THE INFORMATION

George Balanchine, into George Bush and George Brown, into Guy Burgess and Geoff Boycott, Gerald Brenan and Grigori Baklanov, George Brummell and Georges Braque, Geoffrey Biddulph and Gertude Bell, into Giovanni Barbirolli and Giovanni Boccaccio and Gianlorenzo Bernini and Giambattista Bodoni. Into Granville Barker and Gaudier-Brzeska. Into Guinea-Bissau. Gladstone Bag. Gutenberg Bible. Grolsch Beer. Great Bear. Great Britain.

Soon he would have to go out into it: into Great Britain, and its capital, London, which had suddenly-or was it gradually? … Which had suddenly turned, and shaped itself against his peace. It was now two-forty-five. Lunch had already been brought to him; he didn't even know who had borne the tray, such was the tact, discretion, and awe with which she had slipped in and out of the room-Demi? Pam? Paqui? Sheri? As if he was a whispering visionary, a couturier of the cosmos, on the brink of discovering … the universal. Actually he had got throughall the Saturday supplements, and the weeklies, and the fortnightly; but the PMLA and (Christ) The Little Magazine remained unprobed. Today he found three mentions: one in a piece about parking meters; one in a piece about the limitations of multicultural street theater; and one in a piece about the Profundity Requital (this made it all seem worthwhile, and even rational), in which he learned that he had bounced back into consideration, though he still lagged behind the Bosnian poetess who also ran a thousand-bed children's hospital in Gorazde-among others. On top of this he had also managed to cross the room occasionally and write something like Onwards from Amelior? in his notebook. Now he stood with his fists leaning on the long table (once more Nemo over his charts); he was staring at a loose pile of mail, non-urgent, second-echelon, which he would soon spare an hour on with Pam and a few yeses and nos and thank-yous and maybes. You don't know me but. I have recently been appointed as the. I am a student in my. This is the first time I have ever written to a. Despite recent triple heart-bypass surgery I felt I. You're probably fed up with. Here is a photograph of me in my. We at. I don't usually. What's it like being . . .

Gwyn advanced to the central window and looked down at the street and its ballroom of cherry blossom-the dance partners in their ball gowns, swelling and jostling and bristling, all the way to the bottom of the hill. How could the street not like him? The universe, the world, the hemisphere liked him. But the street didn't like him, and the city didn't like him. He would have to be going out into it for important and expensive meetings (things with Richard were not yet over): audiences at the feet of the great Buttruguena, the great Abdumomunov, the great O'Fla-herty. Before, the city had never paid him any mind, except in theater crush bars or high-visibility restaurants and, yes, every now and then out there when people stopped and stared in that fixed, gratified way, or frowned forgetfully as if trying to place him among their acquaintances . .. But now the city behaved as if it wanted to break his face. The city wanted to break his face.

Cognitive dissonance was what he was dealing with. Nothing rhymed.

Whereas applause and praise were gathering, circumambiently, in response to the new thing he had brought into the world, his novel, his gift, the world itself-the streets, which stretched away, in folds and folds-had begun to hate his being. Not qua novelist, he assumed. But personally. It wasn't that the streets were giving him a bad review. The streets didn't read. Newsprint often told him that he was the spokesman for the next generation, and even Gwyn could imagine the next generationminding that-looking around, and seeing how very few he spoke for, and how quietly. But, again, the next generation didn't know he spoke for them, or that newsprint thought he did. This was personal. The compact Celt in his expensive yet essentially democratic chinos and leather jacket, under his silvery blacktop of hair (lightly cropped, at present, against baldness): this creation was no longer invisible and monochrome in its A-to-B, pavement-using, pause-for-thought and taxi-hailing functions, but floridly motley. Was it fame? He had become part of the landscape. And the landscape didn't want him there. Gwyn stood by the window, looking out, wondering what he'd done.

It started happening almost the instant he got back from America. Did America do it? Was it the Californian tan, the money-color, the aurora of American fever?

