Foreword

The room was too small for the compass of footwork to measure out hearsal slabs before pinning them down finally in words, but then all rooms were too small. It was, surprisingly, day. He wavered towards the table, but defeated, veered off and wound himself up more, veered, held still in the sculptor’s favourite subject, the Moment before Action, in which if the sneering pleb but knew it all work and torment and spiritual axions were underdone, and at last with compressed lip strode impetuously over. Couching himself as still and poised as he could manage, a curving spinal spring, he sighed, gestured, wrote: Doctoral dissertation concerning Icicles by Cynthia, an unfinished manuscript. Part 1. Preliminary reflections in the array of carpet-wound tads and scraps that is the grain of Landor’s style. Part 2. Synopsis and elucidation, with an excursus on influences and untimely imitations. Part 3. Essay on the master-servant dialectic: an unexpected spiral taken within the theme of drunkenness and delirium. Part 4. A speculative completion of the extant text, with fragments and annotations.

            But that was no good, he was already opening the gift boxes and spilling their clustered contents on the page. The scheme might have glowed in that little furnace, that pulsating red heart where shapes were born, ripe for scattering glowing cinders over many pages, but the work always crumpled in chalklike on itself, compressing all those golden points into a fractional parody of their imagined potential. To be endured though, casting aside for now the fiction of words latent in mind gleaming beadily in the torchlight, begging to be pried out. All the proof, he wrote under this, as if opening with the unexpectedly playful, yet still thematic, statement of a philosophical thesis, for what I was, and for what I am, lies in such outlines and their progeny. But then opened a shocking hiatus; dark and deep as a cave, but smooth and warm, quivering, slimy, as full of air as a temporizing yawn: a hole, in short, at the sight of which no words mattered.

            A flurry broke loose from the general swell, gathered its horses and attacked the house-cliff on the edge of which he perched ready to launch, prying open a loosely-fastened window, hoping to shake it loose by glum, stupid persistence: kn-echt, it said, knecht-knecht. Answering, he watched a burst of tears smear the glass, melt clear to show again the blurred daubing of outside, a wall inside which decaying dairy plant crouched and spun its dusty web, slick asphalt, a clutch of trees mobbing a path along which struggled a two-legged beetle, an ambulant umbrella; the sky was a soulless iris into which a thumb had intruded. Yes, moved his lips. That’s right, you got it right. Once a name floated free it was hard to recover again, stick the label back down, and unclaimed ones tended to be haunted by nameless claimants unless spoken up for; hence it was important to maintain focus when determination might slip unwarded, writing it on the inside cover of a thick notebook let us say, a very thick one, odd folds and configurations spilling from the neighbourly press of thickly written petals, and still no end envisaged, because he (who?) unlike any other was doing with that notebook unlike all others a thing unlike to all and any other. Writing: S. Windowrattle, and underneath it the word Mind, not the other way about, if it were just darkly hinting at the whole by an encoding thematic or more likely smugly enigmatic, a phrase pedantically repeated at significant breathings or, worst of all, a line haply uttered by a secondary character to underpin the key moment of revelation and resurrect in dewbright morning light all that had withered before.

            From rising, nine of the clock, until now, three hours, prevarication had preceded those hastily-written lines, but he could concede, for want of something better, that that lassitude of small-scale blank despair and those more active intervals of anguished brow-pinching was work, and that because all outlines, essays flung together with no plan but falling obediently into shape when a deadline growled, and arguments discovered only while in flight had encountered, with rare exceptions, approval by those in a position to know, the Zen-like speed that burned the potent cipher into its place in the queue with other dangerous things would equally reveal the strata of the blind strife that had prepared it. Another matter entirely was this: gamy might be the hollow-block charm of this shelter, the ulterior enduring of which had even a noble patina, but better than to leave it now for immersion in that teeming aquarium at the worst time of day, when the puritan at the centre of the world-soul in which all participate throws the guilt-engine into gear, toward the university whose halls resounded now with the absence of sedulous ones, who would pause or traverse only with brisk good reason before they quickly fluttered away to their templates again, clicking agog. For them everything its appointed time and place, but they still did not know what he knew.

