The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (2 page)

RTK:
You say your characters ‘get what they want’. But I sometimes find myself wondering how they would manage to go on with their lives after the last page.

HF:
Well, that’s something we all have to deal with, isn’t it?

RTK:
Earlier you mentioned Patricia Highsmith as an influence on your writing. Highsmith famously said that she was ‘interested in the effect of guilt’ upon the heroes of her stories. Do you think you are interested in something similar?

HF:
No – not ‘guilt’, that’s not something I really recognise. I would say I’m interested in characters coming to terms with things, in themselves and in the world. It’s about their arriving at a knowledge, of murder, of death … And then they use this, and grow out of what they were. That’s a conscious theme of all my books.

RTK:
In your own life would you say you’ve had experiences that affected you in just this way?

HF:
I think for my generation a big part of it was growing up just after the war, in the shadow of that, which had a
profound effect on me, certainly, and from an early age. I remember, at school, reading accounts of concentration camps. And you were told this was what the Germans were capable of – or the Russians, in the case of the gulags. But these things weren’t dreadful because they were done by Russians or Germans. I thought, ‘This is what
human beings
are capable of.’ It led you to wonder how you would cope in that situation – cope, I mean, whether on one side or the other, whether one was in such a camp or running it.

The other main theme in my books, I suppose, is the ‘beauty and the beast’ element – that you have to have them both, you can’t have one without the other. Beauty without the beast is shallow, meaningless.

RTK:
Would you say it’s a necessary acknowledgement of evil in the world?

HF:
Not ‘evil’, just the facts of life. I don’t really ‘do’ evil (
laughs
). I hate the word ‘innocent’, too – I know what people mean by it but I just don’t buy it. There’s ignorance and then there’s knowledge, or there should be.

People say Francis Bacon’s paintings are horrific, but I find them beautiful as paintings. The subject matter is, in a sense, irrelevant. If you consider the power of Renaissance painters who painted crucifixions – the subject may be tragic or whatever you want to call it, but if the paintings are beautiful then in that way you get the whole package. The Grunewald
Crucifixion
in Colmar, for example, is horrific but also beautiful. Whereas paintings by someone like Renoir who just did flowers and rosy-cheeked girls are much uglier to me.

RTK:
So the artist needs to make an accommodation with the horrific, to look at it squarely?

HF:
Oh, I think everybody should, artists or no. I should say, I don’t think artists are any more corrupt than anyone else – I just think they should stop pretending that they’re
less
.

On the morning of his fifty-fifth birthday, Alfred Albers announced to his mistress that someone was planning to kill him.

‘Oh lovey, they’re not,’ Dorothy said, running a comb through her hair, giving her lover a peck on the cheek, and doing up her coat. She smiled at him with what was clearly meant to be a disarming smile. ‘Not today, anyway.’

For a moment Alfred thought of arguing his case, or even of showing her the anonymous letter he had just received. He knew, however, that if he did the one he would only upset her, and if he did the other he would make her angry, and make her accuse him of having cut up some newspapers, glued the words to a sheet of paper, and sent the thing himself. Besides, she was late for work. So he contented himself with giving her a hurt, owlish look; with trying to make sure no tears came into his eyes, as they always did when he was accused of lying; and with telling her soulfully ‘Well, maybe not of killing me’. Then he raised himself on his toes, kissed her on the lips, and said ‘Don’t be late. Remember we’re going to Louise’s for dinner.’

Someone really was though, he protested to himself after Dorothy had muttered ‘Louise indeed’, had added, ‘Be good’, and had practically run out of the house. And after he had gone into the kitchen, been almost knocked over by Matilda rushing out of the house after her mother to go riding—‘Oh Alfred Happy Birthday see you later can’t stop Bye’—and had taken the letter out of his pocket, he couldn’t help becoming slightly
tearful. He understood Dorothy, of course, and if he had been her he would have reacted in the same way. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had told her that someone was planning to kill him. In fact he did so on average twice a year; whenever he had one of his attacks. Only, he told himself, all those other times his announcement had been part of a recognisable pattern. First, the obsessive reading of newspapers, of magazine articles about terrorism, and books about the Second World War. Then the headaches, the cramps that made him retire to his bed, and lie there curled up like a little child in pain. And finally the uncontrollable tears, the awful sense that at any second the door was going to be flung open and
They,
whoever they were, were going to come in and get him, and the whimpering, pathetic pleas for Dorothy to put her arms around him and protect him, because having carried him off somewhere—probably bundling him into the boot of a car without a numberplate—and having tortured him,
They
were going to murder him.

