‘It couldn’t happen to you.’
‘Elena – don’t tempt fate like that. Of course it could happen to me.’
‘…How long did Braine live?’
‘Till sixty-odd. His dates are the same as Larkin’s.’
‘Now don’t you start.’
Loose London in the night was hurriedly and guiltily reassembling itself. The urban shapes thickened. And I could feel it about to resume – the unwelcome self-absorption, the slow twelve-bar blues of my thoughts…For suicide, the metaphysical model I favoured was that of Islam. In the Islamic afterlife, the self-slaughterer was on a loop, re-experiencing his death for ever and ever. But what was the loop’s duration? If it was no more than a minute, then I would choke on my own vomit till the end of time. If on the other hand it was a fair bit longer, then a preliminary hour or two of drugged and drunken stupefaction, under a heap of vodka bottles and pill jars and tins of tobacco, seemed as good a way as any of getting through eternity…Suicide resembled the kind of marriage very frequently portrayed in art, where husband or wife or both just had to get out. Everyone on earth was married to life; and the suicides went because they couldn’t stay, they just couldn’t stay another second. I was married to life, but also to Elena. And I could stay, couldn’t I? I could stay.
‘What’s French for short story?’
‘Not sure. Une conte maybe.’
‘I’m feeling sad about John Braine,’ I said, as the train continued to loiter a mile or two south-east of Waterloo. ‘And guilty about Jed Slot.’
‘Guilty? About that little schnook?’
‘Yes, guilty, Pulc – we should’ve come to his rescue. “Jed?” we should’ve said. “Let us handle this.” We could’ve stepped in and talked about all the different types of short story. The parable. The squib. The anecdote. The sting in the tail. The slice of life.’
‘Your voice has gone all gravelly.’
‘I know. I can hear it…Ninety per cent of short stories are slices of life. And that’s what life is like, in the end. Not a novel. A sliced loaf of short stories. But with different grains.’ Different textures and thicknesses. Some as knotty as V. S. Pritchett, some as smooth as Alice Munro (some as cruel as ‘Sredni Vashtar’, some as tender as ‘The Circular Ruins’). I said, ‘ “St-Malo” qualifies as a smirk short story, El.’ Actually it qualifies as a conte de branlette – but with one vital difference. Quite possibly unique in the soiled little archive of wank fiction, ‘St-Malo’ is true.
*1 No, not even silver-spoon Ivy Leaguers were getting taller; and no one knew why. In a long and fascinating essay in the New Yorker, the scientist–writer, having exhausted all possible explanations, ended with what amounted to a poeticism. His guess was that the cause might be extreme inequality. Extreme inequality, we now know, has an adverse effect on every index of societal health – including economic health…Incidentally my height would have kept me out of the First World War; but not for long. In August 1914 you had to be at least five foot eight. By October it was five foot five (and soon after that it was five foot three). Similarly, twenty-twenty vision, as a requirement, soon degenerated; even basic bifocalism was waived, and you could join up with one eye.
*2 This kind of obsessiveness can be done funnily (as in early Nicholson Baker), but Le Clézio goes about it with a solemnity I found as leaden as his heroine’s opening sally (oh, the falsity and boredom of that ‘perhaps’ and that ‘simply’ and that ‘suddenly’): ‘this girl blurted out, jokingly perhaps, or simply because it had suddenly become the truth: “I am nothing.” ’ Well, it isn’t the truth; and who could possibly take it ‘jokingly’?
*3 Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey. That migration was from India to Eurasia, mainly to the countries of Eastern Europe. The title proper derived from a folk saying repeated to the author by a Bulgarian activist, Mustapha (at a conference in Slovakia): ‘Bury me standing. I’ve been on my knees all my life.’
*4 My early childhood in South Wales was dominated by the sea. Hilly needed no urging from Nicolas and me and later Myfanwy to go to the beach (there were several beaches) in any weather. Two hundred times a year I ran across sand with our big dogs. The dogs, prominent among them Bessie, then Flossie, then Nancy, also did their duty by the Amis children in giving us our first taste of death and grief. That’s how you start.
*5 It was not because he shared Bellow’s view of Paris that Hitler, in 1944, gave the order to destroy it (the order was disobeyed, as were other Führer Orders or ‘Nero Orders’ of his final year)…Saul was in Paris, with his first wife and his first child, from 1948 to 1950 on the GI Bill (and hating the French almost as much as Dostoevsky had hated them in 1862). ‘Americans of my generation crossed the Atlantic…to look upon this human, warm, noble, beautiful and also proud, morbid, cynical, and treacherous setting.’ ‘My Paris’, collected in It All Adds Up.
*6 The last train to Auschwitz left France on August 22, 1944 (bringing the total of doomed deportees to about 76,000). August 22 was a Tuesday. The following Saturday de Gaulle officially inaugurated the Liberation of Paris. That same weekend Philippe Pétain and his crew were being forcibly transferred from one spa town to another, from Vichy in central France to Sigmaringen in southern Germany (in whose castle they gibbered to their defence lawyers while praying for a Nazi victory)…Now there is in world literature a venerable continuity of two-ply humanism in the form
of writer–doctors: Rabelais, Henry Vaughan, Smollett, Goldsmith, Schiller, Chekhov, Bulgakov, William Carlos Williams. In Schloss Sigmaringen the goddess of history staged a negative epiphany. The writer–doctor in attendance there was the nth-degree nihilist and