            Kn-echt. Pathways he knew, and the fact that if one went back far enough and cut to avoid biography’s babbling brooks, the destination would also change, and so the question: if one stepped out of the course one’s position in life dictated in places that while seeming minor had ramifications for further nodes themselves inconsequential, would that same spatially located one become a different person in the same space? If so, the past could be altered, or more correctly, as in the best music the careful and committed tailor-work written history, the only kind, performed on blank events released and made coherent the dissipated fragments of the whole truth that pulsed through haphazard veins. More on that later. Like an ominously raised hand signalling the end of late mornings at the villa, the church spire appeared over the wavering grass embankment, followed by smaller minions gathering in thrown handfuls either side. The train squealed and rumbled, jerkily declining its headlong clamber, grinding reluctantly into the station, and there was nothing left but to get out, unprepared, seeking any deferment, but unequivocally here, joining the line of the condemned as they shuffled through turnstiles out into the bleak rain-spattered compress of what could never convince him as anything other than grazing land into which had been pressed without preparation the semblance of a town and its monastic hulk, the notional university, in red and grey brick, the plan of its main courtyard evoking with the suggestiveness of a lavender-scented evening in amber that humanitarian institution of former days, the workhouse.

            The rooms of his advisor, Dr. Moritz Krieg, were two floors up on the east wing of the main building; this information is provided only so that we can picture our friend’s iro-anglish spirit piloting his inherited self bravely to the start of a task of which he did not greatly relish the undertaking, picturing the preferred prospect of his accustomed place at a sidewalk cafe table, guarded from the brash noonday glare under a generous awning as by gently agitated palm fronds and its oven breath by impeccably cut grey linen, dividing his attention between writing, tirelessly writing meticulous and dream-lengthy notes and gravely, distantly observing the slowly clashing and rotating coloured shapes, the sparking of imbricated rainbow crystals from plane surfaces and corners. That cafes or for that matter awnings never lived up to this picture, that streets were never sun-bleached or kaleidoscopic, was a problem he put down to absence of suitable locale, money, talented tailors, and on the contrary his presence, here, in this ill-positioned time and ill-governed place.

            At the end of a hollow hall, ticking with muffled footsteps distant in space or time, was a doorbell that sounded exactly like his alarm clock, a shrill and arthritic cicada. When a door opened it was always for him, but on the threshold a bush-haired maniac jumped out at him without prior notice; he flinched, expecting, a contingency that ruffled idle time to no practical benefit, assault with some peasant implement and subsequent tribal jubilation, but instead the attacker scowled, gave him a scornful glance from under the aforementioned thicket of black hair with pale, resentful eyes that yet gave the impression of looking elsewhere, through the walls at the sky they mirrored, and lurched past in all the sartorial glory that patchy wool pullover and old corduroy can impart, depending as they were from little more than a buckled wire frame. He pondered for a moment some method by which to erase his discomfiture and the advantage it gave that otherwise utterly paltry person, but here was Dr. Krieg, white-haired but disconcertingly youthful and wolflike and as reservedly affable as he would be toward a book he favoured, but prepared equally to leave it on the shelf in favour of finding the quote he wanted from a miscellany.

            ‘Mr. Knecht, isn’t it? Excuse me, but I seem to have -’ displaying perfunctorily an unfit mask of recollection, though there was every reason to believe that he could not have forgotten that name or failed to take note when, leaving it until the latest reasonable date and time of day, its bearer had placed the call.

