She was not expecting him to give his life for his art. A beautiful myth,’ I agreed. ‘But I’m afraid you’ll find no Corydons here.’
‘I wonder,’ Aurora said softly. She stirred the water in the pool, the broken surface throwing a ripple of light across the walls and ceiling. Then I saw that a long series of friezes ran around the lounge depicting the very legend Aurora had been describing. The first panel, on my extreme left, showed the poets and troubadours gathered around the goddess, a tall white-gowned figure whose face bore a remarkable resemblance to Aurora’s. As I traced the story through the successive panels the likeness became even more marked, and I assumed that she had sat as Melander for the artist. Had she, in some way, identified herself with the goddess in the myth? In which case, who was her Corydon? – perhaps the artist himself. I searched the panels for the suicidal poet, a slim blond-maned youth whose face, although slightly familiar, I could not identify. However, behind the principal figures in all the scenes I certainly recognized another, her faun-faced chauffeur, here with ass’s legs and wild woodwind, representing none other than the attendant Pan.
I had almost detected another likeness among the figures in the friezes when Aurora noticed me searching the panels. She stopped stirring the pool. As the ripples subsided the panels sank again into darkness. For a few seconds Aurora stared at me as if she had forgotten who I was. She appeared to have become tired and withdrawn, as if recapitulating the myth had evoked private memories of pain and fatigue. Simultaneously the hallway and glass-enclosed portico seemed to grow dark and sombre, reflecting her own darkening mood, so dominant was her presence that the air itself paled as she did. Again I felt that her world, into which I had stepped, was completely compounded of illusion.
She was asleep. Around her the room was almost in darkness. The pool lights had faded, the crystal columns that had shone around us were dull and extinguished, like trunks of opaque glass. The only light came from the flower-like jewel between her sleeping breasts.
I stood up and walked softly across to her, looked down at her strange face, its skin smooth and grey, like some pharaonic bride in a basalt dream. Then, beside me at the door I noticed the hunched figure of the chauffeur. His peaked cap hid his face, but the two watchful eyes were fixed on me like small coals.
As we left, hundreds of sleeping sand-rays were dotted about the moonlit floor of the desert. We stepped between them and moved away silently in the Cadillac.
When I reached the villa I went straight into the study, ready to start work on assembling the next issue. During the return ride I had quickly decided on the principal cue-themes and key-images which I would play into the VT sets. All programmed for maximum repetition, within twenty-four hours I would have a folio of moon-sick, muse-mad dithyrambs which would stagger Aurora Day by their heartfelt simplicity and inspiration.
As I entered the study my shoe caught on something sharp. I bent down in the darkness, and found a torn strip of computer circuitry embedded in the white leather flooring.
When I switched on the light I saw that someone had smashed the three VT sets, pounding them to a twisted pulp in a savage excess of violence.
Mine had not been the only targets. Next morning, as I sat at my desk contemplating the three wrecked computers, the telephone rang with news of similar outrages all the way down the Stars. Tony Sapphire’s 50-watt IBM had been hammered to pieces, and Raymond Mayo’s four new Philco Versomatics had been smashed beyond hope of repair. As far as I could gather, not a single VT set had been left untouched. The previous evening, between the hours of six and midnight, someone had moved rapidly down the Stars, slipped into the studios and apartments and singlemindedly wrecked every VT set.
I had a good idea who. As I climbed out of the Cadillac on my return from Aurora I had noticed two heavy wrenches on the seat beside the chauffeur. However, I decided not to call the police and prefer charges. For one thing, the problem of filling Wave IX now looked almost insoluble. When I telephoned Graphis Press I found, more or less as expected, that all Aurora’s copy had been mysteriously mislaid.
The problem remained – what would I put in the issue? I couldn’t afford to miss an edition or my subscribers would fade away like ghosts.
I telephoned Aurora and pointed this out.
‘We should go to press again within a week, otherwise our contract expires and I’ll never get another. And reimbursing a year’s advance subscriptions would bankrupt me. We’ve simply got to find some copy. As the new managing editor have you any suggestions?’
Aurora chuckled. ‘I suppose you’re thinking that I might mysteriously reassemble all those smashed machines?’
