Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (25 page)

‘So?’

‘So, maybe – maybe – there’s a question of plausibility.’

He could feel tempers rising, but was disinclined to interrupt. He preferred to muse on the question of plausibility. Take his own case. Or rather, his and Angie’s. They’d been together seven years, she’d shared every day of his struggle to become a writer, he’d produced his first novel, she’d seen it published and well reviewed – it had even won a prize – whereupon she had dumped him. He understood women leaving men because they were failures, but leaving him because he was a success? Where was the motivation in that? Where was the plausibility? Conclusion, one among many: don’t try putting your own life into fiction. It won’t work.

‘Are you saying my story’s implausible?’

‘Not exactly, I was just –’

‘You don’t believe such women exist?’

‘Well –’

‘Because, let me tell you, they
do
.’ (Vicky’s voice now had a tremble to it.) ‘That woman, that woman you don’t think is plausible, that woman’s
my mother
, and I can tell you that
she was plausible enough to me in real life, when she was alive.’

There was a long silence. Everyone was looking at him, expecting him to take charge. Which he would, of course, though not by sitting in judgement, rather by telling them a story. It was a stratagem he’d devised on the first morning – of throwing into each session an anecdote, a memory, a long joke, even a dream. He never explained why he was doing it, but each free-form intervention was designed to make them ask: is this a story? If not, how might we turn it into one? What do we need to discard, what keep, what develop?

And so he told them about going to Greece, perhaps a dozen years previously, back in the late sixties. It was the first time he’d been in a country whose language he couldn’t understand at all. Friends had rented a house on Naxos for three weeks. It was high summer, and six hours on open deck from Piraeus had left him with a sunburn that made him nauseous and kept him indoors for the first two days. The few other foreigners on the island were as conspicuous as this little English group must have been. In particular; he remembered an American, a chunky fellow with white hair and a short-trimmed white beard; he wore a loose white shirt over belted shorts and drove a white jeep or buggy which was equally at home on the beach as on the coastal road. He would roar past, one leg out on the running board, one arm around a woman – late thirties, perhaps – with olive skin and black hair dyed an unconvincing blonde. She was evidently an island woman, and the prim young Englishman he’d been (but implicitly was no longer) had concluded that she was the island whore, rented by the week at perhaps the same rate as the jeep; or, indeed, with the jeep as a package. Occasionally, they would see the couple in a bar or restaurant, but mostly they were in motion, showing off. The fellow had clearly been modelling himself on Hemingway, and the prim Englishman, both impressed and disgusted by the macho swagger, had hated him on sight. Every time the
jeep came past them on the beach, even if it was far away, it seemed to be throwing sand in his face.

He left it at that, hoping that his students would reflect on the assumptions we automatically make about people – even up to the possibility that the couple were happily married tourists, and the husband had always dressed and worn his beard like that. He also hoped they would reflect on life’s influence on art, and then art’s influence back on life. And if they had asked, he would have replied that for him, Hemingway, as a novelist, was like an athlete bulked up on steroids.

‘OK, all of you, now tell me what’s wrong with the following line: “Her voice was as beautiful as Pablo Casals playing the cello”?’

He didn’t tell them it was from
Across the River and into the Trees
, a novel that epitomised for him the worst of Hemingway. At university, he and his friends had taken to mocking the line, inserting the names of other cellists, other instruments, other physical attributes. Her breasts were as beautiful as Stéphane Grappelli playing the jazz violin, and so on. It had been a game which ran and ran.

‘I think that’s rather nice.’

‘It’s showing off, like he’s hitting us around the head with high culture.’

‘Did I say it was written by a man?’

‘It’s obvious. Any woman can tell.’

He nodded as if to allow a palpable hit.

‘Why does the writer say “Pablo”, why not just “Casals”?’

‘Perhaps to distinguish him from Rosie Casals?’

‘Who’s Rosie Casals?’

‘A tennis player.’

‘Sorry, did she play the cello as well?’

And so they got through the morning. They were a nice bunch, all eight of them: five women and three men. A poet friend of his had suggested that creative writing courses were basically sex academies where the tutor automatically enjoyed
jus primae noctis
. But perhaps aspirant poets were different from their prose equivalents. There was one woman on the course to whom he might happily have offered private lessons, but he gave up on the idea after spotting her arm in arm with Talentless Tim, who defended his consistent use of cliché by saying, ‘It’s not cliché, it’s vernacular.’

