I reached a glassed-off area, an internal conservatory or hothouse for the senior French writers, who were on exhibit but sequestered from the merchandisers, the publishers, the pundits, the conference bums, and of course the junior French writers. It now resembled one of those places compassionately reserved for smokers, still to be found in airports, even American airports…Was that one over there J. M. G. le Clézio? He was blondly haggard-handsome enough. In 1973 I reviewed a Le Clézio novel, War, and the piece was present in my mind because I’d recently collected it. War is an example of choseisme, or thing-ism; thus the author wanders about like a fact-finder from the planet Krypton (three pages on a department-store placard, four on a lightbulb)…*2 The senior French writers sat glazed and unsmiling (and among French intellectuals, I knew, it was considered trivial not to be clinically depressed). Did they find anything funny? One of the things that didn’t make them laugh, clearly, was laughable pretension…In Nabokov’s brightly mournful late novella Transparent Things (1972), flighty Julia takes the stolid hero, Hugh Person, to the avant-garde play that everyone is talking about: and when the curtain goes up Hugh is ‘not surprised to be regaled with the sight of a naked hermit sitting on a cracked toilet in the middle of an empty stage’. Nabokov has elsewhere made the point that all writers who are any good are funny. Not funny all the time – but funny. All the lasting British novelists are funny; the same is true of the Russians (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Tolstoy are funny); and this became true of the Americans. Franz Kafka, whatever your professor might have told you, is funny. Writers are funny because life is funny. Here’s something else that is true: writers are life’s eulogists. The romanciers de grimace, the woe specialists, the wound flaunters, the naked-hermit and cracked-toilet crowd have gone and made an elementary mistake, thinking that writers are life’s elegists…Within the glass menagerie each scowlist was accompanied by an attractive young woman. And this was part of the trouble. In Herzog the hero calls for a sexual boycott of the professional melancholics – those who felt it was their duty to reject ‘worldly happiness, this Western plague, this mental leprosy’. ‘The world’, writes Bellow, ‘should love lovers; but not theoreticians. Never theoreticians! Show them the door.’ Yes, that might do it. I noticed that one no doubt much-praised sourpuss (his baldy haircut, his nicotine-rich moustache, his mouth like a half-empty goody bag with its lumps of fudge and butterscotch) was warmly berating the meek little blonde at his side, who sat with her hands clenched and her head contritely bowed. Come on, darling, I thought (as I secured yet another glass of white wine), heed Moses Herzog. ‘Ladies, throw out these gloomy bastards!’
Now Elena appeared. She looked combative, self-sufficient, and insanely cheerful. No, he couldn’t go on evading it – he would have to sit down soon and come up with a definition of love.
∗
The presentation
‘You’re always saying I look insanely cheerful.’
‘Well you always do,’ he said. ‘And it’s particularly hard to miss around here. Elena – go and have a shriek and a cackle with J. M. G. le Clézio.’
‘…What have you been up to?’
‘Smirking at the scowl novelists – and mapping out my smirk novel. I’m committed to it, Pulc. I already feel it stirring within me.’
‘Mm. That one’ll go the way of The Crap Generation. You won’t write a word.’
‘Provably false. I’ve started it…Wait. Here we are. You’re on.’
‘…Et le vainqueur’, intoned an amplified voice, ‘du Prix Mirabeau de la Non-Fiction est – Enterrez-moi debout: L’odyssée des Tziganes!’*3
‘Careful now,’ he said. ‘Remember Jean-Jacques hates Sam.’
‘Fuck Jean-Jacques. Here’s my speech,’ she said, passing him two photcopied pages, ‘in English.’
Another kiss and she was away, striding forward and up on to the stage. As he watched her go, and watched her climb, he found that a little caesura had opened up in his mind: he knew why France hated America, but he had quite forgotten why America hated France. Elena was about to remind him.
‘Bonsoir,’ she began. ‘En ce moment, les Français ne sont pas très populaires en America (et vice versa), parce que vous obstruez notre chemin vers la guerre. Because you obstruct our path to war. Mais vous êtes très, très populaires avec cette Americaine. Je vous remercie de tout mon coeur pour mon prix adorable…’
She talked for another 105 seconds. During this time he followed the transcript but also looked around and became aware of the audience in the hall. Her unarguably, her ascertainably beautiful face filled half a dozen TV screens, like an electronic tutelary spirit. And the gradual smiles of the men and women gathered there slowly changed, from mildly reluctant to wholly unreluctant, even the smiles of the senior French novelists, as they acknowledged what was plain to see: a phenomenal concentration of blessings…
Well, one thing was clear. Martin didn’t have a crap wife; he had a wife who was a blinding embarras de richesses. And the two of them dwelt harmoniously in a six-bedroom house near Regent’s Park…So what was all this about suicide? But it was a fact; it was undeniably the case that he was always wondering why everyone, including all his children, even Inez (who was now three), didn’t commit suicide. That’s right: each time he laid eyes on them he was agreeably surprised to find that they were still in one piece. Well, here