            ‘Stefan,’ he said obligingly, though uneasy, as if he feared he would be asked to argue for it. ‘Stefan Knecht.’ That bought Stefan admission. Books, books, endless minds arranged there on shelves, only differing so far as possible mathematical configurations allowed, granting as one must from first hand knowledge that the still more limited configurations of sense were rarely a factor in deciding the ordering of words; an old-school panelled study where things were buried to be silent, which creaked when the wind pressed in, the only sound; a mahogany desk with a pale feather-edged pool of sunlight pouring to the floor from essays, exam scripts. This study Stefan coveted, but as with everything he had a weakness for, he found something to disparage, the certainty that this was the only room intended to be seen, that the others were decorated with flowered wallpaper and glass coffee tables. Stefan, when invited to sit on one of the armchairs, his host not presuming to ask a postgraduate to face him from the other side of his authority, immediately laid out the fair copy of his dissertation outline with the strange impression that he was in a consulate and presenting his passport for verification. Tension while Krieg looked over the proposal, the fear creeping as a vine does over a broken pediment that the imposture would be revealed and his belongings picked through by smirking embassy underlings. But very soon Stefan was gratified, approval secured.

            ‘Who was the person on the way out I walked into on the way in,’ Stefan wished to know, hoping his credentials would let pass unnoticed the impropriety; he could not have explained why.

            ‘His name,’ muttered Krieg, occupied, ‘is Bertrand. Running after a Master’s, a case of Achilles and tortoise, I fear. Capable of better things than he delivers. Worse than being mediocre.’

            Stefan worried over whether to say what helpfully made its way out on its own, in the discordantly casual tone of one reciting without great interest some of the leather-bound gold words that fretted the walls. ‘He’s a spy.’

            ‘True. In a way, he is,’ said Krieg, with a matter of fact burst of laughter, and made a point of turning his attention to the matter in hand. Those unable to locate a matter of fact burst of laughter are unlucky enough not to know Dr. Krieg. But everyone knows Dr. Krieg. No, strove Stefan, he is and not in a way.

            ‘This will do,’ said Krieg, as after a nip of sloe gin. ‘Comment: while with most researchers I would take exception to their being overly dependent on the sources, the many, many sources, they load their work down with to impress me with the breadth of their knowledge, or their reading, or at least the extent to which they have studied the library catalogue (I must show you some time how many examples of that I have had lately), your case is the opposite: the only knowledge I have of this writer follows from a review last April in the Mimes,the one you referred me to in your letter, which leads me to believe that your study will be the first. I am right? A good corner to secure for the future, but requiring pioneer-work from you, freeing valuables from which others rather than you will enrich themselves, while rushing to amend your insights.’

            Stefan was reassured. ‘I come from a strong frontier tradition, with many luminous exemplars.’ (That was a jest.) ‘My thesis is intended as much as an amendment as a study: the most perfect works are best left alone, lest there is little more to do than busy oneself with mystifying explorations of metaphor and symbolism, or else fatuous praise, whereas the study of what is admirable but flawed, or owns the overlapping surfaces made of inconsistent threads, which has interest all its own, gives the reward of bringing to full form what was left amorphous in favour of circus-trickster stylistics, of presenting the full realization of the material instead of the author’s part-sighted have-a-hand. For this to be accepted, you must first grant that having scribbled something does not give one final authority concerning what it says, and it follows that the meaning itself, being variable according to the depth-semantics of each assimilator, is inconstant and not subject to copyright. If a deep perception can be argued for by which one can find this chrysalid and let what is merely pulsing quietly there emerge to such resplendent turquoise and garnet life that one cannot abide a state of affairs deprived of it, then what sense is there to leave it in the hands of its originator who keeps boiling the same bones in the hope of making endless soup? Its the genetic fallacy applied to the deified artwork, master knows best, whereas the truth is the same with anything, that mere possession does not confer automatic right to retain but must be earned and continually established by the eternally visible envelope, the mirror of proof.’ Stefan, still and quiet, watched astonished as this new, voluble frontispiece of his talked on, feeling at most a twinge of anxiety when there at a pause while a sequel was sought to match the original because the stumble was overcome even though the imp was clearly laying road for himself as he went, and with the advantage of a map and a welcoming ear it all appeared to mean something.

