Authors: John Lanchester
Fragrant Harbour (26 page)
Church House
Ottery St Mary
1 August
Dear Mr Stewart,
I should warn you at the start that this letter gives a much more equivocal response than the one you have a right to expect.
I remember Professor Cobb with great vividness and was keen to read his manuscript, despite the fact that I know
nothing about Chinese culture. It seemed unlikely that it would be uninteresting, and indeed it was not. The cavalcade of darkness it describes is so extraordinary that it reminded me of something entirely frivolous, a remark of Kafka’s
quoted
in a contemporary’s memoir, that the conversation of a mutual acquaintance ‘was like having world literature parade past one’s table in its underpants’.
I am, however, as I have said, no authority on anything to do with the East, and thought I must seek a verdict from someone who knew the, to me, wholly unfamiliar source material. I dropped a line to an old friend, Donald Shuttleworth, who taught Chinese for many years at the University of London, and who indeed translated some Tang poetry himself. You may have heard of him. I described the work and said I was not asking for a detailed reading,
merely
an inspection which would give me some indication as to the overall level of the translation – like boring a sample to find if there’s oil at a drilling site. He agreed in a letter which had a degree of amused curiosity that I found
surprising
; I hope you won’t take it amiss if I say one’s first response to unsolicited requests for reading a manuscript tends not to be overwhelmingly positive. I sent Shuttleworth the manuscript and think the best thing would perhaps be if I enclose a copy of his letter, as he has given me permission to do.
I wish I could suggest with confidence what you might do next. I think the book is worth publishing and would be happy to be quoted as saying so.
I have recently been reading a great deal of an
extraordinary
French writer called Simone Weil. One of her
memoirists
recalled that at their last encounter he said, ‘Let us hope we meet again in the next world.’ She replied, ‘In the next world there will be no meeting again.’ Let us hope she was wrong.
Yours,
Wilfred Austen
This was Shuttleworth’s letter:
47 Old Church St
Chelsea
27 July
Dear Wilfred,
I was intrigued by your letter, as you may have sensed in my earlier reply. I know of Professor Cobb’s work on the
yuë-fu
lyric form, which was his only publication in my field of interest. I was not aware until your letter that he had ceased to publish any scholarly work in favour of his efforts on this project. But the point which chiefly piqued my interest was the fact that to the very best of my knowledge no such text as
The Lives of the Emperors
exists in Chinese. I wondered if the work was a recension of other biographical material, or a far-fetched title for something one might already know – there is a considerable body of historical writing in the Classical tradition to which the title would not be entirely inappropriate. The former supposition is the more accurate. The work in question does not correspond to any Chinese original. It is a kind of anthology of biographical material of the Chinese emperors, edited together to read as a single narrative. As such it is of considerable interest.
Cobb went to a great deal of trouble to do two things. First, the style of the work is modelled on that of Classical Chinese; to use an imprecise term, it ‘feels’ like a translation. This is something a number of translators have sought to capture, among them Arthur Waley and myself, and I am not perhaps indulging in self-flattery when I say the influence of these attempts is
apparent
in Cobb’s work. It is to do with a limpidity of the verbal
surface
and a seeming flatness in affect which in fact conceals great intensities of feeling. There is no precise equivalent in English.
The second point on which Cobb has expended effort is on the stitching together of his tapestry. The effect is of very great
interest
to me, a scholar in Classical Chinese. Whether it will be able to find a publisher and a wider interested audience I have to admit I do not know.
Yours ever,
Don
‘I’ll find a publisher, Jane,’ I told her. ‘Leave it to me.’ That’s what I promised – but if I had known what I was saying, I wouldn’t have.