They were settling in at the pub, pulling chairs together, when Bill slapped his palm on the table.

‘Hey, Chief, I’ve just had a thought. What if it
was
Hemingway, the man himself, on that island of yours?’

‘Not unless suicides come back from the dead.’

Oh shit, he thought, looking around to see if Vicky had heard. Luckily, she was at the bar buying her round. Trying to seem casual, he asked if any of them had read Hemingway. There were only two yeses, both from men. But everyone knew something about the writer’s life – bullfighting, big-game hunting, expatriate in Paris, war correspondent, many wives, drinking, suicide – and so everyone, from this knowledge, had an opinion about the work. The sum of which was: a writer whose era had passed, and whose opinions were now out of date. Vicky began a long rant about cruelty to animals, and yes, perfectly on cue, Bill asked her if her shoes were made of leather.

‘Yes, but it didn’t come out of the bullring.’

And so he listened and smiled and drank some more. At the pub, he stopped being a tutor; they could say what they liked.

On the last evening, he cooked a gigantic stew and provided so many bottles of wine that they didn’t need the pub. Responding to their praise, he told them his theory of writers and cooking. Novelists, who were in it for the long haul, were temperamentally equipped for stewing and braising, for the slow mixing together of many ingredients; whereas poets ought to be good at stir-fry. And short-story writers? someone asked. Steak and chips. Dramatists? Ah, dramatists
– they, the lucky sods, were basically mere orchestrators of the talents of others, so would be satisfied with shaking a leisurely cocktail while the kitchen staff rustled up the grub.

This went down well, and they started fantasising about the sort of food famous writers would serve. Jane Austen and Bath buns. The Brontës and Yorkshire pudding. There was even an argument when Virginia Woolf and cucumber sandwiches were put together. But without any discord they placed Hemingway in front of an enormous barbecue piled with marlin steaks and cuts of buffalo, a beer in one hand and an outsized spatula in the other, while the party swirled around him.

The next morning, they shared a minibus to the local station. The rain still hadn’t given up. At Swansea there were handshakes and some shy cheek-kissing, and the woman he’d fancied gave him a look which seemed to be saying: no, didn’t you see, it wasn’t Tim I would have gone for, I only put my arm through his because I felt sorry for him. All you had to do was look at me properly, make some kind of sign. He wondered if this was a correct conclusion based on his sympathetic imagination, or merely mad vanity. But in any case, she was now on a different train, heading towards a different life, while he sat at the window on his own, looking out at wet Wales. He found himself thinking that, driver aside, a white beach buggy had an unquestionable glamour about it. If you drove one round London, people would probably think you a member of a rock group rather than a mere prose writer. The pity was, he couldn’t afford one. All he could afford was a second-hand Morris Minor.

2. The Professor in the Alps

He sat at the head of a long, dark table with six students at precise intervals down each side. Fifteen feet away, at the other
end, was Guenther, his teaching assistant, whose broad shoulders and cheerful sweater obscured a view of forest, looping cables and high mountains. It was mid-July: the ski shops and hire places were closed, as were half the restaurants. There were a few tourists, some groups of hikers, and this summer school, which had invited him to teach – in English, fortunately – for six days. He was offered business-class travel, a decent fee, a healthy per diem, and use of the school’s minivan whenever it was free. His only other obligation was to give a public reading on the final night. He was looking forward to this: his generation of writers had adapted well to the expectation that they become performers as well as private, solitary truth-seekers and truth-tellers. He was at ease with interviewers, usefully provocative on political issues – especially when he had a new book out – and a little whorish at the microphone. Ah, the lure of the prepared impromptu. This side of him had come as a surprise, pleasant to him, less so to Lynn, his wife, who had just left him. It had not been an agreeable time lately. ‘And don’t write a book about us like you did with Angie’ had been one of her many parting lines. He had raised his hands, palms forward, as if to say that not only would he never do that, but it had been a clear mistake in the first case. Even if the novel had made a couple of shortlists. Even if fiction was, as he liked to say, omnivorous and essentially amoral.