            The ball flew swift and low but Krieg was there, sending it back over the net with his solider, more tactically considered, less impatient forehand drive, but pantomimically, with a hollow prop racket, the choreography having been worked out in advance by some consensus agent with a smiling pen. ‘What interested me I admit was the bold stroke of announcing it as a settled thing. Let us say that the author-’

            ‘The scribbler,’ interjected Stefan sourly. ‘The species term is scribbler.’

            ‘The scribbler, then, brought this broken clam to your attention from the wish I cant sympathize with that it not gather dust on the mental shelf. But that wish can’t be to see a failure, for that is what any such waif is, exhibited in that naked three-legged table way. What manner of surgery do you mean to use that would repair it while avoiding rage? Improve any criminal banality just as long as some mire-head decided to print it and you won’t have to wait long.’

            Stefan, for that was his name, was bubbling to answer. ‘That is it, the point. He did contact me, must have heard me recommended through a confidant at my old college, and pestered me with it, said it would not leave him alone despite his asseveration that he could not but do it the same favour. A favour he didn’t do me. I trust your judgement, he said, and your ability to find whatever is of worth. I spent a year on these three hundred typed pages, and all that they are good for with me is to feed an ever-hungrier fire some reckless hour toward morning. That was all; I myself have spent the last six months reading, re-reading, annotating, and footnoting the notes until the typescript was black with writing, more of it mine finally than his, and I could think or speak nothing but those words or rhapsodic variations on them, and in their smoke and hot-metal stink I located Landor’s main failing. Before us is the impassable generic traffic jam, the commonplace, such (note the reflexive irony) a commonplace word, of the artist making an artist his subject, plenteous narratival omnibus breakdowns being occasioned by intellectual conversations with similarly inclined soap-bubble people who like nothing better than to dabble all day among tatterdemalion ideas, imposing drideology, the structure of tyranny, on the world instead of recognizing the basic premise that the essence of writing should be rapture in languages aristocratic heritage. This then is my proposal, the sole inimitable instance of a new genre, the perfecting study, against which critics to follow will mash themselves in vain.’ The wind creaked; the sky, in calm suspense between bouts of fume, was the refractive interior of a crystal globe where oil-drops spun in slow coiling shapes; the stage held still under total light; the clock tucked; Krieg tapped the desk with pianist’s digits, content, by the way, to wait for more information. The clay pipe served as an index when intimidation was needed and was otherwise mostly for show but now found itself busied with to fill with social tobacco the ensuing Stefan pause, that is, an M.Litt. staring at a thin glint in varnished rosewood with a slight frown, seeking among the gaps between things already said fresh fuel.

            ‘I am worried about this girl,’ he, Stefan, said at last reluctantly, or with chess caution, then having spoken aloud immediately tried to retrench. ‘That is, not worried, concerned at the anomal-’

            ‘Girl?’ said Krieg sharply, managing with a scornful pipe dream to strip the word of all finery, and what a stupid word it was.

            Lydia Schumann. Lydia Schumann. That stumble-name. ‘Yes. The main character, who is in reality a third-person narrator, constructs a text of her from letters and ’phone calls before they ever meet, a year after their first contact. When they do,’ his voice fading here, struggling out, ‘the trap closes, and he is paralyzed and slowly dissolved in that sweet fiery ambrosia, all will extinguished, he wants to die, to wither as a leaf does, as she did, to brown dust, but, but can’t... and do you know why? She meant too little to him. That is the specific, though I know you want me to hold the criticism in reserve at this point in the logogriph,’ reviving a little, ‘charge against him, I mean the scribbler, that he treats that victim, better that than the work, as less important than his ability to proselytize, demonstrating his own emotional shallowness through his protagonist. Thus the first of three interlinked statements that are the structure of my answer to Cynthia’s icicles: All Writing Is Propaganda. With this, Landor agrees, but in taking it literally, he degrades his own art. But pure, ethereal prose is its highest form, demonstrating the superior point of view without stating its content, after the precept that what stands outside language can only be shown.’

