My Other Life (37 page)

It was the house in Fulham, the park, Eel Brook Common, Musgrave Crescent, the King's Road in the distance, the camera shortening its gaze and becoming intimate, withdrawing into the room and tracking across bookshelves to the chair where Arturo Tripodi sat.

"Julian called that his 'Fellini sequence.'"

"
There is no such thing as a novel anymore,
" Tripodi said. "
It is an obsolete form. Like the sonnet. Like the verse play. How can anyone believe in it?
"

"
What will take its place?
" Rupert's voice, but he remained off camera.

"Isn't he supposed to be deaf?" I asked.

"The questions were written on big pieces of cardboard. We had a girl holding them behind my head."

"
What has already taken its place? The work that is nearer to autobiography or memoir. That is why Svevo is so important. His work is more modern than Joyce's. Joyce knew that, which was his motivation for bringing his work to the notice of European intellectuals.
"

"
But surely the so-called memoir is as much of a conceit as the novel.
"

You could see Tripodi peering forward, his hands to his temples, steadying and directing his glasses as he read this question.

"
It is nearer to reality,
" the old man finally said. "
It has more shocks and they are real shocks. Real flesh, real blood.
"

"
What other examples are there of this new form?
"

"
There is of course my work. But I would prefer to mention the paintings of Francis Bacon. Of course they are not pieces of writing, but they are the best example of the kind of fictions I am describing. How different they are from the formal portrait. People are so solitary when seen from an oblique angle, so defenseless when seen from behind. It is the posture of retreat. The pain, the screams, the flesh, the nausea, the eroticism. The candor.
"

"
But
" —Rupert had adopted a teasing tone—"my
wife is always saying that Bacon's paintings have been superseded by abstract expressionism.
"

"
Your wife is mistaken. All abstract art is little more than decoration. Any painting that is not figurative has no reality. It is merely design. Mondrian is simply superior linoleum. Albers is wallpaper.
"

"
You sound so certain.
"

Tripodi hesitated. He leaned forward again and said, "
Excuse me, how much longer will this take?
"

"
Just a few more questions.
"

But this reply was not written down. Tripodi did not hear it. He looked around again.

"
Time will tell. Jackson Pollock might be interesting as an example of someone who is in extreme mental crisis, but his paintings have no artistic value.
"

"
I thought we were talking about the novel,
" Rupert said.

And so the program continued, the old sage unmoving in his chair, his hands grasping his knees. He was alone, like a decrepit pope in an old portrait.

Tripodi lifted one hand and waved it impatiently. This was a sign of life. There was a sudden cut, the tape cartridge had to be changed. A black and white clapperboard swung shut with a crack,
Tripodi BBC Arena 16/8/82,
and the tape restarted.

"
Flaubert never married. He worked. He wrote.
"

"
I'm married and I like to think that I—
"

But Tripodi did not hear him. It was a comment, not a question written on a card. Tripodi was still talking.

"Madame Bovary is
as modern a novel as it is possible to be. But the house of fiction has many rooms. The novel as we know it is no more than an entertainment, an amusement.
"

Tripodi went on, speaking in abstractions, and I found myself missing connections as the talking head explained the future of fiction. I realized as I had at his house in Fulham that I was not made for such arguments. I needed something more concrete, or else I was turned into a grunting philistine. Tripodi in this program was an intellectual in full cry.

Rupert said, "I'm losing you, Paul."

"No. It's interesting."

"Your eyes are glazing over, as my wife would say."

"OK. I really don't know what he's talking about."

"Because you take a traditional approach. 'He said, she said. The clouds, the grass, the trees.'"

"I don't write stuff like that."

"I'm teasing you. But don't you realize that this man is describing exactly the sort of book I am trying to write?"

"Is that why you want me to see this?"

"No." Rupert was smiling. "Didn't you notice anything strange in it?"

I started to answer. Rupert began rewinding the tape, making Tripodi clownish, doing everything rapidly, backwards, twitching. And then Rupert hit the Play button and the tape began again from
You sound so certain.

