The Back of His Head (37 page)

But I read what he gave me, all the same. Who, this time?—someone hitherto unknown to me, it turned out, an American called John Hopkins whose greatest distinction, it seemed, was to have written a novel called, remarkably,
Tangier Buzzless Flies
. No, the eponymous insects are barely mentioned in it—just once, early on, and perhaps twice more after that. Instead, the novel is full of marvellously precise descriptions of
things
, of the uncreated world and the hovering, implicit, unrealised sexual tension that comes with it.

Just like Raymond's world: in
Kerr
, most obviously—and so it should be, I realised as I began to read the other man. For Raymond's novel is full of him, in sentences flecked with his words but more often in entire scenes, perhaps six or eight throughout, that he works into something that comes to seem his own. That passage early on, for example, one of my favourites, where Kerr is prowling around the enormous lamp in the old Peñón lighthouse, following and following Anir until it's unclear who stalks whom: but there, nearly twenty years earlier than that, are Cabell and the boy Omar, circling each other high in the lighthouse of
Tangier Buzzless Flies
, inspecting the mechanism that turns on a pool of mercury and the beam that reaches out for boats and up for planes and is the most powerful in all of Africa.

I sat open-mouthed at the audacity of this. The detail about the mercury had entranced me—delighted me—when I first read Raymond's version in
Kerr
. The light has
a rhythm of four flashes in each twenty-second revolution
, the boy tells the man in each work, the American's and Raymond's: in each, the man asks the boy how far the beam can be seen and the boy tells him,
On a clear night, sixty-two kilometres
. I'd marvelled at the precision of all this at the time: what
was
there my uncle didn't know? Now, he seemed to be falling apart in my hands like a dry, stale cake.

Or in fact in Julian's hands, for here he came again a few days after, this time with an entire box of books and papers: he
thumped
it onto my desk. You won't believe this! he said. Mark Twain! Mark
Twain?
I asked him.
Innocents Abroad
, he told me, and held it up. Not much, he said—just the description near the start, remember? They land and they get swarmed by the locals? Don't
tell
me, I groaned. He's used it for near the start of
Bisque
? Yes!—Julian, surprisingly cheery for all that was happening—page four, he said. When they land at Ibiza Town. Ray's borrowed just a few phrases, and he uses the word order in some of the sentences as well, you can see that. He sort of writes over the top of them, he takes over their writing voice. It's there if you listen.

Listen I did, and there indeed it was: and back Julian came, over the next few days and weeks, with more of this sort of thing and then more of it after that. Gradually, as I read and reread, I began to see a pattern in what had been done: to see how, in effect, my uncle built his fiction. Not all of it, certainly. The majority of what he wrote was his own: but the more I reread him, the more I began to wonder what that might actually mean, not just to him but to anyone and everyone who wrote and read literature. Those opening pages of
Flatland
—were they his or were they hers, that long-lost unknown dead woman's? If so, who owned them, and, if not hers, at what point did they become his?—since (of this, I became more and more clear as I thought it through) there was no doubt that what he used
did
become his, wherever he took it from. Or were they none of the above: were they just—
writing?

Gradually, an answer of sorts: the beginnings of an answer. As you can see, it's something that still occupies my mind. There was a moment when, reading something from Paul Bowles—for, yes, of course, he was in the mix, too, of course he was, along with obvious others, how could he not be?—reading one of his essays, in fact, not the fiction—I heard the Master. I'd become familiar with the experience of reading passages side by side and seeing where the rhythm of the earlier writer—not words, not sentences, but the rhythm—the voice, if you like—seeing where this melted into the later writer's and became his own. Here was the next step, the next stage: of
course
it was, of
course
—

I forget exactly the words and sentences involved. Instead, I suddenly heard Raymond's voice in the other man's writing, almost as if he was in the room with me. I jerked up straight and looked around. Lord, what was this, what
was
this? I looked down and read more, and the old man fell silent: but not for long, because before the bottom of the page or the top of the next he started up again.

I stared at the words on the page, I remember. How did this happen, how did it work?

I asked myself this again a few days later when I found him writing someone else's fiction, a woman's, I think: work that, on the face of it, was nothing like his in any way—but there he was all the same, barking away on her page. And I asked the question once more when I read someone yet different again and heard Paul Bowles in him—or was it back to Hopkins and his first novel, the one set in Peru, with its almost selfless, pared, almost helpless prose, the nearest I've ever seen to somebody giving up and not writing at all?
The Attempt
, its title—writing as
trying
, in effect, writing as a long shot, writing as almost nothing at all: a feint, a gesture. And isn't that how Raymond wrote at his best, with no ego or as little as was possible, just the words on the page, taking care of themselves, living in their own magnificent, independent word-world? Isn't it?

Just how much of other people's writing had he written during his life, and how much had they written of his? Is this how it worked, had I found the trick of it at last? Was this the only world there was, and was
that
why he'd called his novel
Flatland
?—not for the desert world of Algeria, but for the flat, flat word-world of the page, the only world that really is real?

That's how it is. I'm sure. The words come first. It doesn't matter where they come from, they're the first thing that happens.
In the beginning
—

Then, slowly, facts forming from words, the truth coming from the language and—not soon, not soon—becoming the hard reality we all know and agree on, the sure-footed fiction of our lives.
Yes, yes, of course that happened, of course that's how things were done: what could be more natural?

It's there in writing!