            Krieg offered a controlling pause, his west eyebrow only slightly elevated toward his shocked mane of sea-foam hair, retained or redivivus. The ball had performed an unforeseen swerve and departed court. ‘Well if that’s all, I think... After three weeks lets say you can show me what progress you have made in matching your outline to its explication, not that I doubt the possibility...’ Here something unusual happened. Stefan, who was also called Knecht, basilisked Dr. Krieg with one of those looks that only work on paper, halting the finishing-up act that was supposed to ensue. Time became space, treacherous and convoluted space.

            Dr. Krieg did not seem to mind. [Comment: I have a difficulty with the way you have chosen to begin. Instead of an isolated tessera in time and place with age and occupation, description, even some representation to give the impression of exterior existence of the protagonist (Note: be sure to provide me with mimeograph of Landor’s text, relevant segments, for purpose of comparison with your extrapol.), a prismatic particle descends through a stygian cavern, illuminating nothing, plunges into a dense pool of liquid stone and is lost, sets ripples oscillating outward, by themselves delineating the obstacles they encounter and envelop.] Immediately after this, and partly underneath, scribbled and spoken, began Stefan’s stroke, the text of Knecht.

                                                      Part One: Oscar

For Oscar it was always night. Things read were prop chairs and ladders speaking half-familiar forms in distant glints amid the tenebrous sack-cloth and masticated paper of an empty stage, pea-soup shadow-folds and anisette airwaves beating down on the proscenium from some inexhaustible fund of scenery, until time of day and weather were flicked on by the forgetful paid-by-the-column scribbler and the cheap set jumped out complete, a given fact, against which paradigms flounced their way from one denunciation to the next. Oscar could no longer sleep, spent the hours when the world lay off the boil working until his eyelids felt skinned from his face and the light in his room as sick as dried egg yolk tears; morning when the worlds boiler spluttered again into fire saw him lying on his bed obliterated, his heart not a furnace stoked at all hours but a black, soot-crusted cast-iron stove spitting and fretting with smoke, his mind a single dark line chasing pitilessly through phrases that his merely having coined made them at once appear commonplaces, scraps of brute sound used to sell interchangeable commodities.

            The adjustment to permanent insomnia took more than a week, and for the first four nights he could not bring himself to write anything: his head stopped aching after the third, and he could look at a printed page without experiencing a resurgence of recent food, but he wandered, a dazed, nervous mass, under a zinc-plated sky, darting from the shadow under one porch to the next like a stranded weevil, dozed open-eyed over a forgotten cup of coffee only to snap awake in inexplicable panic over the sudden black deluge pressing against the windows and being unable to understand not how he came to be there but why, why that and not something else he couldn’t think of but must be more important, lay prone in listless absorption [Comment: why this inventory?]while waxen dawn threatened with its chill newspaper headline to expose him as finally excluded from business. The crisis passed when he wrote first what a thought said, there is no more bookkeeping for you, friend. That sentence, with its patina of hopelessness, led to all others.

            If he did not have to go out he might have decided to remain lying there forever gnawing over the bad words he had perpetrated and call it joy, but instead he creaked upright, washed his humid self as if it were just a slightly horrible property he might need and slowly encased its vulnerable skin in a sombre grey suit that, newly dry-cleaned, chafed just the same. Spectacles seemed to conceal his seemingly bruised appearance from the seeming people (whose crowded itineraries always left them room to make mouths at cosmetic irregularities) fleeing themselves in the percussive streets he crossed on his way south to the office, located unannounced in the basement of a crumbling building whose main door never opened. He entered without knocking, ignored the receptionist, a dark dour little creature who greeted everyone except Oscar, having once, and that was enough, wrinkled her mushroom nose at him, and went in to see Ashcroft, the editor, who looked up from a row of text he held pinioned between pen and finger and without preliminary sez in his customary distracted manner, tapping his temple, ‘Its you, is it. Just the man. This submission could do with a going-over. The authors not likely to make a noise about it, because if we weren’t short of material... Just that the style needs taming a little, so you could shape it into more of an argument,’ suggesting to Oscar for one wild moment that he had been here all the time and the last few days had been a viscid hallucination, but as soon as he recognized what game was to be played he was enveloped in a calm glee that as long as he remained awake would never desert him. By the way, Fabius was looking for him a minute ago. More copy? His support was appreciated. Oscar nodded graciously and removed again to the outer office, a contributor under three names, none of them his, smiling a pale smile. 