I found a list of publishers in a reference book, and did some research by looking at their books in the university library. I
started
at the top of the list and began to work down the names. Each cycle of submission-to-rejection, as they became, took weeks or even months. Each rejection entailed my opening a letter telling me, usually politely, sometimes interestedly, sometimes with what appeared to be genuine regret, that the book could not be accepted for publication. Often the letters gave a reason, to do with its length, or its Chinese-ness, or its erudition, or reconditeness, or difficulty, or the condition of the market, or the special problems presented by the fact that its author was dead, or its being a cross between a narrative and an anthology, or its simply being – this was especially popular – ‘not quite right for us’. Of all these letters, the ones which gave a reason were the most irritating. After each rejection I ticked the company in question off the list, filed the
letter
, and started again. Parts of the manuscript would be filthy not just with fingerprints, but also tea stains, ketchup marks, water smudges, and once even children’s drawings. When I got back the rejected work I would get out my list of publishers, make a fresh copy of the original manuscript, write another submission letter, wrap up a parcel, and travel to the General Post Office in Central to send it by recorded delivery.
The great boon of the
Lives
affair for me was that I began to
correspond
with Austen. He wrote to me a couple of weeks after his initial letter, saying that he expected by now the shock would have worn off, and asking me what I was intending to do. I wrote back, and before long we were in regular touch. The sight of his cramped, uneven, rather mad handwriting on an envelope never failed to give me a lift. In a curious way, I think I represented a choice he felt he had not made. ‘I stayed in England and became a member of the establishment, despite myself, something which would not have been possible had I left,’ he wrote. ‘It’s nice being able to tell people my story about the time I met the Queen, but I’ve often wondered, now that it’s too late to usefully wonder, what sort of price I may have paid for that in my work.’ I could sense in him a loneliness. Perhaps that was something else we recognised about each other.
Wo Man-Lee died of lung cancer in the winter of 1983. I read the news in the
South China Morning Post
, in a story headlined ‘Fugitive Dies’. I was surprised to notice that I did not feel
anything
other than a sense of relief. I was not conscious of having anything left in life to look forward to.
One day in February of the new year, after one of my trips to the Post Office with a parcel, I decided I needed some air and exercise. I couldn’t do anything too strenuous since I had to be back in Deep Water Bay by late afternoon to supervise the arrangements for a do. Beryl had come clean: it was her eightieth birthday. Her ‘boys’ were giving her a private dinner and were touchingly solicitous about everything being just so. Leung, her right-hand man, had made a point of asking me personally to oversee the arrangements and I had of course agreed. I assured him that Chef Ng would cook the meal himself. That pleased him.
But the party was a few hours away. My plan was to take a tram up to the Peak, walk the circuit around the hill, and then take a cab from the end of the walk back to Deep Water Bay. It was a nice day, the clear winter weather which is Hong Kong’s closest equivalant to a spring day in a temperate climate. Once or twice in the walk from the GPO to the lower station of the Peak Tram – a few hundred yards up the hill, during which I felt the effect of all the exercise that I had not been taking – I had a
curious
sensation of being watched: that instinctive human
awareness
which no science has explained. But there was no reason for the feeling, as far as I could tell – and in Hong Kong one is in a sense watched all the time anyway. It must be a challenging place to be a spy; perhaps that’s why they seem to like it so much.
There was a queue for the tram, much of it consisting of schoolchildren on an excursion. I had to wait for the second tram and took a seat at the front. As always, the steepest section of the ride was a few degrees closer to the vertical than one had
remembered. I could hear the children’s giggling excitement behind me, and their teacher pointing out the sights to them in Cantonese. As usual in the middle of the day, hardly anyone got on or off at the intermediate stops on the way to the top.
As I get older I find I have developed a faint trace of vertigo. Or it may be that as the buildings in Central have grown taller,
seeming
to reach almost all the way up to the Peak, one has become increasingly conscious of the height; either way, I don’t take quite the same relish in the view on the way up that I once did. I was glad to get to the Peak Tram terminal and get out on Mount Austin Road, the first half of the path running around the hill. An hour’s stroll would be about right.
There were more people than I had expected: European tourists, as well as the schoolchildren going up to the old Governor’s house at the top – a ruin and a garden since it was destroyed by the Japanese. I took the walk easily, enjoying the views out towards Cheung Chau and the thought of spending the weekend there with a book and a bottle of wine, after Beryl’s party. The dinner would be an odd combination of her work friends, her nephew by marriage who was visiting from London, and me. I had made solemn assurances to her boys that the parts of the event for which I was responsible would be a success, but I could give no guarantee that the evening would work as a whole. It would be an odd mix.