Julian has told me it's nothing new, this understanding that slowly came to me, that it's been thought before and also that he doesn't believe a word of it. Maybe so: but you've seen how much I loathe the present-moment sequences in this very book—this one, the one in your hands—those sequences which try to account for the bewildering events happening in the ever-moving
now
, the chaos of the living moment, the tyranny of the present, its disconnections and discontinuities, its yearning for the missing hand of the author and its all-too-manifest lack of it. What, oh what, is going to happen next? Where are we being taken?

Then, on the other hand, how much have I enjoyed sections like this, coalescing as they have, forming themselves, becoming truer and truer as the past presents its increasingly confident language to me. Oh, how the Master must have fallen on the young woman's account of her hundred-year-old Algeria when he did, how utterly crystalline must it have seemed to him in its prose, how much hardened by time, how
old
and
lived
, how irrevocably
true
and
real
, how ripe and ready for him to find a way of gathering up all the emotion and grief and confusion he'd brought with him out of Africa. No wonder he seized it as he did, full of yearning as he was to begin to tell the truth of his time there, and the truth, untrue as it might be, of his time with the youth called Anir: if Anir was indeed a youth or something else, and if that was his name and if in fact he had a name, and if, indeed, he'd ever existed in the first place, which he quite possibly did: though, on the other hand, of course, he might not have done so and it might be the case that there was no one back there, no personal angel of his in existence at all—

It's plagiarism all the same, Julian said, when he'd heard me out. Oh, I know he's a genius, I know Ray was a—
yes yes of course
, I said back to him.
A genius. No doubt about that:
and I meant it, I meant it as I hope you can see.

An uncomfortable pause. Well, then, if he's a genius what do we do with all this stuff? Julian, poking a foot at the boxes, as they'd become by now, on the floor of his studio. It's radioactive, isn't it? I presume we don't mention it to the others? Oh, Lord
God
, no, I told him. Imagine if Robert Semple got hold of this—it'd be in the papers in—yes, Julian said, yes, yes it would, it'd be all over the media, we'd be sunk, Ray'd be sunk if Robert got wind of this stuff, I mean, Nobel Prize-winner and all—

Another pause.

We could put an embargo on it, I said. The library, I mean. Ten years, I think that's the maximum—no one allowed access to these things for ten years? No, he said, I think it's as long as we want, isn't it? A library embargo? However long the trustees want? I'll have to look into it. Then there's the legal statute of limitations, I said. Does that apply? Only to published material, Julian said. It covers publication.

The thing is, he said, however long we embargo this stuff, the embargo'll end sometime, and then—

Another pause. We knew, I'm sure, both of us, what was coming next. I can't believe this, Julian murmured. I can't believe we're thinking this. Another long silence, and then he said, they're pretty much untraceable, I suppose. I haven't made a record of any of this, he said.

Unforgivable, I know, I know—indefensible, even: but understandable enough, surely, given the circumstances. And for the better—well, that's what we told each other as—I'll admit it, I'll admit it—we
burned
these things. Julian and I burned the books and the notes and the incriminating little scraps of paper, everything the Master's borrowings had come from over thirty or forty years. We gave him back his authenticity. The two of us there in Julian's overwhelmed backyard one chilly midwinter afternoon, guiltily popping the poor little rag of a book into his incinerator—the dead woman's dead little book, the first of our sacrifices—and unable, each of us, to meet the other's eye as we did so. A
book
, for goodness' sake, dropped into the face-burning, mote-dancing exhalation of the incinerator. I'll declare it lost, Julian said, not happily. When I get back on Monday morning I'll declare it lost.

And then he said, I wonder how many others there are? Authors
mute inglorious
—you remember the line? Writers who didn't get the Nobel Prize? All those forgotten books, millions and millions of them? Billions? All that writing, d'you ever think of that? All those words, just lying there, no one's reading them anymore, they might as well not've been written? All that thought, all that imagining, all that writing, just—gone?

Yes, I told him. I do think of that, I do.
I can't believe I'm burning books
, I remember thinking. I'm sure this is a oncer, I said to him, the dry heat on my face. I mean, what we're burning now. I'm sure there's nothing else—

I almost said
I'm sure there's nothing else he plagiarised
, but I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't because I've thought a lot about this since and it's become clearer to me that a great artist doesn't do that, it's become clearer that what a great artist does is something subtler and more nearly inevitable and necessary—a duty, almost, to the greater oceanic processes of literature. This is what I've come, over the years since, to think, and I believe it's what Raymond believed, too. I am convinced of that.

I didn't say
plagiarism
back then by Julian's incinerator, and stopped short and held my counsel. I smelled instead the curious, distinctive smell from when I first met my uncle that autumn morning forty years ago and more, the smell of smoke outdoors as it mingles with mist on the presenting edge of rain. And, all the while, the flames, the flames crackling at our unworthy, sinful, book-burners' feet.

One more contribution from Julian, however.

I've cracked the tape, he told me one evening. The one with the secret. I've listened to it. I think you ought to hear it. When he said this to me I was astonished—I thought he'd given up trying. It's on the reverse side, he said, the thing I want you to listen to.

He'd rummaged up a much newer tapedeck, apparently, and had played Geneva's tape on it. Not perfect, he said, but good enough.
Marvellous
, I told him, and I remember he looked across at me when I said that. I watched him push the plug of the deck into the wall socket and slip the tape into its portal.

He shut the lid and looked across at me. He had a remote control in his hand.

Now, you're sure you want to hear this? he asked.