Whereas today, it had all been quite different. For one thing, he had been in a good mood when he had got up this morning and contemplated the day ahead. For another, it was only a month since he had come out of hospital, and never before had he started to slide back into darkness so soon after re-emerging into the light. And for still another, even if he had, exceptionally, had a sudden relapse, he wouldn’t, surely, have started at the bottom of the slope, so to speak; nor have been capable of going so relatively calmly into the hall as Dorothy was preparing to go out, standing there like a schoolboy who has been told to relay a message to the headmaster and isn’t certain how to put it, and getting that message out in such a, for him, bald and undramatic way.

‘Oh, thank you,’ he had said when Dorothy had wished him a happy birthday, and had gone on, when she had smiled at him, and asked ‘What are you looking like that for?’, to say ‘I just got an anonymous letter. Someone’s planning to kill me.’

No, he understood her, he told himself as he stood and looked
down at the letter again; but she should have taken him seriously, and she shouldn’t have been so smoothly, so very thoughtlessly dismissive. I mean, if she told me she’d just received an
anonymous
letter—but then she wouldn’t, would she? Either tell me, or get one.

It was a very nasty letter.

‘To the Jew Alfred Albers. It’s a shame they didn’t kill you when they killed your father. Or that Hitler didn’t make it six million and one. But don’t worry. We’re going to remedy those mistakes. In the meantime if you know what’s good for you you won’t write another word. Otherwise—how would you like it if something happened to your beautiful Dorothy? Or to her beautiful daughter? It might you know. And it should. Damned Jew lovers. From: a Jew hater.’

The trouble was: if he didn’t get Dorothy to believe him this evening, and wasn’t able to convince her that he hadn’t composed the beastly thing himself, it was more than likely that he would have a relapse; and that he would find the shutters being banged shut again, though they had only recently been reopened, and it was still mid-morning in the day of his sanity. And if that happened—well, naturally Dorothy would never believe him. He might even start to doubt himself, and wonder if perhaps, it was possible, he could have …

No, he told himself firmly, and once more stuffed the letter back into the pocket of his old woollen dressing-gown. Someone—someone who clearly knew him and his
circumstances
rather well—had composed that filth and sent it to him, and he was not imagining things. And now what he must do, before he allowed himself to start dwelling on its contents, or allowed that cold, sick feeling in his stomach that opening it had caused to spread up through the rest of his body, was take a shower, have some breakfast, and get to work. To resume his account of ‘The Wreck of the
Chateaubriand’;
and not reflect for a moment that it might be precisely this long-delayed,
long-overdue
account that had prompted someone to buy a
newspaper
or newspapers, and start searching for the words ‘To’, ‘the’, ‘Jew’; and for the individual letters that, pasted together, would spell the name ‘Alfred Albers’.

Of course he would never permit his account to be published, he murmured silently as he made his way to the bathroom. Not in his lifetime, anyway. It was even possible that he would never be able to finish it entirely. All the same, he had to get as much of it down as he could. Because—well, because it was the truth; the truth about himself, and the truth of what happened that night. Because, too, if he did manage to tell the story, to his own satisfaction if not to anyone else’s—mightn’t he, albeit at this late stage, be able to salvage something from the wreck of his mind?

Yes, he told himself now, still trying to be firm. He might. For as he had mentioned in that same newspaper interview in which he had alas let slip that he was engaged on writing about the wreck of the
Chateaubriand
—though had failed to say anything about not intending to publish it—all his mental
problems
had started that night.

The night, as he liked to think of it, that all his dreams had gone down.

*

He had been twenty at the time; a shy, stuttering, portly young man with staring, short-sighted eyes and already thinning hair; and his pleasure at being shown to a first-class cabin when he had embarked at Cherbourg, having his photograph taken, and being asked by reporters who looked as if they could barely read or write about the little book of poems he had recently published, was hardly lessened by the fact that he felt that just by stepping on board this ship he was betraying everything his father had stood for, worked for and died for. Anymore than it was lessened by the fact that he knew perfectly well that if his father hadn’t been who he was, and died the death he had, not
one of his fellow passengers in first-class would have given him more than a disdainful glance, nor would any of those reporters have so much as stepped out of his way, let alone asked him about a volume of poems.