Once or twice again as I walked I had the sensation of being kept under surveillance. I put it down to a mild anticipatory
anxiety
about Beryl’s do.
When I turned the corner into Lugard Road there were eagles circling in the currents a hundred feet or so below the top of the Peak. The visibility was beautifully, freakishly good, and the hills around Kowloon stood out like papier mâché models of themselves. The last stretch of Lugard Road is uphill, and I was puffing by the time I got back to the tram terminus. I saw with a sinking heart that there was a queue at the taxi rank: I had been caught out by the mid-afternoon shift change. Ten people were silently and gloomily waiting in front of me. A taxi came and dropped three American tourists off; then the driver
covered
his flag with a red cloth to indicate he was off duty and drove away.
I had nothing to read. I thought about taking the tram
downtown
and setting out from there instead; but the Peak Tram was busy and there was bound to be a taxi queue at the bottom
terminus
also. At last a taxi arrived and, as it did so, from nowhere appeared a group of five British tourists, all of them noisy young men. They made no attempt to defer to the queue but merely got straight into the cab, squeezing in, laughing and joking. The
people
in the queue in front of me, all of them Chinese, looked at them, appalled but, it has to be said, not particularly surprised. I stepped over the metal rail which kept the queue in order and moved to the cab while the last two youths were still getting into it. I put my hand on the arm of one of the young men. He was large and short-haired and smelled of beer. He had an earring.
‘Excuse me, but this is a queue, and these people have been waiting for some time.’
He stopped and turned.
‘What the fuck’s that got to do with me, shithead?’ he said.
‘You’ve jumped the queue. Perhaps you weren’t aware. You should get out of the taxi and let these people have it.’
He raised his hands up to my chest. We were about the same height but he must have been three stone heavier. He spread his fingers, put them at the top of my chest, and pushed. I stepped backwards two or three feet. One and then another and then the last of the youths got out of the taxi and came around to me. He pushed me again.
‘You going to make me, old fart? Come on then, you going to make me?’
Every time he pushed I gave ground. I did not say anything more. He was visibly becoming more and more angry; working himself up to something. It was strangely like the self-induced, self-incited fury I had seen among Japanese soldiers during the war. I was sure he was about to hit me.
A young Chinese, not one of those who had been waiting in the queue, approached from beside and behind me. He was neatly dressed, wiry, and looked about eighteen. He said, as if reciting a textbook phrase, in English:
‘Can I help you?’
‘Fuck off, Chinky,’ said one of the other youths, who hadn’t spoken before. He too smelled of alcohol. The large youth pushing
me looked at the Chinese boy for a moment and then turned back to me, his face very close. His eyeballs were bloodshot. He raised his arms to my chest and was about to push me again when the Chinese youth, moving incomparably more quickly than it takes to describe, stepped forward and made a pulling-and-chopping movement at his outstretched arms. There seemed to be no
transition
between the man moving to push me and his kneeling on the ground screaming, both arms hanging loosely in front of him. A second Briton took a step backward, then a step forward, and lifted up his right hand to throw a punch. The Chinese, again moving at an entirely different speed, stepped forward and hit him very hard on the bridge of his nose with the heel of his hand. A tremendous amount of blood started pouring out of his nose and he dropped to the ground.
‘Fucking hell, it’s one of them kung fu chinkies,’ said one of the other youths. They did not run, but simply turned and walked briskly away back towards the terminus, leaving their two friends behind. The Chinese youth took my arm and led me into the taxicab.
‘Excuse us,’ he said to the queue. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a collection of openly gawping faces. He said something I did not hear to the driver – who looked a little reluctant, but was not about to say no to this particular passenger. It was a few moments before I could collect myself to speak.
‘Thank you. But who are you?’ I asked.
Speaking carefully, in schoolroom English, as if these were words he had often practised, he said:
‘I am your grandson.’