I saw the old man hesitate and then turn. Rupert froze the tape.

"What do you see?"

"Nothing."

"Look again."

A blur, a figure in the distance glimpsed through the window moving towards the back door, just the back of a small head and narrow shoulders. It could have been a cluster of leaves blown by the wind, a gulp of light, the snap of a clean rag.

In the foreground Arturo Tripodi had turned and I could see the back of his neck—stringy, weak, pathetic, too small for the collar and tie which, on this poor flesh, was bunched like the drawstring on a loose bag. People are so solitary when seen from an oblique angle, so defenseless when seen from behind.

"What is it?"

"You mean, 'Who is it?'" Rupert said. "Remember that blur."

"Your wife?"

Rupert laughed so hard at this I knew my fumbling question had to have a private meaning that excited him, even though his shrieking laughter was like mockery to me.

At last he wiped his eyes and gasped and said, "The charlady's daughter, Clara."

So there
was
a mustached old woman who looked after him. I said, "You want to tell me something."

Rupert's eyes glistened with excitement. His expression was lit with the knowledge that he was about to tell me something I could not even guess at. That was one of his most affecting traits, the way his face shone as he screeched. Being wise is someone's knowing something you don't. Rupert was usually absent, but when he showed his face he was enthusiastic, which was more than I could say for Arturo Tripodi.

With his hand on the tape machine Rupert kept the moment frozen—the blur at the window, the turned head of Tripodi, the feeble neck, the posture of retreat.

"When we were done," Rupert said, "and had put the furniture back, we thanked him and left."

Again, in my mind, I saw the hot little room of dusty books and the overdressed old man in his heavily upholstered chair.

"I was halfway home when I remembered the key that I had been given to let myself and the crew in with. I still had it. I couldn't call him—he was too deaf to hear my explanation. That was why I had the key in the first place, because he couldn't hear the doorbell. The arrangement was that I would put it into an envelope and push it through the letter slot."

He smiled and pressed his fingertips together as though he held a key.

"I was going to send my wife, but she was down in the country and wasn't due in London until that evening. So I went back, and—I didn't have an envelope—I let myself in through the front door. Arturo Tripodi was not in the parlor."

I saw Rupert in the parlor, holding his breath, peering, listening, his face shining with pleasure.

"I could have put the key down. But I had plenty of time. I didn't have to meet my wife until seven. Something made me hesitate. It
was his voice. I thought I heard the word 'trance.' That seemed to me perfect."

He looked for my reaction, and he seemed to be enjoying the suspense, the way I hung on, waiting for his next word.

"He was seated in the library, his back to me. Just a few feet from where we had recorded the program. It's a small house, with more rooms than you might imagine, but this was the next room, just a few feet from where he had discussed the new novel so seriously, his concept of fiction. Candor. Solitude. Man alone."

Rupert was gleeful, his fine skinny fingers trembling.

"He sat in his big hairy jacket, but he was not alone. He was watching a small girl, the one there"—the blur on the tape—"and she was naked. She was so pale, so fragile, no more than eight or nine, no breasts, wearing only a pair of white socks. Her eyes were large and fearful. You can imagine. And Arturo Tripodi was whispering, 'Dance, dance.'"

That was the story Rupert told me.

A few years later Arturo Tripodi died of heart failure. Rupert Moody died of AIDS.

A
WRITER OFTEN
chooses to leave a chapter out of a book. I have always been fascinated by the undressed father and daughter in that ramping perversity Edith Wharton deleted from her novel
Beatrice Palmato
(see the appendix of Professor Lewis's biography of EW); there is the dreamy river chapter that Mark Twain left out of
Huckleberry Finn,
and the sexual ambiguity J. R. Ackerley excluded from
Hindoo Holiday.
There must be thousands more. I suspect this writing to be revealing stuff, but it may be suppressed on other grounds—that it offends polite taste, or strains credulity, or seems inappropriate. Or is it simply a bad fit? Whatever, it is a question of timing: writers are careful not to throw anything of value away. The fact is, no matter how bizarre or scandalous, the sunken chapter always surfaces.