His father had been a hero; a martyr to the cause of liberty and equality; not to mention a romantically good-looking man with long, dark hair and, to judge by the photographs, a haughty expression. Whereas he—he was just a plump, none-
too-attractive
versifier; who, if he didn’t get used to the idea that he was not his father, would never be happy for a moment. All right, perhaps he was betraying everything Jean Albers had lived and died for. Yet hadn’t he also lived and died for the right of the gauche, overweight, unattractive and poor to be treated the same way as the sophisticated, sleek, beautiful and rich?
Indeed
, he had, the young Alfred answered himself, conscious of a certain speciousness in his argument, as he followed a steward down a corridor of polished wood. And what did it matter what had caused the eyes of some of those sleek and beautiful people to flicker with recognition as they saw him come on board, and would, he was certain, cause their lips to smile at him and issue invitations to him as soon as the ship had sailed? All right, they did it only because he was the son of a hero. Having greeted him, however, and having questioned him, might not one or two of those rich, titled and in some cases famous people, or one or two of those reporters, be tempted to go so far as actually to buy a copy of his little book, actually to open it, actually to read what was written there? There was at least a chance. Then if they did, and recognised that seed of truth he hoped was planted there, God willing that seed would take root, and grow, and put forth, however delicately, a flower. And if that happened—then his betrayal, if betrayal there had been, was justified, or even became an affirmation of all his father had stood for. So that far from feeling guilty about the way he was being treated, he would feel proud, and feel that he deserved such treatment; and feel that if his little flower in turn put out
other seeds that scattered across the earth, and caused further flowers to grow, not only was he affirming his father’s life, but he was, in a sense, completing it for him. Through me, he told himself, as with a flush of excitement he recognised an American film star being shown to her cabin, my father might live again.

This sense of pleasure mixed with a sense of betrayal, and a feeling that such betrayal could be reversed or annulled if only he was able to touch the souls of one or two of his fellow passengers, stayed with Alfred for the first three days of his Atlantic crossing; as he made his way towards a New York where he was being awaited—with flowers and a brass band, he’d been promised—by a man his father had helped escape from occupied France. A textile manufacturer who had, in the five years since the war had ended, made a fortune large enough to feel able to send a first-class liner ticket to a person he had never met, and promise that person the use of a duplex
apartment
on Fifth Avenue for just as long as he wanted to stay there. ‘And that means all your life, if you want, Alfred. Seriously.’

Moreover, this feeling would probably have stayed with him for the entire duration of the crossing, if, for whatever reason, Alfred hadn’t been so thoroughly taken up by such a number of his fellow passengers that by the morning of his fourth day at sea he hadn’t told himself it would be futile hypocrisy to pretend any longer that he felt in the slightest degree guilty about the treatment he was receiving. And as for touching the souls of his fellow passengers: he might or might not do so, for fifty people had sworn they would order his book the moment they arrived in New York. But whether they did or not no longer seemed to be any concern of his. As far as he could see, most of them, rich and powerful though they might be, and the sort of people his father would have excoriated, had perfectly fine souls already; and those that didn’t were beyond the reach of poetry anyway; his or anyone else’s. I’m enjoying myself, he told himself as he lay on his bed in his stateroom. I’m happy. Why should I feel bad about that?

Alfred spent the whole of that day in a state of elation that bordered on hysteria. He had breakfast with a French millionairess who was going to New York to marry an American racing driver; he walked around the deck with the film star, who was on her way to make a film with Hitchcock. He had a drink with a plump American man who seemed to be as uncomfortable as he had been expecting to feel, but who was intelligent and funny despite his blushes and his—as someone muttered to Alfred—‘positively existential embarrassment’, and who was reputed to be, according to the same mutterer, ‘quite the richest person on board’. And he ate lunch with a man who said he’d been a friend of his father’s, took coffee with an American publisher who said he’d been amused by all these people
swearing
they’d buy a copy of his book since he was sure that most of them didn’t realise his poems were in French and the volume wasn’t available in New York (‘But if you write a novel, I’d really love to see it’) and spent the afternoon talking with a whole group of people whose names he’d never quite caught but didn’t like to ask for again because he felt he should know them anyway. And what made him most happy was that all of these people seemed to talk to him and yes, like him, not because he was his father’s son, but because they genuinely liked
him,
and found him, for all his lack of physical charms, bright, unaffected, fun and nice.

That evening Alfred’s new friends gave, without really
planning
to or meaning to perhaps, a party for him; a party that was to remain in his mind ever after as the most enchanted occasion of his life. A little interlude—a mere couple of hours—in which nothing jarred, in which nothing was sour; and a moment of magic in which he, who had spent much of his first fifteen years in hiding, being smuggled from one place to the other in cardboard boxes, steamer trunks, or simply under cover of darkness, and who, as he absorbed the lessons his mother gave him every hour of the day and night when it was safe to speak, had come to think of life as a lonely curse to be endured and if
possible redeemed by death, suddenly felt it was possible to live not cut off from the world, but attached to the world, and to everything the world contained. It was a party that both at the time and in retrospect seemed tinged with a mist of gold, at which everyone was young and healthy and happy; and
throughout
which Alfred wanted to embrace everyone, dance with everyone, and shout out to the world that to be happy means to be good.

It was also a party that, having started at ten, would probably have gone on until the following morning, when the ship was due to dock in New York; if, at midnight, the S. S.
Chateau
briand
hadn’t collided with a Panamian tanker and been
practically
cut in two.