Maybe it wasn't anything. Maybe it was nothing.

Take the day before yesterday. The talented fabulist-his prose as clear as a mountain creek-is walking along Kensington Park Road, through the spring rain, after a visit to the local bookshop, when out of the flow of the street an oncoming figure distinguishes itself, by retardation, by arrest, and stands there, awaiting his approach. And as the modern myth-maker nears, this figure starts to retreat in front of him, as if, by following, Gwyn was being followed-preceded, but followed. There is no alternative: the standard-bearer of the near future must raise his eyes and confront those of his follower. A sodden youth in a track suit. Who says simply, keeping step, 'Don't look at my face. Don't look at my face. Look at my hands. Look at the paint on these hands. Look at the blood on these fucking hands.'

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it wasn't anything.

Take yesterday. That rarest of literary phenomena-a cult writer with a mass audience-is walking home up Holland Park Avenue with his plastic bagful of coffee. He looks down for a second and walks into a slab of black. Loose change scatters all around them. The resonant allegorist takes three steps backwards, looks down, looks up again. The dark face in dark glasses is simply saying, 'You dumb cunt. Pick it up. Pick it up, you dumb cunt.' And there is the one-man paradigm-shift, down on his haunches, prizing pennies from the sticky street. He offers up the gathered change and it is dashed from his hand and he's down there again, and again. 'Come on, man. It was an accident.' And the mouth, as vivid as fruit pulp, just said, 'Yeah? I ain't your brother. You ain't my brother. Yeah?' Until he let him go.

Maybe nothing. He stood by the window, looking out, wondering what he'd done.

Gwyn had a new hobby, now, in his head. He was writing, or paraphrasing, his own biography-in his head. Not his autobiography: by no means. His biography, written by someone else. It was the official biography. Gwyn liked his new hobby so much that even he could tell that it might have deleterious-possibly disastrous-effects on his mental health. Solitary gratification didn't come much more solitary than this: even his own body was excluded from it. Here, biography was pornography. But he had managed to reach the (counterintuitive) conclusion that his new hobby somehow kept him sane. Anyway, he was hooked. He couldn't put it down.

Of course, the biography was insufficiently finished. It had no tide, for instance. Yes, it needed work. Now he left his study and went across the passage to the visitors' room, to change.

Although Barry was no. A keen. While no jock or gym rat, Barry responded to the heightened life of fierce competition. He loved games and sports. (But he hated games and sports. Because he always lost.) With his old sparring. With his old friend Richard Tull he enjoyed a healthy rivalry-on the tennis court, over the snooker table, and across the chessboard. (And he always lost. He never won.) As a novelist Tull was no. Unfavored by the muses, Tull was nevertheless. In hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness, if not in imaginative fiction, Tull was Barry's . . .

Superior? T-shirt, shorts, jockey pants, socks: all laid out for him. As usual, hereabouts, Gwyn moved on to a better chapter.

He had a reputation as a. He made no secret of his love of. To him, the fairer. In every sense he was enamored of womankind. Demeter, who would continue to love him dearly, eventually resigned herself to the fact that. Some men, she came to realize, carry with them such intensity of. In him, the lifeblood. Now that Lady Demeter, in the words of W. B. Yeats, is old and gray and full of sleep, it is with a rueful smile that she …

Wearing his new black track suit he came down into the hall and browsed about the sideboard, reviewing the invitations and looking for his car keys. He was meeting Richard at the Warlock. Things had changed: they just said hello, and played, and said good-bye. The Warlock was good because he could drive straight into the car park, eschewing all real contact with the city and the streets that suddenly hated his life.

Gwyn was looking forward to reading the Richard Tull profile: five thousand words. At least it was going to be all about Gwyn. And while he was reading it he wouldn't be reading about soil erosion or Norman architecture or curtain rails or Keir Hardie or deck chairs or treetops, or any of the other stuff he read about, just in case.