I traveled the coast of Britain in the spring and summer of 1982. Afterwards, writing
The Kingdom by the Sea,
I sometimes returned to a seaside place to verify a fact or confirm an impression. Anton and I spent some summer days in Orwell's Southwold; Will biked with me, checking place names on the Isle of Wight. Soon, autumn had emptied the summer resorts, and the gusting winds made them barer still. They were blackened by the sweeping rain of late November. The seas were higher, the cold strands were narrower, the surf noisier. But these were seasonal variations, differences in smells
and skies; they did not alter the judgment in the manuscript I carried with me from one place to the next.

Four days before Christmas I was in Yorkshire, looking at a section of coast I had missed north of Whitby. In the spring, for the purposes of my book, I had taken the branch line from Middlesbrough. This time I was walking. I thought I had set off in good time, but as twilight gathered the shadows I realized it was the shortest day of the year.

Dusk slowed me down, and at Runswick Bay and Kettleness I found it hard to see my feet. It was that uncertain time of day, just after a winter sunset, when the way is made visible by the pale sky showing in puddles on the muddy path.

And then everything was black. I stumbled on through the wykes and dumps until I saw a wavering light. This is how I came to Blackby Hole.

The village was not yet visible, but I knew there were cottages hidden in the nearby darkness, because there was in the air the cozy burned-toast smell of smoke from coal fires, in those days the sharpest odor on frosty nights in English villages. There was only darkness and this coal smoke for a few hundred yards, and then clammy air rolled over me. The next time I saw the light it was smudged and refracted by the drifting fog.

This was the North. I had expected Christmas snow, but the sea fog was much stranger and just as cold and penetrated deeper. It was as if I lay with my face against a marble slab, and the ghostly progress of surf, flopping and gasping on the foreshore under the cliffs, suggested terrible things. I imagined stepping off one of those cliffs, or else the crumbly cliff's edge collapsing under me and the loose chunks of headland bearing me down and flinging me into the black water of the North Sea. The fog had settled and thickened, shrouding the coast and muffling all sounds except that of the suffering sea.

I regretted this trip already. England is one of those safe, overdeveloped countries where a traveler like me has to go to a great deal of trouble to place himself in danger. After days of struggling against the tameness and safety of the coastal footpath called the Cleveland Way I had at this dark hour now succeeded in placing myself at risk. And Christmas was another peculiar problem—the holiday was like an ebbing tide that left all strangers stranded. I
might not be able to leave until I was released by the next tide, the normal working days that were more than a week away, or perhaps well into January.

Alison had said, "If you're not back well before Christmas..." and had not finished the sentence, so as to send me off imagining what the dire implications of the rest of it might have been. She felt, with some justification, that I had let her down many times in the past.

The swimming light showed me a stile. I plunged over it and into a narrow lane. I heard the creak of a sign before I saw the pub itself, the Crossed Keys. And cottages appeared as faint shadows of dripping walls and shuttered windows. I was muddy and cold, so I considered warming myself in the pub. There was a cardboard sign saying
Vacancies
in the window, yet I procrastinated. If I could find a bus or a lift out of the village, I would leave this very night. I was sure that if I stayed I would discover nothing beyond what I could now see in Blackby Hole. It was a tiny place.
Move on,
I thought. And then I saw the crackling fire in the Crossed Keys.

I did not notice at first that there were people in the pub. I saw tangled strings of Christmas lights and hanging ribbons. And there were bunches of holly among the horse brasses on the beams, one round holly wreath on the wall, and a twist of tuberous mistletoe drooping over the door. Because these plants were real, and dying, they seemed less festive to me. Then I saw people: two men in chairs and a woman on the far side of the horseshoe shape of the bar. They had not moved when I entered. I had taken them for pieces of furniture—it was that kind of country pub. But why should they care about me? They must have seen plenty of travelers like me, muddy and sodden from the long-distance path that cut through the village. I was haggard from almost two weeks of this fact checking, and wearing ridiculous hiking boots, and masked with a beard I had grown because I was sick of seeing my face in hotel mirrors.