‘It’s an idea,’ I agreed, waving at Tony Sapphire who had just called in. ‘Otherwise I’m afraid we’re never going to get any copy.’
‘I can’t understand you,’ Aurora replied: ‘Surely there’s one very simple method.’
‘Is there? What’s that?’
‘Write some yourself!’
Before I could protest she burst into a peal of high laughter. ‘I gather there are some twenty-three able-bodied versifiers and so-called poets in Vermilion Sands’ – this was exactly the number of places broken into the previous evening – ‘well, let’s see some of them versify.’
‘Aurora!’ I snapped. ‘You can’t be serious. Listen, for heaven’s sake, this is no joking –’
But she had put the phone down. I turned to Tony Sapphire, then sat back limply and contemplated an intact tape spool I had recovered from one of the sets. ‘It looks as if I’ve had it. Did you hear that – “Write some yourself”?’
‘She must be insane,’ Tony agreed.
‘It’s all part of this tragic obsession of hers,’ I explained, lowering my voice. ‘She genuinely believes she’s the Muse of Poetry, returned to earth to re-inspire the dying race of poets. Last night she referred to the myth of Melander and Corydon. I think she’s seriously waiting for some young poet to give his life for her.’
Tony nodded. ‘She’s missing the point, though. Fifty years ago a few people wrote poetry, but no one read it. Now no one writes it either. The VT set merely simplifies the whole process.’
I agreed with him, but of course Tony was somewhat prejudiced there, being one of those people who believed that literature was in essence both unreadable and unwritable. The automatic novel he had been ‘writing’ was over ten million words long, intended to be one of those gigantic grotesques that tower over the highways of literary history, terrifying the unwary traveller. Unfortunately he had never bothered to get it printed, and the memory drum which carried the electronic coding had been wrecked in the previous night’s pogrom.
I was equally annoyed. One of my VT sets had been steadily producing a transliteration of James Joyce’s Ulysses in terms of a Hellenic Greek setting, a pleasant academic exercise which would have provided an objective test of Joyce’s masterpiece by the degree of exactness with which the transliteration matched the original Odyssey. This too had been destroyed.
We watched Studio 5 in the bright morning light. The cerise Cadillac had disappeared somewhere, so presumably Aurora was driving around Vermilion Sands, astounding the café crowds.
I picked up the terrace telephone and sat on the rail. ‘I suppose I might as well call everyone up and see what they can do.’
I dialled the first number.
Raymond Mayo said: ‘Write some myself? Paul, you’re insane.’
Xero Paris said: ‘Myself? Of course, Paul, with my toes.’
Fairchild de Mille said: ‘It would be rather chic, but . . .’
Kurt Butterworth said, sourly: ‘Ever tried to? How?’
Marlene McClintic said: ‘Darling, I wouldn’t dare. It might develop the wrong muscles or something.’
Sigismund Lutitsch said. ‘No, no. Siggy now in new zone. Electronic sculpture, plasma in super-cosmic collisions. Listen –’
Robin Saunders, Macmillan Freebody and Angel Petit said: ‘No.’
Tony brought me a drink and I pressed on down the list. ‘It’s no good,’ I said at last. ‘No one writes verse any more. Let’s face it. After all, do you or I?’
Tony pointed to the notebook. ‘There’s one name left – we might as well sweep the decks clean before we take off for Red Beach.’
‘Tristram Caldwell,’ I read. ‘That’s the shy young fellow with the footballer’s build. Something is always wrong with his set. Might as well try him.’
A soft honey-voiced girl answered the phone.
‘Tristram?’ she purred. ‘Er, yes, I think he’s here.’
There were sounds of wrestling around on a bed, during which the telephone bounced on the floor a few times, and then Caldwell answered.
‘Hello, Ransom, what can I do for you?’
‘Tristram,’ I said, ‘I take it you were paid the usual surprise call last night. Or didn’t you notice? How’s your VT set?’
‘VT set?’ he repeated. ‘It’s fine, just fine.’
‘What?’ I shouted. ‘You mean yours is undamaged? Tristram, pull yourself together and listen to me!’ Quickly I explained our problem, but Tristram suddenly began to laugh.
‘Well, I think that’s just damn funny, don’t you? Really rich. I think she’s right. Let’s get back to the old crafts –’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 33