            The article was a wretched piece of propaganda, indubitably, with its expected adherence to the historical doctrine, but what offended him more was the manner of its expression. He was altering a sentence adverting to the first global, or holy, slaughter to something more civilized and inoffensive when Fabius came back, about whom let me say a little. Fabius Schumann was of family, which is good because not all of us are so fortunate as to enjoy the delights and heartcreaks of family life, of similar age to Oscar, whom he had chosen to persist in cultivating in spite or even because of the marked lack of enthusiasm this ambition had encountered in its favoured object, always dandyishly well-dressed, and involved in this weekly newspaper in the capacity of assistant editor out of, one might guess, an over-evolved sense of guilt that drove him to made amends in this minor way. Compensating for a general speech deficit, he could never stop talking. Enough. On his way to Oscar, who did not acknowledge him, he received as usual a simper from the desk girl but as usual nothing more, poor nameless desk girl, who here recedes again to stage property and has no further role except as a prim housekeeper who always remembered to polish the brass fittings, along with Ashcroft as paterfamilias, Fabius as the dutiful son and maybe a fat blue Persian, all leading an idyllic existence together in a southern villa beside the billowing metal ocean spangled with jewels blazing all melting songful day. [Comment: ?]

            ‘Come and have a drink. An invitation that will interest you, if you have any sense.’

            ‘Lunchtime,’ sez Oscar, impressed by his own dry promptitude, feeling only slightly light-headed but at once little concerned with what he said, or how. ‘I have to do this thing now.’

            ‘No one would know it to look at you. Hidden away all alone in his burrow, secretive as a fieldmouse, and now we know why. He plots against us.’ Oscar felt a c-fibre twitching an alarm, but swift-managed it with the merest pause in his tailor work. ‘Your article in the Firebird. Up to your standard, but different in tone from your artworks with us, I noticed that right away. How many of you are there, pal?’

            When he saw his own words, made alien by print, tears filled his dry itching eyes. He nearly sobbed. ‘Its nothing, less than nothing. Didn’t know it would be there yet. What a strange thing, seeing your own smug phrases arrogating the authority to define things. It’s enough to make you give up writing, to peel off the outer shell of yourself leaving the putrid fish-sauce components of that calling for the seagulls to mull over. The image that most visits me on days when I can’t bring myself to do anything has some me looking down mournfully on a small tangled heap of bones, skin and hair that represents another, irrecoverable me, loose clinging bits twitched in the stiff breeze, the sea pulsing steadily up the slithering stones to float and dissolve it.’ The words faded on a reedy sigh; he stared at the page unseeing, the white abysm on which the words drifted kindling hypnotically under the lamp.

            Fabius side-eyed him coldly, quizzically. ‘Never mind about later. You need that drink now.’ And so it happened that Oscar floated through the becalmed stir at eleven on a marbled morning with his acquaintances incessant inconsequent chatter not the uppermost layer in the stratified sigma, the dissonantly contrapuntal passacaglia his genial madness composed in place of a world which as we know is more like an eviscerated onion [Comment: no it is not] aspiring in vain to its former, largely fictional (as is come to think of it the aspiration), condition, floated with a sense of implacable destiny past signs, labels, numbers, unfailingly reading the meaning sublimated in all these automatic gestures because the clear fluid in which they swam also pervaded him, and one day soon with a great intake of breath and a silent shout he would disperse into air and light; all he needed were the words.

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