‘But what does the Herr Professor think about this?’

‘I’d like to hear what the rest of you have to say first. Mario? Dieter? Jean-Pierre?’

He needed more time to think. It was an afternoon session which was intended to range more broadly. In the morning, they would analyse texts the students were to be examined on; in the afternoon he was expected to stretch their brains, make wider cultural connections, discuss social and political topics. It ought to have been a breeze, but there were times when their Continental minds, their natural ease with the
abstract and the theoretical, made his own English pragmatism seem like mental sloppiness. Still, they liked him, and he liked them, not least because they seemed to ascribe his lack of rigour to the vibrancy of his imagination. He, they never forgot, was the Herr Professor, the one who had written the books. And if all else failed, he could always tell them an anecdote, a dream, a memory, a shaggy-dog story. They were very polite, and had heard about the famous English sense of humour, so anything he said that was at all odd, or incoherent, was greeted with respectful laughter.

But Jean-Pierre and Mario and Dieter had all delivered their opinions, and now it was up to him.

‘Do any of you know the music of Sibelius?’

Only two. Good.

‘Well, you must forgive me if I can’t explain it in the correct musicological language. I’m only an amateur. Anyway, OK, Sibelius. 1865 approximately to 1957 approximately.’ (He knew these were the exact dates – this was what he meant by ‘whorish’.) ‘Seven symphonies, one violin concerto, orchestral tone poems, songs, a string quartet called
Voces intimae
, intimate voices. Let’s take the symphonies.’ (Not least because he didn’t have anything to say about the other works.) ‘They start – the first two – with great melodic expansiveness. You hear a lot of Tchaikovsky, a bit of Bruckner, Dvořák perhaps, anyway, the great nineteenth-century European symphonic tradition. Then the Third – shorter, just as melodic, and yet more restrained, held-back, moving in a new direction. Then the great Fourth, austere, forbidding, granitic, the work where he most engages with modernism.’ (He’d stolen that phrase from an Austrian pianist who said in a radio interview, ‘No, Sibelius is not of much interest to me, except for the Fourth, where he engages with modernism.’) ‘Then the Fifth, Sixth, and that epitome of compression, the Seventh. To my doubtless fallible ears, one of the things Sibelius is asking, from the Third to the
Seventh is, What is melody? How far can we compress it, reduce it to a phrase, even, but make that phrase as charged and memorable as some Big Tune from the good old days? Music that seems to question itself and its underlying justification even as it beguiles you. I wish I could play you some.’

‘Herr Professor, there is a piano in the conference hall.’

‘Thank you, Guenther.’

He frowned as if his train of thought had been interrupted. His teaching assistant was always looking for ways to assist, which was logical, and yet at times disconcerting. Still, Guenther was very good at shameless queue-barging to fetch the Herr Professor his coffee.

‘So what I suppose I am trying to say is: what is this thing – this ancient, wonderful thing – we call a story? This is a question modernism asked and, you could say, we all still need to ask. And when I consider that simple, essential question – what is narrative? – I often find myself turning to the mighty Finn. Sibelius’ (he added in case they didn’t know the composer was Finnish). ‘Yes, Sibelius. Well, a break perhaps and, yes, thank you Guenther, and no milk.’

When they resumed, twenty minutes later, the teaching assistant arrived with a record player and several old LPs.

‘I have the First Symphony, the Fourth and the Seventh, Herr Professor.’

‘Guenther, you’re a magician, how did you do it?’

His assistant smiled shyly. ‘I found the name of a music professor in the village. He was delighted to lend you the records. He sends you his honoured greetings. The player belongs to the school.’

He was aware of the students looking at him expectantly.

‘Well then. The first movement of the Fourth, if you don’t mind.’

And so he sat and thought how wonderful it was to be
paid to listen to Sibelius, even if it was only for eight minutes and forty-seven seconds. How wonderful the music was too, how darkly orphic in this landscape of tall trees, clean air and blue sky. His life was a mess, his last novel had been crapped on from a great height by all the shitbags in London, he doubted he would ever write anything of lasting value, and yet – with those strings climbing timorously and the brass clearing its throat as if to make some great statement that was never, finally, made – there were still transcendent moments to be had in this poor existence of ours.